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Scriptnotes, Episode 667: The One with Justin Kuritzkes, Transcript

December 4, 2024 Scriptnotes Transcript

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.

Scriptnotes, Episode 635: Is This Person Going to Ruin Everything?, Transcript

April 22, 2024 Scriptnotes Transcript

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)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [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).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/635standard.mp3).

Scriptnotes, Episode 463: Writing Action, Transcript

August 12, 2020 News, Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/writing-action).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 463 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we talk about action. That’s right, it’s an all-craft episode where we look at how the words on the page become the high adrenaline events on the screen. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we talk Emmys.

**Craig:** Ooh. Emmys. I know about that.

**John:** Emmys.

**Craig:** I’m an Emmy expert. LOL. LOL.

**John:** This is going to be one of those shows where we are literally just focusing on one thing and kind of one thing only. It’s all about writing action. So, it’s been much requested. And it’s kind of like our Three Page Challenges in that we’re going to be looking at the actual scenes from movies and TV shows that you’ve enjoyed and looking at what those words look like on the page. So just two very quick bits of news before we get into that.

This past week the WGA East and West members voted to approve the new contract which we talked about on the show last week. 98% of people voted yes for that, so great. Congratulations. That’s done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now we can just think about three years in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, generally speaking forgone conclusion with these things, but that’s good. It is odd – I don’t know who the people are that are voting no. I mean, I fully support their right to vote no. I just don’t know quite what they were thinking. I just always wonder what do they think would happen exactly. If you vote no, yeah, I don’t know. Anyway. But yay democracy.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Three more years of working. And huzzah.

**John:** In less good news, the past week CAA laid off a bunch of agents and support staff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So 90 agents laid off. 350 support staff. So, that was across all their offices, so it’s not just Los Angeles. CAA has a bunch of different businesses in different capacities. But it is not great news. We’ve talked a lot about how support staff are being especially impacted by shutdowns. So the fund that Craig and I helped organize originally for support staff, there’s still money there. It’s run through the Actor’s Fund. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to that.

So if you are newly laid off from CAA and are looking for some money to tide you over that may be an option for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know the specifics. One of the folks that I do know did get laid off. But what I’m hearing is that a lot of the agents were out of sports and live events which makes sense. I mean, the music business – so professional musicians make most of their money from live events, not from album sales if they’re from a major record label, because the record label takes so much of that money. So, without live events, yeah, they’re just not earning. That means the agents aren’t earning.

The shutdown has essentially taken – you know, we think of it from a writer point of view like, hey, we the writers walked out of these agencies. That was over a year ago. But since basically production shutdown in late March I want to say actors don’t work. And directors don’t work. And actors and directors are kind of, you know, that’s a rolling income thing.

So, this is not surprising, but it is unpleasant to see people, especially when you’re talking about folks that are on support level losing their gigs is bad news. And it would be wrong I think to not extend this also to just the country at large. The economic report that came out today was grim, and particularly grim for people who are – I mean, because I don’t really care how hedge fund managers are doing. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t care. They’ll be fine.

But for the average working American this has been absolutely brutal and, you know, we’re not a hugely political podcast, but just shame on the Trump Administration. Just shame on them. I’m going to say it. I don’t care if we lose our one Trump voter. [laughs] I don’t care.

**John:** I really like when John and Craig talk about this thing but not about anything else in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Yes. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is something I’m excited to get into. Action scenes. And so we should probably define our terms here because obviously one of the hallmarks of screenwriting as opposed to playwriting is that you as a screenwriter are describing what characters are doing quite literally in some cases in a screenplay than the way you wouldn’t in a stage play.

So there’s action throughout and there’s scene description throughout. But what I mean by an action scene or an action sequence is where the actual movement of characters and what they’re trying to do takes precedent over any dialogue, over any normal things that would happen in the rest of the movie. Craig, help me out with a definition of an action scene.

**Craig:** I think essentially we’re talking about a movement of choices and behaviors that are not relying on dialogue but rather on what we see. It’s as simple as that. Because sometimes action sequences can be broken down to one character has to pick the pocket of another. We will write that action sequence very similarly I think as an individual writer to the way we would write a shoot-out.

So we’re talking about things that are not dialogue-based, they are not conversational, they are about movement and behavior.

**John:** Yeah. And the function of action sequences in movies, because something Megana and I were talking about off-mic is in many ways similar to sort of how a musical number functions in a musical. It is a moment which all this heightened tension sort of bursts out and becomes a sequence which is about the movement rather than about the thinking or about the thinking or about the planning. And so sometimes it’s a release of pent-up tension. It marks a change in sort of dynamics. And it kind of goes back to a limbic response rather than an intellectual response. It’s really just the physicality of action sequences tends to be foremost.

**Craig:** Yeah. In musicals a lot of times because there are lyrics there they can still – sometimes they can be very internal, very thinky. They can be soliloquies. When we are dealing with these kinds of sequences in movies in television one of the things that happens generally speaking is the writer starts to use all the things that are very specific to the mediums. That means being able to edit. So, just a very simple thing that we have that live performance doesn’t is we can edit before we get into the editing room, right. We can just intercut, crosscut, and up-cut. So reduce time between things.

And we can also move from inside to outside, from high to low. There’s a dynamic aspect to it that starts to happen. Even like when I describe the example of somebody picking someone else’s pocket, close on a hand, somebody is looking. There’s a person outside who sees a car go by with two people in it. All of these things can happen that force our writer brains to think in a very different way. It’s almost like we’re using a different section of the cortex.

**John:** Yeah. And I think my comparison to musical numbers isn’t about the internal/external thing. It’s about in real life people don’t burst out into song. And also in real life action sequences don’t tend to happen.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Yeah, thank god. So, it breaks from our normal reality. Because in normal reality people are having conversations all the time. But they’re not having shoot-outs. And so it’s a break from sort of what we normally expect. And it becomes an important different texture in your film. And so based on the genre of your film there’s an expectation that you’re going to have some action sequences and if you don’t have those action sequences there’s something strange about your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then you’re making My Dinner with Andre, which I love. But that’s the thing that people are always like, “We’re not making My Dinner with Andre.” Poor My Dinner with Andre. It’s a perfectly good film. It became this like negative example.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always the negative example in things.

**Craig:** “Oh, I didn’t realize we were making My Dinner with Andre.” Shut up.

**John:** All right. So we’re going to take a look at samples from eight movies and one TV pilot. So, like the Three Page Challenges you should probably pause here and download the PDF we have which is sort of a master sample of all these things. So I’ve picked certain scenes from these movies. And we’ll talk through sort of what we see.

I tried to pick things that were representative of the style the writers used in how they were doing stuff, but also to show the range of what can be possible here. So I didn’t pick any sort of Craig’s example of a pickpocket. That can be an action sequence, but here I went for bigger things. So it’s either a fight between two people or a sort of bigger sequence where we’re cross-cutting a lot.

And I should also stress unlike a Three Page Challenge we’re not critiquing what we’re seeing on the page here. We’re just sort of observing it. Because none of these are bad examples. They’re all actually really good. And there’s just a range of ways you can do the kinds of things we’re talking about. And it’s important to talk about why writers make different choices and all these choices are OK. Just understand sort of why they’re doing what they’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And all these writers are excellent. And it’s good to observe how they tackle their problems. It’s also good I think to absorb the fingerprint aspect of it which is to say that you and I are the least pedantic people when it comes to this. Rather than suggest that there’s a prescriptive way to do these things what we’re really saying is there isn’t. The best way to do them is the way that is natural to you. I suspect that you and I will both look at one of these and say, oh, this is the closest to the way I happen to do it, but the idea is really here are all these different ways. These are cubists. These are pointillists. These are impressionists. But they’re all making beautiful things. Which one are you?

And if you’re one of these, look how the master does it. Because each one of these men and women are really, really good.

**John:** Agreed. So we’re going to start off right what I consider the top here and I think writers of my generation we all looked to this script and this screenwriter for clues on how to write action. So we’re looking at Aliens, screenplay by James Cameron, story by Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill. Aliens is fantastic. The sequence that I picked here for this example is near the end of the movie. So this is Ripley versus the Queen. We’re on the ship. And it’s remarkable.

So we’re starting at Scene 192, Page 102. Let’s take a look at some of what he’s doing here and how his sentences work. On page 102 we have pretty short little scenes/sequences. We’re cutting between different locations. On the next page we’re getting into much longer blocks of action. It’s all just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to just start reading at the top of the page here.

“Without warning it moves like lightning, straight at her. Ripley spins, sprinting, as the creature leaps for her. Its feet slam, echoing on the deck behind her. She clears a door. Hits the switch. It WHIRS closed. BOOM. The alien hits a moment later.”

**Craig:** Right off the bat this is cool. I love this. And this actually of all the ones we look at, by the way, this is the one I think is closest to the way I do things.

**John:** It’s probably what I aspire to most. And I would have said that this is how I try to do things. I don’t think I necessarily do it as well as this.

**Craig:** No. None of us do.

**John:** I think my actual style is reflected a little bit later on in our samples here. So let’s look at just that little block I read. Why that’s so good. Again, “Moves like lightning, straight at her. Ripley spins, sprinting, as the creature leaps for her.” So, again, our verbs are crisp and clear. We can definitely see what’s happening here. “Its feet slam. She clears a door. Hits the switch. It WHIRS closed. BOOM.” Short sentences that just get to the point. He’s using parallel structure so he can get rid of the subject of sentences. Because she clears a door, hits the switch, he doesn’t have to use she again. It’s quick and punchy.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what I love about this more than anything is that I can hear it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This is something that I think a lot of screenwriters simply neglect and it’s my personal obsession and that is writing sound. So, you can see things, obviously, and a lot of what I love about this paragraph is that not only is it exciting to read, but it’s incredibly useful for everybody on the day.

So, I understand basically how the blocking of this works, including what Ripley is meant to do. Spins. Sprinting. This is clearly a paragraph written by somebody who has seen this scene in their head. He understands that when the alien moves at Ripley she is going to be facing it, therefore she has to spin first before she runs.

So, these are important things. They actually – subconsciously we will notice when they’re not there and things won’t be as satisfying. “Its feet slam, echoing.” OK, what a great noise that is. I can hear it. “It WHIRS closed. BOOM. The alien hits a moment later.” You can hear it. You can feel it. Makes me so happy.

**John:** So, to the sounds here, just on this page, we have the whirs, the booms, the hum, whine, crash-clang, another crash, a wallop. Screeches. All appropriate. They’re all uppercased which is a really common style. So, originally uppercasing comes from, I think, radio plays in which uppercasing was important to mark like these are literal sound effects that are going to happen live while we’re going through the script. Is it crucial to uppercase all your sounds? No. Is it a style that’s pretty useful? Yeah, it is. I mean, I think you can see the sounds – the fact that I was able to pick out those sounds on the page was because they were uppercased. And it’s an expectation that they’re going to be uppercased. So do it if it feels right for your style.

**Craig:** Agreed. Over the years I have reduced the amount of uppercasing I do. But only I think just because, I don’t know, as I get older maybe I get a little more confident and I feel a little less need to grab people’s attention with format. That said, the amount of uppercasing here is completely appropriate. When you’re doing an action sequence that’s when you’re going to want to probably loosen up on your uppercase-ometer and let more come through.

It doesn’t have to be a particularly consistent thing. For instance here you do have a lot of uppercased sounds. But you also have an uppercased “scene through.” There’s actually no reason to uppercase “seen through” there, except this. When you’re writing what can sometimes happen is you find yourself wanting to uppercase something because in your mind it is this punchy moment. So in this case “Newt scurries like a rabbit as the looming figure of the alien appears above, SEEN THROUGH the bars.” Meaning just because he’s done that I understand that she’s going to feel it. She’s seeing it. And that’s her fear coming through. SEEN THROUGH. Even if I don’t consciously understand that as I’m reading it I will feel it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, often as we looked at Three Page Challenges we talk about keeping blocks of scene description relatively short. And on this first page we really are seeing that. Most of these paragraphs are just two to four lines, which is great. And we’re moving between different areas of the ship. He’s using his INTs. If you chose to just use those as slug lines without the INT that’s fine, too.

You’ll notice that there is no day or night because we’re in space, which all makes sense.

But if you look at the second page here there are some long blocks of scene description here of action. And it works because I’m reading every word of that. Because I’m so invested in this. Much easier for James Cameron to do on Page 103 of the script that is fantastic that we love than early on in a screenplay. If this was Page 2 as a reader I might go–

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** I’ve got to read a lot here.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** But here is fantastic and it works. And so I would just say don’t be afraid of doing this in the right moments because what I see here on page 103 if you were to space it out the way we would space out other stuff in this it would be an extra page or two to get through all of that.

**Craig:** Which may be why this is this way. Sometimes I think when I read these things that it was probably paragraphed out a little bit more liberally and then as the page count grew maybe he thought, nah, I could save like literally three pages if I just stop being so crazy about hitting the return.

I personally love hitting the return. This is page 103. That’s not too bad. So, yeah, I’m not sure why that choice was made here. Personally, just for the reader’s sake, I do find it easier to read when I get breaks. When I hit a paragraph like this I do tend to take a breath and it’ll slow me down a touch. So I do like a little bit more white space there.

And I wonder if there was some originally.

**John:** There could have been. The last point I want to make about this Aliens example is that even in the midst of action sequences he’s not afraid to just pull out another simile or metaphor. This is on page 102, so she’s strapped herself into “Two tons of hardened steel. The power loader. Like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer.” Great. And that like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer is exactly what that thing feels like when we actually see it. It’s great. It gives a sense of like, OK, it’s like armor and a weapon at the same time. It’s worth that sentence to put that in there so we really get the notion of what that is.

Obviously you can’t shoot – there’s not enough filmable thing in that little sentence fragment. But it helps us understand what it is we’re going to see when we see that moment onscreen.

**Craig:** You do need this internal watchdog in your mind as you’re writing. And it’s like newspapers have the – what do they call it? The ombudsman. And the ombudsman who works at a newspaper is the advocate of the reader. And you need an ombudsman in your mind when you’re writing and that’s the advocate of the audience. You know exactly if you’re James Cameron what that thing is. You’ve researched it. You’ve looked at it. You’ve had people draw pictures of what the future version of it will look like.

But the people reading don’t. And you need to give them a little tiny, tiny something so that they do, so that they can appreciate and enjoy this the way you want them to. And you don’t want to take a lot of time doing it. You don’t want to – you know, this is not where you do David Foster Wallace footnotes. So, “like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer” I think may win the contest for fewest words required to properly describe that. And it does it great. And it also doesn’t sound cheesy either.

You know, the worst versions are the ones that are derivative, like mechanized medieval armor from hell. Well, you know, don’t do that. Just be accurate. And this is accurate.

