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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids: there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 712 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back one of our favorite guests and guest hosts.

Craig: Yes.

John: Dana Fox is a writer and showrunner whose credits include, taking a breath here, What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, Ben and Kate, How to Be Single, Cruella, Home Before Dark, The Lost City, Wicked, and the upcoming Wicked: For Good. She’s also my former assistant and one of my very favorite people. Welcome back, Dana Fox.

Craig: Ta-da.

Dana Fox: John and Craig are my favorite people. I have to say it right away. Get it out of my system.

John: We’re recording this in our office on a very rainy day. Behind you is the couch, which you would often take naps on.

Dana: I assume you were going to have it bronzed, but it’s just the same couch. It’s still here.

John: The same couch. Lambert is now taking a nap on your couch.

Dana: I saw it, and I had a Pavlovian response to it. The second I saw it, I thought I was going to fall asleep on it.

Craig: The gravity just takes you in, and you just want to lie down and not work.

Dana: Hold me towards it and made me disappoint John because I wasn’t awake to answer his phone.

Craig: Look at you now.

Dana: It’s because he let me nap that I think I did so well in the business.

Craig: [laughs] Okay. Well, something has to explain it.

Dana: I just needed to sleep a little bit. I was so tired. I needed to prep.

John: Look at you now with those headphones on. As Craig said, you do look like Princess Leia.

Dana: Thanks, guys.

Craig: Exactly like Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope, Princess Leia, because you’re wearing a Princess Leia–

Dana: She was a real hero of mine, so thank you for that. I really wanted to be her.

John: Carrie Fisher, of course. Incredible.

Dana: Oh my God, she’s incredible, and the most amazing writer.

John: Did you ever meet her?

Dana: No, I never did. I would have lost my mind.

John: I went to a birthday party for a friend that was at her house. She was exactly as cool and weird as you would want her to be.

Dana: A dream.

John: A dream. An absolute dream.

Craig: Nice.

John: Today, with you on the show, I do want to talk about Wicked, obviously. I also want to talk about character suffering, whether the ’90s were really a great movie decade, or whether this is all just our nostalgia. We’ll get into that.

Dana: Amazing. Am I the character who’s suffering or characters that I write?

John: You will be. There’s a listener question about character suffering.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about me. I was like, “I’m now suffering.”

John: Well, we’ll get into suffering because in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the promo circuit because you’re on the promo circuit right now, and Craig’s been through the promo circuit. It’s just exhausting.

Dana: It’s intense. I’m really tired.

John: It’s a mark of success that you have to do the promo circuit, but it’s just it’s a lot.

Dana: Yes, and you became a writer because you enjoy pajamas and glasses and never doing your hair, and then you’re on–

John: Not being looked at, basically.

Dana: Never having a single person look at your face.

Craig: Yes. That’s my favorite thing in the world.

Dana: Craig, that is the best thing in the entire world. Then you’re on the promo circuit and all the wrong things are happening. People are looking directly at your face.

John: Sitting next to you is the Scriptnotes book, the Hardcovers, which just came in. We’re so excited to hold them. Craig, have you gotten yours up in Canada yet?

Craig: I have not received it in Canada yet. I don’t even know if you guys have my address in Canada.

Dana: You guys, it’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to read it. It’s so gorgeous. Just to say, if I may, John and Craig are the people that I call whenever I don’t know how to do anything. I’m always like, “Hey, guys, I’m sorry.” Let’s say I started with a voiceover, and then I have to do a fade-in. “Where does fade in go on the page?” Nobody knows. It all looks weird.”

John: Basically, non-creative questions then.

Dana: No, that’s not true. I call you guys with every question I have. Now I just have the book, so there’s no excuse that I’m not allowed to call you anymore. I have to look at the book.

Craig: It’s true. Dana sometimes calls. She’s like, “But is 1 also a prime number?” It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. It’s about anything.

Dana: It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. Totally.

John: One of the goals with the Scriptnotes book, as you remember, is that we wanted a book that if you were to throw it across the room, you could hurt a person. I’ll say that the book has some sharp edges to it, which is nice, but it’s actually lighter than I’d expect. Isn’t it lighter in your hand?

Dana: It’s looking wild. It looks like a trompe-l’oeil. Is it a cake? You know that show?

Craig: Absolutely. It looks like it could be cake.

Dana: Is it cake?

John: It could be cake.

Dana: Yes, because you pick it up and it’s like, “Ooh, no problem,” but it looks substantial.

John: If you throw it in your backpack, it’s not weighing you down, but it is a substantial book. Also, it lies flat, which I didn’t know was going to happen, but actually it’s nice.

Craig: Oh.

John: You can actually open up it.

Dana: [gasps] You’re right. I’m doing it. Reader or listener, I’m doing it. This is great.

Craig: You called the podcast listeners readers.

Dana: I don’t know how to do this, you guys. I’m so bad at stuff. I called my phone the internet before to John. I said, I just kept pointing at it and going, “I have to internet it later.” He was like, “What is happening with you?”

Craig: Oh, Dana Fox.

Dana: I love you guys.

John: Thank you to everybody who sent in the pre-order receipts to Drew at askajohnaugust.com, because we love those and they’re a way for us to know how many people are actually buying the book. This past week, Drew, you sent all those folks a bonus chapter. How did that go?

Drew: Really well. People were really nice about it and sent glowing emails back, which felt nice to read.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing. Am I allowed to say this?

John: Please.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing on my ‘internet’, which is my phone, on Instagram. My handle is @inthehenhouse. I’m going to give away 20 copies. I’m going to send them to people.

Craig: What? Really?

Dana: To young people, students. If you’re a student, if you’re trying to be a writer, I want to send you one of these books because these men, Craig and John, are the greatest people of all time, that they’ve spent their time trying to help other writers be better. They believe ‘rising tides raises all boats’, and they’re generous with their time. I love them. I want to send 20 books to whoever needs one.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I have never felt anything doing this podcast until this moment.

Dana: DM me on my internet.

Craig: I’m having feelings.

Dana: Are you having feelings, Craig?

Craig: I’m having feelings. That was beautiful. Thank you.

Dana: It’s the least I could do. I just think you guys are amazing.

Craig: That’s very sweet, and it’s very generous of you, unless you’re stealing the books. If you’re stealing the books, it’s not generous.

Dana: No. I’m buying the books and giving them away.

Craig: Oh, okay. That is generous.

John: The bonus chapter we sent out is on getting stuff written. It was a chapter that was originally going to be in the book, and the book was just 600 pages, so we had to make some beautiful cuts [unintelligible 00:05:46]. We cleaned it up, we’ve formatted it nicely, and we sent it to all the people who had pre-ordered the book and sent the receipts in.

Dana: It’s amazing.

John: We’re still going to send it out. If you pre-order it now, we will send it to you. Drew will send it to you today. If you want this bonus chapter, it turned out really well.

Dana: Great. I’ll take the bonus chapter. Can I get some bonus chapter later?

Craig: Absolutely.

John: She needs to get some stuff written. One of the questions we get frequently is, are Craig and I going to do the audiobook, or are we going to read the audiobook for the Scriptnotes book? The answer is hell no. We are not doing that. That is a job left to a professional.

Dana: Correct.

John: I’m so excited to introduce the professional who actually did read the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Woohoo.

John: Graham Rowat is an actor, a narrator whose talents span Broadway stages, television screens, audiobook recordings. You’ve seen him on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen, Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!, Guys and Dolls, Beauty and the Beast. He’s also a friend and a longtime Scriptnotes listener. Graham Rowat, welcome officially to The Scriptnotes podcast.

Graham Rowat: Thank you for having me.

Dana: Listen to that deep voice, guys.

Craig: You can hear the Broadway right in there.

Dana: Listen to–

Graham: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Craig: It’s so good.

Graham: [chuckles]

Craig: So good.

Dana: Get out of here. Your advice just got better. Everything you guys wrote in the book is better. Just look at that.

John: Come on, the gravitas of that?

Dana: Intense.

Craig: These shows that you’ve been in, just one great show after another. Congratulations. That’s amazing.

Dana: I know. Incredible.

Graham: I thought to myself, I know John gets to Broadway shows. How about the other guests on the pod today? Does anyone get to see Broadway that often?

Dana: Funny story.

Craig: Not as often as I’d like to. I live in Los Angeles, and now I live in Canada.

Graham: For sure.

Craig: I do see shows pretty frequently once they make their way to the Pantages or something like that, or I go to the bowl. I went for Jesus Christ Superstar, and I went for Into the Woods.

Craig: That’s great.

Graham: I love a show.

Dana: That’s great.

Graham: What can I say?

Dana: I love a show.

Graham: I love a show.

John: We mostly love that your voice is our book because when the topic of the audiobook came up and Graham graciously asked, “Hey, do you or Craig want to do it?” It was like, “Oh, it’ll be like four days in a recording studio.” You’re like, “Absolutely not.”

Dana: No.

John: I wanted somebody to do the book who knew the show, knew the voice of the show, had a sense of what this was like. I asked Graham who would do it, and they figured out how to make a deal for Graham to do it. Graham, I’m curious, what is it like to record this? Because the book is not Craig and I back and forth. It’s just, it’s a we voice behind it. What is your process? What is your instinct going into try to read this book?

Graham: Well, the first thing I did was I wanted to listen to every one of the episodes that featured the guests that are quoted in the chapters. It’s tricky because I want to find a neutral voice, but I hear you and Craig when I’m reading the book. There are distinct moments, too. There’s a chapter, the Die Hard chapter, where it is the two of you having a discussion.

Craig: Yes, it’s true.

Graham: The neutral voice is pretty much me. That’s always the easiest thing to work from and go back to. Then, when the two of you step out and actually are John and Craig, for example, there’s Craig’s whole chapter where he presents his approach to screenwriting, I tried to stay true to the Craig persona.

Here’s the thing: it’s a matter of very subtle changes because one of the very first things they teach you when you’re learning the old audiobook stuff is that anything too broad, that’s what the audience is going to be listening to, especially accents. They’re going to be sitting there thinking, “I don’t think that’s a very good accent.”

Dana: You decided not to do the Australian accent for Craig?

Graham: I didn’t. I gave him sort of the Maverick Ed McMahon energy.

Craig: Nice. Good.

Dana: Hot. Yes, sexy.

Craig: Not hot, no. McMahon, no.

Dana: Oh, I thought what the Ed McMahon energy was. I always thought it was really sexy.

Graham: No, young Ed McMahon. A real young, dashing Ed McMahon.
[laughter]

John: Graham, a question for you. We’re talking about the chapters that are interspersed with all the subject chapters are interview chapters. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, for example, we try to do a light edit on them so you can still feel their voice and how they speak. What was it like for you to figure out how to make them sound on that? They read differently on the page, so how was it actually articulating those?

Graham: Thankfully, and listening to the episodes and listening to the interviews allowed me to have an image in my head so that when I got to Greta’s chapter, I could make a very slight adjustment vocally. It’s more about the conversational tone that was a part of their interviews. If I can inject? A little bit of a more casual conversational tone in their chapters, I feel like that makes it more distinct. If I am doing a Greta, I have her in my head because I’d listen to her, so if I make a slight pitch adjustment and I just make it a little more casual, I feel like I’m doing her justice, and I’m making enough of a shift away from the neutral narrator.

Christopher Nolan was the tricky one because he’s the very first one up. I thought if he had been ninth or tenth in your list of guests and I’d reached him, I probably could have gotten away with a very subtle English accent. I think the listener would have been okay with that because they’d be like, “Well, he’s used up all the other textures. We can give him a break.” But because he was the first one up, I had a conversation with the producer when I recorded this; he was Chris [unintelligible 00:11:14] was patched in from Texas. I said, “Should we do it?” and we came down on the side of not doing an accent for Christopher Nolan.

Craig: I think that’s fair. I think it’s a smart idea, given the fact that it starts it off because some people who haven’t heard Christopher Nolan speak might think, “Oh, this entire thing is going to be read in an English accent.” Also, Christopher’s brother Jonah has no English accent.

Graham: It’s so fascinating how different they are.

Craig: I feel like the Nolan family, you’re allowed to do either English or American. You’re fine.

Graham: That’s a relief.

Craig: Yes, you’re good. They won’t be coming after you.

John: Well, Graham, we are so, so, so appreciative that you did the book. Thank you so much for reading it. For folks who want to hear Graham read it, it’s December 2nd, just like the main book is out. It’s available everywhere. It should be on Audible, but every place you can buy audiobooks will have it.

Dana: I have 42 Audible credits I need to spend. I’m going to use one of them on this.

John: This is the perfect thing. It’s also going to be fun for people who’ve listened to the whole show to hear our words and just a different person saying it, which is great.

Dana: Different way.

Craig: Love it.

Dana: That’s so great. I’m so excited. There’s no one I trust more for advice about screenplay writing than you guys. This is amazing that you’ve done this book.

Craig: Thank you, Dana. Whatever content we provided, plus Graham’s magically resonant voice, should be very effective. Everyone should write better after this. We don’t know what else to do, honestly.

John: Graham, thank you. Thank you so much.

Dana: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Graham: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Graham.

Graham: Take care.

Dana: That’s a chill voice right there, man.

Craig: It’s a good voice.

Dana: My thing is I usually listen to voices like that to go to bed at night. I’m having an ‘all right, all right’ moment from just talking to him. I’m ready to snooze it up on that couch over there.

John: Do you listen to any of those sleepcasts where they just talk about nonsense that just goes on, it just melts away?

Dana: Yes, 100%. I like a little patter. I like a sleep timer, and then boom, I’m out.

John: We have some follow-up to get to. Drew, could you start us off with some follow-up?

Drew Marquardt: Martin writes, “I recently listened to John’s appearance on the Birbiglia podcast, and I was fascinated by his method of writing his screenplays in Las Vegas hotels. I wonder if John is aware that this technique of literary production was invented and/or perfected by one of the most successful writers of all time, Agatha Christie. I saw an image making the rounds last year, clearly a scan of an actual book, but I don’t know what book. The quote is attributed to an author named Christiana Brand, and here is the quote.

‘Agatha Christie once described to me her own particular method of getting down to work. She mulled over a book in her mind until it was ready. She said, ‘Well, we all do that.’ She would then repair to a very bad hotel. In a bad hotel, there was nothing to do but to write and plenty of time to do it in. The beds were so uncomfortable that you had no inclination to retire early or to get up late. The armchair’s so unyielding that you wasted not a minute in idle relaxation. The meals were so bad that there was no temptation to linger over them.
Any guests who would put up with such conditions must, of necessity, be so stupid that you couldn’t possibly make friends and spend precious moments in desultory chat. The book would be done in a matter of weeks, and you could pack up a few dull clothes, which were all you needed to bother to take with you and go off triumphantly home.'”

John: Dana Fox, this thing of me writing in hotel rooms, I think I did that while you were my assistant. Was I ever faxing you pages? Do you remember that?

Dana: 100%. A fax machine was involved at some point. I think, also, you did a thing involving trains at one point.

John: I took the train from LA to Seattle and wrote on the train, and then I faxed stuff back from the train. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has written this, except that this last April, I was in Aswan, Egypt, where she wrote Death on the Nile, and I was at the hotel where she wrote Death on the Nile. It was the Old Cataract Hotel. By the way, it is a luxury hotel.

Dana: Yes, she’s full of shit.

John: Maybe at this point, she was actually like-

Dana: The armchair was amazing. The desultory conversations occurred constantly.

John: We were able to tour the room where she wrote it. It’s like a three-room thing with a walk-in closet.

Dana: Fantastic.

John: Then a patio. So she’s kind of flying.

Dana: Yes. [chuckles] It’s kind of amazing.

John: That’s what I’m hearing.

Craig: Thank you for writing in about this. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has done this. Let’s move on to follow up on weirdness. Mike has a recommendation for a good, weird movie.

Drew: “You Want Weird? Friendship from Andrew DeYoung. My wife called it the worst movie she’s ever seen. I thought it was brilliant. We’re still married.”

John: I really liked Friendship, by the way. It should have been one of my One Cool Things. It’s a movie with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. It is just really, really strange in a way that I loved.

Dana: I remember seeing that and thinking, “I’m going to like that,” and then never seeing–

John: You’re going to watch it on the plane when you fly home?

Dana: That’s right. That’s a plane movie.

John: It’s a plane movie.

Dana: I like to cry on planes, too. Can I cry in that or not?

John: No. You will laugh and feel unnerved.

Craig: You can cry.

Dana: I like to cry, if possible.

Craig: At the end, if you feel like a good cry, just force it out. It’s funny.

Dana: Just force it out of you.

Craig: We were on a plane recently and–

Dana: Yes, we were on a plane recently.

Craig: I feel once we stopped talking to each other, we started to cry.

Dana: My daughter, who is 11, bought me a sweatshirt because she knows how much I like to sleep. I feel like this is the only thing I’ve talked about on this podcast is sleeping. She bought me this sweatshirt. It’s called ‘Comfrt’ but it’s missing a letter-

John: Of course, it has to be.

Dana: -because you couldn’t name it that.

Craig: ‘Comfrt’.

Dana: ‘Comfrt’. It’s so soft. Then you put the hoodie over your head, and you pull down an eye mask that’s inside the hoodie that clutches to your face. I was like, “Charlotte, this is crazy. I can’t wear this. It’s hot pink. I’m like an adult woman. This is crazy.” It’s got zippers all over for all sorts of things. It’s extraordinary.

John: Yes, life-change [unintelligible 00:16:50] [crosstalk]

Dana: Literally, there’s never been a better. It was absolutely life-changing. I’m asleep inside of it. I wake up, and I whip up my little eye things. I see Craig Mazin standing in front of me, going, “Dana Fox, what are you doing here on this plane?” We talked for so long on the plane. It was adorable. Everybody around us got involved in us. It was very cute.

Craig: You know what? You looked like a cute little Jawa.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Now you’re Princess Leia. Then you were a little Jawa.

Dana: I’m doing the whole series. I’m doing all of Star Wars.

Craig: If you want adorable, find Dana Fox in her slanket on a plane.

Dana: It’s pretty slankety. I tried to sell it to your wife. I was like, “I get kickbacks on every sale.”

Craig: I’m buying her one. I’m buying her a slanket.

Dana: It’s amazing. I was going to get it for you, but I learned about Craig that he doesn’t like sweatshirts that don’t have zippers. Good talk.

Craig: I need the pull-down. I can’t be trapped.

Dana: You need to get in and out of it that way. Are you the same way?

John: Yes. I really like a zip-up hoodie.

Dana: Are you claustrophobic at all?

John: Not especially. A sweater’s fine. I don’t like a pull-over sweatshirt.

Dana: Interesting. I don’t have many pullover sweatshirts either, unless they have an open neck, in which case I’m fine because I know I can escape.

Craig: That’s what you needed to know about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Let’s just cut right to the heart of the matter. Let’s get right onto the craft and do some follow-up on cuck chairs.

Dana: What’s that?

Craig: Oh, cuck chairs.

John: In episode 710, we were discussing cuck chairs. I’m not even quite sure how we got to the–

Dana: That sounds like a swear word, like 100%.

John: Again, this is why we have a not safe for work warning on this episode. The cuck chair is the chair next to the bed for when the husband has another man sleeping with his wife, so he can watch a cuckolding.

Dana: It’s like an intentional cuckolding.

John: Yes. The cuckold sits in the cuck chair.

Dana: Oh, God.

John: You know the standard corner of the hotel room chair.

Dana: Yes, but the fact that it happens so much in this story that there’s a whole chair for it, as if so many intentional cuckolding situations where people are accepting the cuckolding is happening.

Craig: I got to say, this is a very popular thing.

Dana: Is it really? No, stop it.

Craig: No, no. The cuck chair itself, I don’t know if that’s particularly– This whole cuckolding thing, it’s massive.

Dana: I literally cannot think of anything I would like less than all of this. I have always wanted to be the kind of gal that gets invited into a three-way. I have had so many people invite whoever I’m with into the three-way in front of me without me. They’re like, I would love to take your boyfriend or husband into a three-way with me and mine. I’m like, “I’m standing right here.” I think they can tell I would be very annoying, and I would want to talk the whole time.

Craig: What? No.

Dana: Nothing sexy. I’d be like, “You guys, this seems complicated. I feel like we’re going to all have feelings later that we need to talk about.”

Craig: Actually, it feels to me like the cuck chair might be made for you because it’s not a three-way. You’re not involved.

John: No, so you’re just watching.

Craig: You’re just watching.

Dana: I’m the husband in the chair? Oh, okay.

Craig: Or the wife.

Dana: Well, then, all right. Maybe. Honestly, maybe.

John: You could [unintelligible 00:19:49] have enough.

Craig: You could spend your Audible things.

Dana: Can I put the little eye mask over my face while it’s happening so I don’t have to watch it?

Craig: If you’re not watching, is it really cuckolding?

Dana: I would like to hear it, honestly. Just not see it.

Craig: Oh, that’s fun.

Dana: I feel like that would be sexier.

John: I’m not sure if I mentioned it, as we first discussed in episode 710, but there is a great episode of Decoder Ring, which is specifically about the cuckold chair and cuckolding in general, which goes back to the history of where it came from in Elizabethan times to now, it’s where it all came from. We have some more specific follow-up, including previous guests who’ve done work in this area. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Yes, comedian Sarah Schafer is selling miniature cuck chairs. It’s not inflatable like we talked about, but I still feel like she beat us to the punch.

Dana: I love her. I’ve met her.

John: She makes miniature models, so she makes a miniature hotel cuck chair. We also talked about on episode 710–

Dana: How is this a thing, guys?

John: -that my other company needed to make an inflatable cuck chair. You just put it there when you need it, but when you don’t need it, you can just put it away.

Dana: You have a company that makes sex stuff?

John: No, not at all. I said we would never do that.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you said ‘my other company’ has to make it, like my already established sex chair company.

Craig: John has an entire sex toy company that he hasn’t mentioned.

Dana: I thought that’s what you were saying. It didn’t seem like that far of a stretch. I was like, “Oh, he does technology and sex chairs and stuff.”

Craig: It does seem like a stretch, Dana. It’s a stretch.

John: It’s a stretch. We do have Scriptnotes barware.

Dana: Okay, that’d be cool.

John: It turns out, on Amazon, we found two inflatable chairs that feel exactly right for this purpose. We’ll put the links in the show notes there. Craig, do you want to click through and see these? This is one inflatable chair. You see, it looks like a side chair at a hotel, but it has a logo on it.

Dana: You can carry it in the bag.

John: Absolutely.

Dana: Nobody has to know. Did I ever tell you about the time I checked into a hotel, the only time I’ve ever changed my room? Because I don’t think I’m good enough to get into a hotel room and change it, and say like, “This isn’t good enough for me. I need a better room.” I don’t believe I deserve that. One time, I checked into a room and I opened the minibar and there was a half-eaten sandwich and an open box of suppository laxatives.

Craig: No, you’ve got to move.

Dana: I was like, “I got to go.” I was like, “I love you. I can’t. I support whatever happened here. I’m open to it, but I got to go.”

Craig: Did you write the scene, though? That’s a great scene prompt. Half a sandwich, laxatives. What went wrong here?

Dana: I think you guys should make your listeners write it because I couldn’t figure out what had happened. It was like a murder scene.

Craig: Sandwich and laxatives at the same time?

Dana: To me, it was the sandwich that was so confusing. It was a half-sannie. Anyway, why are you eating if you’re sopped up?

Craig: Yes, that’s the one that’s really tripping me up. Well, I got to tell you, John, you found a great product here if you’re a cuckold. The only issue, as I can see, is that the recommended maximum weight capacity is 200 pounds. I got to figure a lot of cucks are going to be two-plus.

John: If you pop the cuck chair, that’s extra humiliating, right?

