Search Results for: flashbacks

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/flashbacks).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 557 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what happened before this moment, and how do we take the audience there? We’ll be discussing flashbacks, or maybe we already did.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** We’ll also be answering listener continues about managers, writing partners, and remote rooms. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what makes a person an adult? We’ll discuss the markers and behaviors that indicate that someone is no longer a child.

**Craig:** That sounds lovely. Maybe I’ll find out if I’m a child finally, because I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t know either.

**Craig:** I feel like a child with a really poorly functioning spine.

**John:** I do feel like I’m the youngest person in the room a lot of times, which I’m generally not anymore.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a lot there.

**Craig:** You know what we are?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** You and I are ex-wunderkinds.

**John:** That’s what we are.

**Craig:** Now we’re just old people.

**John:** I think we should be up front and clear with our listeners that we are recording this on June 20th, but this episode will probably come out in July at some point. We are living in a world where we don’t even know what Break My Soul sounds like.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** That’s how far back we are, because Beyonce’s song is dropping at midnight tonight. We don’t know what it sounds like. We don’t know what the world looks like post Beyonce’s new song after so much time.

**Craig:** I want to reiterate again that I’m old. I had no idea. I didn’t know what you were talking about at all, even remotely.

**John:** There’s a new song by Beyonce. For all we know, the world could be completely transformed, and everything we’re saying in this podcast could be irrelevant, because she is a goddess who will transform everything.

**Craig:** No. It’s a song. It’s a song.

**John:** More likely, things will go on the same. My question is will her new single make it so that Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush does not achieve number one status.

**Craig:** Is it because of Stranger Things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is it on its way to number one again?

**John:** It’s on its way to number one again.

**Craig:** Was it number one the first time? Probably not.

**John:** Nope. It was top 40, but not number one.

**Craig:** (sings)

**John:** Exciting times.

**Craig:** It’s cool that now, speaking of flashbacks, these songs that were perfectly contemporary for us are these ancient things that can be unearthed for Megana.

**John:** Megana knew the song before Stranger Things.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Is that correct, Megana?

**Megana Rao:** I did.

**Craig:** Yay.

**Megana:** I feel like Kate Bush is a good rite of passage for young goth girls.

**Craig:** Or young not-goth girls.

**John:** How goth were you, Megana?

**Megana:** Goth on the inside, normal on the outside.

**John:** Fully see that.

**Craig:** My daughter has a nose ring now.

**John:** My daughter does too.

**Craig:** She does too?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. How about that?

**John:** It’s been a while since you’ve seen her.

**Craig:** Just side note, since our podcast is about things that are interesting to screenwriters and people with nose piercings. When she asked, was there a difference between you and Mike in terms of acceptance?

**John:** Publicly, no. We present a completely united front to our daughter at all times.

**Craig:** Right, but privately-

**John:** Privately, a little bit.

**Craig:** Who was pro and who was con?

**John:** Neither of us were strongly pro. What I will say is, when it became clear that it was a piercing on the side rather than a piercing in the middle, a septum piercing, then we were better with that.

**Craig:** We were septum. We’re septum over here.

**John:** Team septum.

**Craig:** Team septum. I’m team septum. The way it goes over in my place is Jessica’s like, “Hey, can I pierce my septum?” I’m like, “Sure. What do I care?” Then Melissa’s like, “Um, but,” and then asks a thousand questions. Jessie generally asks me first on those things.

**John:** We save these things for holidays or birthday presents, basically. It’s a big thing she can do on one of the once-a-year gift situations. We go to the really expensive but really good place on Melrose that actually knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** My feeling is that once my daughter turns 18, which is nigh, December, she’s going to do whatever she wants anyway. The tattoos are coming. More piercings are coming. Should I care? I don’t care. Am I a cool dad, or am I just an apathetic dad?

**John:** Or a checked-out dad?

**Craig:** No, I’m not checked out. I actually think I’m cool in the sense that I’m into it. I think it’s fun. Anyway, happy Father’s Day to me.

**John:** Happy Father’s Day, belatedly.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** A month later for all the people listening to this episode. Let’s get into some screenwriter things. I’m going to start with a fun little thread that popped up in my timeline today from Twitter. This is by Jeremiah Lewis. The theme of this thread was ruin a screenwriter’s day in three words.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** He started the thread off with “really well told.”

**Craig:** Oh, “really well told,” that is a classic brushoff.

**John:** I’ve heard that a couple times. I’ve heard that after pitches. I genuinely think in most cases they were trying to sound positive but noncommittal because they hadn’t talked amongst themselves on Zoom, but I don’t know. Now I’m second guessing myself.

**Craig:** I don’t think it ever is a good sign. I don’t think I’ve ever once heard that and thought to myself, “Nailed it.” Really well told. That was really good. Terrific. Good for you. “Really well told” means I’m not buying that, but you did a good job trying to make that sound not bad. That’s basically what that means to me.

**John:** Oy.

**Craig:** Oy.

**John:** Let’s go through some of the other contenders here. Maybe we’ll just alternate turns here. I’m going to go with “really good start.”

**Craig:** That’s also rough. “Lots of potential.”

**John:** Basically, what you did shows us that there could potentially be a movie there, but you were not the one to deliver it. There’s still potential.

**Craig:** That’s not exciting. Jeez, this is depressing. Why did Jeremiah Lewis do this?

**John:** I’ll serve back with a “found it charming.”

**Craig:** I’ve never heard that one, maybe because I’ve never been charming.

**John:** Something feels diminutive about charming. It’s not good, but it’s charming.

**Craig:** This next one is really weird. “Congratulations, you finished.” What? That’s terrible.

**John:** I could tell it was a slog, but you got through it. That’s not so good.

**Craig:** I have one that isn’t on here.

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** “It’s a script.”

**John:** “It’s a script. Wow, it’s fully a script.”

**Craig:** You wrote all of a thing. It’s started and finished. It is script-sized. Congratulations on your script.

**John:** No one can say this is not a script.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s a script.

**John:** “There’s something here.”

**Craig:** “There’s something here.” Wow. There’s so many layers to that one. There’s something here, but you’ve drowned it in nonsense, and you’re not the thing, clearly.

**John:** Here’s the thing. “There’s something here” is a useful note if it’s talking about a scene or a moment. It’s like, okay, this is not fully explored, but if it’s applied to in overall script, that’s not an encouraging sign.

**Craig:** No, not at all.

**John:** “Lots of fun.”

**Craig:** That’s right up there with “this is cute.” You don’t want that.

**John:** Cute and charming, no. “Some good stuff.”

**Craig:** There’s some good stuff. It’s not a complete zero. I feel like if they say, “There’s some good stuff,” what they’re really saying is there’s no good stuff.