**John:** Absolutely. All right, let’s go to our next sample which has a very different style on the page, but also is a movie that I love. This is Near Dark written by Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red. Craig, you had suggested this, so tell me about your affection for Near Dark.

**Craig:** Well it’s a movie that I feel like not enough people have seen. In general Kathryn Bigelow, everybody knows Kathryn Bigelow probably from her – well, relatively more recent films like Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She is a fantastic director. Earlier on she was doing a lot more writing as well. Near Dark I think was her first big feature film. And it’s a vampire movie but it is to vampire movies what Tremors is to good old monster movies. It’s this kind of dirty, deserty, gritty version, although Near Dark is way darker than Tremors.

And it is a wonderful prelude to another one of my favorite Kathryn Bigelow movies which is called Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver. And it is very actiony, but kind of actiony in that gritty ‘70s-ish sort of way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I was kind of fascinated to see how she and Eric Red had done this on the page. And I’m not disappointed because it is a very specific style. It’s not one that I’ve ever used. But when you read it it does give you that kind of feeling. That kind of Near Dark feeling.

**John:** I may be wrong about this but I feel like this is also Walter Hill’s style. And that Walter Hill, if I remember correctly, often does this just single lines stacked up on each other. So if you’re not looking at the PDF of this we should probably describe what we’re seeing.

Rather than traditional paragraphs these are just single lines stacked up on top of each other. And so:

Jesse throws the car keys into Caleb’s open palm.
The farmboy yanks the bedspread off the bed and throws it over his head.
Mae reaches out with her hand, touching Caleb’s arm.

Those are all single sentences but there’s not space between them. They’re just literally stacked up on top of each other like a tower. It’s weird but it works. It changes your expectation of reading. And I think it makes you read a little bit more slowly. But that may not be the worst choice for this because it really reduces each of these lines down to kind of the minimal action required.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s very sparse. So it’s kind of giving you as little as it can, as opposed to James Cameron’s style which is very much, OK, I want to excite you. You’ve got to feel this. I’m telling you this story and I’m in your face.

This is very sparse. So it betrays no emotion. You are providing the emotion for it. So here’s a sequence from Page 75.

Jesse throws the car keys into Caleb’s open palm. Period. Next line.
The farmboy yanks the bedspread off the bed and throws it over his head. Period. Next line.
Mae reaches out with her hand, touching Caleb’s arm.
BULLETS flying left and right.

Bullets flying left and right – bullets is capitalized, but there’s no sense of urgency. It’s just fact. Bullets flying left and right.

She looks into his eyes.
Caleb meets her gaze.
Another EXPLOSION of GUNSHOTS.

So there is this kind of sparse montage. It’s almost like a Moviola is telling you this story, because it’s very montage-y. It’s very like visual, visual, visual, visual. Even with some sounds stuff. And in doing so it does impart a coolness. Do you know what I mean? There’s a style to it.

**John:** It’s detached. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like this script is smoking a cigarette. You know what I mean? It’s got shades on. It’s cool.

**John:** And that said, it’s not just reporting. And so it’s not just a list of what you see. A few lines later, “The sun attacks him beneath the bedspread.” The sun attacks him. That’s a poetic-y kind of thing to do. It’s not simply just reporting what we see in the shot. You’re making literary choices in sort of how you’re describing those moments. And I get that. I get what the sun attacks feels more dramatic than sort of like sun hits him. So there’s choices being made here.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you do a paragraph style of this the way Cameron does in time you may start to lose a little bit of the excitement of it because in a way you’re helping it be exciting. And what I like about the way that Kathryn and Eric did this is they are requiring you to just derive excitement from it. So when you get to this section:

He smashes his foot into the gas pedal.
The sun blazes through the darkened windshield.
He moans assistant the subdued light hits his face.
Blackening the skin on his forehead.

The way that “blackening the skin on his forehead” is just its own line with no more emphasis than what comes right after which is “He ducks below the dash” makes it somehow scarier. It’s almost like we’re not going to help you be scared by it. You’re going to now hear and feel the sizzle and the charring of skin. So it’s a really effective way to do this. But you have to have a kind of confidence in your material here. And the one thing that I’m pretty sure no one has ever accused Kathryn Bigelow of is a lack of confidence. I mean, she’s just so assured as a writer and as a filmmaker.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about trying to use this style if you are an aspiring writer. I think it’s a little bit risky to sort of go this way with the script that you are sending out to the town. Pros and cons. Pro, it’s unusual and if it’s great people will notice that it’s unusual and it will catch their attention and people will be excited about it.

Con. If someone opens this script on page one and they see this, they flip to page two, and flip ahead to page 20 and they see that it’s all this they may not take it seriously just because it just looks different. And so you’re going to have to just – if you’re going to do this you’re going to have to do it exceptionally well just to get over peoples initial reticence to read this kind of different scene description.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that if this is instinctively the way you feel you would write best you should do it. The thing about reactions to screenplays is sometimes I think like if a screenplay is sort of unobjectionable in its format and style, if people read through the whole thing and go, “You know, it was OK.” They just think it’s OK. If it’s objectionable in its format and style and people read through and they didn’t like it they’ll be like, “Oh my god. What is this pile of crap?”

But none of it really matters because the point is they didn’t like the script either way. The gulf between good and not good is miles wide. I do think that if you write something that is gripping and fascinating and you have two or three gripping and fascinating pages people will keep going. There is I think probably less fussiness out there than we are sometimes taught to believe. I think the people who teach fussiness are people who are trying to teach people a sense that they can control their fates, which they can’t.

So I would say like if you could write this and people literally who you force to read it go, OK, yeah, this is actually much better, you write better this way than the other way, then you should write this way.

**John:** Agreed. So, if you actually wrote the screenplay for Near Dark and you gave it to somebody–

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my point.

**John:** Writing it this way? Good choice. Good choice.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Absolutely good choice. Last thing I’ll point out here is the scene headers are underlined. That’s great. Scene headers bold, great. Two spaces/no spaces. You have your choice. Make your decision. Be consistent throughout your script. Anything is fine. So just never come at us saying like, “Oh, it’s unprofessional because of this scene header choice.” It’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only thing I’ll add also–

**John:** Whatever you do is fine.

**Craig:** Whatever you do is fine. We’re very libertarian at formatting. If you are going to write in this style you need to earn your poetry. You have to be good at it. This is a little haiku-ish. So the very last bit.

EXT. TWO-LANE HIGHWAY – DUSK
Three patrol cars swoop after their fleeing quarry like birds of prey.
The object of their pursuit driving away from a setting sun.
Red cherrytops igniting the livid sky.
Two of the cop cars fan out.
Windows rolling down.
Shotguns aimed out.

That is very lyrical. And it helps if you’re going to do this to be lyrical. If you’re doing this style but you’re writing in a kind of prose, just a traditional dry prose way it’s going to get annoying. This is sort of style meets form in a nice way.

**John:** You’re giving the reader a reason to keep reading down the page, which I think is something we should underline about sort of all these action sequences is how are you maintaining the reader’s interest and involvement through the action sequence. And in this case it is by this sort of poetic-y lyric style. In James Cameron’s case it was just real mastery of painting exactly what it’s going to feel like in that moment.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** So, and it’s a great segue to the pilot for Lost, written by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. I picked a sequence which is late in the pilot, mid-to-late in the pilot. Jack and crew have found the pilot of the plane. I always loved that the pilot of Lost is about a plane crashing and the pilot is a character in it.

**Craig:** I know. It’s great.

**John:** So they found this pilot who has still survived. They’re up in a tree. And there’s a monster outside. It’s their first encounter with the smoke monster. The reason I picked this is that I had long heard that the J.J. Abrams style of TV writing used a lot of profanity on the page but also really sort of grabbed you by the shoulders and sort of shouted at you like what you’re seeing. And this was a good example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s just a very different look than the other examples we’ve had here. But I would say also very common in certain kinds of TV writing. So just really good to know what you’re seeing here.

So, let’s start on – so this is Page 79, Scene 80. Look at all the double dashes here. So, “Kate peeks in — but Charlie’s nowhere to be seen. Kate climbs back — peers into the inverted bathroom where Charlie is leaning over the toilet bowl — “

So it’s unfinished actions being sustained by double dashes. And it works well. It helps bring us down the page. We’ll start dialogue with dash-dash. Even if it’s not directly something being cut off from before.

Look at this long sound being described at the bottom of scene 80.

**Craig:** Can I pronounce it? I’m going to try to pronounce it.

**John:** MROOOOOWRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOBWWRRRRRRRRR!

**Craig:** MROOOOOWRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOBWWRRRRRRRRR!

**John:** 40-character word there. It’s the onomatopoeia of describing what this sound feels like. And making it big, making it uppercase, underlining it sort of gives you a sense of what it’s supposed to feel like to those characters in the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is also a kind of style that emphasizes people. So, some of the other styles were emphasizing action and visuals. So when you look back for instance at the work with Near Dark once the dialogue ends and the action starts there is not much ever said. And it’s very much about the things that we see. Gravel. Cars. Road. A dog. Lights. And when we get to this it’s so much about people’s expression, the interruptions, and their emotions. Who they are looking at, so perspective becomes an enormously important thing.

Almost no one gets to complete a sentence which is a very common thing and an appropriate thing to do in scenes like this because it shows a certain awareness of naturalistic dialogue as opposed to stuff that doesn’t make sense. And all those dash-dashes are kind of implying that no one is waiting to talk.

So, you have – I mean, this is now dialogue, but:
Kate: — It’s right outside —
Pilot: — What’s righ –? Shh!

So, it’s implying this kind of chaos. When we get to the all caps underlined paragraphs, like these are absolutely screaming at you, and I think that that is partly an extension of something that I think television writing traditionally was more comfortable with, because in sitcoms like the classic three-camera stage-bound sitcom all the action is in all uppercase. So that’s kind of part of their culture there so it’s not quite as screamy I think in television as it would be – in a feature script I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.

**John:** Yeah. It is really, really screamy. We’re talking about the bottom of page 42. And just two paragraphs that are all uppercase, underlined, and what I’ll say is personally I wouldn’t do it very often. I would do it like once or twice in a script. I think the script probably does it a lot more than that. And that’s just the choice they make and it’s probably pretty common for this show. But:

SUDDENLY THE PILOT’S BODY GETS YANKED UP — BUT HIS LEGS HIT THE DASH SO WHATEVER’S GOT HIM CAN’T PULL HIM OUT AND KATE SCREAMS AND THE PILOT — HIS UPPER BODY OUTSIDE THE COCKPIT DROPS THE TRANSCEIVER ONTO THE FLOOR AND HE SCREAMS BLOODYFUCKINGMURDER AS JACK MOVES TO HOLD KATE BACK — CHARLIE SCRAMBLES UP, YELLING:

So, again, it’s not broken down into even sentences. It’s just like one long shreaky moment. And that probably is what it feels like. So I get it on that level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just as a reader I see that and I’m like, oh god, I’m going to have to get through that. But once I’m in it I’m like, oh yeah, I get why it’s doing that.

**Craig:** And also important to remember that when you’re dealing with a pilot script for a network television hour I don’t know quite how long this script was but my guess it was probably 55 pages or something. So it’s not quite the marathon of a 120-page feature read. This is a little bit harder to pull off in a feature because it is climatic.

Essentially once you get to a paragraph that’s six lines of all caps and underlined that’s the climax, right? I mean, you can’t really recover from that. And this does take place on page 42. So I would suspect that this is probably the loudest, screamiest moment.

**John:** Yeah, it’s actually 42 of 96. So it was a long pilot.

**Craig:** Oh geez. 96 pages? How the hell did they–? Wow. That’s a lot of pages for an hour.

**John:** Yeah, I think it was longer than a traditional pilot. I don’t think it was a one-hour pilot. But, still. That’s great. I’m quickly looking through the PDF and there are a fair number of sequences which do go to all uppercase. But they’re spaced out. It doesn’t do this all the time. And I think that’s crucial, too. You’ve got to leave yourself some – if you’re cranked up to 10 all the time we can’t differentiate what feels like this versus what feels like that. So you’ve got to pace yourself some here.

This is a big sequence and I do remember this from the pilot being like a HOLY COW this is a show that’s trying to do something really new.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s really interesting. I wonder how that – well, I’ll ask Damon I guess. I’m just going to say, “Damon, I know you don’t like talking about Lost anymore. It’s enough already. But I’m going to ask you some more Lost questions.”

**John:** We haven’t talked about WEs and camera angles yet. So, the sample I had from Aliens didn’t reference cameras at all, but he will reference cameras. He’ll reference crane shots and things like this. I feel like we have some We Sees and We Hears in this Lost sample but I’m not spotting them yet.

As we said on the show before, the choice to use the second plural of “we” as a proxy for the reader and the viewer Craig and I both think is fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just make sure you’re using it in a smart way. People who say that it’s cheating to use it are incorrect.

**Craig:** Stupid. They’re just stupid. It has little become the coronavirus is a hoax of screenwriting. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know who started it. I will forever – and this may be what I want on my tombstone. “It’s OK to say we in the action lines of a screenplay.” I mean, here we are, again, in the pilot script for Lost, which did pretty well.

**John:** Yeah, I think so.

**Craig:** And scene 84, “And we intercut now between Kate…” He’s even saying we intercut. As we’re tracking. Now they’re talking about the camera crew as we. You can do it any time in any way. You can do it all the time. No one cares. No one cares. I have never once met anybody real in this business who stopped and went, “Wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, who is we?” Never. Ever. Ever.

Anyone who says you can’t use we or tries to restrict your usage of we or puts rules on we is an idiot. And don’t listen to them. And for god’s sake give them no money. End of rant.

**John:** So Craig’s tombstone it says, “Craig Mazin. We died.” And then it gives your date.

**Craig:** That’s right. “We see his tombstone.”

**John:** Indeed. All right, let’s go to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I had them on the podcast a zillion years ago. They’re lovely. And I think they listen to Scriptnotes so hi if you’re listening.

**Craig:** If you’re listening I just want you to know I watched Lord of the Rings again. Again. I watched it again, John. All of them. I can’t stop watching those movies.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I can’t. I’m like at the point now where I literally know tiny things that are occurring in large battles and I’m just waiting for them like the people that go to see – you know, when Monty Python used to tour and they would just watch the dead parrot sketch and just say the words instead of laughing. That’s me now watching the Battle of Pelennor Fields and I’m like, OK, now you say take it down, take it down.

**John:** Nice. I wanted to put this up next because it’s just so different from what we see in Lost. So those Lost pages were so busy and so much and so shouty. This is so restrained and quiet by comparison. So there’s a lot of uppercase being used. But it’s very – the pages feel pretty spare and it’s not shouting at you very much at all here.