Dana: That might work for the person who wants to be in the cuck chair.

John: I think the second choice may actually be better because this is the inflatable beanless beanbag chair. Besides the bed, it’s pretty humiliating to be sitting in that. It’s loaded around.

Dana: Honestly, it looks pretty nice to me. I think it looks comfortable, no?

John: It’s also max weight 200.

Craig: Again, there’s a gap in the market.

John: Yes, for plus-size cuckolds.

Dana: Built-in possibility for humiliation seems actually in line with the cuckold chair, so it sort of feels like it works.

Craig: You know what? God bless everyone, by the way. If that’s what you’re into and everybody’s cool with it, who cares? I don’t care.

Dana: That’s how I feel. Do your thing, man. Get your sandwich in your cuck chair, and another thing, and you just eat half the sandwich.

John: 100%

Craig: You just have to recognize. I think it’s fair to acknowledge, we don’t king shame. Some kinks are innately amusing. That doesn’t mean we’re degrading you.

Dana: No, we’re happy for you that you found a thing that you like.

Craig: We’re not even laughing at you. It’s just the concept is funny. It just is. It’s funny.

John: Let’s bring it back to a more wholesome moment here. We have some follow-up here from Carrie.

Drew: Carrie says, “I wanted to thank John and Craig for being such calming voices. My dog absolutely hates riding in the car. She’ll often tremble the moment she gets in. However, I’ve found that if I have Scriptnotes on, she’s much less likely to be upset and instead settles for mild discomfort. The moment I get in the car with her, I turn on Scriptnotes, and if an episode ends while I’m driving, I’ll immediately rewind and keep listening. If I don’t, the moment it ends, she starts to huddle in the back seat. While I’d like to thank them for their invaluable writing advice, I also thank them for their pup whisperer skills.”

Dana: That’s really sweet.

Craig: Do you know, ‘settles for a mild discomfort’ is probably what the person with half a sandwich and the laxatives is thinking.
[laughter]

Dana: In the cuck chair.

Craig: Yes, in the cuck chair.

Dana: That’s actually amazing. Also, how sweet is that?

Craig: How sweet.

John: That’s really nice.

Dana: You guys, you have nice pup voices.

Craig: We have nice pup– Yes.

Dana: I believe this. You guys are really good dudes. Pups love you. Pups know you.

Craig: I’ll tell you, my dogs do not like driving around. Cookie does the same thing. She’s very trembly. Real me is talking, and that doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Maybe it’s John.

Dana: Not even podcast me. It’s just actual me.

Craig: Actual me does nothing.

Dana: Oh.

Craig: Oh.

John: All right. Enough banter before we get started. It’s the key topic here. Dana, congratulations on Wicked.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Woo.

John: Wicked 1 and now Wicked 2. This was a long journey.

Dana: Ooph. Yes.

John: Let’s briefly recap what the history of Wicked is. Obviously, there was once upon a time, The Wizard of Oz. It was a book. Then it was a movie. There was a book by Gregory Maguire called Wicked, which sold to Marc Platt, who wanted to do it as a Broadway show first. It is a Broadway show, correct?

Dana: No.

John: Tell me what I got wrong there.

Dana: I believe the idea was to make it into a movie without music.

Craig: Yes.

Dana: They started it as that. I’m pretty sure they maybe even had scripts. Then Marc left. He was running Universal at the time.

Craig: He was, yes.

Dana: He went to be a producer. He said, “The one project I want is Wicked.” He took Wicked. It was Stephen Schwartz that convinced him that Wicked needed music because, inherently, The Wizard of Oz was so musical. It was crazy to do this idea without music.

John: Yes, makes sense.

Dana: Thankfully, Stephen Schwartz convinced him to make it a Broadway musical first. Universal, weirdly, always owned it because they had originally bought it to make it into a movie. They owned part of the rights to the play. Then they made it as a musical first.

John: That’s right. The musical that Stephen Schwartz wrote the music for and Winnie Holzman did the stage play for was a massive hit. I remember seeing a pre– I was on Broadway but pre-opening with Kristin Chenoweth and-

Craig: Idina Menzel.

John: -Idina Menzel. It was great. You could tell this is going to become a thing. It did become a thing.

Dana: It almost felt redefining, I think, too, in terms of what Broadway was doing at the time. It felt almost part movie, part musical in the sense that it had a big hook.

John: Stephen Schwartz is a Broadway legend.

Dana: A genius. The greatest.

John: You’re talking about Pippin. To have somebody like Stephen Schwartz take something that could be a little bit more in the Disney commercial zone for what Broadway sometimes does, to just do this whole other weird thing that was very original in its own way. The whole thing about Wicked is, it’s not The Wizard of Oz, really at all. It’s such an original show and so weird. It’s a weird show with incredible music.

Dana: Oh, geniuses. A lot of them.

John: Talking story, the stage version makes huge changes from the book. The central concepts come through, but it feels really, really different in story and how stuff is structured. Correct?

Dana: Yes. I never read the book-

John: What?

Dana: -which turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I told my 12-year-old he could read it. Apparently, no way, no.

Craig: No. No.

Dana: Not a great idea. He was like, “Mom, some intense sex stuff happened in this book.” I was like, “Yes, I don’t know what it’s about, but I’ve heard it’s amazing.”

Craig: I don’t know about that.

Dana: The extraordinary Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz got together and took the main idea from it, which they thought was so brilliant, which was like, “What if this story that you knew and you absolutely were positive you knew everything about it, what if the bad guy was not who you thought they were? What if the person that was good was maybe not actually as good as you thought they were? Let’s see what that story looks like.”

John: What if they were best friends?

Dana: What if they were best friends? Interestingly, actually, Winnie told me the other day, which I’d never heard before, originally, Glinda wasn’t actually that big of a part. It was in meeting Kristin Chenoweth and becoming obsessed with Kristin Chenoweth that they decided that it had to be a true two-hander, which I had never heard before. That was pretty interesting.

John: All these things that seem inevitable were not inevitable at the genesis of this.

Dana: Absolutely.

John: It’s that process of discovery. The stage show is a huge hit, tours the world, a bunch of different languages. We all know it and love it, but eventually we’re going to make it into a film. The decision to make it from one film to two films, I’d love for you guys to talk about that process.

Dana: I think Craig maybe was around when it was more choice, actually. He can maybe speak to that. When I got involved, I was brought in by John, too. It was already a fait accompli. It was already like, “We’re making this as two movies. We can’t question it, and we can’t go back. We have to just do it.” Craig, you knew more about that stage and development, right? Where they were deciding to make it two movies?

Craig: No, it was a condition that they wanted me to work on Wicked, and I said, “Okay, but it has to be two movies.”

Dana: See, that’s amazing because you’re a genius. You knew.

Craig: Well, I don’t know about that. I’m very familiar with the show, and I read the script as it existed. What I remember saying to Marc was, “Once she sings Defying Gravity, you have to go home. You can’t stay in the theater.”

Dana: By the way, when you’re at the play, sometimes people made mistakes and we’re like, “Bye, that was the most satisfying thing that ever happened. I’ll see you guys. We’re going to go to dinner now.”

Craig: Right. You can’t. You just can’t. Also, the second act of Wicked, totally, is quite different.

Dana: Correct.

Craig: There’s too much to shove into one movie.

Dana: The songs are so extraordinary because Stephen is such a crazy genius, that you try cutting one song–

Craig: No, you really can’t, and you shouldn’t.

Dana: You were like, “I miss that song. That song’s like a short song. I love it and I miss it.”

Craig: I said, I can outline, I can make two treatments for two different movies, and I can write a script from the beginning to the end of Defying Gravity, and that’s sort of how you, “Aah, boom,” and we’ll see you next time. Marc and the executives at Universal, separately, we’re like, “Not sure Marc will go for that.” Marc’s like, “I’m not sure the studio will go for that.” I basically was like, “Everybody, let’s just do it.” Then they all said yes, and that’s it. That was the last impactful thing I did on Wicked.

Dana: Well, it was very impactful, my friend, seriously, because it’s not an obvious choice. It felt so dangerous at the time.

Craig: It feels so obvious now.

Dana: Well, now it does. Everything feels obvious now, but at the time when we were living in it, it’s like they talk about World War II, and it’s like they didn’t know how it was going to end. Back then, they didn’t know. It might have not worked out. We sort of felt like, “Oh my God, this might not work out,” because, as Craig was saying, it was never the first movie. Whenever people saw the first movie, thank God they loved it; it was wonderful. Everyone kept saying, “Well, it was obviously the right choice to break it into two movies.” I was like, “That’s because you haven’t seen the second movie yet.” I was like, “Hold that thought until–”

John: Let’s talk about this because if the decision wasn’t to make one movie and see how it does, and then make the second movie, the decision was to make two movies at the same time, that was distinct movies that are joined.

Dana: Yes, which means you can’t screw anything up because the first movie has to be a success, because you’ve already shot the second movie.

John: Were they cross-bordered? Were you shooting scenes from two?

Dana: 100% cross-bordered, and this is the brilliance of John and the group that he had around him, all the HODs that were so extraordinary, and the brilliance of Cynthia and Ari, that they would shoot the end of movie one in the morning and shoot Wonderful from movie two in the afternoon. They’re in completely different costumes, totally different hair, different characters. They talk about how they had to use different perfumes depending on which movie they were in because they had to sense things to trigger who they were. They had different playlists for the two movies for themselves to listen to because throughout the day, they had to keep it straight. It wasn’t even just–

Craig: Because it was based on location, basically.

Dana: It was all locations, basically. We had 73 sets, and we were turning over sets constantly. These sets were enormous. Nathan Crowley, who’s our production designer, is a genius. He’s Christopher Nolan’s guy. He’s absolutely extraordinary. I’m obsessed with him. Everybody, go find an interview with Nathan Crowley. He’s the greatest guy ever and totally brilliant. His wife is also extraordinary. Obsessed.

John: You know that you’re making two movies, and we’ll get into this one in the bonus segment where we talk about– The promo circuit is like, last time you had to just talk about the first movie and not acknowledge the second movie.

Dana: This is why they were all sobbing in their interviews, and everyone’s like, “Why are these people crying so hard in their interviews?” It’s like, “Because we just finished For Good. We’re crying about For Good. We’re not crying about Popular. We’re crying about the second movie.”

John: Craig and I have not seen the second movie yet, and I’m excited to see it.

Dana: I’m so excited for you to see it.

John: One of the real challenges, as Craig was alluding to and that you were also mentioning, we remember what happens in Act 1. Act 2 races through a bunch of stuff. If you look at the Wikipedia summary of Act 2, it’s like, “Oh my God,” half a line is given to things, and so you have to make much bigger choices about storytelling.

Dana: That’s exactly right. That was the exciting challenge of it, that the second act of the play is 45 minutes long. This movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes or 14 minutes. We obviously created a lot of new material for the second movie. I always used to describe the feeling of the second act as its own movie. You walked in, you sat down with your popcorn, and you got hit with the two, three-act break, and then you went crazy from there. That’s what the feeling is of the second act, because that was appropriate for the play. Then you’re looking at, “Okay, this is a moviegoing experience. People are used to a one, two, three-act structure.”

John: You’ve got to ramp up.

Dana: You ramp up. You’re a little slow. You’re like, “Where are we now? Who are we? What are we doing?” That was the big fun of trying to figure out movie two is how do we remind people where we are? How do we get them used to how much has changed in the time lapse between the two movies? That was actually a big discussion, was how much time to have passed during the two movies. You’ll see when you see the movie. We landed on something I think is interesting.

Craig: 30 years later?

Dana: Well, no. You know what it was? What I realized with my brilliant friend, Lorene Scafaria, is that the experience of people watching the first movie was so intense for them that it actually impacted how we were all thinking about the second movie as we were working on finishing it, because it raised the bar so much. It was like the expectations got higher and higher every time people were like, “Oh my God, this movie is killing me. I saw it 42 times in theaters.” The press tour of the girls became part of the movie itself. That was their friendship in a weird way because they are friends and they’re so close. Watching them be in love with each other platonically and crying all the time about For Good, which nobody knew, created this intense feeling that we knew we had to have come through the second movie.

Part of the decision of how much time passed was, we were like, “Oh, it should be how much time passed for the audience.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: “It should be a year,” because the movies are coming out a year later. Then Winnie came up with some brilliant word for what a year was, which was like 12 clock-ticks of the–

Craig: Clock moons or something, yes. Yes, that’s it.

Dana: She made up some crazy word for this, but we all know it’s a year.

Craig: 12 monthly [unintelligible 00:35:13].

Dana: Yes. The moon passages of the– Yes.

John: Talk about the writing process on this because you’re writing both movies simultaneously, or did you like, “Okay, we’re going to finish the scripts for the first movie and then start the script on the second movie,” or was it all blurred together?

Dana: I was pulled in by John Chu because he’s my favorite person on planet Earth. I told him, “Anytime you want me to do something, I’m going to say yes.”

Craig: Ouch.

Dana: Oh, no, you guys, I meant that I met after you.

Craig: All right, thank you.

Dana: He’s my favorite person on planet Earth who I met after you two.

Craig: Weird, late clarification.

Dana: In the podcast, we could put that before, as if I said it right before.

Craig: Now people skip.

Dana: Matthew, just swoop it out–

[rewind sound]

Dana: I love John and Craig,

[fast-forward sound]

Dana: Working with John, he’s the most extraordinary director, but he’s so collaborative, also, and he makes me want to be a better man. He’s that guy. I’m like, “I love you, John.” I told him, “I’ll do anything with you,” after he and I work together.

John: I want to back up because you worked with him first because he was a director on your TV series.

Dana: Yes, that’s right. He had shot Crazy Rich Asians, but it hadn’t come out yet, and I needed someone to direct the first two episodes of Home Before Dark, which is my Apple TV series. I met with him and he showed me the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians, which had not come out yet. From the trailer, I was like, “You’re a genius. This is going to hit. This is so universal. This is incredible. I love you. I want you to do this.” I was trying to hire him off of a trailer. I was like, “I don’t need to see anything else. I’m obsessed with him.”

He did the most extraordinary job on the TV show. He brought in Alice Brooks, who is the DP of Wicked, to do my show. He brought in Myron Kerstein, the most brilliant editor you’ll ever meet on planet Earth, to do my show. I got to work with all his people. It was extraordinary.

John: I want to stop you for a second because it’s just such a good reminder of the relationships you form and the trust you form and being able to see what a person is like as a collaborator. You were hiring him, but then he’s actually hiring you because he can see, “Dana gets it. We have a shared vision. I know that she can deliver this thing.”

Dana: Correct. Also, I think John’s very loyal. Once he gets his people around that he knows understands the way he likes to work, he wants to keep them close. I feel so lucky to be in his orbit, honestly, because he’s just extraordinary. I said to him, “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it, and I’ll say yes.” He called me after I finished Lost City. He called me and said, “I have another one for you.” He had done In the Heights, while I did Lost City and other stuff. He said, “Okay, I have another one for you.” He said, “Do you want to know what it is?” I said, “No.” The answer is yes.

He was like, “I’m going to tell you anyway.” I was like, “No, no, no, let’s do a bit where I’d make part of the deal without even knowing what it is.” I thought that would be funny. He was like, “No, I’m going to tell you, you’re an idiot.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “It’s Wicked.” I was like, “Oh my God, everybody loves– What is it?” He’s like, “Wicked.” I’m like, “Mm-hmm. I also am one of the people that loves Wicked so much,” because I hadn’t seen it. I’m literally the only American human who had not seen Wicked.

Craig: That’s crazy.

John: What did you say when he said Wicked, you’re like, “Wicked what”?

Dana: Well, I knew of it. I knew it was popular and famous and stuff, but I’m not super dialed in. I discovered Beyoncé two years ago.

Craig: I love it.

Dana: I was like, “You guys, we need to talk. This woman’s incredible.”

John: Oh my God, this is amazing.

Dana: This is always me too late on really important things. I started watching Lost in the last season and was like, “You guys, the Hatch.” Everyone was like, “We’re so over the Hatch, we don’t want to talk about the Hatch.”

John: I like, in a weird way, that you weren’t a Wicked–

Dana: I was not a mega fan. I didn’t know anything about it.

John: Sometimes it’s better to not be burdened by–

Dana: Winnie and Stephen now talk about how helpful it was to have me there, being irreverent and not being so precious, because I just didn’t know. It was the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t go to Broadway to see it. I googled everything I could find. I watched the entire play in shaky clips from France, Germany, whatever, blah, blah, put it all together. I was like, “I get it.” I read the play and I played Stephen’s gorgeous music. Whenever the song would come up as I was reading it, I would play the music, and I was like, “Gosh, this is so good. This is so good, the music.” I loved it.

I was, of course, impressed, and also, I had loved My So-Called Life so much. I loved Winnie’s work from that. He said, “We’re going to work all of us together. Me, John, Winnie, Stephen, and you. We’re going to get into Zooms, and we’re going to break both movies together,” which I’d never done before with a director. I was so excited to be able to do it because it felt like every day we weren’t just breaking the story or writing the script, we were making the movie because it was what he wanted to be doing, too. He was telling us about his vision as we were all talking it through. We spent 153 hours on Zoom before we ever started writing. I know it’s a lot. Craig looks so tired from the 153.

Craig: Horrifying, just so much–

Dana: I just looked over at him and he was like, “Girl, eugh.”

John: By the way, the bullet you dodged. All right, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I did not dodge a bullet.

Dana: The bullet hit you squarely.

Craig: Yes, the bullet hit me pretty hard.

John: [laughs] You had all these Zooms before you started.

Dana: Before we even started writing, but that was the ideation period, where we broke them into two movies. We carded them digitally because we were all on Zoom, so we couldn’t see each other. We had digital cards that we had made, and then I started outlining from off those cards. I outlined both movies. Then John basically was like, “Okay, we’re going to split up Movie 1 between you and Winnie, and you guys are going to write it together.” We wrote Movie 1 together as quickly as we could to get it full because we had stages booked.

They were trying to make us feel that pressure. We wrote the first movie, and then I immediately pivoted. While Winnie did notes from John and Mark. I immediately pivoted and started writing the second movie. I wrote the second movie. Then from that point forward, Winnie and I were collaborating, but we were each in a different movie. When I was in Movie 2, she was in Movie 1 and vice versa, but we were still working with each other. It was like I would send her a scene from Movie 2 and be like, “This is hot trash garbage. How would Glinda say this thing, because I’d want her to blah, blah, blah?”

There was a lot of collaboration, but we were in two separate movies. That was how we got the work done. It was super collaborative with John and with Stephen. Then, being a fly on the wall to watch Stephen Schwartz do the two new songs for the Movie 2.

John: It was pretty great.

Dana: It was like childhood Dana lost her mind. It was amazing.

Craig: I have to say that this is a really good example of you’re a good writer. I think I’m a good writer. Some people should be writing certain movies, and some people should not. The thing is, I love Wicked. I love the show, but I was not the right person for that project. You were the right person for that project. That project needed somebody that not only was a writer but also, how would I put it, a clearinghouse, a diplomat, and an ambassador. For all of these people, and also somebody that really enjoys the collaboration of writing with another writer. I’m such a monk.

Dana: Yes, you’re so private. You just want to be in your little room and do your thing.

Craig: This is just a great example. I underscore this all the time, but just in case anybody’s confused, the credits for this movie are spot on accurate. I was happy to support those. I didn’t fight you. [laughs] They’re correct.

Dana: Yes. Winnie had done a lot of work before any of us came on. That’s why she has that solo credit. Only writers will understand that credit, which is Winnie’s solo because she had been working on trying to make this into a movie for 15 years before any of us were involved in the process. That’s why she has that credit. Then AND, which means she worked also with the team of me and her. It’s a weird-looking sandwich of a credit, but it does represent what happened. It was really an amazing experience.

It was very difficult because of all those personalities and all the different things, we all cared so much. Honestly, it was really hard, I think, because we cared so much. We wanted it to be so good. We all felt this profound sense of responsibility to the fans. Then after Movie 1, it was like ratcheted up to a million. The post-process of Movie 2, I would just sit around crying because I wanted to be worthy of people’s expectations of the second movie because it was so important to them.

Then also, the world has gotten even harder. I think people desperately need a time to sit in a theater quietly with their friends and their loved ones and their family and be able to express their emotions about what’s going on in the world or whatever, in a safe place to do that. I know the movie gives you that.

John: As they witnessed the rise of fascism, you see it reflected back in the movie, yes. There’s a potential to triumph over it.

Dana: Of course, we didn’t write it that way because it was five years ago that we started writing it. We didn’t know this was going to be what happened. I just think, unfortunately, the movie is so timely because this is timeless. There are always people looking for power, and they’re going to do it at the expense of the most vulnerable people.

Craig: Steven and Winnie, all the way back when they were first conceiving of the show, and this is something that Mark told me, that there was underneath it a pretty clear allegory for Nazi Germany, for fascism, for people getting disappeared, taken away.

Dana: They were writing it in the shadow of 9/11 and the persecution of the Muslim population in America. That was partly why World War II is so fresh on the mind. If we all remember, right after 9/11, it started to get really off.

Craig: Yes. Wicked, it’s really interesting how it has so many flavors and layers. On the top, it is pink and green, and it’s two best friends.

Dana: It’s floopy, yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s funny and weird. Then underneath it, there’s something bad, something bad coming.

Dana: I think that’s what people are going to love about the second movie, is that it still has all the pink and green and floopy, but it is really about something. It really has a lot of there-there. There’s a lot of there-there for both the consequences within the friendship. The political stuff, of course, is there, and it hits harder now because of what’s happening. The friendship is so beautiful. You feel like you’ve been on this crazy emotional journey. That was another real challenge of writing the screenplay of the second movie was, in the play, there’s all these reprises.

That you’re hearing that you just heard the A side of the reprise 20 minutes ago in the play, but in the movie, you’re hearing the reprise a year later. How do you get the audience to feel the feeling of that reprise the same way they would have if they had heard the A side of it 20 minutes ago? We were constantly thinking about how do we remind them of the things that happened in the first film so that that’s fresh in their minds. A lot of it had to do with planned flashbacks, but also unplanned flashbacks that came out in editing that I think were really strategic and really smart.

Craig: Dana?

Dana: My love.

Craig: What do you think my favorite song from Movie 2 is going to be? I know what it is. I’m just saying, what do you think of this?

Dana: I’m just going to say, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or not say, but I think that No Good Deed–

Craig: You got the answer. That’s it.

Dana: That’s it. That’s the Craig one. Your brain will exit the back of your head and then come back into it at the end. It’s like the crazy– I lost my mind.

Craig: It’s such a good song. Look, I love For Good. I love it. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. It’s a nice wrap-it-up. No Good Deed is awesome. Having seen Cynthia in Jesus Christ Superstar and watching her turn it to 11.

Dana: You told me about how beautiful that was.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait to see what she does with that.

Dana: I would reference the song you talked about, but there’s a 100% chance I mispronounce it.

Craig: Gethsemane.

Dana: Gethsemane.

[imitating song tune]

Dana: No Good Deed’s going to kill you. Buckle your fucking seat belt for good, though, because it’s–

Craig: Fuckle your bucking seat belt.

Dana: Buckle your fucking seat belt for that one because that’s a goodbye, everybody. I don’t know why. I hope this makes you, too, also feel really emotional when you’re watching it. Part of my emotional experience with the movie is that there is a feeling, a little bit, that Hollywood is dying.

John: It’s a big Hollywood movie.

Dana: This is a big, beautiful Hollywood movie from the old days. You can’t believe this movie got made.

John: They felt the giant sets.

Dana: I have chills. These giant sets that were real, and everything was real. If it’s out of focus, it’s because a person was doing it. There’s no AI. It feels so much like the movies that got us all to be in this business in the first place.