**John:** Not enough stuff to string together to make a movie that they will actually want to make.

**Craig:** No. This one I think is not going to ruin your day. It’ll make you bummed out, but it’s honest. “Not for us.” I’d rather get “not for us” than “some good stuff.”

**John:** I agree with you. “Not for us” makes it clear we’re not even talking about the merits of the thing you’re discussing. It’s just really like, this is not a movie that we can make. I get that. “Promising first draft.”

**Craig:** That’s not terrible.

**John:** That’s not the worst. Not going to ruin your day, as opposed to “enjoyed the premise” would.

**Craig:** You didn’t need a script to enjoy the premise, did you?

**John:** No. You could’ve written this on a napkin, and I would’ve enjoyed it as much.

**Craig:** Exactly. This could’ve been a text.

**John:** “We like a lot of this,” Craig.

**Craig:** “We like a lot of this.” If you hear “we,” start running, because everybody’s going to try and hide as part of a group. Look, hundreds of us really had a problem, as opposed to like, okay, this is awesome. Good news I think is always very focused. Bad news is vague and comes from some hive mind. I don’t blame them. I don’t think that they’re being cowards. I think they’re being human. Nobody wants to be that guy. I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be the person who delivers bad news and says, “You submitted this with dreams that I would love it, and in fact, not only do I not love it, I hate it.” That’s upsetting to everybody. I don’t blame them.

**John:** I don’t blame them at all. Let’s try to pull some joy out of this. What is good things you would hear in one of these meetings? When I’m on one of these calls, it’s like, “Okay, let’s have business affairs get into this.” That’s the sign. Business affairs means it’s real.

**Craig:** Business affairs means you’re getting paid. That’s always a good sign. If they say something along the lines of, “You’re the right person for this,” that means it’s not even about what you’re saying. They are now auditioning for you. They want you to do it. It’s really up to you. They’re trying to convince you to do it at this point.

**John:** If they’re asking about your availability, that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Availability is always a good sign. If they want you to get on the phone with an actor or a director, always a good sign.

**John:** Always a good sign. Previously on the show we talked about main character energy. We have a corollary to this. This is side character energy. This is Lola Okola on TikTok talking us through what side character energy is.

**Lola Okola:** Personally, I’m actually off main character energy. The vibe is beloved side character with great outfits and funny one-liners. No, I will not undergo any character development, nor will I grow as a person. I’m here to be funny and sexy.

**John:** I really support side character energy. I think also it gets back to this thing we talked about on the show before, why side characters often steal movies.

**Craig:** She does land on something important, which is that side characters are not here to change, which means theoretically that side characters aren’t beset by fatal flaws that they have to overcome. Side characters are loyal and they’re funny and they’re supportive. They’re there for you. In the end, when you finally change and succeed and win, they applaud you or hug you. They are very warm, loving, supportive people. I have to tip my hat to one of the great beloved side characters of all time, Jon Cryer, who did such a good job of it back in the day, although now that I think of it, that was a very tragic sort of thing.

**John:** What are you talking about, Sixteen Candles?

**Craig:** Pretty in Pink.

**John:** Pretty in Pink.

**Craig:** I was talking about Pretty in Pink.

**John:** [inaudible 00:11:15].

**Craig:** I take it back. He was actually tragic. You know who was a beloved side character back in the day? Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downey Jr back in the day was a fun, wacky… In Back to School, he was a wacky, beloved side character.

**John:** I always think of Donkey in Shrek as being a side character who’s just there to do Donkey things and not be… I guess Donkey’s worried about Shrek to some degree, but Donkey can do Donkey things. There’s an animated movie I’ve been working on that I really love my side character. She’s just tremendously fun throughout the whole range of it. She does actually protagonate at the end. Some of the fun of it is that I think she does not want to change at all. She has no desire. She does not identify any fatal flaw in herself, and yet she finds herself changing despite herself, which is a joy.

**Craig:** That’s the Dory evolution. Dory was a wonderful, beloved side character, and then Dory got to do her own thing, which is fun. Listen, Lola Okola, I’m with you. I feel like I’m a beloved side character. I don’t like being involved in drama. I don’t want my life to be swirling about in drama. I like to be next to people who are having drama and listen to them and then tell them it’s going to be okay. That’s what I prefer. I don’t always get it.

**John:** Hey Megana, can you help us out with our main topic here? I think we have a question that can set us up well.

**Megana:** Yes. We got an email in from Sky Jones, who asked, “I suppose the topic isn’t strictly a screenwriting topic, but instead relates to all types of fiction. Lately, I’ve been watching some shows on HBO, specifically The Staircase and Station Eleven. Both of them heavily use flashbacks. In fact, they jump around in time quite a lot. I think the use of flashbacks made the storytelling more compelling than if the story had been told completely linearly. I’m wondering if there are any tips and/or strategies for heavily using flashbacks in a script, especially a TV series, which is obviously longer than a feature script. For instance, are there obvious reasons for deciding to heavily use flashbacks? At what point in the writing process is that usually decided? Are there any specific strategies for keeping track of the story in the outlining and writing process when flashbacks are heavily used?”

**John:** Great. Sky, you really set us up well there. In volleyball, that would be the set getting ready for the spike, just like it’s putting it properly in position for us to answer.

**Craig:** Plus Sky Jones.

**John:** Is Sky Jones main character energy or beloved side character energy?

**Craig:** Sky Jones feels like main character energy.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Sky Jones.

**John:** Stormy is the sidekick who is also just a lot of fun.

**Craig:** We have a problem. Who can we bring in? Sky Jones.

**John:** Sky Jones is the only one who can do this.

**Craig:** Sky Jones is here to ask this question. Sky Jones has asked an excellent question, and very specific. Maybe the premise, Sky, is that there’s a more specific way of approaching this, and I think there is, because I think a lot of it is to taste. You have to feel your way through these things. If I know John, and I know him well, before we discuss what to do, he’s going to want to define flashbacks.

**John:** I think we’re going to want to define our terms, make sure we’re talking about the right same thing. A flashback in a general sense is any moment that is set in time earlier than the main story. Of course, that implies that there really is a main story and a main timeline and that you’re not hopping around freely between all these things. Station Eleven is an example of a show. I would say those aren’t really flashbacks, because it’s set in multiple simultaneous timelines. You can’t say that’s a flashback so much. They tend to be briefer.