So, an interesting thing is that in these scripts characters are always uppercased. So, not just on the first appearance. They’re uppercased throughout it seems.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you don’t see it so much in the pages that I picked here, but angle on, angle on, angle on.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Used throughout.

**Craig:** Perfectly fine.

**John:** Perfectly fine. Just a style that this trio uses to describe stuff. So, we do see here like:

CLOSE ON: PIPPIN COWERING…
ANGLES ON: SOLDIERS throw themselves down as the NAZGÛL zoom overhead, emitting their piercing shrieks.

Even though it’s so much more minimal, they’re still doing a lot of things we’ve talked about in previous samples where they’re choosing where to throw their exclamation points, where to really emphasize this is an important moment that you really need to pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s one observation that – well, the first observation I make is that when I read “SUDDENLY! 9 NAZGÛL DIVE out of the dim sky” what I saw was 9 Nazgûl Drive initially. And I thought what an amazing address that would be. I would love to live on 9 Nazgûl Drive.

**John:** 9 Nazgûl Drive.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Oh my god. That would be so cool. In like Morgultown. OK, so it strikes me that this is actually a brilliant way to relay action to people so that your script is not 5,000 pages. These are very long movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this movie in particular was very long. And they know what they want to do. So they’re writing this together as a trio. One of the trio is the director. His plan for something like the following is quite elaborate. So, the Nazgûl of 9 Nazgûl Drive “circle LOW over the CITY, like VULTURES seeking doomed men’s flesh. SOLDIERS are plucked into the AIR by SHRIEKING NAZGÛL and dropped to their DEATHS hundreds of FEET BELOW. TOWERS and BUILDINGS are DESTROYED. CHAOS as SOLDIERS, WOMEN, and CHILDREN DODGE falling MASONRY.”

The words towers and buildings are destroyed are the kind of things that if you are writing in a script and you do not have a firm control over your own production is going to make whoever is doing the budget sweat. Because towers and buildings are destroyed is incredibly vague for what needs to be in a very thought-out sequence.

But, it seems to me that the trio here knows exactly what the plans are and they’re telling you what you need to know and otherwise trust us. When towers and buildings are destroyed it’s going to be awesome. And we have plans. We just don’t want to spend 12 pages explaining to you how that works.

**John:** Absolutely. So, it’s not the extreme example of Atlanta Burns from Gone with the Wind where it’s just like, eh, two words and it’s a giant sequence. There’s more happening here. It’s a little bit more detailed. But it’s not super detailed. And exactly the sentences that Craig pointed out here, another writer could have written them as three pages, where we actually see how this stuff is happening, how our characters are fitting into this. That’s not what they’ve chosen to do here. It really feels like a blueprint in the sense of like this is where this moment happens.

It’s not that it’s entirely just like, you know, a list of shots. There’s flavor here. So, on page 85, Gandalf yells – and you have to do Gandalf’s voice here.

**Craig:** When he’s yelling, “Not at the towers?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Not at the towers! Aim for the Trolls! Kill the Trolls! Bring them down!”

**John:** “TOO LATE! The TOWERS reach the walls, their DOORS crashing down, releasing ORCS directly onto the LOWER LEVELS.” So that choice of “too late,” it is that editorial moment there to really let you know what this is supposed to feel like. Without that we don’t get a sense of what the drama is there.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you haven’t seen the prior two films you don’t understand how much stink Gandalf puts on the name Peregrin Took. “Peregrin Took – go back to the citadel!” Oh, poor Pip. You know, he takes a lot of abuse. I’ve got to say Pippin does a great job of being yelled at and abused by everybody. He makes mistakes all the time. He’s the reason they get into so much trouble initially in the Mines of Moria, because he’s clumsy. And you know what? He’s still out there. And in fact he helps save Gandalf’s life in this moment. So good for you, Pippin. “Peregrin Took. [Unintelligible] Took.”

Sorry, I could do this all day.

**John:** Let’s go onto Natural Born Killers.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So this is the Quentin Tarantino script for Natural Born Killers and I read this script when I was in film school. It might have been the same weekend I read both the Aliens script and the Natural Born Killers. And they had a huge impact on me. I ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which is one of my first paid writing assignments.

I loved Tarantino’s script for this and I did not like the final movie as much. But I think it’s so interesting to look back at what I loved so much about the writing on the page here. So the moment I picked is from near the end of the movie. So Page 127. I chose this because it’s an example of when you’re using sort of different formats to show stuff. Or when you have a couple things happening at once.

In this case there’s the news footage of what the cameras are capturing versus film footage about the reality of what’s going on here. And sort of how you juggle the two of those as a writer to show the textures that you’re getting out of this. So, Craig, what’s your first reaction to seeing this written here on the page?

**Craig:** Well, it is the kind of writing that lets you see what you are supposed to see exactly, which is why I, too, was a bit disappointed in the movie because it was an interesting mismatch I think of director and screenplay. I think there’s an enormous amount to love about Natural Born Killers. But I think there’s an alternate universe where Tarantino directs Natural Born Killers. He directs his own script and it’s just better.

**John:** Yeah. I think so, too.

**Craig:** And so here what’s happening is there’s this commentary on film itself, on the camera and the way the camera works. And it’s doing this wonderful job of having the camera lag behind action. And it’s so smartly done in that way and you can feel it. So a lot of off-screen stuff here, which is incredibly important.

Tarantino understands that part of what action is is what you don’t see. So, there’s a very impressionistic thing happening here. I probably talked about this on the podcast before, but one of my favorite moments in literature is from Heart of Darkness where they’re on the boat heading down the river, or up the river, down the river, and they’re heading via the river. And they are attacked–

**John:** They’re on the river.

**Craig:** They’re on the river. And they’re attacked. And our narrator looks over and sees the man that he was staying next to holding a cane and then he falls. And then only like a paragraph later do you realize it’s not a cane it’s a spear and the spear is buried in this guy. So he’s confused in the moment about what he sees, and so too can we be.

The camera follows the body to the floor and then you hear somebody saying something off-screen. “Oh God! Oh God! Ohhh…” “We’re sending out a hostage. Don’t touch him.” Off-screen the door is kicked open. That’s one of my favorite lines in this because I can hear it, which is so great. And then his camera comes around to catch what’s happening. And then he moves out.

So, it’s just a wonderful way when it says “This footage is very similar to Vietnam footage. It’s shaky, real, harsh, and it captures the pandemonium of battle,” you feel that. This is impressionistic writing. And it’s a great lesson in how to write action in a way that is about confusing the mind’s eye and having us be always three or four seconds behind what’s happening.

**John:** Yeah. I think this reads really well on the page and I think it’s probably more similar to how I would write action than – even though I would love to write like James Cameron, I probably write a little bit more like this in that I wouldn’t trust myself to have giant blocks of action the way that Cameron would let himself do.

But think about this writing and then think about the writing from Lost and they’re both showing these moments of pandemonium and overlapping dialogue and a bunch of stuff happening at once. And you could write a script that gets you to the same scene, both in the J.J. Abrams or the Tarantino way and they’re both good and valid choices for depicting this kind of moment.

It’s really about sort of how you as the writer can best string together words that get the reader to understand what it is that you’re going for.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, all of these efforts do reflect I think the writerly heart of the person doing them, which I love. I just love it. And it’s not that every script that one of these writers writes it’s always going to have the same kind of expression, but I do love the way that all of these are so, well, they’re unique. And I worry sometimes about the way – because we still insist that screenwriting can be taught, which I’m not sure is necessarily the case, there is this therefore requirement for, I don’t know, best methods. I don’t know if there are any – I think the best method is how do you write the best.

And how do you teach that? I don’t know how to teach that. I guess one thing that we’re doing here is we’re sort of saying to people we’re going to give you one of these around the world smorgasbords of different cuisines. Which one do you like the best? That’s probably who you are.

**John:** Absolutely. And I agree that there’s not sort of one best way to do things, but we’re really just talking about fingerprints. You said that earlier on in the conversation. You can sense that certain writers have a certain kind of style. And it would be weird for J.J. Abrams to write this scene in a Tarantino style or vice versa.

I will say sometimes I’ve come onto do a week’s work or two week’s work on a project and it’s not my movie at all. I’m a craftsman here. I’m just here to help out on one little thing. And I have found it useful to actually just try to model the style of the rest of the screenplay just so that my stuff doesn’t stick out wildly from everything else.

And so I’ve come into to do an action sequence and I will deliberately sort of match the other action sequences in the film just so it feels like the rest of the movie, so it doesn’t stick out as a weird anomaly.

And so looking at other people’s style can be really helpful the same way that a visual artist looking at other people’s style can see like, oh, I get what it is that this person is doing. I understand how they’re using line and shape and shadow and form. And I can do that if I need to, but I could also think about how this fits into my own personal style.

**Craig:** Absolutely. That is pretty much the way I try and do it myself. There are times – actually there was one time recently, the last thing I did like that where you come in and you do a week or two. It was on a script that was very well done. It was very well written by a writer who just has quite a different style than I do. And given what I was being asked to do I didn’t think I could do the thing where you match the style. And I told them, I’m like, look, this is not about anything other than I think I just need to sing – I’m a baritone. I need to be in a baritone. I’m pretty sure this person is a tenor. So I just need to do that, but understand it’s not a commentary on the style of the rest of the screenplay. I think it’s wonderful. It’s just this area right here needs a little something else and so I’m just going to do what I’m comfortable with. And everybody understood.

Including, I believe, the other writer who I spoke with and who is terrific. So if you’re going to stray from it at least say so. Acknowledge it. Because otherwise it is a bit odd to just suddenly dump a different color into something that has a certain palette.

**John:** The counter examples where I’ve come in to do a more major rewrite of something and even sequences that I wasn’t really touching I made some stylistic changes just so it would read like one document and it wouldn’t be schizophrenic as you’re jumping from one thing to the other thing. And so sometimes there’s criticism of like, oh my god, that writer came in and rewrote stuff that didn’t even matter. It’s like, well, it mattered because the whole document is going to be read as one thing and it needed to all track and make sense.

**Craig:** Thank you for saying that. Because as somebody who does arbitrate quite a few credit disputes I will see this in statements from time and time again where people say, “All they did was just rewrite this to change a bunch of superficial things to make it seem like they did it.” And I’m like, no. First of all, I’m not stupid. I know what a scene is. And if I read the same scene and they’ve just stylistically made a few things I’m not giving them a ton of credit for it or barely any.

**John:** Not a bit of credit for that. No.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just, dude, they need to run it through their typewriter so they can get to the next scene. It’s just a normal writerly thing to do.

I mean, I understand why people say it, but you’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a major rewrite you do need to just run it through your machine because you don’t want there to be lumps in the batter, you know? How many analogies can I use in one episode, by the way? I’m setting a record.

**John:** You’re really going for it here.

**Craig:** I’m setting a record. And by the way, they’ve all been amazing. I have to say. They’ve all been on point. Incredible.

**John:** They’ve all been really, really good. We’ll do a special edition where we ring a little bell every time you’re using an analogy for something. It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** Let’s move onto another previous Scriptnotes guest, Jennifer Lee. So she came on to talk with Aline and I about Frozen. I wanted an animation sample here because people sometimes think that animation scripts are wildly different. They’re not. They look like normal screenplays. And there are a few – like numbering can happen a little bit differently in animation screenplays, but having written a bunch of animation the scripts look like the scripts. Same for live action.

So the sequence here is again towards the end. I like this because it’s an example of stakes and crosscutting where you’re following a couple different characters and they’re each trying to do their thing. We as an audience have a sense of what they’re trying to do. Every time we’re cutting from one to the next we’re always wondering, oh, but what happened with Anna there? What’s up with Olaf? We’re always trying to track what people are doing. And it’s just a good example of how we do this.

And, again, there’s some stuff that’s written here that is not directly shootable but gives you a sense of the feel or the stakes. So on Page 103 here, “It’s a long, snowy way down. But what choice do they have? They slide down the ice covered building.” The “but what choice do they have” not strictly necessary. Without it though we don’t get a sense of what it is we’re supposed to be seeing in these character’s expressions and their choice to do this.

**Craig:** I think that is shootable. I think that’s – because I know what they mean. If I didn’t know what they mean–

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But they’re good enough – you know, when she says, “But what choice do they have,” I know suddenly the camera is like I’m going to see their perspective, and then I’m going to have a reverse on their faces. It’s going to be kind of close. They’re both going to be afraid. But then they’re going to look at each other like here we go. Because there’s no other – or maybe they look back and they see that the storm is coming. Whatever it is, I understand what that means. And it’s actually a very good way – I mean, I’ve said before I’ve been writing a lot of dialogue in action these days. It’s a good way to give your actors or in this case the animators who are doing the acting a sense of what their expressions are supposed to be, what the intention behind their face is.

**John:** Now this is a big dramatic sequence. We’re near the end of the movie. A lot is happening here. But these pages look pretty quiet. They’re not big and loud and shouty. There’s no underlining. There’s no all caps. To make it clear that you don’t have to use all these tools in your tool belt to do big dramatic sequences.

Here Jennifer Lee, this is pretty restrained, and yet it’s completely doing the job it needs to do of conveying this big final action set piece.

**Craig:** The understanding of how these things are practically used is always helpful. For an animation script if you are working inside of the story the way that they were this is almost never going to be the sole point of contact between people and the movie because there’s also storyboarding going on constantly. So this becomes a very useful tool for production. But it’s always accompanied by imagery and illustration and animatics. And there’s so much more available.

So it makes sense that this is going to be a little less, well, the script feels like it’s not working so hard. Whereas when it’s all we have is text then we do sometimes have to work a little bit harder to at least let people know that this is a moment that’s occurring as opposed to just another skim page.

**John:** Agreed. All right, let’s take a look at a sample from Black Panther by Ryan Coogler. [EDIT NOTE: Black Panther is written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole. In our outline and PDF, we’d left off Cole’s name, so we forgot to mention him. Our apologies.] I love this sequence and I also like that it’s just a fight between two characters. So I’m picking the fight at the waterfall. And it’s a really good scene and there’s really good storytelling happening in the middle of a fight.

One of the most frequent questions you get from new screenwriters is like how specific do I have to be. Do I have to describe every punch, every blow? And that would be exhausting. And what Ryan is doing here is he’s giving us what’s important for us to see. These are the hits that actually matter. This is why it matters. This is how the dynamics of the fight shift. This is like a boxing match, so it’s important that you see that.

And here are the moments where it’s going to leave the being right with the two fighters to look at the reaction of the people who are watching this and sort of how they are encountering this fight that we’re seeing.