Craig: It’s going to be massive.

Dana: Oh, I hope so. It’s just so beautiful.

Craig: Hollywood is not dying. It’s just that it’s been the months after summer, the months between summer and Thanksgiving. The New York Times once again wrote an article about how Hollywood is dying. They’re like, “Yes, it’s always dying in September and October.” [laughter] That’s what it does.

John: You forget the article you just wrote about what a big summer it was for blockbusters.

Craig: Right.

Dana: Right. That’s a good point.

Craig: Thanksgiving and Christmas comes and kaboom. It’s going to be huge.

Dana: I hope that Wicked puts the paddles back onto the business too, and clear, and it’s like, [onomatopoeia] but the problem is they never seem to learn the lessons from the movies. They’ll go like, “But that’s just Wicked, so it doesn’t count.” You can’t learn anything from it because it’s Wicked.

John: Another musical.

Dana: Nothing’s ever been like this. You’ll be like, “Okay.”

Craig: Nobody knows, but you know what? You guys did a spectacular job, and I can’t wait to see the second movie. John really is a remarkably talented director.

Dana: I do need you to FaceTime me when both of you, after you see it, because I had a hard time talking about it. I was just wandering around the after-party just like a zombie, and crying in front of famous people was basically what it was. It was just so weird. I was just like, I couldn’t stop crying. It was wild.

John: It was the experience of the movie, but also the trauma of making it a movie.

Dana: I had some health issues during it that were really difficult. The narrative I had in my head was that Wicked was what killed me. Wicked is why I got sick. Then I realized while I was watching the movie that, “Oh, no.”

Craig: Oh, no. Here we go.

Dana: I just realized that Wicked actually saved me. It gave me stuff to do while I was feeling so sick. Every day gave me a reason to get up in the morning and try and care and feel something again. It is what ultimately made me feel better. It’s what got me better from the sickness. It’s not what killed me.

Craig: That’s fantastic.

Dana: That was part of why I was weeping around the stupid after-party, like an animal.

Craig: When you were working on it, before it was in production, you and your husband were in Calgary for some reason.

Dana: Oh, boy. That was a– Yes.

Craig: I was there, and the two of us were just–

Dana: That was my breaking point. That’s where I was like, “I might have to quit because I think I’m going to die.” I was like, “I have to.” You were working on The Last of Us.

Craig: On the first season of The Last of Us, which was chaos.

Dana: You were like, “This is crazy.” Yes, and I was like, “Our health might be in danger.” [chuckles]

Craig: Yes, we were standing in a park going, “We’re dying, right? We’re dying.” [crosstalk]

Dana: Yes, and you were so nice to me. I was like, “I think I’m dying.” You’re like, “It’s okay, because I’m also dying, so we could die together.” Then I encountered a bear, and there was a moment where I was like, “Maybe it should eat me.”

John: Wow, it would be a way to go.

Dana: I was like, “This would be a killer story, first of all.”

Craig: How would I identify with that?

Dana: Then I would get out of doing the rest of this work, which is so intense.

Craig: That is what like writing is so hard that a lot of times–

Dana: That you want a bear to eat you.

Craig: I have told my assistant a number of times, listen, at some point today, don’t approach from the front, but from behind, hit me with a hammer as hard as you can on my head, and just end this, so I don’t have to do this.

Dana: I’m so glad you and John say those kinds of things because– John less so because John is just like–

Craig: John’s healthy.

Dana: He’s just too healthy. I can’t talk to you, John. I’ll talk directly to Craig. I’m so glad to hear you say this, Craig, because you’re so brilliant and so talented. I always think of myself as just a really hard worker. That’s why my work is good. Not because I have any innate talent. I’m just like, I just work harder than everybody else.

John: No. That’s an eldest daughter thing.

Dana: I’m the youngest daughter.

John: You’re the only daughter, right?

Dana: I’m the only daughter, yes. I guess you’re right. I’m still the eldest daughter.

John: The eldest daughter.

[laughter]

Dana: Hearing you say that, Craig, I think that helps me, and also all your listeners who are trying to be writers, that you also feel that way is amazing. [crosstalk] I want to die every day. I’m like, “I cannot believe how hard this still feels to me.”

Craig: Yet, every time I have a chance to stop, and I could stop, I do not stop. I never stop.

Dana: Oh, I could stop tomorrow, and I don’t stop. I’m crazy.

John: No. You’ve set up nine more shows and movies. While you’ve been sitting here.

Dana: While I’ve been sitting here, I set up 42 new things. It’s like I have a problem. I literally have a Post-it note on my desk that says, “Say no.” Then I just said yes to all the things.

John: All the things. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions here.

Dana: Yes, please.

John: James in Vancouver wants to ask about torture.

Dana: We just talked all about torture. [crosstalk] We don’t need to talk about torture. James, that was your answer to your question.

John: You guys always talk about needing to make your characters suffer in order to see them go through the maximum amount of growth possible. However, how much suffering is too much? At what point does it veer into emotional torture porn as opposed to genuine trials and tribulations?

Craig: That’s a good question.

John: I think it’s a very good question. Torture your hero is fantastic. If there’s a moment where it’s like, “I don’t want to watch this anymore,” or it feels gratuitous, I’m going to stop. You have to make sure that you are giving your character some victories, some hope along the way. If it’s just despair, if it’s 1984, people are going to stop. Then you’ve failed as a storyteller, I think.

Dana: I also feel like you ask yourself, what do you want to go through? I have to close my eyes when torture is happening, actual torture is happening in things. I feel almost the same way about emotional torture, which is like, I want to stop just shy of that because I just think that’s gratuitous and weird, and I don’t need to see it. Also, we’re in a world and a time where everything feels like torture. I tend to go with what I feel and what I think the rest of the world is feeling because I’m also feeling it. Craig, what were you going to say?

Craig: I definitely like to echo the feelings that we have, but give people a way to go through these things somewhat safely. Torturing your characters has to be purposeful. Remember, you’re not just torturing them, you are choosing what to do to them. Therefore, you have a plan, and the plan is such that the torture must be matched to their ability to withstand it and then surpass it. The real question, James, isn’t how much should I torture them? The real question is, what would make this person’s victory feel really earned and satisfying?

Dana: That’s great.

Craig: That’s all.

Dana: That’s great. Also, for each individual character, the definition of torture is totally different. For my husband, the definition of torture is me chewing food that he can hear. Literally, that could be an entire scene where he’s tortured. He says it makes him want to actually murder me in cold blood.

John: Misthonia.

Dana: Misthonia. Yes, he has that thing. You can calibrate it based on who the person is because torture is something different for each person, but that’s so smart.

Craig: You calibrate it depending on the person, and you also calibrate it depending on the tone. In comedies, torture could be as “torturous” as, “The girl that dumped me is with the guy that beat me up yesterday, and I have to sit here and watch them dance.” That’s torture. It’s not Zero Dark Thirty torture. [laughs]

Dana: Yes, nobody’s strapped to a chair in that story.

Craig: Right, but sometimes you do strap someone to a chair, and that’s–

Dana: To a cuck chair. Bringing it back.

Craig: If they’re only 200 pounds.

Dana: We’re going to make it a runner. [crosstalk] Don’t worry about it.

John: To recap, when you’re thinking about torturing your characters, you’re thinking about what is it that you want. What is it that makes you feel uncomfortable or comfortable? What do you as the writer want? You’re thinking about the audience. Where is the audience in this? Also, crucially, you’re thinking about the character. What is it about this character and their journey that this torture is allowing them to grow and progress and do the things you’re going to do?

Dana: I particularly like what Craig says because that almost reframes it for me in a way that I understand that question even more, which is what will make their victory feel more earned, which is such a smarter way of saying what specific torture is right for this person and what level. If you think about it, in Wicked Movie 1, we realized, like, since it was ending at Defying Gravity, she can’t be defeating the wizard. That was what her I Want song was about, but she can’t defeat the wizard because she can’t do that until the second movie.

What she had to defeat was the part of herself that didn’t believe that she could do it. That led to all these discoveries of she was going to see herself as a child and all these different things. It led to different forms of torture for her in Movie 1 than are the ones that she experiences in Movie 2. It was all about making those victories feel earned and/or the bittersweet ending feel as sad as possible.

Craig: That’s a good question, though. You know what? Vancouver representing.

Dana: I love Vancouver.

John: One other quick question here from Zach. Was the 1990s a great decade for action movies, or am I just experiencing whatever generation thinks that the decade they grew up in has the best media? Some of the films that he’s listing here are The Fugitive, Bad Boys, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Speed, Armageddon, Twister, Men in Black, and many others.

Dana: They’re all perfect.

Craig: Amusingly, none of those movies are even in the top 50 of the best movies of the 1990s. The answer is yes. The 1990s were incredible.

Dana: It’s insane. Yes.

Craig: I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m here to tell you the ’90s were the best 10 years of movies that I’ve experienced in my life. When I look back at what they did there, it’s astonishing.

John: The danger is that we are all roughly the same age cohort and that we were in our young 20s there. You always think about that period of your life as being like, “Oh, that was fantastic.” The way we would test that is we should get younger people to watch movies of the different decades and have them–

Dana: Shouldn’t that be a follow-up question? [crosstalk] Can you ask your audience, to younger people, “Watch those movies and see if they’re bangers like we think they are”?

Craig: I have been showing great hits of the ’90s to my assistants and the office PAs and basically all the kids that are–

Dana: What do they think?

Craig: It’s been just one home run after another.

John: That’s great.

Dana: That’s great. Will you share that list, though? Share that list. Put that list out for me. Give me your top 10 because I want to watch them.

Craig: This list right here, all these movies are fun, but it’s like he’s not even listening. Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Silence of the Lambs. [crosstalk] I can just go on. Fargo. There’s so many incredible movies.

John: He was specifically talking about action in his days. Yes, there are incredible movies. 1999 was a banner year. You look at the movies that came out that year, it was absurd. Yes, you’re right.

Craig: You know what? Fair, Zach. You were talking about action movies. I’ll give you a pass on that. All those were great action movies. The Fugitive is like–

Dana: The Fugitive is a perfect movie. Have I ever talked to you about the movie? Okay, I want to tell. Super quick, though. We may have learned this because we went to the Stark program, so we may have learned this the same. I always learned structure was character, and it was all about how the character’s going through a specific journey. We learned there’s the character’s need and there’s the character’s want. The movie is all about where they start off the movie, where they want something, and they’re making a journey towards needing something.

Wherever they are along the way, those key plot points are always about whether they’re getting what they need or whether they’re getting what they want, that kind of thing. The other thing that I learned was that the protagonist is the character who changes, not the lead of the movie. It’s the character who changes, and the antagonist is the character who causes that person to change. The protagonist of The Fugitive is Tommy Lee Jones, of course. The antagonist is Richard Kimble because Harrison Ford, of course, is the lead of the movie.

Craig: He doesn’t change.

Dana: He doesn’t change at all. He’s like, “I didn’t kill my wife,” in the beginning of the movie. In the middle of the movie, he’s like, “I swear to fucking God, I didn’t kill my wife.” At the end of the movie, he’s like, “I fucking told you I didn’t kill my wife.” Tommy Lee Jones, the whole structure is key to Tommy Lee Jones’s arc in understanding that Richard Kimble is telling the truth.

Craig: Yes. This is all correct.

Dana: That helps me with structure more than anything else.

Craig: Nice.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is sitting between me and Dana. It’s a thing called the Owl, and it’s this little camera device. It looks like a speaker. It looks like a tall speaker, but it has a camera at the top that is a panoramic camera. We’re on a Zoom like we are right now with Craig, and Drew, and Graham. It is showing individual slices, individual shots of me and Dana, so that we actually look well framed in it. It is just a piece of magic. It’s the Owl.

If you’re doing any sort of situation where you have some people in a place and other people are on Zoom, it is a game-changer. When we’ve done other things like this, Scriptnotes, you have to move the laptop back far enough so that everyone can see each other, or there’s a camera up on the wall.

Dana: I’ve done so many things like this, I’ve never seen it work as well as it’s working right now. We’re all seeing each other’s faces. Everybody’s in the frame. It’s amazing.

Craig: It’s really effective.

John: What’s so smart about it is it has the panoramic view, and it shows you at the top, but it’s smart enough to individually slice out when someone is speaking to give them framed as a single.

Dana: I urge every studio to get one of these because all of those Zoom calls I have with you guys, where 27 of you are in one frame, I can’t do it anymore.

John: I was on a Netflix call, and literally, it was like a satellite shot of two executives at a table.

Dana: Yes, satellite, literally, like a Google Earth shot of the Netflix building.

John: It’s hard for me to read it in attention. I’m like, “All right. Do they get it?”

Dana: I was like, “Do they like it? Do they want it?” I can’t tell.

Craig: I’m going to get one of these for the production office. I’m going to get one tomorrow.

Dana: Oh, for the production office. It would kill for that. For production meetings?

Craig: Yes.

Dana: Everybody. Great.

John: Craig, for D&D, when we’re a hybrid, like while you’re up in Canada, game changer.

Craig: Yes. [laughs] John and I–

Dana: Did you just slip in that Craig is doing D&D?

Craig: No, we play D&D together.

John: Play D&D every week.

Dana: Oh, I thought you guys were making a movie together. It’s cute. You guys are cute.

Craig: We are. We’re adorable. We talk about torture. John and I were playing in a game on Thursday evening, where we were subjected to a three-hour pointless combat, where we ended up captured and shoved into a mine.

Dana: Oh, my God. Are you with other people in this story? Who else is in there?

John: Oh, my God. Who’s who? It’s me, and Craig, and Chris Morgan. We’ll talk about it. We’ll tell you after. We’ll sidebar.

Dana: Yes, sidebar. Chris Morgan made it in, though. We all know he was there.

John: Dana Fox, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Dana: I would love my one cool thing to be my husband’s podcast, which is called The Most Important Question. It’s mostly about climate change, and science, and all sorts of interesting stuff. Because it’s not a thing, I am going to say my one cool thing is heating pads. Because what it allows you to do is lower the temperature in your bedroom to 55. If you can’t see your breath, you’re not doing it right. Then you get the heating pad so that you don’t die. It allows you to keep the room as cold as you need to keep it. Amazing sleep.

John: Love it.

Dana: Please enjoy.

Craig: That’s good.

John: I also am a big fan of the heated seats in your car.

Dana: Stunning.

John: It can be the middle of summer, but you just want a little–

Dana: Summer? A little back warmer?

John: Yes.

Dana: Heat up that lumbar?

John: Absolutely. Loosen up your back.

Dana: Not getting back pain? Loosen it up?

John: Fantastic.

Dana: Love it. Great story.

John: The new car also has seat coolers, and so it blows air through the seat. Game changer, so you don’t have the sweaty back when you go into a meeting.

Dana: Not to steal another one cool thing, because I totally want to hear one. We also got the ID. Buzz. Let me tell you, this is the electric VW buzz that looks like the hippie thing.

John: You have 19 children.

Dana: We have 19 children. We put them in this hippie bus. We drive around, and it brings so much joy.

John: It’s a beautiful car.

Dana: It’s a beautiful car. We got the peel. People are like, “All right, all right.” Everybody becomes Matthew McConaughey when you drive by. You get peace signs. You get smoking weed signs. We’re in Virginia. We’re in southern places where nobody does shit like that. Everybody is so happy around this car. It’s the cutest thing. My husband got me a little bumper sticker on it. Surprised me one day. It says, “We can’t all come and go by bubble,” on the back of the car. It’s really precious. He’s a great guy.

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

Craig: Yes, please. My one cool thing this week is a set of puzzles, a nice puzzle suite from Eric Berlin, who’s a pretty prolific puzzle constructor. He’s a big participant on one of the big teams in the MIT puzzle hunt that happens every year. This one is actually a great one if you’re thinking about getting into this sort of thing. It’s not far off, difficulty-level-wise, from the one that David Kwong and I ran back in the day at the Magic Castle. This one is called Have Fun Storming the Castle. We’ll include a link for you.

Dana: I went to the David Kwong at the Magic Castle one with you guys. That was great.

John: It was with him.

Craig: Difficulty-wise, it’s right about there. You should be able to get through it. Maybe you might need a hint or two, but probably not.

Dana: I’ve never felt dumber than when I was– I was like, “I’m so smart.” I came in, I’m like, “I’m so smart. I went to Stanford, I’m so smart.” I’ve never felt dumber than that night.

Craig: It’s because you use different skills. This one’s got eight puzzles and then one meta puzzle.

Dana: How do I engage in it? Is it online, or is it on my internet phone?

Craig: Yes, you can pick up your internet, get your internet out of your pocket,-

Dana: Okay. That’s my internet and whatever.

Craig: -turn your internet on. [laughs] Then switch your internet on.

John: Unlock your internet on your face.

Dana: Unlock your internet with my face. Copy that. I know how to do that.

Craig: Exactly. Then follow the link, and it will cost you a whole eight American dollars.

Dana: This is great. That’s a great one cool thing.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by [crosstalk]

Dana: Wait, hold on. Don’t do a thing. I love you guys. You’re amazing people, and I really love you, and I miss you, and you’re great, and thanks for being such great people.

Craig: Dana, you are just a permanent ray of sunshine. I can’t explain how happy I was to see Dana in her slanket on that plane. I was so happy.

Dana: Comfort. One of the vowels is gone. I don’t know which one. I can’t help you get the sweatshirt because I don’t know which vowel disappeared.

Craig: Like 70% of people that I know, if I had seen them on a plane in their slanket, I would pretend to have not seen them.

Dana: You would pretend that you had not seen them. 100%. No, I know. I get that about you.

Craig: I’m on a plane. I don’t want to do all that.

Dana: I felt so touched. I was like, Craig usually ignores people on planes. This is special.

Craig: Then Jack McBrayer just chimed in, and we had the best time.

Dana: We had the best time. I really do love you guys, and you’ve been amazing friends and mentors to me forever, and I appreciate you. Truly, I’m so grateful for you guys. It’s hitting me because I’m here in town for Wicked, and that took five years of my life. There are certain people in your life who just don’t leave and don’t stop being amazing, and it’s you guys.

Craig: I will say, Dana, I don’t know if I’ve been changed for the better, but I know that I’ve been changed for good.

Dana: I’m going to get you something. I’m going to get you a present. I’m going to get you some merch. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: I want merch. I want pink, and I want green.

Dana: I’m going to get you a mirror that has lights on it.

Craig: By the way, that’s how you know that no one’s ever sent me a mug.

[laughter]

Dana: I’m going to do it. I’m going to send you the mug. I’m going to send you the Owala water bottle. Everybody loves these water bottles. They did a Wicked collection. I got 72 of them for Christmas presents.

Craig: Good, because Melissa doesn’t have enough water bottles in her house.

John: No, it’s a huge shortage, yes.

Craig: We have a room that’s called Water Bottle Room.

Dana: By the way, I have 757,000 water bottles, and I somehow don’t have enough water bottles. There’s never the cap. It’s never the right thing.

Craig: This water bottle thing– Anyway.

Dana: They’ve got us by the balls. By the way, if anybody wants to have fun, look up Hugh Grant talking about water bottles. It’s a delight. I have a whole side career where I just watch Hugh Grant do interviews. It’s so fun.

Craig: Second one cool thing. I like that.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To view an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, but no cuck chairs. [laughter] 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 e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the promo circuit.

Dana Fox, thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Dana: Thank you for having me. I love you guys.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Dana Fox, the reason we get to see you in person in Los Angeles is because you are here doing a promo for Wicked For Good. I just want to talk about the promo circuit because on so many levels, it’s a celebration. Congratulations, you made a movie. It’s out there in the world. You made a series of a new season of television, it’s out there in the world. Then, like, oh my God, you have to just schlep around and promote it. You have to do all the things.

Dana: It looks really fun when people see it, and everybody’s dressed up, and you’ve got all the hair and makeup, and everyone’s like, “You’re great, everything’s great.” It’s so hard. It’s like a job. It’s a real job, and it takes you away from the job you get paid for, which is typing on your computer.

John: You don’t get paid to [unintelligible 01:08:43].

Dana: For months, I didn’t work because I was promoting the first movie, and thank God, we had a lot of people who wanted to talk to us, which was amazing. I felt so lucky, and so I really wanted to take advantage of it. Then it was March, and I realized I hadn’t written a single word for the year. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to pack my entire year worth of work into the next couple of months because the next promo tour is about to start.” That was very intense.

It is a lot of work, and I hate to say that because you imagine normal people with their normal jobs sitting there rolling their eyes at me, being like, “Oh, getting makeup on is really hard.” It’s like I became a writer because I’m terrible at that stuff. I’m so bad at blow-drying my hair. What even is that? It takes hours. I don’t understand it. Then I see the girls, Cynthia and Ari, and I’m like, they look like they’re going to the Met Gala every time they step out. I’m like, that is a lot of work.

John: Hours to get to that place. I remember back when I was in Startup Program, you were just a couple years behind me. There was a writer-director who was talking about, like, “Oh, yes, I do that, but I’m going to have to do the awards season starting for this movie.” Oh, that’s presumptuous. They think that movie’s made up for the awards. He wasn’t wrong. He was just like, he’d been through it before. He knew that, “Okay, those are three months I’m not going to get back.”

Dana: I’m very superstitious, so if something goes well, I have to wear the same clothes. It’s gross. It’s like, I’m that lady. I can’t talk about anything in the future. I’m like, I’m done. The premiere’s on Monday in New York, and I’m going to do that and do a couple more interviews. I’m assuming I’m done because I can’t–

John: You’re not done.

Dana: Ooh, but I can’t say it out loud.

John: Let’s talk about the gendered expectations of this, though, too, because for you need to have a great-looking outfit. Hair and makeup, but also great outfits for things, where Craig and I don’t– We’re just sticking to our suit.

Craig: I got to tell you that [crosstalk]

Dana: No, I was going to say, have you seen Craig lately? Look at his glasses. He looks so cool.

Craig: They send over a stylist who’s a lovely man, and they send over a makeup lady. Now, for me, makeup is, “Can we please make your head not so shiny?”

Dana: That takes a life time.

Craig: That’s really what makeup is. “Can we do something about the eye bags?” It takes about 20 minutes, maybe 30, but–

Dana: I’m in there for two hours and 30 minutes.

Craig: That’s the gendered part, right? That is a big one.

Dana: Can we make her look like she doesn’t have three kids?

Craig: They send over a rack of clothes, and I’ve got to try things on and make decisions. I’m not good at that.

Dana: I think that’s nice that they do that. They’ve done that for me, and I felt so appreciated. I appreciate Universal so much for treating the writer that way in features because, Craig, you’re the writer in a television show, which means you’re like the king of the castle. I’m a writer in a feature movie, which means they’re like, “Who? What’s that girl doing here?”

Craig: They don’t have to do it, and it’s nice that they are doing it.

Dana: They don’t have to. It’s very nice that they’re doing it.

Craig: It’s also a sign of how much they respect and appreciate you. For me, it was interesting hearing you say you had to take all this time off. For me, that stuff happens while we’re in post. It starts happening, I would say, two brutal months, maybe three, and I’m working all day. Then you just have to go and–

Dana: For me, when I have an interview and I have to get glammed, that’s my day. He killed my whole day. Does it do that for you?

Craig: Most of the stuff that I end up doing are interviews. There’s the junket days and all that stuff. The phone interviews or Zoom interviews, I don’t need to do anything. When somebody’s coming for a magazine and they’re doing photographs or you’re going to an event, then, yes. I got to work on a Saturday now because I did this thing on a Thursday.