Another thing I would distinguish is that yes, novels could have flashbacks, a comic book could have a flashback, but really it feels like mostly a cinematic and a TV invention, because in a novel, I can be halfway through a paragraph and talk about something that happened before and bring us back to that moment and bring us back to the present time. You’re not really at one place in a book the same way that you are in a movie. We really know as an audience if we’re in a flashback or not, whereas opposed to a novel, it’s just a constantly churning stew of information that’s surrounding us.

**Craig:** Flashbacks exist in connection with the present. They don’t exist on their own. You’re right to say that there are shows where the narrative exists in multiple timelines. Those aren’t flashbacks, because ideally they’re commenting on each other in some important way, but not specifically. To me, a lot of good flashbacks are there very specifically latched to either the thing that came right before them or the thing that’s coming right after them.

**John:** There’s a reason why we’re moving from this present time to that flashback thing. Either it’s to provide some piece of information, some piece of context, something that makes it clear why this is happening. That to me feels like a flashback as opposed to now this next 10 minutes is going to be set in this other time period for just storytelling reasons. Now, we’ve talked about flashbacks before. I did a Google search. We actually talked about them in Episode 10, way back in Episode 10.

**Craig:** I’m sure we did a great job of it.

**John:** We did a great job there. I’ve also talked about it on the blog. One thing I want to make sure we don’t get out of this thing without talking about is how you indicate flashbacks in this script, because it can just be like you cut to this thing, you say it’s a different time, but I find, and tell me if you’re doing the same thing, after the day or night, I will tend to write, in brackets, “flashback,” just to make it clear, super clear on the page that this is a flashback, this is not cutting to something else in the present day timeline. What do you do?

**Craig:** I don’t think I write the word “flashback,” because for me at least, it feels a bit artificial, meaning it’s defining it in a way that I may not want the feeling to have. Typically, I will say something and then what the time is, five years ago, eight months ago, yesterday, because the word “flashback” I think is maybe too loosey-goosey, and there is a vague whiff of cheese about the word. That’s not our fault. It’s just that there’s been a lot of cheesy flashbacks. When you and I were kids growing up, the sitcoms would flash back all the time. It would be like (mystical sound effects). It was really cheese ball. To avoid that and to help tie in some specificity to the timeline, I’ll usually just use the time.

**John:** That’s fair. I think I probably will do that in the script if I’m moving to something we’ve not seen before in the movie. I think I’m saying the brackets “flashback” is to a moment that happened before in the movie that we’ve actually been watching, to make it clear that it’s connected to this thing.

**Craig:** Like a repeat.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah. Then I would probably say “flash to.”

**John:** “Flash to” as a transition rather than as a-

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** It’s whatever feels right on the page.

**Craig:** As you and I have made clear, hopefully. None of that stuff matters. I’m sure that other people will now dedicate hundreds of Reddit threads to the orthodoxy of flashing back.

**John:** Let’s get into some of the orthodoxy, because they have a stink to them. It’s not a blanket prohibition on them, but people have issues with flashbacks. We have a question here from Francoise. Megana, maybe that can set us up for this part.

**Megana:** Francoise says, “I recently received coverage on a feature script that noted a first flashback appearing on Page 26 was too late to be throwing this sort of device in the audience. The note went on to read that a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. I haven’t heard this before and would appreciate your thoughts to set me straight.”

**John:** We haven’t read Francoise’s script, but I kind of get what the reader might be saying, is that as an audience, we are approaching a movie, and we have a certain set of expectations about how the movie is going to work. If we’re 26 minutes into the movie and suddenly it’s doing a very different conceptual thing than we’ve seen before, that could be jarring in a bad way. I think you can absolutely have a movie that works really, really well, where the first flashback is on Page 26, but if it’s a thing you’re going to be doing a lot, it feels a little bit late to be introducing that as a device, to me.

**Craig:** It depends. I think where the reader goes awry, as they so often do, is by trying to create a general rule out of an individual reaction. The general rule is a flashback needs to happen much sooner so the audience isn’t thrown off or confused. Half the time you’re writing flashbacks to throw the audience off or to confuse them, disorient them. Audiences enjoy some disorientation as long as it pays off. What may be is that whatever the flashback contained was information that felt out of place there. That doesn’t mean the flashback is the problem. That means the stuff inside the flashback is the problem, if you get my drift. The mechanism, they say this sort of device, the device of a flashback, can work anywhere if the stuff you’re flashing back to feels correct in that spot.

**John:** I think that the problem with flashbacks is that often you’re flashing to things that don’t feel correct or they don’t feel like they are necessary or you’re illustrating something that you don’t need to illustrate. Here’s an example of something that Megana found that we’ll link to. It reads, “Flashbacks interrupt the narrative flow. Consequently, they should be used only when it is not possible to tell the story chronologically. Don’t use the flashback to merely illustrate what a character is relating verbally. It is often more effective to remain focused on that character who’s recalling them to the event, so as to gauge what the memory means to them.”

Here what I think they’re saying is a bad use of flashbacks is I am telling you a story and then we’re going to flash back to the events that I’m telling you there. That’s probably not a great use. What tends to be a more effective use is if we’re on a character, and then we flash back to the experience was meaningful for them and come back to them at the present time. Just having it be an illustration to go along with a person’s narration, that doesn’t feel great.

**Craig:** As is so often the case with what we discuss, there are all of these potential rules and pitfalls and ways to do these things, but if you write something well, then the mechanism will be just fine. No one will complain about a… Just as no one will complain about a Stuart Special. What was the Megana one?

**John:** What did we call that, the Raoveal?

**Craig:** The Raoveal? No one will complain about a Raoveal. Everything will be fine because they enjoy it. If they don’t enjoy it, then so much of what… I wonder if so much of the Sturm und Drang of screenwriting orthodoxy comes down to the fact that a lot of people will blame a misuse of technical things to avoid saying to somebody, “Your writing is bad,” especially when their job is to evaluate the writing and give a critique, because that’s a useless critique, but oftentimes it’s the only true, essential critique, “Your writing is bad. Sorry.” They can’t do that, so they say, “Oh, this flashback shouldn’t be here.” If the writing were good, then yeah, I think there wouldn’t be a problem.

**John:** I think there are also cases where something is not working in the script, and it could be that they are getting lost or confused about what it is they’re supposed to be following. I think sometimes poorly done flashbacks or nonlinear storytelling can be a contributing factor here. I’ve lost the thread. I don’t understand what it is I’m supposed to be following. I’m getting confused in a bad way. I don’t feel confident that you are going to be able to lure me there. Yes, maybe it’s bad writing, but it’s also there’s a thing you’re doing on the page that is confusing to them, something that is not working great for them about how you’re choosing to convey this information or get it out there.