So, Craig, this is probably your first time seeing this on the page.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** What are you feeling?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, love the white space. I’m just such a fan of, like when we were saying I wonder if Cameron was sort of compressing some paragraphs together, I love how easy this is to read. I also love how choreographed it is. So, when you’re reading this action you can feel this movement. This feels like dance. And that is something that I remember experiencing in the scene itself, which is that it felt like two very competent people who had been trained in something that was old and storied were now exercising that talent and that skill against each other.

And the description of movement here is wonderful. I pull from pages like this what the writer wants me to feel. And what I feel like he wants me to feel here is the beauty of this movement. This is a beautiful fight. I mean, when you look at how he describes these things – and he says, “Both with great skill.” Well that’s evident. Because he also balances it out. You know, they’re both, M’Baku and T’Challa are both really good at what they do and there’s showmanship to this. It’s a bit of a show. And they both have their different styles, which I love.

So, this was like watching or reading somebody describing ballet. And music criticism is like, I don’t know, I can’t remember what the analogy is. See, I’ve run out of analogies. But writing about dancing, it just feels counterintuitive and hard to do. Well, he did it. So this feels like an exciting thing because it’s not just, well, you know, good old toxic masculinity fistfight. It’s not that. It’s something else. There’s tradition to this. This feels quite historical and there’s like a culture to it, so I love that.

**John:** Now, on Page 25, this is the first time we’re cutting away from the sort of POV of being in the fight to people watching it. But even when we’re going to other people’s point of view, “From T’Challa’s POV we see Ramonda cheering from the sidelines.” So, again, we’re looking – it’s the sidelines, but it’s his reaction to the people at the sidelines watching, which is important. We’re centering the story on him. And so this is where we get to the first dialogue. “Show him who you are!” Sort of reminding us what the fight is still really about. Because one of the challenges when you have people fighting is at a certain point you stop thinking about what they’re actually fighting for. What the actual point of this battle is.

And what’s so good about this sequence is that it’s always clear why he’s doing what he’s doing and why he’s giving up his powers. What’s at stake is really clear. And not just his life, but his overall position within this hierarchy. So, just really terrifically well done.

And an important moment, so so many of these things I’ve picked have been late in the story, like sort of final battles. This is a very important early battle that shows who this character is and without this sequence you would not be as firmly rooted in his point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, so all sorts of things get set up here, which is what good early scenes do. And it is, of course, the fight itself. This is all just the subtext where everything is about his character and the way he considers his rival, not enemy, but rival, which obviously will turn to an ally. But it is a great way of thinking about how to escalate and elevate what we’ve seen a billion times.

We’ve seen two guys fighting a billion times. Go watch any nature movie and you’ll see more two guys fighting. A billion times. It’ll just be animals or fish. But placing it and centering it inside of a kind of cultural or spiritual experience makes it different. And writing the action is such a way that it honors that and feels like it’s part of that makes this fun to read. And it also helps me understand why it’s not just two people beating each other up. Because that’s just boring. And this is not boring.

I mean, in the end, right, that’s our job? Don’t be boring.

**John:** That’s our job, to not bore people. Also, we have clear expectations of how fights are supposed to work is that one character will win and one character will lose. In this case it sort of seems like one character will win and the other character will die because we’re at the edge of this cliff. And so the stakes are really clear. So it’s a surprise when it gets to a point where it’s not about killing the other guy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s an important reversal at the end of this. So, it’s all just very, very well done. Again, a good script to look through overall, but I really like what he’s doing on the page here for this action sequence.

**Craig:** Wakanda Forever.

**John:** Another superhero movie that I really loved an action sequence in was Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs. The sequence I’m picking out here is from the No Man’s Land, which is a really important character moment in which Diana first steps out of the trench, crosses through No Man’s Land, WWI, and got to the other side. And it’s her sort of really coming into her own superhero identity. So I wanted to look at what that looked like on the page.

So, this is more conventional. You’re going to read a lot of screenplays that are sort of done this way. And so just be used to this style because it’s common and effective.

One of the things I want to point out the difference between this and Black Panther is “IN THE GERMAN TRENCH. ON THE BATTLEFIELD. IN THE ALLIED TRENCH.” These are intermediate slug lines and they’re a way of sort of directing our attention without going through a full INT. SOMEPLACE – DAY. EXT. SOMEPLACE – DAY.

In Coogler’s script he does the same kind of thing but he uses full scene headers, which you don’t necessarily need to do because they really aren’t separate scenes. They’re just aiming the camera a certain way. And so this is kind of aiming the cameras at the German trench, on a battlefield, in the Allied trench. When you have a sequence that’s moving around to a bunch of different places these intermediate slug lines are a useful way of sort of grouping together a bunch of the kind of scenes that are going to stick together. Even knowing that you’re probably not going to necessarily follow this shot by shot, these are the places where this action is taking place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if just from a scene numbering point of view that once the first AD got a hold of this that “In the German trench” became 77a. “On the battlefield” 77b. Because the scene numbers really are to organize your schedule and make sure that you get everything, right. Because a lot of times I think writers think that the numbers are just there to, I don’t know, have some sort of iteration. But in fact they go all the way to the editors who are keeping track and making sure they get everything.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, in this case they probably would want to do this. But you’re absolutely right. This is kind of what I would call – this is the RP, the received pronunciation, of action description. This is just classic action description. There’s no twists. There’s no like funky bits. This is kind of right down the middle classic good old fashioned action description. And, by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with that, either. Not everything has to be quirky in its own way, or idiosyncratic.

This is probably the thick middle of the bell curve of how action is written.

**John:** Yeah. To your point about the scene numbering, I hadn’t realized this until I was looking at it. This is all considered Scene 77.

**Craig:** Yeah. No way.

**John:** Someone else has a different script that actually has little letters for each of these things because you got to just make sure that everything got shot, that everything made it to the edit, that you have everything. So for people’s sanity there would be more stuff. But it doesn’t matter for the read on the page.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Which is really what we’re talking about here. And so these intermediate slug lines and not doing the days and nights makes it an easier read. I think if we stuck in real full scene headers for each of these times we’re cutting between on the battlefield/in the German trench it would have been a little bit more exhausting. So I like this style.

**Craig:** It would have been a lot more exhausting. Absolutely. Because, you know, once you do get to that, that level of document really is a technical document. So you walk around on the morning of a shoot day and everybody is looking at their little tiny pages of the script. And they’re making notes. And those notes are technical. So, when we get to 77b somebody is writing down we use this lens. The script supervisor is checking in with the camera folks. It’s going to be this lens. It’s going to be this size. Everybody is doing that job. So it’s not about the read anymore. Nobody is there looking at the literary quality of it. It’s technical.

I’m kind of curious, John, what you feel, because I have a feeling – and again this is all preference, there’s no rights or wrongs, about CONTINUED at the end of a scene and then CONTINUED at the beginning on the next page.

**John:** Oh, so the thing that software will do for you automatically I don’t find it useful or helpful at all. When it’s an option I turn it off. Do you use it or do you not use it?

**Craig:** I don’t. I don’t because I don’t really know what it’s there to do. It’s a little bit like when you were a kid and you wrote a love letter to your crush in ninth grade or whatever, and so you’re like “this is what I think” and then you get to the bottom and you’re like “continue – arrow” because you’re afraid that they won’t turn the piece of paper over. [laughs]

**John:** They won’t know to turn the page.

**Craig:** It’s the most unconfident thing you could put at the bottom of the page. No, it’s not over. There’s more. Yeah, of course there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the end of it. It’ll be over when it says The End. So I don’t know what the point of that is.

**John:** So here is I think the point of it is that if you see the CONTINUED that happens on Page 80 it also carries across the 77 scene number. And so if you’re flipping through pages and you ended up on Page 80 and you’re like what scene number is this, you don’t have to flip back to see what scene number it is. So it’s a time saver on that level.

But it is just extra words [unintelligible] on the page and that’s why I just turn it off.

**Craig:** Yeah. And generally what happens on the day is when they’re printing out sides for everybody, which is what we call the little tiny mini script pages, of that day’s work there’s no confusion whatsoever. Because if you have Scene 77 on your first page of sides and then half of it spilling over to the next page and then Scene 78, which you’re not shooting that day on the second half of that page they’ll just put a big X through 78. It’s pretty clear what you’re shooting.

And I think also if you don’t do the continued they may just – I can’t remember if most software just sticks the scene number there anyway, just as a matter of course at the top of the page. I’m going to take a look right now and see if that’s the way it works.

**John:** Sides are a whole special business. And sometimes there will be problems in sides. And that’s again why it can be really helpful to have a writer on set. Because if you get your day’s sides and you realize they’ve actually left off a line of dialogue here, that stuff does happen. And people unfortunately will gravitate too much towards the sides and not towards the actual script. You have a script supervisor there, too, who is also keeping an eye on that. But sides can be a problem and things can come up.

I’m sure increasingly productions will move to digital equivalents of sides which can hopefully ameliorate some of the problems. But it’s traditionally been you’re at a photocopier and you’re shrinking down pages and you’re using a Sharpie to X stuff out. It’s traditionally been a very physical process that can be prone to mistakes.

**Craig:** Without question. And that is why screenwriters have to be on the set. Let me say it again. Screenwriters have to be on the set.

In television of course we’re there. We’re there because we’re running the show. But in movies there’s not only are screenwriters often not there, but they decided apparently that directors get to say if screenwriters can be there or not, which is freaking nuts. I mean, do directors get to say if the cinematographer is there or not? It just doesn’t make any sense.

So, nobody – nobody – knows the script better than the writer. Sorry. The writer. And if there had been 12 writers hire one whose job is to be the writer-writer. And they need to be there. And people need to respect what they’ve done. Because they’re the only person sometimes who has the complete and total picture. Especially when you have a non-writing director who really is focused on the work that day and who may come up with a brilliant way of shooting something that leaves one tiny important thing out that was on the page for a reason.

It’s mind-blowing to me. Absolutely mind-blowing. And another reason why I think the feature business continues to suffer, aside from COVID and all the rest of it, creatively in comparison to what’s happening in TV. Because there’s just this cultural exclusion of writers which literally serves no one. It doesn’t even serve the director.

Umbrage.

**John:** I was worried we would get too far into the episode without any umbrage. So there we are.

**Craig:** We had some earlier, too. I mean, it’s been throughout.

**John:** Finally, let’s take a look at The Kingsman, written by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. I picked this one just because it was a slightly different style. It’s very comic. And so I wanted to have something in here that has a sense of some fun and some whimsy to it. And you see that in some of the scene description. So it’s starting at Scene 204.

Some stuff looks like conventional action. “Bullets spray all over. Thank god for Eggsy’s Kevlar. The guard yells to his cohorts.” All that stuff reads kind of normally. But then like, “Elton is a revelation – a shockingly dirty fighter, biting and clawing as he wrestles the Third Guard to the ground.

So within this action sequence we have to see Elton John be doing some dirty fighting. And so it’s important that within this sequence you are emphasizing the stuff that is shocking and surprising. So it can’t just be a list of shots. It has to have a sense, the feel of the rest of the movie. And you want to make sure that your action sequence do keep in the style of the rest of your film.

**Craig:** Correct. So action is a sneaky way to influence a reader’s understanding of tone. When we think about Near Dark and the way that Kathryn and Eric did it, you can feel the tone of Near Dark in there which is – it’s sort of gritty and dirty and sweaty. And kind of desert poetry.

And this is clever. There’s a wink. It’s snarky. “Elton is a revelation” is funny. It’s just a funny way of putting that. “Lady Gaga kicks the Fourth Guard in the balls, but he just picks her up and carries her back towards the cells…” That’s funny. Not the balls part. The fact that he just picks her up and he’s like, “All right, Lady Gaga. Come on. You’ve had enough.

That is funny. And your action sequence or your action description should in some way feel like it’s in the same world as your characters. It has to match the vibe. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** In terms of tone and what a script feels like, obviously dialogue is incredibly important. That’s going to be a sense of the voice of your film. But the actual your voice is going to come through a lot in your action and the words you’re choosing to describe this thing. It’s why Near Dark feels so different than some of these other samples is because of how they chose to write those things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So just be really mindful of things. And don’t assume that there’s only one right way to do things forever.

These last couple examples have been more conventional, but they still within that space find ways to convey what’s important about this film versus another film.

**Craig:** 100%. And, again, they will keep kind of letting you know how you’re – look, you can have a race between gazelle and Usain Bolt. That is quite serious. But it’s clear it’s not meant to be quite serious. “The best race we have ever seen is taking place.” There’s a certain dry British observational tone to this which is reflective in the movie. Because that is the movie and it’s wonderful. And so it’s smart.

The action is not an excuse for you to stop being smart, smart being literate, stop being clever or creative. It’s an opportunity. So use it. It’s just wasted, I think, if you look at it as this kind of “oh I’ve got to describe things now so let me just get that over as quickly as I can.” So like Jane and Matthew understand that this is an opportunity to entertain. Because the action description is meant to describe a thing that is also supposed to be entertaining. Not just there. They all – all the people we’ve read today have been very good at that.

**John:** So my small rant here is I remember, god, 10 years ago, 15 years ago I was sent a script and they needed me to rewrite out the car chase sequences because the very well paid famous writer when it came time for the car chases in a movie that was mostly about car chases would say, “And now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. Better than you’d ever imagine. And it’s really phenomenal. But I won’t both wasting your time describing it here on the page.”

I’m like what are you doing!? You cannot just abdicate your responsibility for writing this action sequence. That is something that is going to be portrayed in the movie. It needs to be on the page. I was so angry that he had gotten away, apparently, well kind of gotten away with not writing those sequences and he was going to let someone else take care of that.

**Craig:** I’ve seen this and it is freaking mind-blowing every time. I feel this by the way in scripts for musicals, it’s like “Song.” But…

**John:** What?

**Craig:** What am I seeing? [laughs] Are we just stopping the movie and playing a song against a black screen? This is part of our job.

**John:** Exactly the same. It drives me crazy. Or people just have assumptions, oh, you just write up to the song and write after the song? No. I wrote what happens in the song. And with the knowledge that lyrics can change. But I had to write – it is a scene. I write the scenes. The song is a scene. I’m going to write this moment.

**Craig:** Correct. It is our job. So don’t be that guy/girl. Don’t do it.

**John:** Craig, I want to say this has been a really exercise for me. Because so often when we look at pages we’re having to point out the things that are not working and try to be gentle with people’s feelings but also help them. In this case these were all really good writers who did a really good job describing the things that were in their movie which is the whole point of what screenwriting is, to help the reader see a movie before that movie even exists. And each of the examples is really good.

So I hope that people who are listening to this and reading through these pages recognize the wide range of possibilities there are for describing action and experiment. See what feels natural under their fingers to describe the kind of sequences they want to do.