Dana: Part of the reason that I accepted the whole idea of the stylist and all that stuff was because Franklin Leonard from the Black List pulled me aside and was like, “Writers are always wearing black, they’re hiding, they’re in the background, especially women, and they look like publicists for someone else. Don’t do that.” He’s like, “Wear color, be out front, make yourself look good because that is part of raising the profile of writers in Hollywood.” That’s part of people understanding that we actually work on the movies. We do stuff.

Craig: I have this thing that I think I’ve successfully articulated to the stylist I work with, which is because part of his job is to try and get me to be a little bit more adventuresome in what I wear because I’m not. Where I draw the line is I’m like, okay, but when I’m up there, like we’re doing a FYC event and it’s me and the actors, it’s about the actors. More importantly, I cannot try to even seem like I think I’m as cool as them.

Dana: I’m trying to compare myself to Pedro.

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: 100%.

Craig: I’m Dad. I need to always be Dad. As long as you can keep me Dad, and let the actors have their beautiful aura of coolness.

Dana: As long as it’s clear that I am Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo’s nanny, then we’re fine. [laughter] I’m not up there to try to be like them. I do stare at them lovingly during all of the Q&As [crosstalk] and just tear up because they’re just so beautiful and lovely.

Craig: You’re so important to the movie, and John is so important to the movie and the editors and everybody. These events are entirely about the actors. I reiterate this, too. I’m trying to explain this. Because sometimes, especially when we do–

Dana: They do a lot of events where the actors are not there. These are more the craft ones, like the BAFTA.

Craig: Those are fun.

Dana: It’s about craft, and then they really do listen to what–

John: What’s so interesting about those roundtable-y things is that you are having genuine conversations, but you’re done up because you’re taking photos at the same time, and so you’re looking at stuff. I find if I get makeup for something, I feel it the rest of the day, my eyes get itchy, and I hate having it on. I have to scrub it all down.

Craig: What is that? Dana, why do our eyes get itchy?

Dana: It’s the powder in it. Do your eyes get itchy?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. From the–

Dana: You guys are allergic to something. You got to tell your makeup artists that they need to do sensitive skin stuff.

John: I think it’s just the powder that they use to keep my shiny head from–

Craig: I think it’s anti-bald powder. Because like John and I, our heads are bounce cards, basically. Whatever they use for that clearly makes your eyes itchy. Honestly, no man can complain about makeup. It’s just like–

Dana: Thank you for saying that, because I, as a woman, feel that I could have been president of the United States if I had not had to blow-dry my hair throughout my entire life, because that is how much time I would have gotten back. I could be the president right now.

Craig: Really, you should have been.

Dana: I mean, please.

John: Dana Fox for president. Once again, we’ve–

Dana: Solved it all.

John: We solved the problem.

Dana: We solved everything.

John: Dana, we love you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

Dana: I love you both so much.

John: Bye.

Dana: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• Dana Fox on Instagram and IMDb
• Wicked: For Good
• Graham Rowat
• Friendship
• Comfrt travel hoodie
• Sara Schaefer’s miniature cuck chairs
• Pittman Inflatable Camping Chair
• Inflatable Beanless Bean Bag Chair
• What the Cuck?! | Decoder Ring
• Wicked the book and the stage show
• The Fugitive (1993)
• Owl Labs’ Meeting Owl 3
• Eric Berlin – Puzzle Snacks
• The Most Important Question podcast
• Heating Pads
• VW ID Buzz
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
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• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to episode 679 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, Who’s Behind the Wheel? We’ll discuss point of view and storytelling in both film and TV, both on the script and scene level. We’ll also talk about the most dangerous person in the room, plus we’ll answer listener questions on visual effects, syntax, and dealing with clingers.

In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll explain east side versus west side for non-Angelinos, also known as why Craig and I never see the ocean.

Craig is gone this week, but luckily we welcome back a very special guest. Liz Hannah is a writer, producer, and director whose credits include The Girl from Plainville, The Dropout, Mindhunter, Longshot, and The Post. Welcome back, Liz Hannah.

Liz Hannah: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

John: We’re so excited to see you. We’ve been trying to schedule you for a bit. You’ve been super busy, but this was the week I texted and you got right back to me. I’m so happy to catch up with you.

Liz: Me too. I’m so happy we got it done. I know we’ve been keep trying to do it. 2025, just like 2024, the wheel keeps turning.

John: The wheel does keep turning. We’ve talked a lot about sort of that was weird and unique about 2025 already. We had Dennis Palumbo on to talk through how you try to get creative work done in this strange–

Liz: I loved that episode. I loved that episode.

John: Thank you.

Liz: It was great.

John: Thank you.

Liz: Sorry to interrupt but I feel like I dropped at a time, particularly where I was having the same conversation with so many creative friends, which was what that episode was about so strongly. I hope if you’re listening to this, you’ve already listened to that, but if you haven’t, please listen to that.

John: We had some listeners write in with their reaction to that. One of them is Ryan Knighton, who’s been on the show a couple of different times. Ryan Knighton is a Canadian writer, a blind writer who has traveled a bunch. Drew, read what Ryan had to say.

Drew Marquardt: “Years ago when I was on assignment for a magazine during the Arab Spring in Cairo, I interviewed a number of filmmakers and writers. All of them had stopped working. All of them were in fact quite depressed, they said. They were exhilarated by that political change, unlike the world around us right now, but their depression stemmed from the fact that they didn’t know what work to do. Simply put, they said, ‘How can you make art that refers to a world that no longer exists or is about to disappear? Make art about what?’ Even in positive political change, a similar anxiety, if not paralysis, emerges.”

John: What I thought was so great about Ryan’s point is it’s not just that we’re in this moment that feels so dark and scary. It’s just that we cannot even have a prediction about what the next couple of years will bring. People going through the Arab Spring, they could be really hopeful about the change that was ahead of them, but also they just didn’t understand how to write about the world that was going to be changing so quickly.

Liz: I think that it’s hard to think about what you’re doing on Thursday when this universe is happening, so it’s hard to think about what you could write. I think there’s a paralysis. I also feel like writers are searching for paralysis at times, so like when we have legitimate ones, it’s even doubly hard and surprising. I think that for me, I tend to write in political, social formats often, or worlds, and for me, there’s a paralysis of what should I be saying now.

I think when you’re going through something that feels as traumatic, honestly either positive or negative, there feels a pressure of a response to be valid and somehow parallel to what’s happening and somehow speaking to what’s happening. If you’re not doing that, then it feels defeatist of like, what am I doing with my time? Then I think also for me as a writer, which I know you spoke about on the episode with Dennis Palumbo, but as I’m a writer, what can I do to change the world with everything that’s going on?

You really can. I think that we both serve the roles as entertainers and as we can be mirrors to hold up to the world. We can be reflections on people in power. We can be reflections on where we want the world to go. We can be reflections on how the world is that nobody wants to see. All of that is, there’s a lot of pressure on that to do that well.

John: Because we’re a podcast by writers, largely for writers, it’s very easy to think about it just from our point of view, which is good because no one else is thinking about our point of view. It’s important to remember that there’s also other decision makers out there who are trying to think like, well, what movies should I buy? What movies, TV shows should I greenlight? You’re trying to develop this thing that’s going to come out in two years, three years, like what will even make sense?

One thing I’ve found on recent phone calls and pitches and things like that is if I can talk about things that are universal themes that will make sense, no matter what the world is like, that’s really helpful. One of the projects that I’m hoping to get going ultimately comes down to this moment of unexpected international cooperation to deal with a serious problem. It’s like, oh, that feels universal.

It feels hopeful. It feels like it’s a fraught idea to explore at this moment, but also a thing that you could see working really well for– It’s what we want to sit down in a theater and see. It’s like, oh, a bunch of people coming together and actually solving a problem. I think as we’re thinking about what we as writers are trying to create, we have to be mindful that the people on the other side of that table are also trying to figure out what the heck is going to make sense as these shows and these movies come out.

Liz: I don’t think it’s one-to-one, but I personally feel like I have to tread a little bit in hope right now. I am finding that to be a constant word that comes up in conversations with executives and conversations with buyers is we need to have something hopeful that can be revolutionary, that can be not. But I think something that isn’t living in the darkness that we are living in just by waking up and turning on the news, I feel like finding a way out of that is both universal, as you’re saying, and also something that we can always hold on to and the only thing we can hold on to right now.

John: I was listening to this Culture Gapfest this morning, and they were talking about an article and trying to differentiate optimism from social hope and the idea of optimism feels a little naive and it can feel self-defeating. I was like, “You’re ignoring the world around you.” Social hope is remembering that people can come together to actually achieve things when they need to. There’s reasons to still have hope even in dark moments and it’s a thing we need to kindle as writers, but also as parents. I think it just is making sure that you’re able to be developmentally appropriately honest with your kids about this moment that we’re in, but also how people come together to resolve these issues.

Liz: Yes, I have a three-year-old and so living through the past six months has been just very strange and seeing his community of other three-year-olds and how each of them really is developmentally different in terms of how much they’re perceiving of what’s happening and how much they’re not. My son, fortunately, is very deep into cars right now and cars are fine, so that’s great for him. We’ve been living in that world. Lightning McQueen, A-plus over here. I would love to talk about Cars 2 with somebody, just like really want to break that down.

Then other kids are really understanding it and really they understand who Donald Trump is. They know who Kamala Harris is. They understood what the election was, at least peripherally in terms of how it affected their universe and the world. It’s really hard, as you said, to balance being a parent and how you appropriately have that conversation with a three-year-old, a five-year-old, an 18-year-old, and how you balance that with yourself.

I think, as a writer, I have found myself paralyzed with what’s happening in the world, both with the pressure of how I feel I can respond and also just how, as a parent, I can function and raise him. The thing that I continue to go back to is hope, and I think it’s really important to differentiate that from being naive about just, oh, it’ll all be fine. Hope doesn’t come without parameters that are, we’ll have to do a lot of work to get to the place that we can be hopeful for. Part of that is working.

When I wrote The Post, I’d been writing that movie for a long time, and it just so happened to come out in the era of Donald Trump, and I sold it right before the election in 2016. That’s the thing I’d say to writers who are looking for a way to respond, is tell the story that’s in you. It will always be relevant if it is something that you find relevant to your path and your existence.

John: Absolutely. Now you’re working on The Post 2, the Bezos era, and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be fantastic. Just so much better. All those dilemmas of Katharine Graham and all the things, now the problems are solved.

Liz: Yes. We fixed it all in 1971.

John: We did it, team. Another bit of follow-up, that same episode with Dennis Palumbo, we answered a listener question about a listener who was comparing themselves to the Pixar brain trust, and feeling like, well, I’ll never be able to do as well as the Pixar brain trust. Drew, what did Scott have to say?

Drew: Scott said, “My framing of this is to think of it this way. I need to write a spec script so good that really talented people would read it and want to work with me on the project. It’s still a high bar, but it’s not as daunting as saying you have to write something as good as Toy Story all by your lonesome.”

John: All right. I think that’s fair. We talk about writing a script as like, this is the plan for making the movie, but it’s also a document that shows how good of a writer you are, and that hopefully, people will want to invite you into a room to do things. Liz, you started as a feature writer, but you also worked in rooms with other writers, and you start to realize like, oh, we are smarter together than any one of us is individually.

Liz: Yes. I think there are at least two things to that. One, I completely agree about a script being a document. I don’t write novels because I want to write a screenplay that becomes a visual piece. In that, there are thousands more of collaborators, but you as the screenwriter, your draft of the screenplay, that goes, be it a spec or be it your working draft that gets a director attached or whatever it is, that’s like your metal that you can show and that’s your proof of concept of yourself as a writer. I think it’s important while difficult to compartmentalize the steps and the successes that are possible at every stage of a screenplay. I wrote The Post as a spec to get representation and to have a career.

I did not write it because I thought it would get made. I’ve said it many times, but it was– it’s a moral thriller where the two leads are in their ’50s, no one kisses, there is not an ounce of sex in it, and truly the piece of the puzzle is solved within the first six minutes of the movie and then the rest is just like, do we do it or not? I wanted to watch it and I wanted to make it and so that’s why I wrote it. The screenplay changed my life, then the movie changed my life, but there were very significantly different stages of that one was involved with the screenplay.

The other thing I’ll say is that absolutely working in a room, it’s always better to have more brains than one, in my opinion. They have to be the right brains. They’re not always the right brains. That’s the thing about a room that is complex is sure. There are showrunners I know who’ve had dozens of rooms and their rooms are nearly perfect at this point because you’re working with the same brain trust that you have cultivated over the course of your career. That doesn’t always happen and it doesn’t happen often early and I think it’s trial and error, but when you get that room that fits perfectly for you and for what you’re doing, then yes, it’s great.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the episode that you were on with Liz Meriwether talking through your experiences on those rooms and it became so clear that how you cast those rooms, how you put those rooms together makes all the difference in the ability to achieve a vision. You can still have a singular vision of that showrunner, that creator, but they have help.

The original listener who wrote in with that question was like, all right, I’ll never be as good as a Pixar brain trust. It’s like, yes, but you get to be part of that Pixar brain trust by showing what you can do and by allowing yourself to be part of that community. It’s also the very understandable sin of confusing your first work with someone’s finished thing and the way that we– if we went back and looked at early drafts of things based on what they became, you see the transformation that the process itself brings out.

Liz: It’s also, calling it a brain trust, I feel like simplifies it almost. It’s more of like a full body that has been completed because you have one person who’s a really good right arm. You have one person who’s a really good left brain. You have specialties within that “brain trust” that are specific and going to exactly what you just said, like knowing your strengths and showing those strengths on the page gets you to be the right arm in that room rather than thinking that you can accomplish the entire personage that is the writer’s room of a Pixar movie, which by the way has multiple iterations throughout the life of a Pixar movie. This isn’t the same four people for 10 years.

John: If people want to go back and listen to the deep dive we did on Frozen, they had a plan for that movie and well into the process as they were watching it on the screen like, “Oh no, this is not right.” Then it was coming in and recognizing, “Here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. How do we steer towards the part of the movie that it wants to be?” That’s also part of the process. It’s the thing we don’t see as often in feature films, but in TV as we’re back in the old days when you were shooting episode by episode, you’re finding episode by episode.

Now that we do things more as a block, you have to really then take a gestalt look at the whole project and figure out, okay, where are we at? Where are we getting to? That’s actually one of the main things we’ll talk about today in the episode is really point of view and perspective and storytelling power. That’s the thing you discover in the process, whether that process is a long movie development or episode by episode or breaking the whole thing as a room. That’s part of the journey. It’s part of the discovery and you have to be open to that as a reality of writing.

Liz: I’m not sure if you talked about this on that episode because I, unfortunately, missed it, but there’s also an amazing six-part documentary about Frozen 2, which is on Disney+, which comes in towards the end of the– They don’t have a ton of the feedback of it, but they do have that, they don’t know what the main song is going to be. They walk you through all the animation process. It’s amazing. I really recommend it, particularly if you think that any one person or any six people do it on their own at Pixar or Disney Animation, you’re very mistaken.

John: That’s great. Back in episode 652, we were talking with a playwright who was having trouble adapting their work to film and Tony wrote some feedback on that.

Drew: Tony says, “Craig touches on it in the beginning when he says that plays are inside and movies are outside, but I would take it a step further relating a similar comparison that was shared with me, that plays are driven by what people say to each other while movies are driven by what people do.”

John: I like that as a distinction. Plays are mostly talking. They really are. It’s about the verbal fights and spars and [unintelligible 00:15:28] we have between those characters and movies, we see people doing things. I think that originates with the fact that movies are brutal. Fundamentally a visual medium that sound came later. We tell stories through pictures on the screen.

Liz: I think that’s great. We’re going to talk about it, but I think that POV in general is an interesting distinction between film and television and plays and that doesn’t mean that you can’t have privileged POV in plays, but I think it’s really specifically different because of the visual aspects, the visual tools and technical tools that you have in features in television, but I like that. I think that’s a great distinction.

John: Yes, I like it. A phrase that Craig and I have discussed often on the podcast is begs the question, which does not mean invites the question. It really, it’s a legal term that means circular reasoning and things like that. I saw a piece by Alex Kirshner this week where he said begets the question, which I think is a clever way to use the framework of begs the question, but actually have it make sense.

Begets the question, it causes us to think of the question of this next thing. If you are reaching for begs the question, maybe add an ET in there and make it begets the question and maybe that’s how we’ll get through this annoying thing where begs the question has come to mean something it was not originally meant to mean.

Liz: Love that.

John: Love it.

Liz: I love being a trendsetter too, so I’m going to start using that and people will be like, “Whoa, where’d that come from?”

John: Absolutely. Begets the question.

I was talking with a friend at dinner this last week and he works on government contracts. He doesn’t work for the government, but he works on government contracts and he was told that they are supposed to remove all their pronouns from their email footers because of Musk and Trump and everybody else, which is nuts. I just want to have a small moment to rail against this because here is like, even if you believe in that woke-ism and all these things have to go away, pronouns are so effing useful.

It’s so nice to see if there’s a name, I don’t know, or if it’s a Chris or a Robin, to know whether it’s a he or her or who am I talking to is so useful. There’s this expectation that all names we can automatically understand the gender of, we simply can’t. I would just encourage people to put that in their email footer just so everyone knows, so that if it’s– Particularly if it’s a Chinese person is looking at this, they understand like, oh, I’m talking to a man versus a woman. I think it’s just ridiculous. I say, please keep putting your pronouns there. I think it’s useful.

Liz: Yes. Also, there are so many things to be concerned about in this world. There are so many legitimate problems. The idea that this government is attacking existence and attacking things that are not hurting people, like putting your pronouns in your emails, which of course is a tangent of attacking trans rights and the queer community. We’re smarter than you, we see what you’re doing. It’s just so beyond infuriating to me that I don’t actually have an articulate thing to say other than how petty and small and bored must you be that these are the things that you’re attacking.

John: My case I’m trying to make is that in addition to being helpful for a group of marginalized people, it’s just helpful for everybody.

Liz: Yes, I agree.

John: It’s just so damn useful. It’s like a small innovation that was just incredibly helpful. To take it away because you’re worried about the political valence of it is dumb.

Liz: It’s all dumb, yes.

John: It’s just my small rant on a topic. On more happy, positive news, this last week we launched Highland Pro. It’s now in the Mac and iOS app stores. It went great. We were a little bit nervous. We did a soft launch in Australia just to make sure that it would actually work properly and that people could subscribe to it. It’s worked really great.

Thank you to everybody who wrote in with the comments to Drew. Drew’s been sorting through the mailbox. Thank you to everyone who left a review. That is super helpful. Liz, I sent you a copy. I don’t know if you had a chance to play with it yet.

Liz: No, I am in a deep, dark place of not writing right now. When I do write, I will. This is why your podcast two weeks ago was very helpful. No, I’m currently in a like, carding, and Google document phase. That’s where I’m at.

John: That’s great.

Liz: I love Highland. I’m so excited. Can I shout out my favorite edition or my favorite aspect of this? Because it’s insane that we haven’t created this. I’m sorry for not knowing exact way that you do it. I always call it a scratch pile or like I have a different file draft document where I put things in there where I don’t want to get rid of them but like I don’t want them in this draft and I always have two documents and it’s always annoying because you’re like, where is this? You guys have created just a place that you can put it for every document.

John: It’s just a shelf.

Liz: It’s just the shelf where you put it.

John: The shelf [unintelligible 00:20:23]

Liz: I saw this in the program and I was like, this is great. This is so useful. It’s just there’s a lot of common sense things which is not dismissive but there are common sense aspects to Highlands that I’m very appreciative of that shouldn’t be hard to be in there for writers.

John: Absolutely. We’re excited to have it out there in the world. I’m excited for people to copy things from it because the other apps will do the things we do which is great because it makes the world better for other people too. Fantastic. If you want to try it, it’s on the Mac App Store. It’s on the iOS App Store. You can just go to “apps.com” and see more stuff there. You can see a little video of me talking about it. In fact, if you want to see, it will throw people because so many people when they meet me in person like, “Oh wait, I wasn’t expecting your voice to come out of that face.” You’ll see my face. You’ll see me talking there and see how it all fits in person.

Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is about the driver’s seat. This is something that occurred to me this last week. I was watching two series that I really enjoy. Severance and The White Lotus. I was thinking about which characters in those series were allowed to drive episodes, which characters were allowed to drive scenes by themselves. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but mostly from the context of features. In features, very early on, you established the rules for the audience, the social contract of like, these are characters who can drive scenes and these are characters who can be in scenes but not drive them themselves.

We’ve talked through issues even in the first three pages where we’re confused from whose point of view we’re telling a story. Liz, as somebody who has done more episodic work, I feel like those are some fundamental choices that you are making early on in the pilot, but also in those rooms. And you have the opportunity to bend or break those rules as you go through a season, as you’re figuring out episode by episode. Talk to us about what you think of when you think of the driver’s seat or point of view or even some other terms that you might be using when you’re referring to this phenomenon.

Liz: I think point of view, an episode protagonist is something that we use a lot. I am actually, breaking a series right now and point of view is incredibly important to the storytelling of it and there are a number of point-of-view characters within it. My partner and I, after we sold the show and we were like, let’s sit down and really think about what we want to say, how we want to say it. The how you want to say it is what characters do you want to say it.

That for me is a day one conversation because I can’t really start to break story without knowing who is going to be telling that story to an audience and who I’m going to be trusting with that story and who my audience is going to be trusting. By the way, that might be a trick, right? When you have a point of view character, it’s always privileged storytelling because they are not just a narrator telling you what’s happening. They are telling it through the lens of them as it is also a character revolving in the story. I think it’s really for me fundamental.

On Plainville, we had a lot of point-of-view characters because we had three timelines and we had a central thesis which I think does begin to adjust how you have these conversations which was, what if everyone was involved in this? It was a challenge to ourselves which is, what if we step back and don’t take a black-and-white perspective on this and say she’s the villain, he’s the victim?

Let’s look at everybody in a three-dimensional way and once we start doing that and telling that story of how these two people ended up here and their families ended up here, what are the scenes that come out of that story that feel organic and then who are the storytellers of those scenes? Lynn was always a primary storyteller, Coco’s mother, both because of her own trauma and her own journey but also because there were stories to be told about him that should come from her and shouldn’t necessarily have come from him because you are your own main character of your own life.

I think it’s really important. I think that happens organically in any series and should happen organically at the top because, in my opinion, you don’t know what story you’re telling until who’s telling it. That goes for features or television. I think of Severance in particular, now you’re adding another layer to this which is the privileged storytelling. Which is, you as the filmmaker are withholding very significant beats from the audience and you’re probably feeding incorrect or–

John: Misdirections, at least.

Liz: Yes, misdirections to the audience that you also don’t want the audience to be upset about. You don’t want an audience to feel betrayed by those misdirections. You don’t want the audience to feel betrayed by your storytelling techniques, but you do want them to be surprised. I think the crafting of that is a whole other level that I’m sure begins with what we were just talking about, which is who are my storytellers? Then also, at what point do I start to lie or misdirect?

John: I want to separate those two ideas out a little bit. There’s who has storytelling power and within the world of the stories or who do we get to drive things? Then also, really the social contract you’re making with the audience about not just who’s telling the story, but to what degree you as the creator of the show, as the show itself, is allowed to misdirect and do a magic trick on the audience.

Let’s start with the first part because one of the things you said that I thought was so interesting is you talked about storytelling power. You mentioned narration, and most series are never going to have narration. You’re not going to hear the person’s inner thoughts. That’s actually a useful way of thinking about who can drive a scene. Could that person literally have a voiceover?

Would it make sense for that character to talk directly to the audience? If it is, then they clearly have storytelling power. They can actually speak directly to the audience. In Big Fish, the movie, both Edward Bloom and Will Bloom can speak directly to the audience. You hear them talking directly to the audience. That choice I had to make in those first 10 pages to let it know both of these people can talk directly into your ears.