A thing I will also say is that sometimes we have… I’m just thinking back to the whiteboard scenarios of complicated shows with complicated structures. There’s a real question about how many different timelines an audience can be expected to maintain. If you are in a two-timeline story and then you have a flashback within one of those timelines, how much can the audience put up with there. I think that’s a thing you’re only going to discover on the page, but maybe in the editing room as well.

**Craig:** Things have become far more complicated. The audience has become far more sophisticated when it comes to these things. That doesn’t mean that your job is to provide a timeline Olympics for them. Sometimes the story just wants to be simple and clean, and you should respect that. When you’re talking about whether or not to use a flashback, ask yourself, am I doing this simply because I’m bored with the way things are going in the current timeline or the current structure or the current narrative unfolding, or am I doing it because it would make this all much, much better? It has to be the latter. It can’t be the former. Don’t do it just because it’s something to do.

To answer the specific question from Sky Jones about at what point in the writing process is it decided to use a flashback, for me it’s in the outline process. I don’t capriciously go, “Oh, I’m going to fling myself backwards in time here.” It is as structured in and outlined in and prepared for as any other scene. In terms of keeping track of the story, you should be able to keep track of the story. If you’re having trouble keeping track of your timelines, the audience will have no chance. If you feel like you need multiple color-coded tabs to control multiple timelines, either you’re writing Inception and you’re aware that you’re basically creating a puzzle box for everybody or you’re getting too complicated.

**John:** I think it has to come from an overall Inception point of view. Am I writing the kind of movie or kind of show that will have flashbacks? If you are, great, but you’re going to be planning for those. If you’re not that kind of show, then how are you going to deliver the information you need to deliver to the audience about things that happened before. I don’t know if they explicitly said it, but it feels like the Game of Thrones guys said, “We are going to have no flashbacks on our show at all.” When they did need to go back in time to show a crucial point of family history, they had to do some Wargy time travel stuff to go back there, to make an excuse for why we were showing the audience this thing, because the show has no flashbacks otherwise.

**Craig:** That’s not quite true. For instance, they showed how the Night King was created.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** This is a personal opinion of mine. For episodic television, getting in and out of flashbacks is easier than for movies because every time you start an episode, you have an opportunity to start in one timeline and then go ahead. I do that all the time. It helps to ground people, essentially. You could have a series where every single cold open is something that takes place in an earlier timeline to create an ironic context, hopefully, for what you’re about to see.

**John:** Absolutely true. Megana, you have a question.

**Megana:** Yeah, I have a question or maybe a theory. I think for newer writers, maybe what doesn’t work about flashbacks is the impulse to deliver exposition through flashbacks. I think what you guys are saying is that if you use a flashback to emotionally inform the story or complicate things, then it works, but if you are using it as a shortcut to explain something, there could be a better, more effective way of doing that.

**Craig:** Exposition, we’ve talked about quite a few times, is either a burden or an opportunity. We’ve talked about interesting ways to deliver exposition, for instance through a relationship or personal drama, or if there’s a flashback and there is exposition, but it is presented in that flashback in the context of something that is interesting or moving or startling, then I think it’s fine. It keeps coming back to a very simple thing. Do you do it well or not? This is why for all the episodes that we’ve done, we could probably just do one mega, meta Scriptnotes episode, and it is be a good writer. It really does solve just about everything.

**John:** I do wonder if there’s a certain kind of… We could give somebody the outline and say, okay, here’s all the things that need to happen. You go to seven different writers. If there are seven different really good writers, they could make something that seems impossible on the page actually work, because they know the tricks and know how to get through it and know how to arrange the stuff, whereas opposed to a new writer would really struggle to get that stuff to work, just because they don’t have the tools in their toolbox to make it possible.

**Craig:** That’s right. We can certainly say things like, hey, avoid doing this. Whatever it is that they move toward, if they’re not good at that, it doesn’t really matter that they avoided this. Similarly, there are times where it may be better for them to just follow their instincts. If there’s one takeaway, at least for me, it’s that you just make sure that the flashback is earned and is not simply something you’re doing as a trick. It’s got to be something you are compelled to do, because it’s going to make things richer.

**John:** Let’s get on to some other listener questions. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Great. To Ampersand or Not To Ampersand asks, “How should I tell my writing partner I want to write my own scripts? That’s a lie. How do I tell my writing partner I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original-”

**Craig:** Oh, damn.

**Megana:** “… feature behind their back and am about to start a new one? Neither of us are working writers yet, but we have written two decent, at least we think so, pilots together. We’re great friends outside of writing, but for the future I see myself enjoying being a solo writer more. What’s the best way to break up with my writing partner? What on earth do I do on the off-chance one of our pilots actually sells?”

**John:** Craig, how do I break up with my girlfriend? Tell me how to break up with my girlfriend. That’s the same kinds of stuff. It’s like, “I really want to see other people. I really want to not be in this-”

**Craig:** “I have been seeing other people.”

**John:** Serial monogamist here. Listen, Ampersand.

**Craig:** Ampersand knows what we’re going to say, right?

**John:** You don’t want to be in this relationship, and therefore you need to have a grownup sit-down adult talk with this person who’s also a friend and say, “Listen, I’ve enjoyed working on these things together, but I really want to write some stuff on my own. I’m sorry this may hurt. You may want to write stuff on your own too. I really think this is going to be what’s best for me. Let’s have a chat.”

**Craig:** Without question, that’s what has to happen. It doesn’t have to be tragic. The way I would put it… I had this conversation many years ago with a writing partner, who’s a wonderful guy. I told him the truth. The truth was, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own.” It had nothing to do with our writing process or whatever was going on with our career, because we were getting movies made. It was just, “I think I’m supposed to be writing on my own, and so I should probably be writing on my own. I think we’ll all be happier.” He is more of a writer partner guy. He has a new writing partner. They’ve been working together for many years. It’s fine.

That’s really what it comes down to is some of us are solo writers and some of us aren’t. We don’t know when we start out. I think it’s perfectly fair to sit your partner down and say, “Okay, you know what? This is how it is.” As far as the shared custody of the pilots, just say, “Look, if somebody is into those pilots, let’s cross that bridge when we get there. We’ll figure it out.”

**John:** I have friends who wrote stuff together. They were married, wrote stuff together, got divorced. Now some of the stuff’s getting produced, and they’re figuring it out. They have joint custody of stuff, and it’s fine. The other piece of advice I would give to Ampersand is I don’t think this first conversation is the time to say, “Oh, and I also already wrote this other script.” That’s irrelevant to hear. Basically, going forward, you want to work by yourself.