A thing I did early in my career when I was trying to figure out how to write action, I would just imagine these crazy action sequences and just try to write them. They weren’t part of any movie. But I just wanted to get a sense of like how would I describe, like if that helicopter had to come into this building what would actually happen there. And those kind of challenges, it’s like learning to draw. It’s really awkward at first but then you kind of get better at it. And so I would just say look at action as an opportunity to improve your craft rather than as a drudgery, like a thing that you have to do when you get to those moments in your script.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because if you do that’s how it’s going to read. It will read like drudgery.

**John:** It’s going to read that way.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. I mean, movies are not just spaces in between people talking. The stuff in the action is just as important if not more so than the things people say. And we to honor that and practice our craft in those moments I think even more assiduously than we do when we’re writing dialogue. Because the more visceral part of experiencing television or film is what we see when people aren’t simply talking. That’s what we feel.

And even when it’s a conversation it’s important to understand where the action fits in and what I need to see. Tell me what to see. And for the love of god if anybody tells you that you can’t “direct on the page,” show them these things and then tell them to shut the F up.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Say, “We see you shutting the F up.”

**John:** That is the lesson they need to learn. All right, that’s it for that segment. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, so one of your previous One Cool Things was that guy who was going through his Sudoku and had this brilliant revelation of how to solve a Sudoku.

**Craig:** Absolutely amazing.

**John:** I’ve been playing a bunch of Sudoku because a new app by Zach Gage who does a bunch of other iOS apps that I love called Good Sudoku came out. What’s clever about it is it has some tools to make solving Sudoku a little bit easier, but more importantly it lets you tackle much harder problems. Because you can ask for hints and it won’t tell you what the number is. It will tell you here’s how you can figure out the next step. Because there are strategies for doing stuff. It can talk you through that. And so it’s just a really well done iOS app.

If you’re curious about Sudoku and don’t really get how to do certain things in it, like X-wing for me was this bizarre concept for me to learn.

**Craig:** That’s a tough one.

**John:** It really helps out a lot. So I would recommend Good Sudoku. It’s a cheap app on the iOS App Store.

**Craig:** Everybody loves a cheap app. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is an aspect of a game that I’ve been playing called Ghost of Tsushima, which is pretty popular right now. I think a lot of people are playing it. It’s exclusive to the Sony PlayStation, so if you don’t have PlayStation, apologies. Set in feudal Japan and you’re a samurai. And you are helping repel the Mongol invasion, so basically kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, which is cool. But the part of it that I think is so wonderful, really enjoying, is the sword play itself, which I think is really strong.

There’s a certain way to do combat in video games that I find satisfying. And I think of it mostly in my mind as the Batman Arkham solution, which is it’s a button. And it’s a rhythm. It becomes like a dance, like we were talking about in Black Panther. You’re hitting that, let’s say it’s the square button. And that’s your primary sword swing. And you get used to the rhythm of it.

And then as you get better they’re like, OK, now here’s a new thing. You can throw in a triangle and do this. And as you keep going it sort of slowly but surely expands. And so you’re using all of the buttons, including the triggers. And doing different stances, different moves. And it just flows. And it becomes that very beautiful fluid combat the way it was in Batman in the Arkham series, or Spider Man, or now Ghost of Tsushima.

So, recommend.

**John:** Excellent. Cool. Well that is our show for this week. So stick around if you’re a Premium member because we’re going to talk about the Emmys.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** But for everyone else, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our special action outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Or there’s a link in the show notes. You can find those show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

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.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Craig, thank you for an action-filled episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig, I have some bad news for you. You received no Emmy nominations. I’m really sorry.

**Craig:** That’s weird. I don’t understand.

**John:** Because last year you got a bunch. And then you look at the chart, just really high. And now it just plummeted all the way to zero. Not negative. But zero.

**Craig:** Right. Zero. So, that is a–

**John:** You got snubbed.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is a dramatic fall off from lots to none. I mean, I didn’t have a show. So, I guess–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sort of something?

**John:** And to be fair, I didn’t get any Emmy nominations either.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Same excuse for both of us, having no show.

**Craig:** That might be inter-Academy rival though. Like the Emmys think of you as the movie Academy guy. And so it’s like the Sharks and the Jets.

**John:** Yeah, a little of that. But we were not the only people who didn’t get nominations. And so I want to talk about, I have a small little rant here about snubs.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** I hate the whole concept of snubs because to me snubbing implies that you deliberately chose not to give somebody something. I’m passing out cupcakes but I’m not going to give Susie a cupcake. That to me is a snub. You are snubbing Susie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Reese Witherspoon not getting an Emmy nomination is not a snub really. It’s unfortunate because she’s a really good actress and was apparently great in all these shows that I didn’t end up watching, but there’s also probably a really clear explanation why is that if you’re a good actor in three different shows, and so some people are filling out their ballots saying I’m going to nominate Reese Witherspoon for this thing, but not this thing because it would be weird to nominate her for two different things. It splits it up. There’s a reason why she didn’t get a nomination.

It’s not because she’s not good. It’s because she was in too many things.

And I think the problem of too many is also the reason why some shows got “snubbed.” Because there’s just way, way, way too many good television shows in 2020. And we can’t give awards to everything.

**Craig:** Well, and there’s also this very vibrant prediction community. So, they have predictions about what is going to happen. They get kind of invested in their predictions. They talk about it. And a lot of the people who are writing the stories in the trades are involved and saying, look, I’m pretty sure the five people are going to be this. And then someone says, “Well what about this show?” And they’re like, no, you’re stupid. Well, but then that show gets nominated and so either we were all wrong or something went – they snubbed somebody. Clearly it’s a snub. It’s a snub because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

But you’re right. That’s not a snub at all. It was an unpredicted outcome. It is important to remind everybody that it is not ultimately the definition of what is good or bad art. Everybody has a relationship with television shows. I assure you that my daughter’s relationship with Criminal Minds is far deeper than her relationship with say Chernobyl.

**John:** Oh my god. What is up with Criminal Minds? My daughter is watching Criminal Minds as well. I don’t get it.

**Craig:** Somebody explain – and I’ve asked my daughter to explain it. She can’t, other than to say she must continue to watch Criminal Minds. It’s like the Chinpokomon thing from South Park. Is it there are subliminal messages? Are they taking over the world? I mean, nothing against Criminal Minds, but like my daughter is so into Criminal Minds that we happen to be – we were sitting together the other day and the topic of famous people came up. And she’s like what famous people do you have phone numbers for. And I’m like, OK, I’ll take out my phone.

And I start saying, OK, I have this person’s phone number, this person. And then I’m like – and I get to Paget Brewster who I directed in a movie 20 years ago. And I’m like, oh, you know what, I think Paget Brewster is in Criminal Minds. Because I don’t watch Criminal Minds. And she was like, “Wait, what?” And I said Paget Brewster. And I kid you not, my daughter cried. Like emotional tears. Because I knew Paget Brewster.

What has Criminal Minds done to our children? [laughs] What is happening?

**John:** OK. Have you watched any episodes of Criminal Minds with your daughter?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That show is so dark. I cannot believe how dark that show is. And that it’s on every week apparently on CBS.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It aspires to be Silence of the Lambs. But the fact that it’s just a CBS procedural, but it is also doing Silence of the Lambs, it makes it in some ways kind of more disturbing. Because it’s just like these characters are talking in perfectly normal sort of ways about incredibly gruesome things.

**Craig:** Yes. Look, I don’t speak ill of anything. I will simply say I don’t have the same relationship–

**John:** No, nor do I.

**Craig:** With Criminal Minds as my daughter does. I’m not the Criminal Minds audience. And I don’t understand a lot. I mean, I just don’t kind of get the whole Criminal Minds. I don’t know. It didn’t happen between us. We had a good first date, but it wasn’t going to last.

**John:** But back to Paget Brewster, I think of Paget Brewster as a comedy actor.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because she’s so funny.

**Craig:** She’s amazing.

**John:** I see her on Another Period.

**Craig:** So good on that.

**John:** And I’m seeing her on this show and I’m like, wait, is that really the same actor? Because she’s just doing – she’s doing a perfectly good job of being in a crime procedural, but it’s not at all the actor who I think of her as. It’s so weird.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a really challenging concept. I love that we’re talking about Criminal Minds instead of the Emmys. It’s so much more interesting to be honest with you. So, Criminal Minds, they have a good starting concept for a show which is every week they’re going to encounter some sicko and they fly – and I love that they have their own plane. It’s awesome. They fly in and they’re like, OK, we’re going to figure out just what new flavor of total sicko this is.

And each one of the people on any episode of Criminal Minds would have their own movie at this point. Like there would have been a made for TV movie about that person.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re all so specifically crazy. But now they’re on like season 80 and it’s like their view of the world is literally every week there is a Ted Bundy level person up there, or John Wayne Gacy. Like every week.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No matter what.

**John:** But the Ted Bundy/John Wayne Gacy character is often some actor who is always playing a good guy in everything else. So it’s always like a James Van Der Beek or a George Newburn is the killer in it. And I’m sure they’re relishing the opportunity to play somebody who is not goody two shoes, but oh my god.

And I just don’t get what she loves so much about it.

**Craig:** There might have been something on TikTok. Like something happened on TikTok which as we know is controlling our children’s minds, and it just happened. And there’s so much. I mean, you can watch Criminal Minds in quarantine, by the way. It’s the perfect combination. Well, it’s summer, we can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything. Criminal Minds everyone. And, yeah, so basically 15 year old girls are living the C-Minds life right now.

**John:** Just to get back to the Emmys for a second.

**Craig:** If we must.

**John:** When you cheated on me with the other podcast for Watchmen I was happy to see that Damon and company got so many nominations for Watchmen. It is a phenomenal show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is great to see. And we have many other friends who got nominations. I’m genuinely happy for all of them that they’re being recognized for their hard work. I just also want to take this moment to recognize all the other shows and performers and writers who didn’t get nominations who also did really amazing work, because there just wasn’t space to acknowledge it all.

**Craig:** Exactly. On the Watchmen front, something cool might be going on there in terms of more to say on the radio. But I also want to call one person out. There is one nomination that made me the happiest, and that was Kaitlin Olson who got nominated for – I think it’s in the Best Short Form Comedy category. It’s the one that Megan Amram kept trying to win I think. And it’s for the show that she does on Quibi with Will Forte. And it made me so happy – the second reason it made me so happy is because I love Kaitlin. She’s fantastic.

But the first most important reason is because she’s married to Rob McElhenney who once again did not get nominated for an Emmy. [laughs] He’s just been waiting. Oh, he’s waiting. And, by the way, in all seriousness deserves it. Like the Always Sunny guys deserve it. I think the Mythic Quest folks deserve it.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So he’s just been always on the outside staring in, like the Little Matchstick Girl. And Kaitlin was just like, “Oh, hey Rob, look at this. I got nominated for an Emmy. Anyway, what do you want to do today?”

**John:** Yeah, Craig, had you been nominated for an Emmy for your performance in Mythic Quest I would have been happy for you, but I also kind of would have wanted to throw a trash can just on behalf of all the actual actors out there.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s inevitable that I don’t. I’m not sure, yeah, the appearance of Lou is always in doubt. Lou is not a character that you expect to see in the list of characters on the first page. Lou is a surprise. Like, what, episode seven, Lou? I don’t know if I’m going to be in the second season or not.

You know what? A little bit of Lou goes a long way. Let’s face it.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for the talk.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

Scriptnotes, Episode 437: Other Things Screenwriters Write, Transcript

February 21, 2020 Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/other-things-screenwriters-write).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 437 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, sure, we’ll talk about screenplays, but we’ll also focus on other things that screenwriters write, including outlines and treatments, because Craig you and I, we’ve been doing a lot of that recently.

**Craig:** Good lord have we.

**John:** Then we’ll be answering questions from listeners just like you. And in our bonus segment Craig and I are going to discuss the Myers-Briggs personality test. And we will reveal which four letters tell everything you need to know about us.

**Craig:** Uh, I don’t know why anybody listening to this show hasn’t kicked in the whatever it costs to get these bonus segments. They’re better than the show. They’re the best. [laughs] They’re really better.

**John:** Sometimes they are really quite delightful. So, if you want to sign up for these it’s obviously at Scriptnotes.net and you can get in on all the bonus action.

All right, a little bit of news. I’m doing a criminal justice panel called Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice. That’s February 26. This is one of those special little panels that will hopefully livestream, but if you want to be there live in the audience you should come to it. So, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s going to be me and some TV showrunners and some criminal justice experts talking about our portrayals of the whole system on screen and what the realities are and how we can do a better job making those things match up.

So, it’s sort of a companion piece to the mental health and addiction panel that I did last year.

**Craig:** And where is this panel taking place?

**John:** It’ll be at the SAG building, so on Wilshire.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Pretty small space. So a lot smaller space than what we do for our live Scriptnotes shows. But if you want to come see that that is available to you on February 26.

**Craig:** You know what I wish in terms of follow up and news and all the rest, I will there was something you could tell us about Highland 2.

**John:** Oh, thank you. I was even going to omit that for this week, but now I’ll say it.

**Craig:** No, I refuse. Say it.

**John:** A couple shows ago I talked about student licenses. So if you are a student who needs to use Highland 2 we do have the capability of adding your whole school so that if you have a .edu address for that we can sign you up for that. You need to give us the contact information for your program or professor. I didn’t really explain very well this first time. I’ll try to explain better now.

But you can send us an email at brand@johnaugust.com. That’s brand@johnaugust.com. Say what program you’re in, but most importantly who the instructor is who teaches your writing program so that we can contact them and they can actually send out the form for signing everybody up. So it’s not just like a “hey I’m a student, give me the license.” We actually need to get your program signed up so we can see that you genuinely are part of that writing program.

**Craig:** On behalf of the public school district in my town of La Canada, I’m curious do you also offer this to public school districts, for high school maybe?

**John:** At this moment we don’t because we need to have somebody who has a .edu address. And high school kids generally don’t. College kids generally do. So, if we can expand at any point down the road we will, but it’s kind of a manpower problem. We need to actually verify who these people are.

**Craig:** I was thinking more of like the schoolwide thing, you know. If a district called you and said we want to purchase a school license.

**John:** Oh yeah. That’s very doable. And that’s already doable sort of in existing plans.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** Totally possible.

**Craig:** All right. Great.

**John:** Let’s segue to the main topic today which is the stuff that we write that is not screenplays. So we’ve talked a lot about screenplays obviously over the course of 400-and-a-zillion episodes. All the words on the page. The format. How to best convey things. But this last couple months I’ve found myself having to write treatments for things. And I’ve sometimes written a treatment for myself which is basically a set of notes, a plan for how I’m going to attack a movie. But this was the first time in a decade that I’ve had to write a treatment that is being turned in. It is like the plan before the plan for the movie. And I found it difficult to write. I found it difficult to convey some of the stuff I would normally be able to do in a scene in just paragraph form, especially when it comes to conveying the inner thoughts of characters. Why they’re doing what they’re doing. A sense of tone. The comedy. The decision about when to move into italics for suggestion of dialogue.