In most series, most movies, you’re not going to have that, but the equivalent of that is who is driving a scene by themselves? Who is the person who the scene doesn’t start until they enter the room? Those are fundamental choices. As you’re thinking about that on a series level, you might say, “Oh, we need to know what’s happening with Jane and Bob in this whole thing.” But if neither of those characters has been established in a way that we can expect to see them in a scene by themselves, that’s going to feel weird.

Those are the reasons why you can’t cut to are you a show that will cut to the random security guard and his conversation with somebody or not? Those are big choices you need to make early on. You can have fun with it at times. I can think about in The Mandalorian, they’ll cut to a conversation between two faceless guards who are having a little conversation, but it’s always in service of the bigger storyline. You’re not going to keep coming back to them as a runner.

Liz: I think there’s also the question of if you have to know what’s happening with Steve and Jane, but you’ve never established them as POV characters, then do you really need to know what’s happening with them? Because I think that it can become overwhelming sometimes, particularly when you’re starting out as a feature writer or as a television writer of I have to tell everyone’s story.

This is the other thing going back to the difference between plays and feature and television. In plays, you have a set cast, and you can only have so many people there, and you can only tell so many stories within that set cast. With television, in particular, it can be endless. You can continue to add cast as the episodes go on, and many shows do. Is the story that you’re telling with that cast member, that character, important to the story that you’re telling overall?

Which is why I do think it’s really important to come down to theme and come down to, as a creator, as a storyteller, what is it that you want to say, and what do you want to have your audience leave with. We always talk about blue sky in the writer’s room, which is that first two weeks, which is so lovely when you get to just sit with the writers and talk about what you want to have happen. It’s big dreams and there’s no bad answers and there’s no wrong answers. That all comes later.

For me, by the end of that week or two weeks, I want to know what the show is that we’re making. What are we collectively saying, and what are we all on board to collectively say? On The Dropout, we had a lot of conversations about her, about Elizabeth Holmes, and about the characterization of her within the series. What did we want to say, and how did we want to say it?

There was a lot of perspectives about her, in particular, at the time, and so a lot of our conversations were pushing that out and coming with our own bias to the table and then talking about that bias. Similar with Michelle Carter in Plainville, was a lot of people having a bias towards her, and that’s fine. I don’t think everybody should have the same opinion. That’s important. Again, when you talk about the brain trust, it’s important for not everybody to agree.

John: Let’s talk about Elizabeth Holmes. Clearly, she’s the centerpiece of the story, and she does protagonate over the course of it. We see her grow and change over the course of it, but if you’d locked into her POV exclusively for the entire run of the series, it would have been exhausting, and you really would have had a very hard time understanding what anybody else was doing, because she’s mostly for better, for dramatic purposes. She is, I don’t know if you want to say a narcissist, but she is, she’s really at the center of all this stuff, and she herself does not have a lot of insight into the people around her. You needed to be able to establish early on that we’d have scenes that were not centered upon her and understand what was going on around her.

Liz: I think she’s quite unempathetic, and just, if you’d never watched The Dropout and you only watched the documentary or listened to the podcast, it’s very hard to empathize with Elizabeth Holmes. Part of our goal was to infuse some empathy into her character, and I think empathy is the important word here. I don’t want anybody to sympathize with her. I think she’s quite hard to sympathize with. Empathize in terms of, can you put yourself in her shoes and see it from her perspective for a moment within the series? It doesn’t have to be the entirety of the series, but can you take a step back for a moment and not just go, whew, that monster, and find yourself into it that way? That was really important for us.

Then I think a word we continue to use, protagonist, which I think is important rather than hero of the story because the heroes of that story were not Elizabeth Holmes. The heroes of that story were other true people who worked at Theranos, as well as people who were just the day-to-day people who were completely affected by that. They are the heroes of their own stories, as well as this one as a whole. I think it’s important to remember when you’re trying to break out your point of view characters, they don’t have to be the hero of the story, they don’t have to be the villain of the story, but they are often the protagonist of the story.

John: I want to talk about protagonists as it relates to a recent episode of Severance. Again, we will not do any spoilers here, but in the second season, there’s an episode that is largely from the point of view of a minor character, a character whose name we knew but had never had storytelling power, and suddenly it’s all centered around her, and Mark, who is clearly the hero of the story, clearly a point of view character.

What I found interesting as I was watching, I thought it was fantastic, and I wondered as it finished, “Wait, did anything actually happen, or were we just filling in backstory?” Then I was like, “Oh, no. She really was the protagonist of the story.” She was the one who came into this episode with a need, a want, a desire, and was trying to do it, and we saw her in every moment trying to create some agency for herself to be able to affect the change that she wanted to affect.

The episode had a very classical beginning, middle, and end of a character who was trying to achieve one aim in this episode, which is good classic TV. At the same time was intercutting to show you all the history that led up to the moments that we were at. I thought it was an incredibly good episode, but also a really good reminder of the attention and craft required to both move the ball forward as a series while still having stakes and development and progress within an episode.

Liz: I have not watched that episode.

John: Hopefully my vagueness is useful.

Liz: No, it’s great. I think I do know who it is, and if I don’t, it still brings me to the same point, which is, I think that you have those conversations in the writer’s room when you begin to talk about that character very early on. Which is, I would imagine that in season one or in season two, whenever that character is first mentioned or introduced, You probably, as a showrunner, have in the back of your head, I really would like to see the perspective of this character of what is happening or of a separate story. I want to know more about this character because it affects your casting.

It affects your conversations of, okay, so if we are going to see a privileged point of view of that character at some point, how is that affecting the characters we’re seeing on screen now? I love when television shows do that in good ways, in successful ways, because it can both fill in the blanks on some things, but more importantly, you can think that a story is contained in a box and you realize that the box is open. Now there are things that you had no idea to be curious about that now you’re curious about, so it can change your perception of the series.

John: A term we’ve used a couple times here is privileged storytelling, and I’d love to unpack that because I’m hearing that to mean it is the special relationship of the show to certain characters or how we as an audience also understand that the show is not telling us everything.

Liz: I think it’s that. I think it’s two things, so we’ll just complicate it even more. I think it’s yes, that, and then I also think that it is a privileged storytelling of a character’s inner life that the rest of the characters are not privy to. For instance, with Mark in Severance, from the pilot, we know, as the audience, more about him than he does, because he obviously is severed. There is privileged storytelling in two ways, that I think is, in Severance in particular, exceptionally well done, and at a very high level, that would drive me insane.

For instance, on The Dropout, it was privileged for the audience to know that the box didn’t work. Because we knew that, she knew that, but not everybody within the series knew that. In Plainville, we knew that Coco and Michelle’s relationship was not what Michelle was telling everybody that it was, but they don’t know that. I think it’s important to distinguish as a writer and as a storyteller, what information everybody has, why they have it, and if the audience has it as well, how that changes their perception of what is coming next.

John: This is what is so complicated about writing, is that we have to be able to both be the architects who know why everything is there and how it all fits together, and we know if we have perfect insight to everything, and be able to step outside and say, okay, from the artist’s point of view, where are we at, how much do we know? In a case like Severance, where we have so much more information than the characters themselves know, and we have to be looking at Adam Scott’s characters like, this is this version of Adam Scott who wouldn’t know this other thing, and how is this all tracking?

It’s complicated, but I think that’s honestly the excitement and the reward of it. It’s so difficult to do on a writing point of view, but it can be so satisfying when it works well from an audience’s point of view because it’s requiring us to use our brains in interesting ways that are actually natural to how we are built to function. I think we have this inherent desire to understand other people’s motivations because it’s a useful survival mechanism for us, and it’s engaging all those things in our brains.

Liz: The only thing I would add to that is my own personal opinion, at least as how I come from a writer and as a viewer, which is the actual events of any story, but we’ll take Severance. If you gave me a five-page document that told me everything that we’re getting to and what’s happened, it just won’t be that interesting. It just won’t. It will never be that interesting.

What is interesting is how each character unfolds the story in front of them, how each turn happens, how I’m allowed to participate in each turn, and how the information is interpreted both by me and the people on the show and the people that I talk to about the show. So I think it’s important, at least for me, to always come character first when we’re talking about point of view and come from character first of empathy and character first of journey. For instance, is the story of Watergate most interestingly told through Nixon’s point of view or from the two journalists who fought for a year to break that story?

When you start even at the very beginning, for me, with the Pentagon Papers, is the most interesting version of this to tell the story of how the New York Times got the Pentagon Papers, potentially, is the most interesting version for me, Katharine Graham, and that it’s actually about her becoming the publisher of The Post and having her coming-of-age moment, that’s more interesting to me, and that’s the point of view in which I’m telling that story.

John: This is a reminder that after 679 episodes of this series, it always does come back to the fact that storytelling is not about the what, it’s about the how. It’s how you tell the story makes all the difference. Point of view, driver’s seat, who’s in control of telling the story is one of those fundamental how decisions that you need to make early on. If you made the wrong choice, well then go back and rethink it from another point of view. The reason why Liz is doing all this work on notecards this week is because she’s figuring out the how before she starts putting pen to paper.

Liz: Also, it’s really hard to write.

John: You’re avoiding writing.

[laughter]

Liz: Writing is hard.

John: Writing is hard. Let’s switch to something that’s a little less crafty and more the business that we’re in. This was a thread by Todd Alcott this last week where he was talking about– he was actually referring to some political events, but I really liked his description of what he saw in Hollywood all the time. He’s talking about the stranger in the room. Drew, if you could just read through– It’s not the whole thread, but something that will link to the full thread, but read through what Todd was describing about the stranger in the room.

Drew: “Screenwriters especially are well aware of the role of the stranger in the room. The stranger in the room is anyone in the meeting who is just there as a friend, someone who has no creative authority on and no stake in the project being discussed, anyone in the room who is a last-minute addition. Sometimes it’s a 20-something intern, sometimes it’s an executive from a sister office, sometimes it’s someone from marketing, or sometimes it’s an older, more experienced producer who’s lending a hand for a day.

The purpose of the stranger in the room is to destroy the project. The stranger in the room is the one who, after the writer and producer, and director have all agreed on the direction of the story, says, ‘Well, how will that play in China?’ Or, ‘This sounds a lot like whatever movie,” or, “But isn’t this movie really about love?” Then, suddenly, the balance in the room shifts. Suddenly, a collaboration, a negotiation, as it were, becomes an argument, where, just moments earlier, everyone was agreeing on how awesome the project sounded. Now, suddenly, the creatives are on one side, the suits are on the other, and the meeting becomes a power struggle, one the creatives can only lose because the suits have the money and the creatives only have the art.

John: Oh, this gave me such terrible flashbacks because I’ve been in those rooms where like, “Oh, wait, who’s that person? Who’s that?” Things are going well, and they ask questions, and they just start pulling threads. Creative challenging is fantastic if you’re poking at that thing, but then you realize like, “No, no, you’re here to destroy this. You are here to sink this ship.” At least three or four times in my career, I can really point to like, “Oh, this was a trap. This was a setup. This was meant to ruin a thing.” So I want to acknowledge this. I’m not sure I have specific solutions for it or guidance for it.

Liz: I’m breaking into a sweat having this conversation, legitimately.

John: This has happened to you.

Liz: Yes, I’ve never heard the phrase, “Stranger in the room.”

John: No, neither have I.

Liz: Maybe that’s terrifying me because now I’m putting pieces together through my career. Creative conversation, creative conflicts, creative pushing is always good at the appropriate time. I think what this is we’ve already gotten past these 12 hurdles, and now this person is like, “Let’s go back to Hurdle 1, and let’s start talking about that,” or, “Let’s go back to Hurdle 6, and let’s talk about that.”

It’s funny, out of nowhere today, maybe because I had read the rundown for the show and was thinking about this, and sort of like, “That never happened to me,” and then now I’m sweating. I was thinking about this one experience I had making a movie. We were on set. It was an indie. We were trying to figure out how to make this movie for no money and all of that. The director had called me the night before and pitched to me how we could save some days or things like that. He had pitched to me an idea of losing this one scene.

The knee-jerk reaction for any writer is like, “No, every scene’s important.” Then I thought about it and I was like, “Well, maybe we could move the content of the scene to someplace else.” Particularly as a writer on set, your job is the problem solver. Your job is to maintain the integrity of the show or the feature while making it producible. I was like, “Yes, I think we can do that.”

Then the next day I went into a meeting and one of the collaborators on the project was like, “Oh no, we absolutely can’t do that,” and really pulled it back. Then we went backwards in time to going to why this scene existed and all of this. I sort of was like, “If I’m the writer and I can say we can lose this scene, then we should probably move on from this argument.” We didn’t, and we continued to have it until we still lost that scene.

I promise there’s an end to this, which is I generally find the stranger in the room as they’re saying whatever they’re saying purely out of ego and purely out of the need for their voice to be heard. I don’t generally believe that it is for the goodness of the project. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be, but if you are the stranger in the room, and you are saying something like this, you know that it’s not positive, you know that it won’t end well. There’s no other reason for that to be said other than, “I want to be heard, and I need you to hear me.”

That goes to my advice, which is hear them. Let them be heard. Acknowledge whatever feelings are being felt by everybody and whatever threads are being pulled on. Then get off of the call as fast as humanly possible and never talk about it again.

John: Yes. It’s lovely that it could be in a call. I’ve had this happen in person twice. One case was the executive. Literally, we were like weeks away from shooting. I was like, “Listen, I think it would be best if we went back to cards and really thought about this.” I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, We’re not going back to cards. This is not a fundamental situation.”

Another meeting where I was on my polished step and this producer asked me basically a fundamental POV question. It’s like, “Well, what if it wasn’t about this, but it was about this other thing instead?” I was like, “Where do you think we’re at?” In both those situations, I extricated myself as well as I could from that situation.

Liz, what I think you bring up, which is so insightful, sometimes I’ve been the stranger in the room, I’ve tried to be really mindful of, “Listen, I see a fundamental problem here. How do I both acknowledge the fundamental problem and help steer people correctly without just blowing the whole thing up?” I think that is a delicate art too. It’s really making clear, within the reality of the space you’re in, what is the most work or the best work that could be done to get people to the next place.

If I truly feel like, “You need to stop this,” or, “You need to kill this,” I will always do that in a one-on-one and not in a group situation. Because I think it’s the group situation, the social dynamics of it that make it so awful. It’s like, you’re around a set of people who are seeing these things. If it was just a one-on-one conversation, it wouldn’t happen.

Liz: Yes, my scenario was also in person. I also, just as a human, don’t tend to react well in person to these scenarios because I’m just like, “Why are we having this conversation? We’ve already done this. There’s really big fish to fry, this isn’t one of them.” I think you bring up a bunch of really good points, one of which is that sometimes there is something true behind it, and though it means more work, or fundamental work that seems to have been accomplished, there might be some truth to the note.

To be clear, I think it’s important to always look at each note as if there is truth behind it. I do not believe in dismissing notes. One of your episodes, which I send to people, which is, “How to Give Notes to Writers,” which is one of the most foundational podcast episodes that anyone working in this business should listen to, because so much about this is about presentation, both from writers receiving notes and people giving notes. That process can immediately taint whatever the note is very quickly and very easily.

Look, we are sensitive, sweet, often thin-skinned people in this industry who don’t like to be wrong. That doesn’t always make for the best amount of collaboration when it gets to that stage where you are so close to the end. I think it’s important to really look at who the note’s coming from, how the note is coming to you, and process that in whatever way that you have to process it to hear the note.

I also really go back to something that Christopher McQuarrie said, which is, I’m going to butcher, but it’s something I think about a lot, which is, “There is no bad note.” There is no such thing as a bad note. There is such thing as a poorly given note, but there’s no such thing as a bad note. Because if you’re getting noted on something, it just means you’re not doing your job as a writer. You’re either not doing your job by how you’re telling the story, you’re either not doing your job of the point of view, or you’re not doing your job selling it.

That, for me, really changed my way of hearing notes and hearing the way in which I should think about them. I also want to say, that doesn’t mean you’re a take-every-note, but it means that you need to consider why it’s being given to you.

John: Yes. One of the things about Todd’s thread that really resonated for me is that the person who was coming in to do this job really had no stake in it or didn’t have the most immediate stakes. I wanted to differentiate that person from a questioner. Questioners can be just incredibly annoying. There’ll be directors, or producers, or actors, who will just want to have a three-hour meeting where they pull everything apart, and it’s just part of their process in how they figure out stuff. It’s so annoying. As a writer, it can be torture.

You see, “Okay, there’s an end product, there’s a reason why we’re doing this,” and you just have to put up with it and live in that space with it. Sometimes good things will come out of it, sometimes it gets to be frustrating. You understand, they are making a genuine effort to make this fit right into their brain, and that’s a valid process. It’s the stranger in the room, it’s the person who’s just there to be an assassin, whether they know it or not. They’re there as an excuse for killing a thing or for destroying a thing.

I think if you’re going into a meeting, this is some practical advice here, try to know who’s supposed to be in the meeting. If someone shows up who’s not supposed to be in that meeting, your spider sense should tingle a little bit just to make sure you understand something hinkey could happen here. Usually, it’s going to be a more senior person or some other person like that. If it’s another writer, be especially alarmed because that can be weird. That’s happened a couple of times where it’s like, “Why are you there, Mr. High-profile screenwriter? That doesn’t feel great to me.”

Liz: Who I know comes on and does rewrites. That’s so weird that you’re here.

John: That’s so weird. Maybe you’re thinking about the same person who’s been in that room. If that happens, that’s reasonable. Sometimes it is actually that junior executive. I’ve been in a couple of situations, “Why is this person doing this? Why is this person here?” First off, it’s great if they’re there to learn stuff, but when they then ask the questions and pull stuff, in TV pitches, I’ve had this happen more often, where they start to ask you for needless detail. I’m like, “Oh, okay, great, I’ll help you out here.”

Liz: I agree, but I don’t think any stranger in the room is there without a goal. Unless you have invited them there, unless you as the writer have invited a friend or something like that to hear this. If there’s an intern in the room, the intern is trying to prove to their bosses why they should have a promotion. If the writer is there, they’re proving to their bosses that they’re going to get the rewrite. You have to really evaluate the stranger in the room’s intention. Most often, there is something behind it. That doesn’t mean it’s malicious to you. It doesn’t mean that it’s personal. It also doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. It just means, again, going back to how it’s being delivered and the surprise factor.

To be frank, when you get to that stage and you have a junior executive that’s never been in a meeting start giving notes, you’re kind of like, “Wait, haven’t we gotten past this?” It can be alarming. I always try and think about notes in any stage, be it a stranger in the room or an evil person in the room, just to think about the context in which the note is coming to you.

John: Absolutely. If you are that intern in the room, the person who’s invited in, try to get a sense, you can even ask ahead of time, “What do you want me to do in this room?” Especially if you’re talking to the writer or the creatives, you have to be respectful and delicate and make sure you’re leading with some praise and if you’re asking a question, there’s nothing in that question that has a subtext of like, “You idiot, this doesn’t make any sense.” That’s where you run into problems.

Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Drew: “After a little industry success, I’m now discovering that I have friends, distant relatives, and son acquaintances who want to pick my brain or set me up on blind date-style meetings with my cousin who just started film school. I’ve even had friends and relatives share my email address without asking me. I like to share with people who are starting out, as a few people did for me when I started. However, I’m not sure how to decline when the connection is forced and I don’t want the obligation or how to distance when someone becomes too persistent, asking for Zoom after Zoom, sending life story emails, or asking to send me their screenplays. How do you guys deal with getting cornered by family and friends? How do you deal with clingers?”

John: Okay, so my mom, rest in peace, love her to death, but she would try to connect me with anybody and everybody. She was overgenerous about this. I had to step in and say, “Mom, you need to stop doing that. This is not useful for anybody. I will talk to your Boulder Screenwriters Group once, but I’m not going to do it every year. I’m not going to do it all the time.” I think Craig and I have the convenient excuse of we do a podcast every week that everyone can listen to and that’s the conversation. Before I did that, and for everybody else who doesn’t have their own podcast, bless you. Liz, do you have any suggestions for ways to be tactful and helpful but not deal with clingers?

Liz: Yes. Boundary is really important. Establishing that you cannot share your personal information that cannot be shared is really important. I also have a work email and a personal email. I think having those two, still setting boundaries, but those two are really important because if there is someone that you feel that you can be helpful to or feels polite and appropriate that you can reach out to, then you can do that from your work email. I know that it seems silly, but it does not feel as disruptive to me when it’s going to my work email. It feels like that’s the right avenue for it to happen.

Look, I try and talk to whoever I can. I try and be as helpful with my time and energy as I can be because I had a lot of people be helpful with theirs when I was coming up, you being one of them. I don’t have a podcast, so trying to do that is important. Having the ability to say, “Look, I totally would love to talk to you. My life is really crazy right now, so I can do it for an hour in March or I can do a 15-minute call now or I can do–” I just think really boundaries and being honest with yourself that you are a kind person for having any conversation and extolling any experience to people is really going above and beyond.

John: Yes, I completely agree with you on boundaries. Also, just establishing those boundaries at the start in a really friendly way. Saying, “I don’t have the time to read anything.” The truth is we’re all crazy all the time. We never really have time to do things. You can also say, “I’m sorry, but no, I can’t.” That’s also fair too. People have busy lives.

Listen, I have Drew and so Drew is the first filtering mechanism for people who are going to try come at me. Even independent of that, I think you just have to have your own system for saying no and not feeling awful about it or ignoring things and not feeling awful about it. That’s the reality. People ignore emails all the time. It’s not a crime.

Liz: I would say also go with your gut. I honestly have – knock on wood – had 99% wonderful experiences with people that have reached out or asked for a Zoom, a coffee, or whatever. I don’t read scripts unless it’s from somebody I know.

John: Same.

Liz: I think that is a step too far for me. I always just go legally, it’s a step too far. If you’re looking for a way to say, “No, I can’t read that, but I’ll talk to you,” then that’s the way I always go. It’s like, “I can’t read your script legally; it’s too complex for me to do that, but I’m happy to talk to you about what issues you’re having storytelling-wise and see if I can help.”

John: The other thing I think is useful for me to say, which is absolutely 100% true, is that when it comes to how do I break into the industry? How do I do this? How do I do this stuff? I can talk to you about scene work. I can talk to you about how movies work. I cannot talk to you about what it’s like to be a 20-something-year-old starting in 2025 in this town. That’s just not my experience. You’re much better off dealing with people who are just there and have just moved through that space than I will be.

One of the reasons why we try to keep bringing on guests who are newer in the industry is to make sure that we’re still hitting the realities of what it’s like to be in those moments right now because like, Craig and our experience, it’s 30 years past that, and it’s not the experience of starting in 2025. Let’s go to Dean, who’s writing about the visual effects industry.

Drew: “Regarding the sudden shutdown of The Mill and MPC and Hollywood VFX in general, how is it that these giant companies working on some of the biggest and most profitable movies and shows in the world keep going bankrupt? Their work is world-class. It keeps happening. What is it about VFX that is clearly unsustainable?”

John: Clearly, this email came in before Technicolor also shut down. It’s horrible. Listen, I don’t understand VFX economics, but clearly, a different situation has to be figured out because we’re able to do incredible visual effects and we’re spending a ton of money on visual effects, and it’s still not enough for these companies to be profitable and sustainable. Something big has to shift here. Liz, do you have any insight? Do you know anything about this space?

Liz: No, I don’t. Everything has VFX, so it’s horrific what’s happening. Again, I don’t know the economics of it, but it doesn’t make sense to me. There has to be a change.