**Craig:** The whole “I’ve secretly written multiple drafts of an original feature behind their back,” was there some sort of arrangement or agreement or understanding that you could not write things on your own? Unless there was. Either way, I think that just doesn’t need to be an issue. I just think you can simply say, “Here’s the way it is,” and that’s it. Don’t get too caught up in how they’re going to feel. They will feel their feelings, and they will process it, and then they will move on as well.

**John:** Also, I’ll say if this person is a friend, you want to maintain them as a friend, make sure you make some plans in the upcoming couple of weeks to do things that are fun together, because you don’t want this person to just disappear out of your life.

**Craig:** Yeah, like writing a script.

**John:** Go see a movie together. Just do some stuff so you don’t lose this person.

**Craig:** I’m so glad Megana’s here, because usually I’ll say something like that and then there’s just silence and then John moves on.

**John:** [inaudible 00:31:41] silence.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. God.

**Megana:** Are you guys ready for a manager question?

**Craig:** So ready for a… I woke up this morning ready for a manager question.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** Tim from DC asks, “I think my manager is pretty ineffectual, and I need to leave them.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**Megana:** “I’m questioning the time of when to leave.”

**Craig:** Right now.

**Megana:** “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim, one that my rep says they’re going to take out as soon as I send them the next draft, for which they’ve already set up several generals and supposedly have dozens of people waiting for, and another project that I’ve been working on for months that may soon be sent out to the town. I guess I’m wondering, since my current rep is going to get 10% regardless, if I solicit a new rep with other projects already in progress, will a new rep want to fight as hard for me, given the fact that my two most active projects are both tied to my old rep? Might my new rep resent having to push ahead with my current projects without being entitled to that 10%? How does one handle this kind of situation?”

**Craig:** Aha, Tim.

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** These are good questions.

**John:** These are good questions. I think Tim may also be making some mis-assumptions about what that manager owns or controls.

**Craig:** Unquestionably, there is a premise issue here. Managers are not agents. Agents represent clients and procure employment for them, and in doing say, they are essentially attached to the deal and make 10%. Managers do not do that. They are not allowed to do it by law. They break the law all the time, but they’re not allowed to. Managers are service providers. They make 10% as long as they’re providing a service to you. If you fire them, they don’t get 10%. There is a concept called on the wheel, off the wheel. They are off the wheel when you fire them. The new manager can work it out with the old manager. That’s their problem. You let them figure that out. I assume you have an attorney. An attorney can also advise on this. You need to leave them? Leave them. You’re questioning the timing of when to leave? There’s no time like the present.

When you say, “I’m working on two projects to which my rep already has a claim,” this is where my hair goes on fire. These people have claims to nothing. Nothing. They convince you they do, but they do not. Considering that your manager is pretty ineffectual, I wouldn’t be worried about repercussions, since obviously they’re not good at stuff, including, I would imagine, repercussions.

**Megana:** What if the manager has been sending them notes and giving them creative feedback?

**Craig:** Great. Thanks. Look, here’s the thing. They paid them. Let’s say I write something, and my manager represents me, and then it gets sold somewhere, and my manager gets 10%. That 10% is the service fee that they have to continue to service me. It doesn’t matter if they give me notes or not. Everybody can give me notes. Why do we think that we owe these people anything for the notes that they give us, when we can get notes from friends or we can pay $100 for notes? Notes are nothing. Most manager notes are terrible. If the manager’s notes were great, this person wouldn’t be considering leaving. Tim would be thrilled, because the manager would be making the scripts better. That’s my point. Good managers who actually are able to give good comments and help connect you in rooms of good people and be effective, they don’t have this issue because their clients don’t leave.

**John:** I agree with most of what Craig has said here. I think that realistically, that first project which they are aware of, which they have been exposed to, which they have given notes on, they’re going to try to hold that over you like they control it or that you owe them something for the work they’ve done on it and they’ve meaningfully set up for it. I agree with Craig, it’s not your problem. It’s your new manager’s problem. That’ll be taken up by them. This thing that you’re writing right now that they don’t seem to be aware of, don’t worry about that. That doesn’t matter. Use that new thing to get you your next rep, because they would love to see something new and show what it is you’re working on right now. You do need to leave. This is a great time to leave. It’s a great time to be looking for a different manager, a better manager, one who gets it and gets what you want to do.

**Craig:** Tim, to specifically answer this question about how will the new rep feel… I’m guessing that you’re early on in your career. It sounds like it, at least. I don’t think a manager is concerned too much with the 10% right now. They’re playing a longer game where hopefully they forge a great relationship with you, your career advances, you start to become a big shot, and then that 10% means a lot. Right now I don’t think their motivation is going to be particularly tied to any single instance of a commission of what you’re going.

**John:** Agreed. Megana, another question we can answer?

**Megana:** Moe asks, “I’m a mid-level TV writer, and I’m curious about the WGA stance on remote writers’ rooms. The union and many studios/production companies have publicly stated a need for diversity and inclusion in writers’ rooms. I love the big speeches, but in regards to action, the best way to bring more diverse voices into a writers’ room is not to force them to move to one of the most economically inaccessible cities in the country. I’m a writer of color and do not live in Los Angeles for this reason. I know several others who are in the same boat. They either cannot afford to move to LA or are responsible for a larger, sometimes multi-generational family unit, not to mention people who are pregnant and parents with young kids benefit greatly from the flexibility of remote rooms. My personal experience has been that older writers higher up the food chain are now pushing to be in person. Almost all of the writers I know are very happy staying remote. We’re at a point in the pandemic where remote rooms have become incredibly normalized. The kinks have been worked out. If the WGA is truly interested in supporting its nonwhite, economically diverse writers, shouldn’t they push to standardize remote and hybrid writers’ rooms?”

**John:** Great. We can talk about whether this is a WGA issue or not. Let’s just talk about remote rooms and hybrid rooms versus the standard where everyone just is around one big table and there’s a lunch order every day. Over the past couple of months, I’ve had a bunch of showrunners on Scriptnotes, and we’ve talked about how they were working, how they’re working in person, how they’re working remotely, hybrid stuff. A lot of them do miss being in the rooms with their writers. They feel like there’s things that happen when people are together that just don’t happen in the Zoom rooms. That said, a lot of really good shows have been made with Zoom rooms over the course of the pandemic. It is possible.

I definitely hear what Moe is saying though about having to be there in person is really challenging for some people just because of the cost of Los Angeles, and being fully remote is a good choice for some writers. I think you’re going to see both of these things moving forward. I think you’re going to see fully remote rooms moving forward. I think you’re going to see more hybrid rooms. I think there will be some fully in-person rooms. I think they could be less and less common, just because it’s better for people’s quality of life to not always be trucking into the office. Craig, you’ve not worked in a writers’ room, but what’s your instinct and what are you hearing from other people?