I found it kind of a frustrating form. And you’ve done a little bit more of this than I have, so I wanted to talk through why we write outlines and treatments and sort of best ways to use that document form to convey the movie you hope to write.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Because I’ve written a lot of treatments and my treatments are very scriptment like. The last one I wrote I think was about 70 pages. And so I believe in them, but I also find them painful for so many reasons. But ultimately a good pain.

So, I’ve done it all for all sorts of things. And it’s not something that is necessary unless you’re being commanded to do it as a condition of employment, which is rare.

**John:** Is rare but actually the thing I’m doing right now, one of the steps was a treatment.

**Craig:** Well there you go. Then you’ve got to do it.

**John:** And so to have a document that is going to be judged based on how well they can understand the movie in this was new for me.

**Craig:** Well, then this is a good opportunity for us to kind of talk about some best practices and some techniques that make things a little bit easier. And also some tips and tricks, because there are some pitfalls. You can get trapped inside of a treatment pretty easily trying to achieve an effect that ultimately is not really achievable inside that format.

So, I guess maybe the first thing to sort of ask is how do you even define one of these documents.

**John:** I think that’s a great place to start, because I would say you scale up from sort of a beat sheet, to an outline, to a treatment, to a scriptment. And the first time I ever heard the term scriptment was in relation to James Cameron who writes these very long, sort of 70-page scriptments that actually do have some dialogue in there and are almost – if you squint you can sort of see the screenplay in them.

But let’s start with that smallest form. Do you have any different levels of document that you would describe?

**Craig:** No. And the truth is I’ve never done a beat sheet because once I start thinking that specifically then I’m already kind of writing an outline.

**John:** I would define a beat sheet, and these are much more common in procedural television, but I would define a beat sheet as not necessarily single sentences but really kind of bullet points that sort of talk through these are the moments in the story, especially in television leading up to act breaks to sort of show you – it’s almost like just the index cards of how you would get through the story. And so they’re very minimal and you’re just sort of looking at the big actions that happen there, or the big reversals, the big moments.

An outline is a much more flexible term, and you’ll see things that I would describe as really kind of a treatment but they call it an outline. An outline is, to me, a much more – a better fleshed out version of the beat sheet that actually shows – tends to show scene by scene, definitely sequence by sequence how you’re getting from point A to point B, what is introduced where, the callbacks to things. It’s a longer document. So to me an outline is probably a 10-page document. What are you thinking?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, outline is basically a very thorough beat sheet, where you’re not just saying things like “police station, they interrogate the suspect.” And outline would say “Police station. This person and this person interrogate the suspect. They want to know this. She says this. They’re not sure. They decide to go talk to somebody else. Next bit.” That’s kind of like how you would scale up I would imagine from beat sheet to outline.

**John:** I find outlines very difficult to read if I’m not actually familiar with the story itself. I’m thinking back to an arbitration I did a year or two years ago and where one of the documents in it was an outline. And I would say it was 15 pages. And it was almost incomprehensible. It was very hard to follow bullet point to bullet point, paragraph to paragraph sort of what was happening. It was in this weird middle ground where it wasn’t kind of telling the story. It was just sort of saying – it was just giving the scene without enough of the transitions and segues between moments to really help me understand what movie I was watching.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I find outlines to be in a kind of useless no man’s land. I mean, I understand the value of a beat sheet. It’s this minimal organizational tool. It’s sort of the equivalent of continuity. So when you’re making a movie or a television show and you’re in editorial at some point someone will generate a continuity which is just literally a list of scenes in order with their numbers and the briefest description of what happens in them.

But as a plan, an outline kind of falls in between. It’s almost like so if a beat sheet is the plan for tonight is chicken with rice and string beans, an outline is chicken, butter, parsley, string beans, this thing. But there’s no instructions of like how long do you cook, how do you cook it, are there any other ingredients. When? It’s just not enough. It’s not enough to be anything.

Once I decide – this is personal – but once I decide to flesh something out it’s going to be a treatment or a scriptment. Those are really where I find myself living.

**John:** So this project I was writing this treatment for was going to be one of those longer form things. And so I wasn’t stuck in this sort of no man’s land. I really was sort of writing up the whole thing. I really looked at it as this is a prose document that is describing the movie that you’re going to be watching. And so it’s not trying to be an approximation of the screenplay. It’s really describing sort of sequence by sequence this is what’s happening in this sequence but told in really prose form. And when I needed to use dialogue I would move into italics, which is sort of a common choice. Then it always becomes awkward when you have two characters who need to talk to each other. Generally one person is in italics, one person is not in italics. It’s not perfect. But it works.

The other thing I will say about this treatment that I turned in, it had a lot of preamble that was not filmable material but was really talking you through this is the world, these are the characters, these are the challenges, this is what you expect, this is what you don’t expect. So there was quite a bit before we actually got to the story part of the treatment which is a luxury you generally don’t have when you’re turning in the screenplay. You don’t have five pages to talk through the plan for the thing. You’re actually delivering the actual object itself.

**Craig:** And how many pages did that – you’re describing this as a treatment.

**John:** This whole treatment was 26 pages altogether.

**Craig:** Perfect. So this about makes sense to me. To me, the only difference between a treatment and a scriptment is that in a treatment you are prose-ifying the plan for the movie, but you’re not saying everything. You don’t have to explain every transition or every tiny little thing. You can compress a couple scenes into one descriptive paragraph about the sort of thing that happens. For instance, if there’s a battle you can kind of summarize the battle and explain what matters. And as scriptment you’re doing it like a script, where you just now will say everything. Every moment, every little detail, every little transition. It’s all being spelled out in prose.

Prose is more efficient than screenplay to an extent. Although what I suspect is that I probably have written more words in the 70-page scriptment than I am in the 110-page script because in a script it’s just the description is, I don’t know, it’s just a little bit more efficient. And dialogue is a little punchier.

So, do you have to do – there’s no reason to do a scriptment, by the way. I’m one of the few people that does them. I guess James Cameron is one of the other ones. They’re a bear. It’s just that what happens with me is if you said to me, “Hey, I need you to write the classic 25-page treatment,” I’d start and I’d end up with a 70-page scriptment. Because that’s just kind of how my process goes.

**John:** Yeah. It was everything I could do to stop myself from doing that and to actually not keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding from the inside-out, but actually sort of limit myself to, OK, in this section, about ten minutes of screen time, it’s going to be about this much page count in my treatment and I’m not going to keep expanding and keep expanding. It was a real danger at certain points.

**Craig:** I mean, the benefit of the scriptment is, well, there are two main benefits. One I think is pretty much a wash with the treatment. The other one isn’t. Both a treatment and a scriptment will provide your collaborators with a very clear picture of your intentions. It’s very hard for them to say afterward, “Why did you do this? Or why did you do that?” You told them you would. It was incredibly clear, in fact. They can disagree. Meaning they can read your script later and go, “OK, we know you said you would do that, and you did it, and we now realize we don’t like it.” That’s fine.

But they can’t be surprised. The benefit, the special benefit of a scriptment, is that you are that much more prepared to write the script. The script becomes that much easier because you’ve kind of written it. You haven’t written all of it. There’s all those wonderful nuances and bits and bobs that come out in scene-crafting. But you’re never wondering, well, OK, now how am I going to get from this to this? Every question has essentially been answered. And so the writing becomes a little bit more of an extension of the scriptment as opposed to just starting up a new process.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk some pros and cons here. I would say a con for the treatment is that as a screenwriter you don’t have all of your tools. Like you don’t have your ability to easily do dialogue, to do transitions, to do a lot of – the film craft of this is not available when you’re just doing sort of prose form. And so you don’t get all the magic you get in writing a screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An advantage I would say though is as I head in now to get notes on this I’m probably a little less protective of what I’ve written because it’s not sort of the finished versions of things. And so it will hopefully be a conversation about this is what I’m trying to go for in this scene, this thing that is not fully written yet. So, while it’s frustrating that I cannot give them the full version of what that scene would be or what that sequence would be like, it’s going to be very easy to change my plan for it based on their feedback and their reactions and get the director’s input into these moments before we’ve even written the scene.

**Craig:** No question. There is a rigidity that is implied in a scriptment. That said, what I have discovered is that producers have no problem blasting through that rigidity.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the nice thing is even then revising a scriptment as I just did last week is also relatively academic. Because so much of what is there is there. And even when they are saying, well, OK, it seems like a better version of this would be this, or we would prefer if this would happen, that it’s all still within the context of the scriptment. That they’re sort of subconsciously working within the framework that you’ve created. They are aware that there are certain things that if you knock down are a much bigger deal. That is an added benefit of the scriptment. It is a little harder for them to fall into the trap of “we’re making a small thing, a tiny suggestion,” that in fact would unravel the rug. They kind of can see that it would unravel the rug, and so they’re a little more crafty about how they’re going to approach things, presuming that they want the script done within some reasonable amount of time.

**John:** Also, you can talk about the story as a story rather than the execution. So you can talk about this is why we think this is not going to work. Or this is why we’re not happy with how the story is tracking here. As opposed to we are not happy with the dialogue you wrote in this scene. And so it is a chance to sort of focus on story without the question of is the problem what happens in the scene or is the problem the words that I used to describe the scene.

**Craig:** For people who might be hearing a strange noise it’s in my office. The heat system sometimes does this little rattle-y thing. It’s a very old building. This building is like from 1908.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve not been to your new offices yet, but based on everything I’ve heard on my side of the microphone I think it’s like a steampunk kind of collective place.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** And that there’s artists and people living together in this big giant space. And they sometimes have a drum circle going.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. We all wear top hats with goggles on them. And–

**John:** A lot of unicycles. A surprising number of unicycles.

**Craig:** Unicycles powered by little flamethrowers. Yeah, that’s how it is over here. It’s very steampunk. Steampunk is the nerdiest of nerd stuff.

**John:** I love how nerdy it is.

**Craig:** It’s so nerdy.

**John:** I mean, I don’t enjoy it for myself, but I really enjoy that people enjoy it so much.

**Craig:** Like do you like science fiction? And Victorian England? It’s such a weird combo. Anyway, you were talking earlier and you said something interesting that I kind of filed away that I wanted to circle back around to. And that was the issue of comedy. It is very difficult to be funny in a treatment or an outline or certainly a beat sheet. To the extent that I don’t really try too much. The only kind of comedy I will ever try and include in a scriptment is if it’s the kind of comedy that could be neatly encapsulated in a three-sentence exchange between two people.

But beyond that you can just sort of vaguely say an insane thing ensues, or something like this, and describe it. But if you’re trying to get laughs with this thing you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And you probably will risk seeming a bit sweaty.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. Both of the things I’ve been writing in treatment form recently have been comedies. And there’s moments in which like I’ll put in the right line that sort of indicates what the tone of the dialogue is. But more I think I’m indicating like these are funny elements that will be together. Like you can see why these characters in this situation will be funny and what the specific moments are that can happen. But I’m not trying to get you down to the granular joke level, because it’s just not the right medium for it.

**Craig:** Yes. And, so balancing out the fact that comedy is really difficult, one thing that’s actually very easy to do in a treatment or scriptment, which is very helpful I think for us as writers to both prepare for ourselves and also share with our collaborators, is subtext. Because there are things that characters can be thinking. And as you know from writing a novel prose is brilliant at letting us know what someone is thinking. Whereas in movies and television, the entire point of the process is for us in the audience to discern what someone is thinking through their behavior, their choices, their performance, and so we write toward that. We write to create subtext.

A treatment or an outline or a scriptment allows you to make that subtext clear. So nobody has to wonder what someone is thinking. They know because you’ve told them. Now, whether or not you execute that correctly in the script, who knows. And rewriting is always necessary. But there can be a discussion about intention. Because what happens is a lot of times is without this step, without the treatment or the outline, you turn in a script, it comes back, and they go, “Well we don’t like this scene.” Well why? “Because she’s being mean.” And you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she’s actually being gray. See, here’s what’s going on. And I thought that was clear. It wasn’t clear to you. But this is what’s going on. This is how it should be done on the day. And they go, “OK, OK, OK, we see that, we see that, we see that. Got it. Got it. Got it. Maybe you could just throw another word in or something just so we…” Because people get confused and draw the wrong conclusion all the time. I do it as a reader, too.

Scriptment kind of helps pave the way for that.

**John:** Yeah. Because you essentially can cheat in that the scriptment form doesn’t have the same rules in that you can only write what can be seen or heard. You can sort of veer into character’s thoughts to make it clear why they’re doing what they’re doing. It comes with the territory there. It’s nice.

**Craig:** Absolutely. So, it is an exhausting process. I find it very exhausting. And I had to do two of them recently for complicated reasons. I mean, not one and then the same one again, but rather two different ones, but somewhat related. And it’s exhausting. It is as exhausting as writing a screenplay.

But it is really helpful. It is the kind of I think most useful homework you can do. It will always save you from fundamental problems of not knowing where you’re writing to. I think some people get concerned that it may limit them somehow. That it will limit their imagination. But my response to that is always twofold. One, once you’re writing the script if you want to deviate from your scriptment or your outline, do it. And, two, you are perfectly free when you’re writing the scriptment. In other words, you can’t argue that it’s restraining or anti-imagination. You’re using your imagination when you’re writing that. It’s just a question of when do you start making decisions. Do you start then or now? I personally like to do it before I start writing the script because writing a script is really hard and I get very anxious when I have no clue what’s coming next.

**John:** Yeah. See, I’m generally not a planner ahead. I generally start writing the script without any sort of detailed outline or treatment going into it. So this will be the first time I’ll be doing that based on my treatment. And I will say I am looking forward to the fact that some complicated decisions will have already been made about like how I’m going to get all these things together. That’s great.

But thinking back to Arlo Finch, you know, with Arlo Finch I started the first book with a pretty detailed plan. The second book I didn’t go into it with a specific plan for how I was going to achieve all the things I wanted to achieve. And I really loved that process of discovery. And I discovered the villain who I thought was going to be the series villain was not the series villain and there’s a whole different character. And so I respect that like my not having a very good plan going into the second book probably freed me up in some ways.

But then in the third book I did end up writing an outline and it was helpful. So I’m saying I guess it really does depend on your situation, how much time you have, and sort of which way you work best.