John: Great. All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Thank you to everybody who’s been playing Birdigo. We’re still up on Steam. The demo is still there, which is great. A game I’ve been playing a lot over this last month, and I think I’ve broken my addiction, so maybe I need to pass it along. It’s like the ring where I need to get other people to play this game, which was fun. It’s called Dragonsweeper, and it’s like Minesweeper that we all played, where you’re looking for the little mines, except there are various monsters hidden around. It’s by Daniel Benmergui. It is a free game that you play in your browser. It takes maybe half an hour to do once you’ve mastered it.

It’s a really clever mechanic and gets your brain to think in really interesting ways. If you need a distraction, if you just need your brain to stop ruminating on things it’s ruminating on, I point people towards Dragonsweeper, which is a benevolent time suck that I’ve found over the last couple of weeks.

Liz: Love that.

John: Liz, what do you have for us?

Liz: I have a one and a half one cool thing.

John: I love it, please.

Liz: Both my mother and my best friend were diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Both are okay and recovering and in remission.

John: Great.

Liz: My big thing is mammograms. One cool thing, love a mammogram. Mammograms are not covered by insurance until you’re 40 years old, and my best friend was 38 when she was diagnosed. More and more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in their 30s or younger. If you have really any cancer in your family, you should be going to get tested. If it’s not covered by insurance, you can find ways to do it. There are really great ways to do it. My boobs, my two cool things.

Then the plus to that also is that in this experience, I’ve learned a lot about how women’s health is just shockingly underfunded and under-researched. One of the aspects of that is menopause and perimenopause, which has been something that’s been talked about a lot. Many of my family members have had to, either because of cancer or because of age, anything like that, gone through it earlier.

Naomi Watts just wrote a book, which is called Dare I Say It, which is about menopause and how she went into menopause in her 30s. It was shocking. Then, she discovered that many other women went through it as well and that menopause is not that thing that just happens when you’re 50 years old, that it’s actually something that progresses through your life. My addition to this is also to read Naomi Watts’ book, which I think is really enlightening and makes something that feels very, very scary and isolating, not that. Also, women should be talking about their health just as much as men do. That’s it.

John: These are great things. In terms of cancer screening, like we’ve heard, I’ve talked about colonoscopies on the show several times. I think it’s underappreciated to the degree to which there are certain cancers, certain terrible things that just with not horrible tests, you can just actually deal with it. Things that are grave threats that are not threats if you actually just get the test and get it early enough to see what’s there. Mammograms are 100% in that category.

Liz: My best friend actually, and she’s talked about this publicly, so I feel comfortable saying it, she had a rash on her chest. She was under the age of 40. The only reason that they found the cancer was because of this rash. Her doctor said that she should just go get a mammogram and get checked. If they had waited until it was stage 1, if they had waited until she was 40, God knows what that would have been and what would have happened. It is crazy that it’s on us to be like, “Hmm, that rash on our chest, maybe that’s cancer.” But there are preventative ways to find these early that are not necessarily constantly talked about or open.

John: Yes, great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the 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.

You get signed up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on East Side vs West Side. Liz Hannah, no matter what side, I want to be on your side because you were a fantastic return guest. Thank you so much for being on the show this week.

Liz: Thanks for having me. It was great.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Liz Hannah, you and I, we’re east siders by definition that we’re not on the west side. We’re actually in the middle of the city. If you’re able to look at the platonic ideal of Los Angeles, we’re plopped in the middle of it. For folks who are outside of Los Angeles, which is a big chunk of our listenership, I feel like I want to give a little geography lesson and a little geography explanation because your choice of whether you live on the west side or the east side is going to fundamentally shape some of your experience of living in Los Angeles. Can you talk to us about when you were first aware of there’s a big difference between living East and West?

Liz: Yes. My mom is from LA so I grew up coming here a lot, but I still didn’t understand it until I went to AFI. AFI is on the east side. It’s in Los Feliz. I lived in West LA, which is on the west side. That commute was really hell. It was awful. Significantly changed my experience for my first year of AFI. Then my second year, I lived in Los Feliz on the east side.

It was both my first time living here as an adult. I understand, also, coming from New York, just how much in your car you are in, in general, and then how much more you are in your car if you live on one of these sides and you must commute to the other.

John: Yes. There’s not a perfect New York comparison, but it’s like if you lived in Brooklyn, but you’re traveling to the furthest north place in Manhattan, if you’re traveling to cross 110th Street every day all the time, but it’s actually not quite a fair comparison because there’s just trains that can get you there directly.

Liz: You can do things on the train. You can read books.

John: You can do things on the train rather than being trapped in your car. The reason why the East-West split is so noticeable in Los Angeles versus the North-South split is because while there are some freeways that go East to West, you have to cross the 405. The 405 is sort of the boundary, the dividing line between what we think about East and West. If you have to cross the 405 at certain times of day or cross that imaginary wall, it’s just awful.

I would have meetings that would be out at Bruckheimer’s company, which is on the west side, and lord, an hour and 15 minutes later I’m finally home based on the time of the day. You have to plan things so carefully. That’s why I think Taffy Brodesser-Akner, when she was out here doing her book tour, she had an east side event and a west side event because they’re fundamentally different things.

Liz: They’re two different worlds. I think also they’re culturally very different. It sounds stereotypical, but West Siders are just a little more relaxed. They like nature a lot and they love the beach. That’s just what it is. Well, nature, not so much, but the beach. That nature, I think is shared.

John: They love the beach.

Liz: Nature is shared by all because there’s hikes everywhere in Los Angeles.

John: Yes. They live in a city that has a beach and you and I live in a city that does not have a beach.

Liz: No, we live in the city and they live in a beach city. Those are the fundamental differences. I think there’s like a walkability aspect to both the west side than the east side that exists, but it’s very different in those walkabilities and where they are. It’s just culturally very different.

John: Yes. There are things that are similar between the two. They have Abbot-Kinney, we have Larchmont, we have certain central points, but things do just fundamentally work differently.

Liz: A friend of mine lives on the east side and started dating somebody on the west side and we call it a long-distance relationship.

John: It is.

Liz: That is a commitment that you are making.

John: I moved out here for grad school and I was going to grad school at USC, which is east side and sort of South of the 10-2. Things are a little bit thrown off for that. I had some friends who lived on the west side and some friends who lived in Los Feliz, Hollywood. The differences between those things are vast. One of my friends, Tom, I would work out at the YMCA with him on the west side, but I was living in Hollywood. Good lord, that commute to get back from the gym was insane. On one of those commutes back, I happened to drive over the 405 and it was during OJ’s Bronco chase. I was able to stop on the bridge over the 405 and see OJ Simpson drive along this boundary wall between East Los Angeles and West Los Angeles.

Liz: That was the last time you drove to the west side?

John: Honestly, I think I did stop going to the gym shortly thereafter. I just realized it’s a fundamentally different thing.

Liz: I also live in the Valley now, which not to complicate it more, but like that’s–

John: We should talk about that.

Liz: The Valley is like above it all. I would refer to it more as east side than it is west side, just because it still has the dividing line of the 405. Once you get far west in the Valley, you’re basically in Topanga and Malibu. It’s more east side. I will just say that I can get to Silver Lake faster from where I live than whenever I lived in West Hollywood. Freeways are great. I just feel like now we’re in an episode of The Californians.

John: We are very much in an episode of The Californians. It does come down to that. Some practical takeaways here. If you are coming to visit Los Angeles, like, “I want to see Los Angeles–” I will have people who will show up and say like, “Oh, well, today I want to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame and I want to go to the beach and I want to go to Getty center and all these things.” It’s like, you’re insane.

Liz: Also have a great time doing that without me. No, I’m good. Thank you.

John: “No, I’m not going to do that with you.” You are going to be in your car the entire time. If you are literally out here for a week and you want to see all those things, three days in Hollywood, three days on the beach, split up your time because you’re not going to make yourself happy trying to do all those things from one central point.

The bigger question, though, is if you are moving to Los Angeles or you’ve taken a job or coming here to school, you have to make some fundamental choices. I would say, you’re probably best off living close to where you’re going to be spending most of your time just so you’re not killing yourself driving places. While there are more train options and bus options than ever before, still, you get a little bit trapped by the geography.

Liz: I would also suggest, do a Vrbo or something and stay in different places before you commit to where you want to live. One of my best friends lives on the west side and I joked when she moved there. She moved there from New York and I was like, “Well, I’ll never see you again.” She will drive to me. I was like, “Great.” She doesn’t mind doing that. It was important for her and her kids to live on the west side and she knew the burden she was taking on by moving across that, near the end of the world. Now she’s back. I think you have to sort of find your neighborhood and find your place. It is like New York.

John: Yes, very much.

Liz: While we’re saying east and west, there are pockets of neighborhoods within each of them that have their own personalities and their own quirks and things like that. I lived on the east side for a really long time but I never lived in Echo Park or Silver Lake but I lived in Los Feliz. I lived in Hancock Park. I lived in West Hollywood. Now I live in the valley, just FYI, the streets are so wide here. There’s no street, parking [crosstalk]. It’s lovely.

John: Yes. There’s no reason the streets need to be as wide. It’s lovely.

Liz: It’s glorious. Now I’m like the old person who drives in West Hollywood, and I’m like, “These streets are too small.” I think you just find your place, you find your people. Don’t rush it and say–

John: Agreed.

Liz: I do think what you said is really important is, if you are coming out here, for instance, to go to grad school and you’re going to go to USC or you’re going to go to AFI, find a hub that is localized around that.

John: Yes. Because otherwise, you’re going to be angry at yourself for two years that you made the choice that you made.

Liz: Yes.

John: All right. It’s always a great choice to talk with you. Liz Hannah, thank you for Zooming in all the way from the valley.

Liz: Thank you.

John: Let’s talk more soon.

Liz: Love it. Bye. Bye.

Links:

• Liz Hannah on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 676 – Writing while the World is on Fire
• Slate Culture Gabfest
• The Post | Screenplay
• Episode 128 – Frozen with Jennifer Lee
• Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 on Disney+
• Highland Pro
• The Girl From Plainville on Hulu
• The Dropout on Hulu
• “The Stranger in the Room” by @toddalcott on Threads
• Episode 399 – Notes on Notes
• Dragonsweeper by Daniel Benmergui
• Dare I Say It by Naomi Watts
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Today’s episode has no bad language, but it does have some mild spoilers for Severance. If you’re trying to go into that show clean, without any spoilers, about midway through the show when Craig starts spouting wild theories, just skip ahead 30 seconds or a minute, and you’ll miss all of Craig’s wild speculations. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh. Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 677 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what the hell is going on? We’ll discuss mystery box shows where the premise and audience experience involve solving the puzzle of what’s really happening. Then, we’ll talk about revisiting old projects. I am just back from two weeks in New York, working on the Broadway version of Big Fish, which I’ve been working on for now 20 years. We’ll talk about how writers should approach their earlier work when they need to.

We’ll also follow up on home automation and locked pages, plus answers to some of our listeners’ questions, and Craig and our bonus for premium members. Let’s talk about taking some time off. You just took some time off. You took the weekend off. Your weekend off feels like time off.

Craig: [laughs] I had to negotiate it, too.

John: Yes, let’s talk about being more deliberate about working on certain days, not working on certain days, and refilling our supplies after a lot of work sessions. We’ll talk about ways to do that.

But Craig, first, we have a little housekeeping. We want to thank all of our premium subscribers. You want to keep the lights on here.

Craig: When you say you, you’re talking to me. I am a premium subscriber.

John: You are.

Craig: I pay the $5 a month.

John: See, that’s what we’re here to talk to you about, Craig. Because right now, you’re paying $5 a month. We’re going to be raising that price.

Craig: What?

John: Moving up to $7.99 per month.

Craig: 7–? [sighs]

John: Because people should really be on the annual plan. Here’s what’s happening. Our annual plan is staying put at $49 a year.

Craig: Oh, so that’s even less than $5 a month.

John: It is. We really want people to stay on the annual plan because it’s just less tedious for everybody involved to stay on the annual plan.

Craig: We’re really incentivizing this?

John: Apparently, because we initially rolled out with this price, and it was really parity between the two things, people stayed on the monthly plan. People should move to the annual plan.

Craig: How do you do that?

John: It’s so simple. You click on your account settings. There’s a link in the show notes to this. You got an email if you’re a premium subscriber, just please move over to the annual plan.

Craig: It’s good for you, and apparently, it’s good for us.

John: It would save a listener $48 per year.

Craig: We’re asking you to give us less money.

John: Please give us less money.

Craig: Please give us less money. We should make the monthly $14,000.

John: Yes. [laughs]

Craig: Then watch how quickly they go to that annual subscription. You know what I’m saying?

John: We debated. If we went up like $1, would that be enough of a factor? Would it be enough of a friction that people would actually do it?

Craig: No. Can I just say, is there a point in our humanity, in our civilization, where we will just move on past the 99-cent gimmick?

John: Some stuff, yes, it doesn’t make sense.

Craig: It’s just everybody does it in every way, shape, or form. We’re all on to the trick, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: We all know what’s going on.

Drew Marquardt: They’re supposed to be doing away with the penny soon.

John: The actual physical penny.

Craig: Typical.

John: The idea of 99 cents doesn’t go away.

Craig: I could argue that all prices at this point should be rounded to a dollar.

John: Yes, they should be.

Craig: Rounded up or down, but then taxes back–

John: Let’s say an issue with like, if something costs $99, it’s really $100, too.

Craig: This is my point, so what are we doing?

John: What we are doing is raising the price to $7.99 in the hopes that people will get to the annual plan, which is $49.

Craig: I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s lovely.

John: We should talk about, Craig, how much money do you make from Scriptnotes?

Craig: Oh, I have seen $0.

John: I see $0 as well. Craig and I don’t take any salary for this.

Craig: No.

John: The money pays for our incredible editor, our producer, Drew.

Craig: We’ve gotten cars out of it, obviously. We got the cars and the houses.

John: Absolutely. All that big podcast money. We’re not the Pod Save America people who actually like to buy houses with stuff.

Craig: The Pod Save America guy lives across the street from me.

John: They’re doing well.

Craig: That’s a really nice house. They’re lovely people. I was in Vegas for a couple of days.

John: Gambling the Scriptnotes money?

Craig: Gambling my Scriptnotes money away at the penny slot machine. They project ads for all their acts everywhere. On the side of a casino that was facing my room, they were advertising a true crime podcast. I don’t remember the name of it, but apparently, they’re on tour. They’re on tour in Vegas? A podcast?

John: Many questions are raised by this. First off, when are we going to do a live show in Vegas on the strip? That’s crucial.

Craig: Right. Can we have dancers?

John: Yes, we’re going to have dancers. The question is topless, not topless? Or maybe there’s two shows. The later show is topless. I don’t know.

Craig: I would be fine with a kid’s show, a family show.

John: A family show, yes, for sure.

Craig: Then, at night, an adult show. This would be amazing.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, of course. We could get the ladies, but we could also get the Thunder from Down Under guys.

John: Oh, 100%. I would definitely have to be on a mixed show.

Craig: We need a mixed show but not at the same time. I think they would confuse each other with their choreography.

John: Different acts, different segments.

Craig: You bring on one group, then we do the first half of the show. Second group comes on, gyrates. We come back. What a weird thing to come back after, for you and me. It would just like, we’re the worst people to follow any kind of hot strip show. Then it’s just like, “Back to these two podcasters.”

John: It really does make a hard transition into, let’s talk about transitions, or let’s talk about–

Craig: Back to slug lines.

John: Yes, or I was going to say the Scriptnotes slot machine. The Scriptnotes is like a video poker machine, like those branded things.

Craig: Ooh. That’s fun.

John: That’s good stuff.

Craig: You know what the jackpot is, right?

John: What is the jackpot?

Craig: Sexy Craig.

John: Oh, yes. I always think if you get the jackpot, you get to be on a three-page challenge. It’s like a live show.

Craig: No.

John: I guess now it’s better than that.

Craig: No. If you get five sexy Craigs in a row–

John: Oh, lining up. Oh, gosh. We don’t take a salary. This pays for everything else, but the money that’s left over at the end of the year, we donate it away. We donated this year to Hollywood Heart, which is a beneficiary of our great live show. We also support the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps writers and others in the Hollywood industry.

Craig: Isn’t that also targeting some funds for the fire relief?

John: Exactly. Yes. That’s what we do with the money. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it all possible. On the topic of games, though, we actually have a game shipping this week. Way back in Episode 655– actually, not that way back, 655 is 22 episodes ago.

Drew: That‘s like half a year.

John: Half a year ago, I put out the call that I was looking for an indie game developer to partner up with on a game that I wanted to make. Drew, we got 10 people writing about that.

Drew: That sounds right.

John: I zoomed with a bunch of them. They were all fantastic and great. I ended up picking this Canadian developer named Kory Martin, who has been toiling away. Now, just a few months later, we have a game for you to try out right now. It’s called Birdigo. Birdigo, like the thing that flies. It is a roguelike deck builder where you’re trying to make words. Craig, you just played it. Tell us about the game. Your experience so far.

Craig: Oh, I just played a little tiny bit, but as far as I can tell, what’s going on is you get some letters from a constrained letter bank, a little bit like a Scrabble tile distribution. You have to make some words from your letters. As you make words, you get some new tiles. You have some discards, and you’re trying to hit a point number to move on to the next thing. But when you do, you’re going to get some sort of power-up, some kind of Belatro-style card that makes the next rounds better, because I presume it just gets harder and harder and harder.

John: It gets harder and harder. It’s a roguelike in that it’s really difficult to complete a level, what we call a migration, but eventually, you’re able to do it, and then it unlocks more things down the road. If you would like to play it, you can play it right now. It is on Steam as part of the Next Fest event this week. You can follow the link in the show notes or just go to birdigogame.com, click through and see the game that’s there. The first 50 levels are up for everyone to go and play this week as part of this special event.

Craig: And John?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s called Birdigo. Like vertigo but with a bird?

John: Yes.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: Birdigo.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: We don’t know yet, so it’s free. The demo is free. We don’t know what the final pricing is going to be.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll ship it sometime this spring, probably.

Craig: Right, but right now, it’s free.

John: It’s free.

Craig: It costs nothing.

John: Yes, so you should try it. If you like it, put it in your wish list. Originally, we were going to call it AlphaBirds. It’s really a spin-off of the physical game we made called AlphaBirds, but Birdigo was a better name for what this game is.

Craig: Yes, I think so. Plus, also, people love the stuff on there. Are you going to bring it to iOS at some point?

John: We’ll do Steam first, and then we’ll see where we’re at for it. Because the nice thing about doing it on Steam first is we can then transition to Xbox or Switch or all the other stuff. Eventually, iOS would be great, too.

Craig: All right.

John: It’s fun.

Craig: Great.

John: All right. More follow-up. Drew, help us out on locked pages and unlocked pages.

Drew: Michael wrote in and says, “I’m a script coordinator on a large TV series where our security is super intense, and everything is distributed digitally. Since we’re forbidden from printing scripts, I thought our show would be a great case study to implement keeping the script pages unlocked throughout production and using the locked scene numbers as our linchpin for revisions.

My stipulation was that I would only do it if it didn’t mess with the workflow of any of our departments. However, in reaching out to the departments, I found that not having locked pages would cause issues with the work of our script supervisor and our post-production team, mainly the editors and assistant editors.

Our script supervisor told me that they use a software to do their job that relies on the pages being locked. One of our scripties uses MovieSlate and the other uses ScriptE, which seems almost final draftian in its arbitrary rigidity. The software organizes their notes by scene number, take, timing of take, notes, cameras, and other things, but each page of their notes corresponds with a facing page, and that refers to the page number of the locked script.

John: Let’s pause for a second here. What I think I’m hearing is that in a physically printed script, you have on the right, if you’re printing on one side of the page, on the right in your notebook, you would have the printed page of page 46, but there’d be a blank page on the left. I think that is the facing page where they’re typically taking notes or doing other things on that page?

Craig: Okay.

Drew: Since the notes are not connected to a specific facing page, if that page were to change with the new content during the shoot, the notes wouldn’t line up anymore. At the end of the shoot, all the notes and their facing pages are exported as a continuous document to send to the editors. The assistant editors use the daily reports from the scripties to assemble binders for their editors with all the notes and their corresponding facing pages. Those binders are organized based on the locked script and messing with the locked pages would mean it was difficult for the AEs to match the scripties notes with the facing pages.

It appears that until the software the script supervisors use can find a way to connect their notes with just the scene number and not the locked script pages, I think locking script has to remain. I will say, even though I can’t figure out how to make it work and not interfere with certain departments, everyone I pitched this concept to was down for a change. For my showrunner to the script supervisors and post-production, people would love to bring things into the digital era and leave some of these old methods behind. Also, no one cares about keeping color names for revisions.

Craig: In talking with my script supervisor, he did bring this issue up, but even he seemed quite flexible about it. I believe there’s a way in the output to just say, okay, just bring me to the notes for scene, whatever. The idea that the assistant editors and the editors are using this massive binder of notes is a pretty old school, I think. I have not seen the binder in a long time.

Also, the idea of editors routinely consulting the notes, while lovely is something I’ve seen every now and again, like a four-leaf clover. It’s actually quite frustrating how editors just don’t look through that stuff. In a way, I like that. The editors get their fresh take on things. They don’t necessarily want to be bound by whatever opinions were written down on the day.

But I do believe that document would still function unless you were literally using it like a printed bound thing, which I don’t think anybody does anymore, or most people don’t. I’m sure the ones who do will write it and insist everyone does. The companies that make the software really need to just make this very simple change. It should just be organized by scene number. I don’t care. I’m doing it on Season 3. I’m doing it. I’m just getting rid of the page breaks. I don’t care. [sings] I love it. I don’t care. That song was originally written about this very topic. Page breaks.

John: I’m happy that Michael, who is a script coordinator, the person who is responsible for this, was writing it and was really trying to make this change happen and was consulting with the people who he knew it could affect early on in the process. It really does sound like people have entrenched ways of doing things that don’t necessarily make sense, but it’s what they’re used to, and it would be an adjustment.

Craig: Movie productions, television productions are rife with this-is-how-I’ve-always-done-it-ness, and sometimes getting people into the new way, you got to drag them kicking and screaming a little bit. Once they’re there, they’re thrilled. It does take a moment or two where they’re like, uhhhh. I’m doing it.

John: It’s good news on colored pages as well because the concept of colored pages is good.

Craig: At this point now on revision levels, it’s just so that you know which– is it draft one, two, three? I might change them to numbers.

John: In the part we cut out here, it says they started using version plus number for our drafts.

Craig: I might do that. Drafts V1, V2, V3, Rev1, Rev2, Rev3.

John: Put a date on it.

Craig: The thing is I put a date on them anyway.

John: Colored revisions have dates.

Craig: Maybe I’ll just do date revision. That’s it. The revision is this date.

John: How do you like doing dates? Actually, I have a question about this and then about Oxford commas, but we’ll talk about both.

Craig: Sure.

John: My preferred way of doing dates is I love periods between dates.

Craig: Very European.

John: I love the year first and then the month and then the day works really well for me.

Craig: If you did year, then day, then month, you’d be fully European, I think.

John: Yes, exactly. Doing date then month, things increase the right way. When you do date before–

Craig: Oh, I completely agree. This is one area where I think we’re right. I go day, month, year, which is more standard, I think. Just because of my old, old, old computer days, my convention is to go underscores in between because periods were reserved for file extensions and dashes right out.

John: Absolutely no colons on the Macintosh.

Craig: Oh, good Lord, no. Something, underscore, something, underscore, something.

John: Related question. I have a similar related question in terms of what your preferences are. For the Scriptnotes book, we’re now starting copy edits. Oxford commas. My personal take is I believe that Oxford commas can be useful for disambiguating situations. Obviously, we can bring up situations where without the extra comma there, you’ve changed the meaning of it. I find oftentimes commas are wedged in there in a superfluous way that makes me annoyed. How do you feel?