**Craig:** I spent some time briefly in the Mythic Quest room.

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t use a writers’ room myself. Personally, I am okay with certain kinds of remote collaboration. As Moe says, some of the older people, that would be me, “Some of the older writers higher up on the food chain are now pushing to be in person.” There’s a reason for that, Moe. It’s not capricious. It’s not because they can’t work the newfangled Zoom. Of course they can. There is a kind of magic that happens when people are together. It’s different. The question of how to balance that against access is a good one.

As far as the Writers Guild is concerned, the thing that the Writers Guild can do to help this is to get writers paid more, so that they can afford to live in Los Angeles. The Writers Guild is almost certainly not capable of dictating how writers’ rooms should be structured, be it in person or hybrid. It’s just not something that their own members would want. I don’t think their members would all agree with you. Sometimes when people write these things, I think they think that they are standing on firmer ground than they are. I get the premise of what you’re saying, Moe. I don’t disagree, but others will. Even if the Guild did agree, the studios would have zero interest in mandating that there could never be an in-person room. It’s just not something they would do. It is a weird limitation of our creative freedom to collaborate as we wish.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer here is get writers paid more, particularly writers on the lower end of the spectrum, the income spectrum, or as you put it, on the food chain, lower down on the food chain. Then they can afford to live somewhere in LA. By the way, it’s never easy. These are jobs that a lot of people want. Maybe you’ll have to drive in 30 or 40 minutes each day, which means that you live about a mile away from the office. In all seriousness, there will be some hardships and there will be some difficulties. The way we get around some of the structural inequities, I think, the fastest is through money.

**John:** I agree with you. I think the WGA was in a position to force remote writers’ rooms when it was an actual matter of safety. That made sense. There were a lot of studios that basically refused to allow any in-person writers’ rooms because of safety and because they didn’t want the liability of having a bunch of writers sitting around who didn’t absolutely have to be sitting around, but they could do their job remotely, made it possible.

It’s easy to think about writers together in a room, because we see it and they’re all ganged together and there’s a lunch order. We know what that is. There’s a lot of other jobs in the industry that have been remote, that are now going back to in-person, but it’s a real question job by job, person by person, how you’re going to do it. I think about editors. I think about color correction. I think about a lot of the other… Craig, you’re recording this right now at your post facility. During the pandemic, that post facility was not open. They were figuring out other ways to do it other places. I’m guessing now most of the post is happening kind of in person and kind of in a place. Is that true?

**Craig:** Certainly for us it is. We follow the ever-evolving rules that come down from the corporation. The rules from the corporation are rules that take into account the union rules. We are cross-sectioning with the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, and IATSE. All of those unions have their own positions on what they mandate. Basically, we follow the most strict set of rules. Boy, am I tested a lot. Oh, am I tested.

**John:** It’s a thing I think people outside the industry don’t have a sense of just how often folks in the industry are tested, as opposed to any other industry, probably even more than professional sports. You’re just constantly tested here, because it’s worthwhile to keep sets healthy.

**Craig:** First of all, it’s a union mandate thing. You have to. A lot of it was driven primarily by the Screen Actors Guild or SAG-AFTRA because they had the only employees that could not wear masks all the time. Because actors must take their masks off, everybody around them then had to follow a bunch of procedures for SAG-AFTRA to essentially say, “Yes, our members can work for you.” We’ve been very careful about all that stuff. As far as writers’ rooms go, Moe, there’s no chance that the Writers Guild is going to be taking this up as a cri de couer. I think the best we can do is try and get people paid more so that they can afford to live in the city where these things happen.

**John:** Agreed. I think over the next several weeks, Craig and I will informally ask a bunch of our showrunner friends about what they’re doing on their shows and where things are headed and get a sense of what’s really happening out there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I bet if we did survey all working members, the split would not be what you would think it would be. I think it’s going to be widely divergent about who wants to be in person and who wants to be fully remote.

**Craig:** Then the question is who are you asking, because ultimately the showrunners are the ones deciding. One of the weird things about our union is that it includes a lot of management in it, which I think we’ll maintain as massively problematic.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing… Craig, click through that link. I think this is right up your alley. It’s a subreddit called cutaway porn. It’s all the images you remember from books growing up, but where you have an image and then it cuts away a piece of it, and so you can look inside.

**Craig:** This is David Macaulay stuff.

**John:** Yes. Let’s look inside a Bronze Age roundhouse. It cuts away the roof or shows how parts of a castle function and how things go together. I just found it delightful, nostalgic, really informative, just how stuff actually works. I don’t know who was the first person to… I guess da Vinci probably had cutaway stuff like this. It’s really showing the inner workings of buildings and systems and machines. I think it’s delightful.

**Craig:** There was a big book I had called Castle. I believe it was Castle.

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember Castle. Castle’s great.

**Craig:** It was just medieval castles, cutaways. Spectacular. Learned so much. Still think about those things occasionally from time to time as we’re playing D and D.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** That brings me to my one cool thing.

**John:** Segue man.

**Craig:** Segue man. This is fairly narrow, but if you are playing D and D or any role-playing game on Roll20 the way that we are… We had a nice in-person session.

**John:** We did. We did. Our first in-person session since the pandemic.

**Craig:** Lovely. You know what? I have to say, side note, a little worried that going from a bunch of guys sitting around a table with pen and paper and dice and maps and dry erase markers, it would just feel too clinical and sterile if we showed up with our laptops instead. Nope, it was great.

**John:** It was fine.

**Craig:** Perfectly fine. Turns out we are what we needed. We.

**John:** That’s what it is.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** I know, right? Every now and then, I will plug a plugin, which on Roll20 they’re called APIs. There’s one called SmartAoE that has been written by a fellow named David M. I don’t know his full name, because that’s how he goes on the forum. AoE stands for area of effect. Megana, why would you need an area of effect spell?

**Megana:** To affect a certain area?

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Well discerned there.

**Craig:** In fantasy warfare, there are lots of things that target an individual person, and then there are spells and things that target an area, that could hit lots of people at once. It’s annoying figuring out like, okay, I cast fireball, and it’s going to cover this much space. Then you got to draw the shape out, drag it over, make it resized, move it around. SmartAoE makes it so much simpler to do. It’s more fun. I got to say, these people are brilliant. These men and women who write these things… Is it Java, I guess?

**John:** It’s good stuff. It’s all the stuff of geometry and math, but applied to… It’s trying to apply cones and circles to a grid. You can look [inaudible 00:47:39] supposed to do it, but it’s inevitably an argument between Craig and Kevin about who’s covered and who’s not covered. This just does it so much better.