**Craig:** I’m not surprised that that’s how it went for you. Because if you think about it, you planned chapter one, you planned act one. And you planned act three. And then act two you let yourself roam around a little bit. And that makes sense to me actually. The areas where you get the most screwed when you kind of don’t know what you’re doing is in the beginning and in the end. And it’s only because, look, the inherent risk to full-on freedom, the kind of freedom that comes with the fog of war, of not knowing necessarily right off the bat what comes next, the cost is that you may suddenly realize, oh god, I’ve literally written myself into this terrible corner.

If you’ve planned your beginning and you’ve planned your end, then I think makes total sense – give yourself some license to roam around in the middle.

**John:** I agree. At some point we will have Michael Arndt on the show. Michael Arndt I think is still in the process of this movie that he’s written that I think he’s directed several versions of along the way. He is the ne plus ultra of what Craig is describing where by making a plan and then sort of building on a plan and building on a plan and building on the plan you can make something hopefully terrific. So, we’ll get Michael on the show at some point because I’m curious to see – he’s probably the most extreme version of this process.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s a big planner, isn’t he?

**John:** He is. All right. Let’s get to some questions. And the first question is actually about that planning. So Michael writes in, “I’m wondering how long the Chernobyl bible that Craig delivered with his pilot was for his development deal. I’m about to start pitching an historical series with a similar scope. And I’m curious to know what kind of deal my reps should be asking for and what kind of document was sufficient for the pickup.”

**Craig:** OK. Good questions. So I’m looking at it right now. And it was 65 pages. The 64 pages included, let me just give you a sense of it so you have a basic sense of the range, an overview, which was basically a mission statement. This is why I’m writing this. And this is ultimately what it’s about. Then were a number of pages that were about the characters. So the main characters would each get their own page and a description. And then the sort of sub-characters, secondary and tertiary characters would maybe get bundled onto a page together. And then each episode would get its own outline. And those outlines were not scriptments.

So, I’m going to pick a random episode. Episode two is about 12 pages.

**John:** And these are paragraph pages. And your paragraphs are five to nine sentences maybe?

**Craig:** Well, you know me, I’m a big white space guy. So typically the average would be three I would say. So I like lots of white space. I also would include photos to kind of help people have references as I was talking through things. And so that was it. I kind of did it that way. And laid it all out in that regard.

Now in terms of the deal, the deal that I made which I think was fairly standard was that I would provide them with a show bible, and then I would provide them with a pilot script. That’s kind of what they do. I think that’s pretty standard. I mean, Michael I’m not sure if you’re going to places like HBO or streamers, or if this is a network thing. I don’t know. Probably not network because you’re saying it’s a six-hour miniseries, so I assume it’s like an HBO kind of thing. That’s basically what you’re going to get. I mean, that’s how they do it.

Now, I had never written a show bible before. I asked Carolyn Strauss to get me an example. She sent me one. And lo and behold I did mine much longer. It’s just what I do. So I’ve written the longest show bible ever and probably ruined it for people after me who are going to be like, “Well, you know, Craig’s show bible was…” Sorry. Sorry other writers.

**John:** I do hear other folks who are doing shows for streamers find that they are being asked to write a bunch of additional stuff that was sort of not in their original contract between delivery of the pilot script and the decision to actually pick up the series. And that can be incredibly frustrating. And that is a situation which you do want to stand up for yourself and say like, “OK, I’m doing this because it’s helpful for me, but at a certain point you need to start paying me for the things I’m writing.”

It sounds like your show bible was already part of your contract which is great, which is how it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And honestly it’s all about get the show or don’t get the show. And I’m going to do that anyway. I mean, it’s just part of my process regardless. So the thing about the term show bible is it’s incredibly flexible. It can be, I suppose, whatever you want it to be. I saw one sample that was like five pages long. And I’m like I don’t know how this is a bible per se. So it’s really what you make of it. Just like same in features. Same deal.

All right. Next question. Anonymous writes, “I have a short film that I’ve birthed.” Oh, I like that. “I hired a writer.” Wait, so did you birth it or, OK?

“I hired a writer to write a 14-page script and now after a year of revisions a team of people are helping produce the film on a very small scale. A producer came onboard to help, non-paid, and they are insisting that you can’t have the word ‘I’ in the title. Apparently they are OK with the letter ‘I’ but not the word “I.” They say you are asking the audience to be in the position of a character before knowing anything about them. They have taught screenwriting in college and won screenplay competitions and apparently this is a big sticking point for them. Am I missing something? Is there filmmaking gospel that I missed about the word ‘I’ in titles? I am Legend. And I, Tonya seemed to do just fine. I acknowledge the word ‘I’ sounds weird in a title but I think the uniqueness helps it stand out. And there is some logic to using I am blank based on our story.”

John, this is a puzzling question.

**John:** It is a puzzling question. So, Anonymous, you are not crazy. It is absolutely fine to use “I” in the title. The reason why I picked this question and put it here is because it comes down to the issue of what is rules and what is taste. And the producer has certain taste, and the producer does not like the word “I” in a title. That’s fine. That producer can have that opinion. That does not make it gospel. It does not make it right. You can freely debate that person on whether “I” can be there. But there certainly is no rule.

And people have tastes. People have opinions. And I remember on Charlie’s Angels one of the producers was really obsesses with – she wanted to see the Angels eat to make sure that it was clear that for all the physical activity that they’re doing they do actually eat food. But didn’t want them to eat food in a messy way. And she had a problem with any sort of like Carl’s Jr kind of messiness. And I get that. That’s taste. That’s not actually a story point. It is just her taste and her opinion. And when you are bringing somebody in on your project you do want their taste and their opinion. But it does not mean that you always have to follow it or treat that as being gospel.

**Craig:** Yeah. First of all, Anonymous, if you hire a writer to write a 14-page script I just want to caution you to not write into a screenwriting podcast and say that you have a short film that you birthed. My problem with “I” is that. It’s when you say I’ve birthed. How about you and the writer birthed it, since the writer wrote the 14-page script.

But that said, you say a producer came onboard to help, nonpaid. So I’m not really sure what that means. But what you’re describing that they’re doing is this – it’s called appeal to authority. Rather than expressing their opinion as an opinion, they say it’s not an opinion because, A, I have taught screenwriting in college, and B, I have won screenplay competitions. Well, that in fact represents zero authority I’m sorry to say to that particular individual. Also, this is art. It has nothing to do with authority whatsoever. Either it’s good or it’s not, depending on who you are and where you’re standing and how you see it.

No, there’s no rule. And anybody that starts to do stuff like that needs to go away. Especially when they’re tossing out rules that you know are wrong. I mean, you just know that’s wrong. How is this person walking around in a world where this is plenty of stuff that has the word “I” in it and thinking that somehow you’re going to be fooled? That’s the part about this that I find vaguely sociopathic.

**John:** Yeah. That they’re holding onto their opinions so strongly even despite evidence to the contrary.

**Craig:** Right. Like clear evidence. And they presume that somehow you won’t unearth it? You will.

**John:** Oh no! They have IMDb.

**Craig:** Wait a second. Before I say what I’m about to say, do you have or have you ever heard of the Internet? You haven’t, great. So you can never say “I” in a title. Yeah, no, that’s just silly.

**John:** Not true. Salvatore from Australia writes, “Listening to Episode 436 with Liz Hannah you mentioned that the writer should always focus on what their own unique perspective is when writing a project. But what exactly does that mean in this context? I’ve heard that a lot but I’ve never actually heard it defined. For example, what did Craig recognize as his own unique perspective in the Chernobyl disaster? Was it the theme that lies always incur a debt of truth? In other words, how do I answer the question of why should I be the one to tell this story?”

**Craig:** Those are two different questions.

**John:** OK. Different questions. But let’s try to answer both.

**Craig:** Yes. So, you have one question, Salvatore, which is what does it mean to have a unique perspective on something. And then the other question is why should I be the one to tell this story. There is no answer to the second question. Nobody should be somebody to tell any story. You want to, you are compelled to, you feel a need to. It would give you artistic pleasure to do so. That’s why. I don’t believe in this kind of notion that one person or another is specifically anointed by fate or the universe to tell a particular story.

What is your unique perspective? The way your mind works. That’s it. Meaning when we say that to people what we’re really saying is do this the way that feels instinctively beautiful to you. Don’t do it the way you think other people do it or would want you to do it. So, when I sit down and I think I’m going to write something like Chernobyl, what I don’t do is go and watch a bunch of other limited series based on historical events and go, OK, oh, that’s good, I should do it like that. Or obviously I wanted to do it like this, but they do it like that. I should really do it like that.

No. I just follow my gut. So that’s what we really mean. Every writer has some sort of instinctive understanding of what they want to do. And that’s the part that you provide that nobody else can. So, let that be your loadstone.

**John:** Yeah. Salvatore is asking about unique perspective. I think what we tend to look for is unique vision and unique voice. And those are things you can find in writing, both writing on the page and sort of what the ultimate thing is that gets made. But it’s sometimes easier to think about that in terms of other media. So like with a composer, like composers have very distinct styles. You could imagine sort of a Danny Elfman score on this movie versus a – I cannot pronounce Craig’s Chernobyl composer, but–

**Craig:** Hildur Guðnadóttir.

**John:** They would be very different approaches. And they have different ears, different visions, different voices when it comes to how they are going to do their work and do their art. And so it’s a question of like what are you brining about your art and your perspective, your vision to this material. And that’s why Aaron Sorkin writing about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is going to be very different than Craig writing about that or me writing about that. There’s different things that interest us and there’s different things we’re going to highlight. It’s just going to be a different thing.

And so you are inevitably going to be coming into a project with all of your priors. All your history. Your tastes. Your fears. That is going to make it unique. I think what Craig is arguing is don’t try to minimize what makes you unique in order to write the version of the movie that someone else could write, because that’s pointless.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s exactly right.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Breton Zinger?

**Craig:** All right. Our next question is from Breton Zinger, which is awesome.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** I want to be Breton Zinger. Breton Zinger writes – this is not a question. This is an order. “You should do a segment on how to be productive writing wise while traveling. I always have grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done, and then I only get X started.” Yeah, what do you think? You’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve done a lot of traveling. How do you manage this?

**John:** A recent thing I’ve started doing while traveling, and I went to Korea and Japan, and I had very long flights ahead of me. And so a thing I’ve started doing which I really recommend for everybody is you know you’re going to have two, five, 13 hours on a plane. That’s great time where no one is going to interrupt you. While we’re in the plane before we’ve taken off I make a list of here’s all the things I want to do on this flight. And that’s stuff I want to actually accomplish, but also I want to watch that movie I’ve been meaning to watch. I’ll go through and figure out what movies are on the seat back that I’ve not seen yet that I do want to see.

I have books and it’s like I want to read two chapters in this book. So not just the stuff that I have to get done, but the stuff I’ve always kind of wanted to get done. Because to me there’s nothing more dispiriting than having spent 13 hours on a plane and realize like, oh, I got kind of nothing done in that 13 hours. Or I played games on my phone that I could have done anywhere.

So, I try to make that time really productive. And so whether it’s travel, whether it’s jury service, whether it’s some other thing where you have a block of time that is uncommitted, use that time.

The other thing that I’ve been much better about in the last few years, especially with writing the books, is that I need to have at least an hour of uninterrupted writing time every day. And so I claim that with my family saying I’m going to need this time. And so I can go downstairs to the lobby. I can go somewhere else. But I need to be uninterrupted for one hour to do my work. And that’s been great. And I’ve actually been pretty productive during breaks because I’ve sort of blocked off that time.

**Craig:** Those are all very strong notions. Yeah, long flights are nice because you actually get so bored that the notion of doing work becomes attractive.

The one thing to keep in mind, Breton, is that when you are traveling you’re going to be more tired than you normally are. So I think possibly just lower the expectations. There’s possibly going to be some jetlag. Also, you’re traveling, so that means you’re probably there for some purpose. To see things, or do things. So you’re going to have less time and your mind is going to be a little more distracted. And also the writing is something that is contextualized within your normal life at home and you’re not in your normal life at home.

So, I would say also give yourself a little bit of a break and maybe don’t make grand plans to get X, Y, and Z done. Since you only get X started, how about next time just make a plan, a non-grand plan to get X done. And see if you can do a little bit more on X, and then you don’t have Y and Z staring down at you going, “You suck.” And see if that works. If that works then maybe next time you could do, OK, do X and start Y. Just manage your expectations. It’s hard.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed. Patrick Tebow writes, “During the Three Page Challenge section of Episode 434 you two briefly touched on the use of pictures in a scene, such as when a character looks at a photo on a desk. Is this prop and avoid at all cost kind of situation? Or is it mostly a problem when a picture is used as a cheap way to start a conversation between two characters?” Craig, what do you think? Is it always a bad idea to be referencing a photo or a picture in movies?

**Craig:** It’s mostly always a bad idea.

**John:** I agree with you.

**Craig:** I never want to say anything is always wrong, but somebody using a photo to start a conversation between two characters, that’s easily avoidable. The bigger issue is when a character is alone and looking at a photograph. Because that’s a cheap way for the people making something to externalize a thought. I need to know that they miss mom. Or, you know, the classic one is some guy picks up a photo and it’s him and this woman and he’s sad. And we realize that she’s either dead or left him. And it’s just pretty tropey. It’s pretty clunky. And it’s kind of incumbent upon us to come up with interesting new ways to do that. I think at this point in 2020 pulling the old staring at a photo thing is going to feel a little soap opera. A little The Young and the Restless.

**John:** I agree with you. Because I’ve never actually had the experience of wanting to pull out a photo and stare at it. It’s just not a thing I’ve ever done. And I don’t believe it. The movie 1917 which I enjoyed very much does have that as an element. I think it gets away with it to a larger degree than you’d expect because it’s set up in the plot and also because we have an expectation that these soldiers actually would have been carrying those photos with them and it’s a prop that is actually handed off and sort of useful story wise in the course of the movie.

So I believed the characters more when they are referencing photos because that’s a thing that soldiers do.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. So if it’s appropriate to the time then it makes total sense. I mean, but if you’re telling a story now you’re right. I mean, I don’t look at photos ever by the way. That’s a whole other side conversation. What’s happened to our culture with photos, I just don’t understand it. I mean, do you ever just sit there and start looking through old photos?

**John:** No, I look through Instagram to look at other people’s photos.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Photos are about what’s happening right now, not about history.

**Craig:** Right. So that’s also insane, by the way. So it’s all crazy. But when people are like we have to get a photo of ourselves I’m like, OK. Why? Are we going to – I mean, I’m becoming that guy who is like, fine, I’ll do it, but will this ever be looked at again? Why are we doing it? It’s so weird. Anyway.