Craig: Oxford commas, from an informational point of view, are objectively superior because they give you more information than less. That’s always a good thing. From an aesthetic point of view, they are inferior to the American style. American style is cleaner. In the 94% of cases where there is no ambiguity, the American style just simply reads better.

My thing is I don’t think you need to be consistent. I think if you feel like, “Oh, this requires an Oxford to disambiguate,” put it in.

John: Great. I think we are aligned and agreed. That will be the notes back to the copy editor. That was what I did on Arlo Finch. To me, part of the reason is that even though this is text that is not meant to be read aloud, I’m still reading aloud in my head. I perceive a comma as being a small pause, and it’s an unnecessary pause in a series of things. When it’s not needed, it’s weird.

Craig: It’s a funny thing that in our language, when we do list things, we group the last two things together, and I don’t know why. A, B, C, D, E and F. We just do that. It’s weird. I don’t know. It’s a strange mental thing.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up here.

Drew: In the bonus segment of 671, we talked about home automation. We had a lot of smart people write in. Apparently, Lutron HomeWorks is the top-of-the-line lighting system, including shades and curtains.

John: That’s actually what we use. I forgot the name of it, but that’s what we use. That’s the app I have on my phone that lets me turn on any light in the house.

Craig: I had Lutron in my old house. I hated it. So annoying.

John: I think if it’s not set up properly, it can be just an absolute monster.

Craig: It is set up properly. I’m just like, I got to go to my phone. The switch is right there on the wall.

John: You should be able to do either one. It wasn’t set up properly.

Craig: No. It was set up properly. It’s just a pain in the ass.

John: I can tell our system. I can just verbally say, set the lights to 20%, and it’s a blessing.

Craig: Everywhere. Oh, because it’s linked into your Alexa or whatever?

John: Yes. In the TV room, I can just say, set the lights to 20% as I’m watching a movie, and it’s just great.

Drew: There’s also, apparently, an open-source software called Home Assistant, and that can pretty much connect everything, but it’s very DIY. You have to set it up yourself. It’s not plug-and-play.

John: Mike also uses Home Assistant for other stuff, which also works with Lutron. We can do things that are clever, but it relies on Mike figuring out how to do stuff and then teaching me what the commands are.

Craig: I’m quite good with these things. I did also try to explain to Melissa how the Lutron worked, and that didn’t go well. That’s also my future. I have to explain it to Melissa, and I just know it’s not going to go well because here’s what I’m going to get. I’m going to get a text that says the lights aren’t working, or Lutron is broken. I’m going to say, no, it’s not broken. Is there smoke coming out of it? No, it’s not broken.

John: The Wi-Fi is down, which could mean anything.

Craig: Yes. I actually get the wife’s Wi-Fi is down quite a bit.

John: It happens. All right. Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which is Puzzle Boxes. This comes from a listener question. Drew, read us a question here.

Drew: Christian writes, “I love both Severance and From, but I’m worried that they’ll both be Lost all over again.

Craig: Oh, jeez.

Drew: I’m worried my own novella is in the same trap. I feel really cheated by the end of Lost, but love the middle of the journey. When mysteries don’t deepen the focus, but just get wider and wider, it can temporarily create momentum that feels like a recipe for a disaster ending. How can you keep the pleasures of a puzzle box without falling into the trap of an unsatisfying ending?

Craig: I love when people say, I’m just worried that it’s going to become like that thing that was one of the most beloved television shows of all time and a massive hit. [sighs] Can we just stop with that? Can we just stop with beating up on Lost like it was a failure or something?

John: It was a great success.

Craig: It was.

John: Let’s broaden our scope. There’s a lot of series that do things like this, obviously talk about Lost. Severance is a current series.

Craig: Severance, Watchmen, but Watchmen had a built-in ending, so it was different.

John: Westworld, Twin Peaks, Silo right now. The new show, Paradise. Yellowjackets are just still going on. Heroes, Leftovers, Alias, The Man in the High Castle.

Craig: Good Lord.

John: They’re a really common thing. What’s uniting about all these kinds of shows is there’s a question of what’s really going on that is central to the story engine. It’s who killed Laura Palmer? Where are we really? What is this place? What the hell is Lumon? In Man in the High Castle, why is there this footage of an alternate reality? What strikes me as different about some of these series, though, is what the characters inside the series’ relationship is to the central mystery, is whether the characters are actively trying to figure out what’s going on.

Like in Lost, where the hell are we? What is this island? What’s happening? You as the audience are on the same level as the protagonists, or situations where the heroes inside the story know exactly what’s happening, and you as the audience are just behind where they are. Yellowjackets is an example of that, where we’re getting these flashbacks and everyone in the present day knows what happens there, but we’re just getting exposed to it bit by bit.

Craig: Yes, there’s probably a good distinction to draw between mystery and puzzle box, because puzzle boxes are constantly putting forth things that are surreal. That’s key to the genre, is surrealism. The granddaddy of all of these is Prisoner. The Prisoner? With Patrick McGowan, so this is in the ‘60s. I just remember my dad showing it to me when it was being rerun on PBS, which when my dad would come say, “Hey, Craig, sit down, we’re going to watch something on PBS,” I knew I was in for boredom. As a small child, I was like, “Prisoner, just– what?”

John: I just remember there’s this giant, white, floating ball-

Craig: The bubble.

John: -the bubble that is after him, but it’s great. You have no sense of what’s really happening there. Æon Flux was an MTV series that also had it. It seems like I have no idea how this all connects.

Craig: The surrealism is crucial. The idea that things are emerging that are very specifically puzzling as opposed to– why somebody did something, to me, is a mystery. I remember in Watchmen, they opened a door, and there’s an elephant in a room with tubes coming out of it. What? Severance, particularly this season. Last season, because it was somewhat limited in its scope, it wasn’t quite a puzzle box. It was closer to a mystery. This season, so far, has been a puzzle box.

John: Yes, absolutely. This season is leaning much more into the mythology, and who are the Eagans, what is this town, and the gradual reveal that the outside world is not normal, either. In the first season, it felt like a little stylized normal world, and it’s clear that the outside world is not a normal world either in this. I think it’s really important that you’re distinguishing between most shows. Many shows have mysteries at the heart of them. It’s like, who did this thing? You were trying to solve this puzzle.

You have either detectives or somebody who is investigating, is trying to solve this thing. It is the building up of mythology and impossible connections that is so tantalizing about a puzzle box show, and also can be really frustrating at times. One of the things that our listener was pointing to, Christian, is that sometimes it feels like they’re just spinning new plates.

Craig: This is the gift and the curse of puzzle boxing. As a writer, you and I know that if you have a scene and you want something exciting to happen, throwing something in that makes everybody go, “Wait, what?” People are in a house, and they think there might be a ghost, but they’re not sure, and one of their friends has gone missing, and then they open a door, and there’s a dragon in it. Wait, what? Black. Credits. They’re coming back next week. Everyone’s talking about the dragon. What the hell’s going on?

This is cheat coding your way to grabbing people’s interest. Each time you do it, it’s a little bit like heroin. Drew, I’m going to talk to you because you obviously know quite a bit. Drew, you remember the first time, right? You’re chasing that dragon the rest of your life. That first hit of puzzle boxing, you’re like, wow. Once you hit the fourth or fifth, you start to go, okay, anything can happen at any point. The value per puzzle starts to go down a little bit, particularly as the puzzles accrue in an unsolved way.

What Christian’s concerned about, and I think rightly so, is all of the puzzles have to have an answer. At best, they are interrelated. At best, there are one or two ahas that make all of them make sense all at once. In the case of Watchmen, I thought that was about as good as it gets. Maybe because it was one season, I went aha for all of it. When you have an ongoing series, the challenge is to figure out how to make these connected ahas that resolve everything without ending your show. That’s the trickiest part of all.

John: That’s the thing, when Damon Lindelof came on the show, we were talking about that, and at a certain point, he had to come to ABC and say like, “How many seasons do we have left? Because I need to pace out what we’re doing here because otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.” He got the answer of, at that point, two more seasons or three more seasons. Like, “Great. We can plan for this overall we’re getting to.”

That also ties into, how often are you introducing new clues or new mysteries? If it’s every episode, then you’re setting an expectation that this is this kind of show. If it’s once or twice per season where you’re doing that stuff or addressing the underlying mystery, then it’s not so foregrounded. It’s obviously always going to be there as an open, unresolved thread, but it’s not pressing. Those are fundamental decisions you make as a showrunner.

Craig: There is that give and take where, like you say, you get to dole these things out because how powerful they are. The things you have to watch out for, in addition to over-puzzling people to the point where they just go, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” is making sure that the characters themselves maintain a reasonable level of curiosity and a realistic interest in trying to solve the problems themselves. Because there are times where the characters just seem to go along with puzzles sometimes, go along with weirdness and then say, what is this all about? The other one is like, I don’t know. Let’s see where it goes.

After a while, you get the feeling that no one’s trying hard enough to solve the puzzles, which can also be a little frustrating. They’re fun. Look, the worst part of solving a puzzle is the finish, unless it’s wonderful. It’s high-risk, high-reward. To refer back to Lost, I think a lot of people just presume that the ending of Lost was “bad”, that it’s legendarily been discussed to death. Damon himself seems to write an editorial about it every few months, God bless him. It was good, I think, and millions of people thought so. People are always going to disagree about these things, but when you look at a show like Lost, the degree of difficulty to do– how many episodes did they do?

John: 20 to 22 episodes per season.

Craig: It was like 100 episodes or something. To do that is astonishing. What we ask now is maybe to do 20 for a puzzle box. For instance, Severance is in Season 2. I think they’re doing 9 or 10 episodes a season. I don’t know how many seasons they go for, but I can only presume that if we’re on Severance Season 8, something’s gone terribly wrong.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: Which is a weird thing to say because, theoretically, you want shows to go forever.

John: One of the points you made there is how the characters in the world are related to the central mystery. We’re talking about shows where the characters don’t have all the information. It’s not just that the audience is behind. The characters themselves are curious. It’s really a question of how do you make the mystery integral to the show but not overwhelming so that you can actually just do other stuff that a series needs to do in terms of how are the characters in relationships driving plot and story? It’s not all about the franchise mystery of it all.

Example, the far end would be The Leftovers, which is premised on this idea that 3% of the world’s population suddenly disappears. We see the effects of that, but no one is trying to answer the question, what really happened? At least the characters that we are seeing and following don’t have the capacity, the agency to try to solve that. It’s only in the final season that they actually really address what happened, resolve this great loss and make a change that addresses this fundamental mystery. Instead, it’s dealing with the repercussions of the premise, rather than trying to solve the premise.

Craig: More Lindelof. I guess Damon, he’s the king of the puzzle box. I think you’re right. I think that a good puzzle box story makes sure that part of the puzzle impacts the identity and central crisis of the characters, and the way their relationships function. So Severance is very good at this. In the end, do I want to know what is going on at Lumon? Do I want to know what Cold Harbor is and the data refinement process? Sure. Do I want to know why there are goats in that room? Yes, I do. Do I want to know more where Ms. Casey is/Mark S’s wife? Absolutely.

John: 100%.

Craig: Do I want to see how that is going to function within the matrix of Mark’s interest in Helly R? Now we’re just down to good old soap opera, and I love a good old soap opera. That’s where my heart is. Your brain is teased and entertained by the puzzles, but your brain will only get you so far. For what we do, the heart has to be there. And ideally, the stakes of the brain solving the problem are fed directly into the stakes of whether or not the heart gets what it wants.

John: The other thing I would point out to Christian is that as you’re trying to figure out your story and how it all fits together, when you have scenes with characters that know more about what’s going on, be really careful about those shifts in POV. That’s the thing that you’re seeing Season 2 of Severance grapple with, is that you have characters who work for Lumon who are just having conversations among themselves outside of the Severed Floor. They know so much more than we know. Those conversations are very carefully tailored, so that reveals stuff to us that they would know. That becomes a really difficult balancing act.

Craig: It is very hard to do this kind of show — Again, I tip my hat to Severance because they’re doing it — In a world where we have the internet and entire subreddits dedicated to parsing every single thing. My youngest daughter is currently now into Severance. She binged Season 1 with my wife, and now she’s watching Season 2 along with us. She was all over the theory because TikTok was all over the theory that Helly was actually real Helly and not– spoiler alert, if you’re now watching the show, you know it’s going to happen. She was ahead of that. I have a crazy Severance– it’s not a theory. I just had this idea. I’m sure it’s all over Reddit, too. I’m not original about this, I’m sure. Should I say it?

John: Say it.

Craig: I’ve been wondering lately if it’s all backwards, that the people on the outside are the ones that have been “severed,” that the outside is, in fact, the experiment, and the inside is very much what is real.

John: Sure. As we learn more in the second season, the outside world is not what we think it is. It’s not just that the cars are old. It’s that they’re in a non-existent state. The license plates don’t match. The two-letter state abbreviation is not a US state. It’s always winter. There’s something that’s really strange about the outside world.

Craig: One thing that’s really strange about the outside world, the fact that Ms. Cobel almost got to the edge of something and then turned back. It’s a lot easier to say, create a false reality where someone’s wife is dead than it is to kill someone’s wife in reality and then bring her back to life in a false reality. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s just stuff going on that makes me think it’s flipped around. Because I keep thinking, what are they doing in data refinement? Perhaps what they’re doing is refining somehow the way the outside world functions.

That said, it may not be that at all. Also, I don’t care. Here’s the truth, I don’t care. What I really want is for people in the end to be happy or to be resolved, to fulfill their destinies by sacrificing or doing something for the greater good. We have villains. The villains have become much more sharp this season. Corporation has become much more of a villain now. Mr. Milchick, you can feel his– oh my God, this storyline, can I just side note for a second? I don’t want to turn this into the 400,000th Severance podcast, but I was so delighted with this little mini storyline of Mr. Milchick being presented with those paintings, those incredibly, what do we call them, corporate racist? There’s like a corporate racism is its own thing where it’s like, we recognize your contributions, and look, we made a picture.

John: We want you to be able to see yourself in a story.

Craig: We just made our leader Black for you but in a bad painting. That little tiny, tiny story between him and– I can’t remember her character’s name, the woman who speaks for the board. I guess the two Black characters that are working for the company. Oh, it was just handled in the most delicious way. Really, really well done.

John: It was an interesting moment because not knowing what the real world of the show really is, oh so, race is still a thing. Based on the evidence of the rest of the show we’ve seen so far, does it have the racial history of America? It clearly has some racial history there. The fact that their Black is actually specific and acknowledged within the world of the show.

Craig: Right, which a lot of times in shows like this, they do the old colorblind thing where nobody has any comment on race whatsoever. You’re right. It was like an interesting break in the reality bubble of everything.

Anyway, to, I guess, wrap up the question here for advice, if you are thinking about writing one of these things, obviously, plan everything out, be meticulous, study your great mysteries, read Agatha Christie, read Arthur Conan Doyle, read as many things as you can that function like this clockwork machinery, watch all of the great puzzle box shows, go through the whole Lindelof catalog, basically, the Lindelog, and learn, and then figure out how to both begin middle and end it all, and create the characters that fit into it and are informed by it that we will actually follow and care about because when all is said and done, if you’re the kind of person who is only interested in how the puzzle box resolves, you’ll probably be disappointed all the time, but most of us care about the characters and the relationships.

John: One last observation I just need to make is that the fact that we can have this conversation about Severance is because it is a weekly release schedule. Had they dumped all these at once, there’s no conversation because you don’t know where people are at in their watching.

Craig: How are we still talking about this like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world? I wouldn’t even make my show if it were dumped all at once. I just wouldn’t do it. The thought of it, the thought of working that hard for that long for everybody to watch something over one day or a three-day thing and then occasionally nibble on it, oh my, why? Why does Netflix do this?

John: There’s a project that I would love to be able to make, but if we end up at Netflix and we’re released all at once versus someplace else, we would fundamentally have to change how we’re doing some things because you just can’t count on the–

Craig: I literally don’t understand. I’m sure there are a lot of people at Netflix, or a number of algorithms who would be happy to explain it to me. It seems so patently obvious that the shows that people talk about, the shows that grip people and get them excited are indeed released once a week.

John: So, second topic. I was in New York City for two weeks working on a new version of Big Fish, the Broadway musical that I did 12 years ago. This process resulted in a 29-hour reading where we had actors in for one week. You get to rehearse and perform it once for investors and theater owners and other friends. It was great. It was so, so much fun. We had Patrick Wilson starring and Jerry Zaks directing, a great experience. Then also when I got back from New York, I went in and did an EPK interview for Corpse Bride, which is the 20th anniversary of Corpse Bride that I wrote with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler.

Craig: Twenty.

John: Twenty years. The experience of those things back to back made me think about when do you go back and revisit old projects? In the case of Big Fish, this is a thing that I was working on, first, the movie and then the Broadway show. Andrew Lippa and I had this giant catalog of like, here’s all the songs we wrote for the show. And as we’re reshaping and moving stuff around, it’s like, oh, I remember this little bit from this little bit. The bag of scraps you have can be really, really useful. Remembering what was the intention behind some of those things.

But for Corpse Bride, it was a chance for me to go back and watch the movie again, which I had not seen in 20 years. I remember like, “Wait, what did I actually do on this?” I watched the movie, then I read the script before I came on board. There were so many lines. I was like, “Oh, I remember writing that line.” Nope, I didn’t write that line. That was Caroline Thompson or Pamela Pettler. It was already in the draft. But then there were things that I did change and did add. It’s like, oh, I had no idea. That moment, which worked really well, like, oh, that was so great. The chance to reconnect with those things.

It also made me really wish that I’d kept a journal, that I’d kept some record of what the experience was like. Because in the conversation with the co-director and the producer, I had some ability to just remember why things were the way that they are, but it’s mostly just like, yes, that thing exists. I’m not quite sure how we got to that moment.

Craig: I’ve talked about this before. I’m not a big reflector. I don’t spend a lot of time in my brain in the past. I spend almost no time in my brain in the past.

John: I’m not much of one either.

Craig: It’s a watercolor mush. I remember the strangest things and not things that would be relevant but also, in general, not too motivated to go back and watch things.

What does sometimes happen is I get a chance to see something that I did through someone else’s eyes. When my youngest daughter was home from college, she and Melissa also watched The Hangover trilogy. That was exciting and fun. I didn’t sit there and watch it with them, but every now and then, I’d wander by and hear something and be like, “Oh, I remember that day.” It is fun to see people who grew up with something come to talk to you about it.

It reminds you why you did it in the first place. If you write things particularly for kids or for the broadest segment of the audience, you’re probably not in line to get Portrait of a Lady on Fire-type reviews. Not to say that some things like that aren’t wonderfully reviewed, but in the end, all that fades away. Then you see like, is there something there that lasted for people? That is interesting to see. But the thought of keeping a journal, oh my God.

John: It’s made me think back all the way to how I got interested in screenwriting in the first place, was Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The first script I ever read was his script because it came in a bound book with his script and his production journal. I got to see how he made it and what the whole process was. It was so incredibly illuminating to me. It made me want to become a screenwriter. I don’t have that for much of my stuff. I do for the Arlo Finch books because I had that separate podcast series I did, called Launch, which people could still listen to.

That really charts the whole process from I have this idea to write this book to the book is now out in French. It charted the whole process. That’s such an exception, and there’s no time machine that I wish I could go back and do that. I really wish I had records of more of what the conversations were.

Because even on Corpse Bride, now we can go back and search emails, and emails are so helpful to find out that stuff, but that was back in the time of faxes and phone calls. Now the stuff would be Zooms or Slack messages that are not as searchable. I feel like there’s a lack of a record of some of what’s really happening in the projects I’m working on right now.

Craig: Other than the insane digital paper trail, to me, the product of the work is the most important. I know that people are fascinated by the process. We do give them this very curated look at– “Stay tuned after the episode to watch behind the scenes.”

John: We are filming those. You’re doing all those in one day, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: You’re having to reflect upon, this is this episode, this is–

Craig: They just go, let’s talk Episode 3, let’s talk Episode 4. Though it’s interesting, what I don’t do is say things like, “It looks like so-and-so is in real trouble.”

John: A lot of people do.

Craig: I don’t do that. If there’s a cliffhanger, I’ll let the show do the cliffhanger. I just try and provide as much thematic context as possible. I’ve never been the person to pick up a book like Stanley Kubrick discusses how he made 2001. Weirdly, I don’t care. I’ve never had interest in that. I’ve always had interest in just the result. It may be because of my deep-seated belief that process is personal. I don’t want to follow someone else’s process. I don’t want to feel like I’m emulating anybody. I just want to try and follow my own natural instinct, which, hopefully, will get me to the best thing.

If I did write a diary called The Making of The Last of Us, it would contain quite a lot of whoa stuff. Not all good, but just like, wow, you guys had to do that? You went there? It took how much to build that thing? Yes. But people at HBO will tell you– I just say I’m so allergic to behind-the-scenes because I don’t want to– I want them to believe. If we keep showing people backstage– and that thing is an interest, I just try and avoid that if I can.

John: A case where I have had to go back through a project and reconstruct a narrative of things is in an arbitration. There’ve been times where I wrote something five years ago, and I have to go back through my drafts and figure out which drafts do I submit? What actually changed? What am I actually saying happened here? I did a little bit of that for a Corpse Bride where I was trying to figure out what changed draft to draft. I wonder if I might be willing to put this in a small box of things I feel like could be a good use for AI in a sense of like, compare this draft, compare it to this draft, and tell me what changed. Because it’s such a tedious task for a human being to do but actually is so well suited for something that is just looking for patterns.

Craig: Although change is difficult to judge if it’s judged quantitatively.

John: I would never do it for something. I would never do it in an arbitration situation, but for me, talking on the EPK, what changed over the course of between when you started, and really, it’s like, what were the big shifts? That’s hard for me to reconstruct if an AI or some other system could point out this is the character who’s different. This is how Barkus was in this draft, and this is where Barkus got to. That would be useful for me.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I’ve become one of those people. Anytime someone says AI, I go, boo.

John: I totally get it.

Craig: I was watching the Super Bowl, and some ad came on, and we were like, “What is this for?” Then finally, they got to AI and we all went, “Boo.” I guess it’s inevitable.

John: I want to totally validate that experience, that feeling. Also, by saying, “Boo,” make sure you’re not dismissing that it actually is real and that it’s there. Because sometimes people will just say, “Boo,” in a disbelieving way.

Craig: No. I say, “Boo,” like, “I don’t want it.” I just wish it weren’t there. I do. I love technology. Just this one, I wish it weren’t there. I so resent the fact that Google gives me that garbage AI result at the top of the page, and you can’t turn it off.

John: I’m sure there’s some workaround that.

Craig: There isn’t. The workaround is to query Google for results that only occur prior to the date the AI existed. It’s not useful.

John: I switched to DuckDuckGo for searches on mobile, which has been fine. What I want to underline is I wish it weren’t there is a valid expression, but that’s not going to help us get any policy or regulation or any controls over it. That’s my worry.

Craig: I can’t get any policy or controls over anything. I’m not a senator.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions.

Drew: Keanu writes, “I’m a high school student at Heritage Academy Maricopa, and my class had a question about screenwriting. If a person is in a cave, is it interior or exterior?”

Craig: I love this question.

Drew: What about Godzilla vs. Kong? Would the middle of the earth be interior or exterior and where do we draw the line?

Craig: Wherever you want.

John: Wherever you want. It’s just a philosophical question.

Craig: I know. I love it.

John: Am I inside or outside?