**Craig:** It just does it better and saves me from arguing with Kevin, which is really why I install everything.

**John:** A very good plugin. Thank you for doing that. It was also really nice to see everyone in person again playing D and D. That was in person, and also I took a Peloton class that had other riders in the studio with the instructor for the first time. It felt like, oh, the pandemic’s over.

**Craig:** We’re back.

**John:** We’re back.

**Craig:** We’re back.

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

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Sam Brady. 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’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 adulting. Craig, Megana, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Hey, Craig, when did you become an adult?

**Craig:** Oh, me, probably around seven.

**John:** Same with Mike. Mike became an adult very, very young. I did not become an adult very young. Megana, how about you? When did you become an adult?

**Megana:** Today.

**John:** Today. Now you’re an adult.

**Craig:** Today I learned I’m an adult.

**Megana:** I don’t think I’m an adult quite yet, because I’m bad at putting myself to sleep.

**Craig:** Who puts you to sleep?

**Megana:** Me, but I feel like to me, that is the definition of adulthood, being able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

**Craig:** Then no, I’m not an adult either.

**John:** It’s not a matter of literally rocking yourself to sleep. It’s a matter of telling Megana, “Hey, Megana, go to bed.”

**Craig:** It’s not like somebody needs to read you a story.

**Megana:** No one’s patting my back as I go to bed.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Somebody should be.

**John:** Somebody should be.

**Craig:** We’ll get Bo over there.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say. I think Megana’s bringing up a general case that’s a good marker for adulthood is recognition of consequences and avoiding consequences. If I don’t go to sleep at this time, I’m going to be a zombie tomorrow, or if I have an extra beer, I will suffer for it. That’s a thing which as you rise up through your teenagehood and into your 20s, eventually at some point you realize, okay, the consequence of this is not worth it for me, and therefore I will do a responsible, mature thing and not do that dumb thing.

**Craig:** I think a lot of maturity and adulting comes down to self-denial of basic pleasure, in part because you’ve enjoyed it before and you don’t need to feel it all the time, and also because you and your pleasure are not necessarily the most important thing. You may have a partner. You may a child. You may have employees. You may have work that you’re doing, your vocation, customers, clients. There are people for whom you are accountable. You begin to put other people ahead of your own base interests. That feels like a very adulty thing to me.

**John:** It’s accountability, but it’s also just responsibility. I remember when I first got my pug, Jake, I was responsible for it. This little being would not stay alive if I didn’t feed and care for him every day. That was a maturity thing. It was my mid-20s that I finally had my own dog. It was a form of growing up, because now this thing was fully my responsibility in a way that nothing else in my life had been. Paying rent is a responsibility. Just making sure the bills get paid every month was responsibility.

**Craig:** God, I remember paying off my student loans, getting a credit card, making those payments, making sure I made the payment every month, making sure I had enough money for rent, doing a budget, a lot of money stuff, simple, basic money stuff. I think also what helped me adult maybe faster than other people is that when I came to Los Angeles, I was 3,000 miles away from my parents. I had zero interest in relying on them for anything. When I say anything, I mean anything. No kind of support whatsoever, neither emotional nor financial. Nothing. There’s no net. There’s very real consequences for failure. That urgency definitely led to a fast adulting, because the alternative to fast adulting was a pretty dismal kind of failure.

**John:** The thing about moving out here without the safety net is it could lead to more ambitious choices, it could lead to many things, but it could also lead a person to be cautious and paralyzed. It wasn’t for you. You were always probably cautious, but you were still pursuing what you wanted to pursue. Recently, people were talking about how whenever they do a profile of 30 under 30, super successful people in their 30s, it should also show what do their parents do and what was their background that let them do those things. People who have these billion dollar valuations, there’s something about the history that got them there that’s probably a common thread behind them and what allowed them to take the chances that they took.

**Craig:** No, I think sometimes it’s just some people are like that, and some people aren’t.

**John:** Now Megana, are you an adult? Do you consider yourself fully adult or are you still a kid in many ways?

**Megana:** Aside from the sleep thing?

**John:** The sleep thing.

**Megana:** I think I’m an adult. I think another big part of being an adult is taking responsibility for yourself, being able to apologize and have self-awareness. I hope that I have those things. I think that qualifies me as an adult.

**John:** Apologizing, standing up on your principles, and not always doing what situationally is the easiest, recognizing the shades of gray and that things aren’t perfect. I remember my daughter and I have this argument about… She was saying there’s never been a truly communist system, but a truly communist system would be fantastic. I’m like, sigh. I fully get that that’s where she’s at in the understanding of it all, but also recognizing the world doesn’t match up to our utopian expectations and that you have to adapt with the world you actually have.

**Craig:** That’s a pretty adult thing to say.

**Megana:** I do think also, just to tie it back to side character energy, I think that not thinking of yourself as the main character to me feels like it signifies adulthood.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** It’s a version I think of what I was saying earlier, which is you’re not the most important thing anymore. Other things are the most important thing. You becoming whatever it is that you’re aiming for… You have things or people or friends or stuff that you’re trying to get done, and it’s no longer about… Children are narcissistic, as well they should be. They’re trying to figure out who they are. At some point, you’re you, let’s get on with it.

**John:** Becoming an adult doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily old, that you’re suddenly giving up all your youth. One of the things I’ve done over the course of my career is always trying some new things, because I feel really young in those new things, because I’m inexperienced. I’m doing all the first-timer mistakes and figuring stuff out. Whether it’s doing the Broadway musical or doing the book series, there are chances to feel young again, even though I’m a full-grown adult. I’m young in doing those things. That is an opportunity not to feel put out to pasture, a sense that you are newly exploring some things with the same enthusiasm I did in my 20s for screenwriting.

**Craig:** I always say I really do feel like I’m just maybe 10 or 11 but in an older body. I mean that in that I’m still that person. Everything that I do that’s new is scary and exciting. All the fears that I had then, I probably still have quite a few of them now, despite all the therapy. I think I’m just better at managing it. Part of I guess being an adult is realizing you’re not really an adult. What you are is a child who is capable of doing more and who has different values I guess is what it comes down to.

**Megana:** I would say though that although the two of you are very much so adults, you’re both very curious, and you have a lot of optimism and excitement about new things.

**John:** I hope so. The other thing that I would say is a marker is that when people start coming to you for advice, that is some sign of being an adult. When people come to you as being the wise person who knows some things, it’s one marker. When hopefully, you’re still going out to get advice, but people come to you for advice, it’s the rest of the world recognizing, oh, you seem mature and like you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I feel that way. It’s not an age thing, because I meet people from time to time who are much older than I am, and they feel like the least wise people.