**John:** Let’s do one last letter. This is from Mark who is actually Mike. So this is the guy who wrote in saying that he is moving to Los Angeles and wanted advice and people wrote in with advice. His real name is actually Mike. We changed it to Mark because we’ve sort of gotten in the habit of changing everyone’s names unless there’s a real reason to keep their real name because of all the assistant stuff we’ve been doing. We just don’t want to accidentally put people’s real names in things. But his name is actually Mike even though we called him Mark early on.

Craig, would you read this for us?

**Craig:** Yeah. This is his update. He says, “Thank you so much for airing my question about moving to LA. I’d also like to thank the listeners for their fantastic advice. I especially appreciate how widely the advice has ranged from esoteric to practical. Passion, enthusiasm, patience, and consistency will still with me for years. But don’t write at home and get a California driver’s license are going to be equally useful.

“Here’s my update. I landed yesterday after a hectic month of packing my Brooklyn apartment, quitting my job, and using up every last drop of healthcare I could squeeze out of my employer-sponsored plan.” Oh America. “It’s a huge relief to finally be here. All I’ve seen of the city so far has been the freeway from LAX and the two-block radius surrounding my North Hollywood apartment.” Ah, that’s where I was.

“And I can’t wait to get a car so I can continue to explore. I’m heading to a D&D game tonight.” What? This guy is amazing. “And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of fellow nerds and writers. Would it be possible for you to put me in contact with Eric from Episode 432? If he’s comfortable sharing his contact info with me I’d like to reach out regarding writer’s groups. Thanks again for your time and everything you do. I’m hoping to make it out to a live event soon. Best, Mike.”

Well that’s, I mean–

**John:** That’s lovely.

**Craig:** He sounds like us.

**John:** He does. So I did put him in contact with Eric. Eric wrote back and said, “Sure,” and so they are going to be talking about a writer’s group.

**Craig:** Three months later we’re going to be doing a How Would This Be a Movie. Eric has murdered Mike.

**John:** [laughs] Wouldn’t that be fantastic? So it’s really two outcomes. Either like the same way that Megan McDonnell was hired to write Captain Marvel 2, it could be that Mike was hired to write another Marvel movie, or he killed Eric.

**Craig:** Or Mike and Eric met and fell in love. And then just started doing crimes like–

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Just like Bonnie & Clyde. Listen, there’s a lot that we can do with this.

**John:** It’s a ripe story area.

**Craig:** We really got to see how this turns out. This is exciting.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a Reddit thread called r/imsorryjon. It is told from the perspective of Garfield, sort of. Basically it’s a re-imagination of Garfield in which Garfield is a Lovecraftian monster who kills and possessed Jon Arbuckle and does horrible, horrible things. It is a dark, disturbing thread to go down. And I just greatly enjoyed it. I just love appropriation of cultural elements and twisting them into wild shapes.

I particularly like this idea that Garfield is sort of one of those lantern fish that sort of like lures people in. So I would just say if you want to see some disturbing Garfield imagery I would point you to this Reddit thread.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, I do want to see that. How could I not want to see that? My One Cool Thing this week is a person. And I don’t know if you know him, John, but I certainly do very well. His name is Scott Silver. Scott is a screenwriter like you and I and Scott is nominated for the second time for an Academy Award. This time around it’s for co-writing Joker with Todd Phillips. He was also nominated for 8 Mile.

And I just want to call him out because I think a lot of times what ends up happening, especially when you’re writing with a director is that suddenly the other writer kind of starts to disappear a little bit for whatever reason.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And weirdly the reverse happens in television where I notice that suddenly – like Johan just started disappearing from things. And even sometimes people would say “Chernobyl director Craig Mazin” and I would have to be like, no, for the love of – let me right it and tell you why that’s not true.

But Scott has been doing fantastic work forever. He wrote and directed Johns. That was his first movie, which is a really cool movie. He wrote 8 Mile. And he also wrote The Fighter which is awesome. And now Joker. And so he’s had a very long, very productive career. And he’s a terrific guy and an excellent writer. And so I just thought, yeah, I’m going to give this guy a little extra love because, you know, a lot of times when this stuff is going on you can get easily overshadowed by the actors, and the directors, especially in features. And so my One Cool Thing this week is Scott Silver.

**John:** And also Scott is an east coast based writer as well I believe. Right? He’s not living in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yes. He lives in Manhattan.

**John:** Fantastic. So, again, you can run your career from wherever you choose to live. Easier in Los Angeles, but definitely doable in New York.

Stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be discussing the Myers-Briggs personality index. But otherwise that’s the end of our show.

Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin [Box]. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And a reminder, of course, sign up for Premium membership at Scriptnotes.net to get all the back episodes and our bonus segments. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig. When did you first hear about the Myers-Briggs type indicator?

**Craig:** Many, many years ago. It was I think literally when I met Melissa. Because–

**John:** So college?

**Craig:** College. Because her parents were super into it.

**John:** So for people who don’t understand what we’re talking about, it is an assessment, it’s a test, it’s a short three to five minute test you take where you answer a bunch of questions and then it scores you. This is back in the days of pencil and paper when I was doing this in college. It scores you and you get a four letter code that sort of indicates your personality type.

So there’s four criteria. There’s four sort of characteristics. And it comes out to be a grid of 16 personality types.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this is all based roughly on Jungian stuff. Jung, how will I say this as charitably as possible, was wrong about a billion things.

**John:** As was Freud.

**Craig:** Correct. But that’s the point. They were early. They were wrong the way that a lot of people thought the world was flat and yet they were brilliant. So, Aristotle did not know that the world was round, but he’s a pretty brilliant guy. So they were, you know, at the forefront of things. Did Aristotle not know that the world was round?

**John:** I don’t think he–

**Craig:** I don’t think he did.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Well we’ll put that in the hopper for a later discussion. But so, you know, he had these theories, this kind of collective unconscious and these archetypes and these things that meant something to all of us. Regardless, out of that comes this fascinating way of analyzing personality. And unlike a lot of other ways of analyzing personality which basically come down to asking you are you a this kind of person or a that kind of person, Myers-Briggs uses like a quad-axis formula where there are four different scales. They are binary scales. You go this way or you go that way. So for instance you are extroverted or introverted. The words don’t always mean what they mean colloquially.

What’s fascinating about this is that they take the results of those four things and then analyze each combination. There are 16 in all. And out of the combinations of these things they make inferences which aren’t necessarily intuitive to what the individual parts of the collective four letter descriptor is. But for whatever reason when they look at it and combine those four things and assign this, OK, if you’re this, this, this, and this, you’re going to be this. It’s kind of right. It kind of works.

**John:** It’s kind of right but it’s also kind of right in the way that horoscopes are kind of right sometimes.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Or your astrological sign or a lot of other things that feel like this does apply to me as opposed to the other criteria. So, we’ll put a link to one of these tests so if people want to test for themselves to see what the score would be for their personality type. You told me that you came out as an ENTJ?

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** And so when I took this test in college I also came out as either an ENTJ or an INTJ. Anyone who knows me that I’ve become much more extroverted over time. So, that I became an E over time. When I took the test last night I came out as ENFP, which was different. But honestly I think I messaged you the actual scorecard I got. I was very close to the median on all of these things, and so it really was not a strong thing. Like answering one question slightly differently would have changed my score. So I think I probably am very similar to you on a lot of these things.

Judgment versus perception. I would perceive you to be strongly judgmental. That sounds negative and loaded, but you do tend to have very strong opinions on things.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s not in the Myers-Briggs model, judgment is not necessarily like I’m judge-y.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s rather – and neither is perception more like, oh, I notice lots of things. In the Myers-Briggs model judgment is basically about, well, frankly it’s related to what we were talking about in the main episode about scriptments. Judgment is really about planning, and being decisive, and you’re preference if you are more towards judgment is liking things to be a bit more clear-cut and decided. You don’t do well with a general sense of not knowing what’s going to happen. Uncertainty is not your friend.

Whereas people who are more towards the perception side of things, it’s a little easier for them to adapt to changing circumstances. They’re OK with a kind of I’m not really sure what I’m going to do next. I mean, really what it comes down to is are you the kind of writer that likes to know the next scene or are you not. And that’s kind of cool actually.

**John:** That does describe the difference between you and me. It’s that I am a little bit more on the seat of my pants. We should I think say that mental health professionals don’t use this test.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So it really is a thing that is interesting for lay people to do and explore. Have you ever tried to use anything like this for the characters that you’re writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nor have I. But I do feel like it’s the kind of thing where aspiring screenwriters might that that, oh, this will be a great insight. I suspect there are tools out there that will help you figure out the personality types for your characters. And I just do not think it would be a useful way to spend your time on thinking about your characters.

**Craig:** Not even remotely. Because ultimately what it is is there’s 16 of them. So what are we saying? There’s only 16 kinds of humans in the world? Not at all. It really is just a general sense of how you – the only useful aspect to this as far as I’m concerned, other than just vague curiosity, is that it might help you feel a little bit seen and a little bit normal. Because there’s a description of who you are and it’s kind of cast in the most positive light.

For instance, I think in our society we tend to view extroversion as a very positive thing. You’re a people person. Whereas introverts are a bit suspicious. They’re shy. And maybe they’re afraid. And what Myers-Briggs says is neither of those are two. Extroversion/introversion are simply defined as what energizes you more, being around people or not? And that’s a very positive way of thinking about who you are.

So that part is really helpful. And in that sense it’s fun to do.

Should you use this for writing? No. Should you go to those sites that are like if you’re this type you want to marry that type? No. [laughs] That’s nonsense. That’s all just nonsense.

That said, if you are with someone, as you and I are, not just by the way with our spouses but with each other, and you’re involved with people, and you’re–

**John:** You have relationships in work relationships, in friendships, everything.

**Craig:** Exactly. And you’re kind of curious why when you relate to a certain person there are some times where there are conflicts or confusions, doing this could actually give you a little bit of insight. And by insight really what I mean is understanding and empathy. You go, OK, they actually do see the things a bit differently.

So it’s easy to say, ugh, the problem with that person is they’re so rigid. They’re always just trying to quickly decide what we’re doing next. They’re not open-minded. And the other person could say, oh my god, that person literally doesn’t plan ahead or think of anything, they’re just improvising constantly and it’s just this mush. Well, those are negative ways of thinking about those things but there are positive ways of thinking about those things. And I think this helps you do that.

**John:** Yeah. And the degree to which those could be complementary traits for the other person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In terms of thinking about this with your characters, as I was going through the questions yesterday I would say that some of the questions are worth asking of the characters in your story. So, I would say I don’t think it’s a good idea to come out with what is the four-letter score for this character. But asking question about like does this person seek out parties and social interactions, or does this person want to sort of retreat and build up energy for themselves? Is this person quick to make a decision or want to gather everything in before making a decision? Those are useful metrics that could apply to some characters in your script. And especially if you’re looking at the protagonist in your script and how he or she works then you might decide, OK, you know what’s going to be great and frustrating for this character in this comedy that I’m writing is a person who is going to do the opposite. And that is probably a useful way of thinking about some of these traits in terms of the characters we’re writing.

**Craig:** Yes. It is a really good way to interrogate your own personality bias that may be getting imposed on your characters. Especially if people say all your characters sound the same. Well my guess is then they all sound like you. And so you have a way of thinking about things and suddenly all of your characters are. So taking a look at the ways other people think about things, not as deficits or failures but rather simply as differences might help you expand some things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** For instance, one of the axes of the Myers-Briggs test is sensing versus intuition. By the way, their words are terrible.

**John:** I think they’re bad choices. Because it’s not like sensitive is more sensitive. It’s actually relating to does it have to have data or you’re going on gut feeling.

**Craig:** Yeah. They didn’t pick great words. But regardless, the sensing side of things are people that are rather detail-oriented. They’re somewhat literal and practical. They like to deal with concrete stuff. And the other side, the opposite on that axis is intuition. These are people who are more conceptual. They’re more abstract. They like to know what the overall theory or big picture is. They like to know what’s the point of this as opposed to how does it function. There’s an interesting dichotomy there.

**John:** I’m not sure it quite is a dichotomy though. That’s [unintelligible].

**Craig:** Right. It’s kind of an arbitrary thing that they’ve done. All of it is arbitrary, honestly. But it is a nice way to challenge yourself when you’re writing your characters to say, wait, if they’re all sounding the same is it because they’re all kind of super detail-oriented people? Where’s the person that gets frustrated with that and just wants to know why and how? Just big picture this for me, I’m a dreamer, I’m a conceiver, I’m an imaginer. Whatever it is. Just nice ways to get out of your own head. Weirdly I suppose the tool is designed to get into your own head. But I like to think of it as getting out of your head.

**John:** So, as I was doing research last night another sort of test that’s done in a similar way is called the Big Five personality traits. So OCEAN is the model they have on call. And those five characteristics are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m neuroticism. All of it.

**John:** Yes. 100%. And I bring it up just because in the traits that the Myers-Briggs is looking at, those aren’t the only meaningful traits that help define how we react in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I would say just if it’s helpful for you to look at it that way, great. But that’s not going to give you a complete picture of why someone does the things that they do.

**Craig:** No question. This is just I think more than anything it’s food for thought and a fun party trick to do when you’re – I mean, when I would sit and do this with Melissa’s family, half of the discussion was, “Wait, you say you’re a blah-blah-blah? No you’re not.” The other problem with this is that usually these tests are, well, they’re asking you a question and you’re answering it. But we don’t always know what we are.

**John:** 100%. And you’re imagining one scenario in which you remember, oh that’s right, I left that party early. But that other time where I stayed out till 4am. Wait, so how do I answer this?

**Craig:** Correct. Sometimes people also – they think that one way is better than another and so they answer that way.

**John:** Totally. My personality type is that I want to ace the test.

**Craig:** Well there you go. So then you’re starting to min-max this thing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you do, min-maxing the Myers-Briggs. We’re nerds.

**John:** Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

**John:** Bye.

* John will be part of the [Beyond Bars: Changing the Narrative on Criminal Justice](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-bars-changing-the-narrative-on-criminal-justice-tickets-91710373195) panel on February 26th
* Contact [brand@johnaugust.com](mailto:brand@johnaugust.com) for information on [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/) for students and educators
* [Outlines](https://screenwriting.io/what-does-an-outline-look-like/) and [treatments](https://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-treatment/) on screenwriting.io, and some examples in the [johnaugust.com library](https://johnaugust.com/library)
* Scriptnotes, episodes [436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies), [434](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety), and [432](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
* Reddit’s [r/imsorryjon](https://www.reddit.com/r/imsorryjon/top/?t=all)
* Scott Silver on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0798788/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Silver)
* The [Myers–Briggs Type Indicator on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator) and an [online test](https://www.16personalities.com/)
* The [Big Five personality traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/437standard.mp3).

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