**John:** That’s a thing. I don’t think it’s necessarily a function of age, but it’s a function of adulting.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Then there are these people. Bella Ramsey is 18, and she has this weird, Yoda-like wisdom. I’ve never encountered it quite like the way it is in her. So wise, like when they say old soul. I don’t think old soul is the right term. It’s an adult soul. She has adult soul.

**John:** Megana, Craig, you’re some of my favorite adults.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Enjoy. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, guys.

**Megana:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM) reaching [number one on the pop charts](https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/kate-bush-reclaims-uk-chart-running-up-that-hill-1235104046/)
* Beyonce’s [Break My Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjki-9Pthh0)
* [Side Character Summer](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ce6zOHKqxgW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) by Lolaokola on IG
* Jeremiah Lewis’s tweet @fringeblog [Ruin A Screenwriter’s Day in Three Words](https://twitter.com/fringeblog/status/1538582676076220419?s=21&t=sJtLfzZYwV9-3UIB4DF_IA)
* [Scriptnotes Ep. 10: Good Actors and Bad Writing Partners](https://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-ep-10-good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners-transcript)
* [Flashbacks and dreams](https://johnaugust.com/2003/flashbacks-and-dreams) on the blog
* [Reddit’s Cutaway Porn](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cutawayporn/)
* [Smart AoE](https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/10485883/script-smartaoe-graphical-interface-for-implementing-aoes-on-gridded-maps/?pagenum=1)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Brady ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/557standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

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

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

Craig: I can’t wait to learn.

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

Craig: We’ve been to enough.

John: We’ve been to enough.

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

John: Yes, absolutely.

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

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

Craig: Great.

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

Craig: That’s a great number.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Just above.

John: We’re higher than Congress.

Craig: Yes, we’re higher than Congress.

John: That’s our goal on this podcast.

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

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

Craig: Wow.

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

Craig: That makes sense.

John: That does make sense.

Craig: We don’t really advertise.

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

Craig: You at home are our Salesforce.

John: 100%.

Craig: We do offer some commission.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: 100% of 0%.

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

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

John: 3%.

Craig: Wow, okay.

John: Small?

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

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

Craig: A little bit of self-selection.

John: What percentage are between 35 and 54?

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

John: 65, yes, that’s 100%.

Craig: We’re an adult podcast.

John: We’re an adult podcast.

Craig: We’re a mature podcast.

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

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

John: 98%.

Craig: 98?

John: 90.

Craig: Oh, 90.

John: Nine zero.

Craig: That’s rather educated.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m not surprised.

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

Craig: I’m going to go with 22%.

John: 25%.

Craig: Oh.

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

Craig: 34%.

John: 50%.

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

John: Yes, that’s good.

Craig: Okay, that’s quite good.

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

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

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

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

John: It’s a three.

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

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

Craig: A big favorite or a-

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

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

John: No, which is fine.

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

John: You are her sleepcast.

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

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

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

John: I think we should do that too.

Craig: That would be fun.

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

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

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

Craig: Well, there is that.

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

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

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

Craig: Great topic.

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

Craig: Oh my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: My God.

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

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

John: It’s a lot of words.

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

John: No reference at all.

Craig: None.

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

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

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

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

John: Cringe.

Craig: Cringe.

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

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

John: No.

Craig: No, he’s indifferent.

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

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

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

John: Well, except they did.

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

John: Go opens with a Stuart Special.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They’ll get there.

Craig: They’ll get there.

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

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

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

Craig: Yes, it feels relevant.

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

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

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

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

Craig: The present is assumed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: No.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, congrats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Neurotypical.

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

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

Craig: Nightmare.

John: If you’re coming in there-

Craig: Absolute nightmare.

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

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

John: Congratulations on your movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: Yay. In theaters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely.

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

John: Totally.

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

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

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

John: It wasn’t, yes. Weirdly, yes.

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

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

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

Craig: Oh my gosh.

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

Craig: Friends.

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

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

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

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

John: Air conditioning is good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Victoria has an audio question.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Absolutely.

John: 100% valid.

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

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

Craig: They’re meta.

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

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

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

[crosstalk]

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

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

Craig: Didn’t we just do this?

John: We did our younger selves.

Craig: Oh, this is older self.

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

Craig: Okay.

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

Craig: Oh, how old am I?

John: You can decide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: That’s what I want.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Totally. Not a problem.

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

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

John: Home Alone.

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

Drew: Probably nine or 10.

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

Drew: Macaulay Culkin was nine years old.

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

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

Craig: They’re all hard.

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

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

John: They’re not the person for you.

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

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

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

John: Also, well-intentioned and good because–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Lots of bits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Love a door.

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

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

Craig: Doors.

John: Doors.

Craig: Doors.

John: Helpful. Doors and windows.

Craig: Big fan of doors.

John: Let’s answer a question from Andrew.

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

Craig: [laughs] Poor Scott.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Malmsbury?

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

Craig: Love it.

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

Craig: My heart just sank.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, it is.

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

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

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

Craig: Some great early life hacks.

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely. I remember our first microwave.

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

John: Incredible.

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

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

Craig: It is spectacular.

John: Yes, everyone knows that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Air fryer, that’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, that was my worry.

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

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

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

John: Whatever your game is.

Craig: Doesn’t matter.

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

Craig: Whatever. You got to have one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: 80% of you really enjoy it.

John: Yes, which is fantastic.

Craig: Thank you for continuing to enjoy it.

John: I think it was more like 90%.

Craig: 90% of you enjoy it.

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

Craig: Woo-hoo.

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

Craig: Aw. Thank you.

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

Craig: Got to go to Hollywood parties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Did I make a mistake?

John: Then it does fill up.

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

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

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

Craig: Exactly. Bye. [laughs]

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

Craig: You can leave.

John: I can leave.

Craig: You can leave. It’s up to you.

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

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

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

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

Craig: What brought you here?

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

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

John: Good plus one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes.

Craig: Is that what they were called?

John: Yes, Tribbles, yes.

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

John: Sundance parties can be that way, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I should meet everybody.

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

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

Drew: Oh, no, not at all.

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

Drew: That’s much better.

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

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

Craig: That was nice.

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s like, I would not want–

Craig: What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: There’s too many people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, clothes.

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

Craig: Wear clothes.

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

Craig: So you get the sense of–

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

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

Craig: And a pink hat.

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

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

Drew: Yes, it’s true. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you. Party.

Links:

• The script for episode one of Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes
• Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay
• The Sheep Detectives
• Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests
• Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury
• Solasta 2
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