Craig: Right. It’s great. Interior and exterior are mostly useful for productions to figure out if they are actually going to be physically outside or inside so that they can decide if maybe they’re going to build a set or if they’re going to have to worry about the weather. When it comes to something like a cave, personally, I would say interior because you are getting out of the rain. It really comes down to rain in my mind. If it were raining outside, would my actors be getting wet?

John: Which is the cover side.

Craig: Exterior. Now, if you’re under a bus shelter or something, if you’re hiding from the rain, sure. The center of the earth, you mean in the molten core of the center?

John: No. In the Godzilla vs. Kong movies, there’s this giant underground, it’s really an outdoor space that happens to have a roof on it.

Craig: In that case, I probably would say exterior because there are probably sub-interiors within that. If there’s a cave inside of that world where there’s the dome sky, then– Truman Show, exterior street, interior house. All of it, spoiler alert, under a dome, interior.

John: 100% agree. It’s the other classic things like interior space, exterior space, exactly. If it feels like you’re outside, it’s great. It’s not going to affect anything. We get it.

Craig: It’s not going to affect anything, but I do like the philosophy. Here’s maybe a useful way of thinking about it: If where you are could be separated from another interior, it’s probably exterior, if you’re going to go inside from where you are.

John: I would just go to inside, outside. If you enter a place, then you’re interior. If you exit a place, you’re likely going into an exterior.

Craig: Feels about right.

Drew: Steve writes, “I’m working on a script that features actors who play in a cover band. I’d like to show them performing live on stage in small venues. I’ve read about some of the challenges David Simon faced while filming bands live in the show Treme, but can you go into specifics as to why? Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Also, am I mistaken in assuming that the songs that I choose will be cheaper since I won’t be using the actual recordings?

Craig: Here’s why shooting live songs is hard. It comes down to editing. When a band is playing live, it’s never going to be exactly the same each time. Their movements, the notes, the tempo, everything will always be a little bit different from show to show. Any tiny difference will make a jump happen if you’re going to edit from one camera to the other unless you’re filming eight cameras. Even then, most of the cameras will be seeing the cameras.

Now you’ve got some painting out to do and you don’t get that fluid feeling of going through. So typically, what we do is we ask the musicians to play to a fixed track. The fixed track will be in their ears, and they mime play along with it, essentially. They can live play along with it too, but they have to be locked in for editing purposes. It is a challenge.

John: Either a pre-record or a click track, basically something to keep them on exactly the same metronome for things. For Steve, if it’s looking to do maybe a smaller indie project, in some ways, that might argue towards doing some live recording because maybe it has a feel where it’s just you’re just going to record the entire thing, or it’s in a one-er, or there are reasons why you’re there and you’re experiencing it live. I think back to the movie Once, which is about the folk singer you fall in love, that feels like a thing that was probably recorded live and made sense to record live. It felt like the right vibe for it.

Craig: If you’re going to do, for instance, that wonderful song Falling and it’s two people, one playing guitar, one singing, three, four cameras going at once, that’ll get you what you want. No problem. We face these challenges from time to time, and we figure them out with the sound department. But fun, chaotic, proper live with a club, and everybody dancing and everything. The sound is the biggest issue, is figuring out what we’re going to hear and how we’re going to hear it.

The other thing about playing live is the music is coming out through big speakers. Now, you can record the individual tracks, but you still have to mic the drums. You’re getting bleed through those drum mics from everything else that’s playing. What are you going to play for people when they’re watching? Because recording live is its own thing, plus you have the crowd dancing. It may all look great, but now it sounds like mush, or it doesn’t connect to what we’re seeing. Challenges.

John: It’s challenges. Answering two more little things, Steve asked, “Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene?” Not really. The dinner table scene is its own unique problem just because of eye lines that are getting people to match around a dinner table scene. Here, you have a bunch of people who, yes, they might be looking at each other, and that’s just a thing. It’s going to be the same problem whether you’re recording it live or they’re lip-syncing to a thing. “Will it be cheaper than using the actual recordings?” No, because if you’re going to do your own recording of the thing, you’re making your own recording, period. Recording it live doesn’t change that.

Craig: It could be cheaper only in the sense that if you’re going to use the recorded version, you have to pay for both the licensing and the mechanical, the master.

John: I’m presuming that if we see a band performing on stage, you’re going to record a band, that band, or another band recording on stage.

Craig: That recording you’re making, it won’t cost you anything. You’re just paying the licensing at that point and, of course, the performance fees for the band, or if they’re actors, that’s the acting. Yes, it could be a little bit more, but then you have a lot of other challenges you’re going to have to deal with, and you have to weigh those two things side by side. It’s a tricky one.

The good news is, post-production people, production people, sound people, they’ve all been here. They will all give you advice on the various ways you can go, but it is a bit of an interesting puzzle. When you’re trying to figure out how to, for instance, then shoot a conversation between two people who are off to the side with the band playing in the background continuously from their live performance, how are you going to do that? It’s all very tricky.

John: There are reasons why you want that band to be looking like they’re performing and not actually performing.

Drew: We’ve got one last question. Todd in Maryland writes, “I love when you guys talk about D&D. I’ve played tabletop role-playing games since I was a kid and think they’re great for storytelling and socializing. The strange thing, however, is that very few campaigns stick in my head as being memorable stories. Usually, there are one or two standout moments, a funny interaction, a clever situation to a puzzle, critical success or failure, but the personal goals and growth of the characters and the overarching plots are lost in the wash of time. Have you ever used a role-playing campaign as the basis of a screenplay, or are these two fundamentally different mediums?”

John: I think they’re really different mediums.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Two issues there. One is the campaigns that he’s in aren’t memorable. That may be chalked up to the DM. Partly, that’s the job of the DM is to tell a great story, to make more than one or two memorable moments, to provide a lot of great NPCs that you can remember, and to make it all make sense in the end like it was all meant to be purposeful. That’s an entirely different question than from– also, let’s say you got that, should you base this? No, you should not.

John: We’re about to resolve a campaign that I’ve been DMing for the last year or so. Listen, I went in with some story points, but I really let the players dictate what was going to be happening. They are the storytellers of a lot of this. Those characters making those choices, their bad roles a lot of times are the iconic moments from it.

Craig: Like any good DM, you edit as you go. As long as you don’t make a change that undoes something that we all saw happen or somehow invalidate things, you’re fine. It’s a little bit like the puzzle box thing. You just want to make sure that when you get to the end, people are like, “Oh, this is, so nothing mattered. You just randomly did this, even though all these other things happened.” Yes, the puzzle has to make sense in the end.

John: What is I think consistent with good cinematic storytelling is the players, the protagonists should be the most memorable characters and the one who are driving things. While I set up a villain and sub-villains who I thought were useful and good and interesting, your heroes should be driving the story, and they have.

Craig: You hope that you have a group of players that create relationships with each other or key relationships with an NPC, but the point is relationships and how they interact with each other, that’s the fun. When I’m a player, I’m so much more interested in how I deal with the other party members than I am with how I deal with the rest of the world.

John: Absolutely. One thing that I did in this campaign, which we tried out, mixed success, but I said, in our session zero, as we were getting stuff ready, every character had to have relationships with two other characters around the table. It didn’t have to be like brother and sister, but they had to have some other connection with them so that they came into this small community with a sense of some shared history and purpose and relationship. It’s an idea I would continue through to the future, even as we’re looking at our next campaign, is I would love to come in with my player being connected at least to one other player.

Craig: I think it’s a good icebreaker moment. What happens is the players, as they play-

John: They make choices.

Craig: -they begin to figure out who they are and then they just create new relationships. Some of them are good running jokes. I had a good one with Phil Hay’s character based on the session zero, but then a lot of them just emerge because somebody’s character may irk your character by what they do. Then that’s the thing now by the choice they made. As long as you give people room to find their own bonds and flaws, as D&D says, you’re doing great.

John: Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show/experience I had while I was in New York City called Life And Trust. Now, Craig, when you were in New York ever, did you go to Sleep No More?

Craig: I sure did.

John: Did you like Sleep No More?

Craig: I definitely went to Sleep No More.

John: Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More.

Craig: I attended it.

John: Let me talk about Sleep No More, and I’ll tell you about the differences between this and Life And Trust. Sleep No More, you go to this space and you drop off your coat and put on a mask, and then you’re wandering through this space, and you start to realize were there actors? Basically, anyone who’s not wearing a mask is an actor, is a performer in this world. You start to realize like, “Oh, Macbeth is happening around me.” As you’re wandering through the space, there’s really very little structure to it. You’re seeing scenes and moments, but it’s cool and also has a feeling of a little bit of an escape room in the sense of you could just spend all the time looking at the very cool set direction and such.

While I was in New York this last time, I went to see Life And Trust, which is by the same folks who did that. It is done in a bank in the financial district, an incredible space, and just gorgeous and much more ambitious than Sleep No More was. As you’re entering it, there’s a little bit of dialogue at the start as you’re sent off. Then like Sleep No More, you’re wearing a mask. You’re exploring the space, and you could just look at all the incredible set decorations throughout the whole thing. You realize that what’s actually happening is probably Faust or a version of Faust.

I thought the structural elements on it worked really nicely. We’ve just had a really good time. If you’re going with a group, you end up getting separated by default, and you’re having your own experience. Then really part of the fun of it is when it’s all done, which is about three hours, getting back together and like, “Did you make it to that space? I had no idea that thing was there.” I saw this scene happen, and you’re trying to piece together what all happened. I really dug it.

Craig: I remember that I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and watching people. Whatever a voyeur is, I’m the opposite of that. I felt very uncomfortable. No reflection on what they did, their performance, the quality, it was all clearly working at a very high level, and people do love it. I just thought like, “Oh, if somebody were to be looking at me, I’m the bad guy.” I’m just scrolling around, Eyes Wide Shut style, just basking in the performance.

I kept thinking to myself, a lot of these people are the classic starving artists in New York, working this gig for probably not a lot of money, and then waitering during the day. Then I show up at night, and I just casually watch them. I’m not going to watch them. I’m going to turn away and watch something else. I’d rather walk down that hallway than look at you and appreciate what you’re doing. I just felt so icky. I don’t know if anybody else had that.

John: I think that is a valid experience. I will say that this show was much more dance-driven than the other one was. The other one was like–

Craig: You know me. I love dance.

John: You love some dance. At times you realize like, “Oh, there’s choreography happening. Oh my God, I need to move really quickly because they’re about to slam into me.” You have to be so ready to do things on the fly, which is fun and impressive that they could do. Here’s the moment we had at the end, though, that made me– this is true for all Broadway actors, but I really felt it for this is, so we’re down in the financial district, and I have to take the train to get back uptown. We get on the train, and two of the performers are in there too, along with all these young Chinese girls who were there who had just seen the show and were fawning over them. It’s like, man, you just did this thing and you want to be done. Suddenly, there are people there who saw you do it.

Craig: Some actors really enjoy it.

John: Some actors love it.

Craig: Some fans, are you kidding? Who doesn’t like a few fans?

John: All right. Life And Trust is my one cool thing.

Craig: My one cool thing– let’s see. Yes, we’re getting close. This is a sad one cool thing, but it’s a wonderful one cool thing. So in about a week, my intrepid assistant, Ali Chang, will be graduating out of assistant university, and we’ll talk about what she’s doing next. It’s quite exciting. For another time, that’s really up to her. I just wanted to make her my one cool thing because for two years, she has just been the best.

I’d never really had assistants, but if you’re going to be a showrunner, you need not just an assistant. You need a super assistant. You need somebody who is operating like your auxiliary brain and, most importantly, is filtering everything that goes in and out to make sure that the showrunner doesn’t drown in information, so organization and anticipation but then also all the good nurturing stuff.

Then like, “Hey, I want to try something fun for dinner. What’s the best blank?” She knows everything about everything everywhere. I must have spent probably 1,000 driving hours with her because we just drive places because you got to go scout. You got to go to your sets. You got to here and there. It’s just like an incredible wingman and such a super person. I won’t have to miss her because she’s still going to be around, but she just did a fantastic job. She is my absolute one coolest thing this week. The great Ali Chang.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Never heard of him.

John: Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers who really need to switch over to the annual plan and not the weekly plan. Save money.

Craig: It’s going to $7.99, but soon, it’ll be $799.

John: That’d be crazy.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Oy. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about taking time off. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, one of the real challenges of being a writer is that because we’re not on the clock, we’re never off the clock. One of the things I really missed about a 9-to-5 job is when I was not on the job, I was just off, and I had no responsibility to that place of work. That just doesn’t happen as a writer.
Craig: No, and there’s this whole new world of people that don’t go to the office. They Zoom commute, which means, a lot of their time during the day, they’re probably also off.

John: It’s unstructured.

Craig: Yes, but if you Zoom commute as a writer, you’re just being a writer. We’ve always just been somebody that occasionally would go to a meeting. It doesn’t matter. You wake up. Theoretically, you could be writing. You should be writing. That’s what your brain tells you at least until you are fully unconscious. You can always possibly be writing. It is difficult to draw the line, and then if you are in the middle of a production–

John: My daughter is in her second semester of her sophomore year. I was FaceTiming with her, and she’s like, “I’m so overwhelmed. I have this paper to do and this stuff, and it feels like all I do is I wake up. I go to class. I go to work. I do homework, and then I go to bed.” It’s like, “Yes, we validate that. Yes, that’s what the experience is. Are you taking time off?” She’s like, “I’m sleeping okay.” It’s like, “No, I don’t mean sleep. I think you actually need to have some time that is just not that time. You have to replenish and refill.” It’s a hard thing to hear or to try to do because you’re just like, “If I’m doing that, then I’m falling further behind on other stuff.” It’s hard to internalize that idea.

Craig: It is, and it’s probably a sign that you either are trying to do too much, or you need to learn how to do the things you do more efficiently. That’s our greatest hope. The first thing we want if we’re an ambitious person is to say, “I’ve been asked to do 100 things. I feel like I could do 10.” Either I need to tell them I can’t do those other 90, or I need to learn how to do 100 things. Now, it turns out that we can do more than we think.

The dangerous thing is if you keep doing that and succeeding, where does it end? Where it ends probably is a nervous breakdown. College is an excellent time to find out just how much you can do. Sometimes the feeling of being overwhelmed is really just the fear that you are going to have to expand your appetite and your output because it’s hard, but you can, until you hit a point where it definitely feels wrong. I’ve had a few of those.

John: I’ve definitely had a few, too. The nervous breakdown I had at the end of D.C., it was my first TV show, was that just trying to do too much and not recognizing or not being honest with myself that I was overtaxed. It just was impossible to do it. I remember very distinctly feeling like I was just a vessel for making the show. If I was listening to the radio in the car, it’s like, “Is that a song that could be in the show?”
I was basically just a sorting mechanism for things that could be in the show and things that were not going to be in the show. Healthier now, I don’t do that.

One of the things I’m trying to be more deliberate about doing is, today is a day off. I’m just not actually doing any work. I’m not thinking about work. I’m going to do whatever feels good and not out of a sense of obligation, but I’m just going to chill and not stress out about stuff. It’s hard for me to do that because I recognize that there are always 10 more things I could be doing with that time.

Craig: I don’t have a guilt about those times. What I struggle with is finding out ways to actively do nothing. When I say do nothing, actively not work. Today I’m not working. Instead, I’m going to clean out this. I’m going to go do here. I’m going to meet up with these people. I’m going to walk around a museum. Mostly what I want to do, I find when I’m not working is dissociate. That’s what I want to do. I want to dissociate. I want to sit down with a video game or a puzzle and go bye-bye.

I think that’s fine. It’s probably not on the top of the list of psychological recommendations for people, and maybe people might think that’s a sign actually you’re doing too much because you need to dissociate, but I actually find it wonderful. I like going bye-bye because my brain is working all the time. I need to sometime just send it to bye-bye town.

John: That will give you Birdigo, and you’re playing some Birdigo.

Craig: Dissociate.

John: Dissociate. The other thing I’m trying to do more of is just allowing myself to be bored. It’s because I find that I’m trying to fill every moment. I would find myself pulling out my phone as I walked upstairs. That’s 20 seconds. I didn’t need to pull out my phone during those times. Literally just putting the phone down and just being in a place and just letting myself be bored. Just stare at my dog for five minutes. It is good for just bringing everything down a little bit for me.

Craig: I think that in time, our ever-increasing age will force us to do these things more and more. I do think sometimes I better get all this stuff in that I want to do now. What I want to do is we call it work. I don’t think of it as work. This is what I want to do. I’m lucky enough that what I want to do is the thing people pay me to do. Fantastic. I will do it now as much as I can until my– I smell burnt toast, and that’s the end of that.

John: We met up with friends of ours from Los Angeles but now have a place in New York. We went to the Met, and it was great, and they had a great exhibit there, and loved it. He’s kind ofd retired. He’s a writer, and he’s just like, “I’m just done. I’m just done working for other people. I stopped enjoying it. I have the ability to be done and I’m just done.” That’s a hard thing to admit. I can’t imagine myself getting there, but I’m really happy that he’s happy doing that.

Craig: That was the goal, I think, for most people for the longest time. I’m thinking of a friend that we have in common who keeps telling me, “Once this is done, I’m ready to finish.”

John: I know who you’re talking about. It’s been 20 years he’s been saying that.

Craig: Right, and I’m like, “Okay, but you’re not. It’s not going to happen.”
John: He’ll describe the plan, “Oh, we’re going to move to Upstate New York. We’re got this place and all this stuff.” It’s like, “Yes, you’re going upstate, but you’re going back.”

Craig: You’re not going to.

John: Your kids are in college. They’re out of college now.

Craig: Because you like the life, man. You like the life.

John: Growing up, did you have any concept of a Sabbath or a day off? Did your family do any of that?

Craig: No. Weekends were for homework and essays and stuff. I was always nervous when I got to the weekend, mostly because I had to spend all day with my parents instead of just a little bit. That was when, I guess, they imposed this running around on your weekend is bad. I did get to play. Don’t get me wrong. I got to go outside, but I had to do all my work first and had to do it great. Homework is the worst. Have we ever talked about how dumb homework is?

John: Homework is generally terrible.

Craig: It’s just the stupidest concept.

John: Study after study shows that it’s not productive.

Craig: It doesn’t do a goddamn thing. What is the point? If you can add two numbers together, why do you have to add more two numbers together all weekend long? It’s stupid. It’s not learning.

John: It also contributes to the Sunday scareies, that sense of this is all the work I have to do to get done, so I’d be ready for my new week. It’s bad.

Craig: It just gives teachers something to grade. It just gives them something to grade. It’s stupid.

John: I think our advice is let yourself rest. Don’t do your homework.

Craig: Don’t do your homework, kids.

John: Don’t do your homework.

[laughter]

John: Don’t do homework that other people have assigned you. If there’s homework that you feel like you want to do to make yourself ready, great.

Craig: If you work at a job and someone’s giving you homework, listen, you got to figure out your boundaries there and make choices.

John: As we record this on President’s Day. It’s on the calendar, is a day that should not have been a workday for Drew, certainly.

Craig: You know what? Drew made a choice. I think he made what I would call a coerced choice.

Drew: I could have not come in.

Craig: It’s a little bit like when a magician tells you to pick a card, any card, you’re picking the one they want you to pick.

Drew: It’s the one that’s popping up.

Craig: Yes, but thank you for picking this day. It was so nice of you. That’s it.

Links:

• Birdigo on Steam
• Lutron HomeWorks and Home Assistant
• The Prisoner (1967)
• Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof
• Patrick Wilson, Jordan Donica Leading Industry Reading of Revised, Broadway-Aimed Big Fish on Playbill.com
• Falling Slowly scene in Once
• Life and Trust
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 653 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss a giant area of television writing we’ve barely covered over the 12 years of our program, which is multi-camera sitcoms, from Seinfeld to Friends to most of the Disney channel programs. These were the shows we grew up watching, and they still account for a sizable portion of the writing happening today. We’ll also look at the WGA’s Annual Report, which, gasp, shows that writer income was down for the years, for reasons we can’t possibly imagine. So we’ll try to get to the bottom of that.

To help us through all this, let’s welcome a writer-producer-director whose credits range from My So-Called Life to My Boys to The Carmichael Show to Superstore. She’s also the secretary treasurer of the Writers Guild of America West. Welcome to the incredible Betsy Thomas.

Betsy Thomas: Oh, John. Wish you’d follow me around and just do that all the time.

John: Absolutely. I’m your hype man.

Betsy: That was fantastic.

John: The first time we met – I think it was the first time we met – you had reached out to me, emailed me or called me, to say, “Hey, can we talk about me running for the board?” We had a drink. We talked through stuff. And I’m so happy you decided to run for the board.

Betsy: I am, most of the time. But yes, that was really fun. We had a drink, and then I was like, “Oh.” Then later, I was like, “Oh, you made an exception for me.” I was like, “Oh, I feel flattered.”

John: It was a Friday afternoon, so it was, “Let’s have a martini,” but I’m not generally a “let’s have a martini-”

Betsy: I know. I learned that later.

John: You can hear that laughter off to the side. That is Megana Rao, who is joining us this week.

Megana Rao: Hi.

John: Hi. Drew and Craig are both out this week. Thank you so much for stepping in.

Megana: Of course. I’m excited to be here.

John: Very relevant, because you’ve just been reading a bunch of multi-cam scripts, right?

Megana: Yes, I have. I am working my way through all the seasons of Cheers through the scripts that I can find in pdf form online.

Betsy: Wow.

Megana: Which is not intentional, but I just started reading the pilot, and I was like, “Oh, this is fun.”

Betsy: It’s very cool that you’re doing that. I hope they survive long enough that you can work your way.

John: We’re gonna talk about multi-cams, but in our Bonus Segment I’d love to talk to you about golf, because you are a golfer, and Megana and I know nothing about golf. I’m speaking for both of us. You don’t know much about golf?

Megana: I don’t know much about golf, despite my father’s best efforts.

John: Very nice. Your father golfed, but you do not golf?

Megana: Correct.

John: Have you ever golfed?

Megana: Yes, I’ve golfed with my dad a lot.

John: Only people who subscribe to the Premium membership will actually-

Megana: Get to hear [crosstalk 02:30] stories.

John: … get to hear all about Megana golfing. Before we get to that, let’s talk about some news. Deadpool and Wolverine opened this past weekend. It made a bazillion dollars. It was really good for movies to succeed. I’m just really happy when things are working. Overall, the box office is down a little bit from last year, but we also have a lot more movies that are still in the pipe coming out. I feel pretty good about it. I see you nodding your head.

Betsy: It’s great. It’s incredibly exciting. I hope this continues. It sure seems dumb that they had that five-and-a-half-month break where people couldn’t do any promo, and they decided to delay all the releases. That seemed like a real waste of momentum.

John: Yeah, it does seem like a bit of that. Deadpool and Wolverine was a movie that famously did have to stop shooting because of the actors strike. That pulled all the people away, which was a hassle for them, because there’s a ton of cameos in that movie, and all those people having to be rescheduled. As the actors strike was going on, I just felt like how they get out of this and how does that movie specifically pull all of its cameo people back in to do those shoots, the logistical nightmare of that seems crazy.

Betsy: Yeah, that’s hats off to the line producer.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Combat pay for them. More big movies coming out. I just want to celebrate when there is good news, because so often we see, oh, numbers are down. It’s like, numbers are actually doing pretty well.

Betsy: Yeah, it’s great. I think we should celebrate all good news all the time.

John: 100 percent. That’s my goal for 2024 into 2025 is celebrate the wins. Let’s do some follow-up. We talked last week about listener who had concerns – he’s part of a writing team. He said, “Oh, the WGA said the gains for writing teams that was not really the gains for writing teams.” We were like, “No, you misread it.” But Megana, could you help us out with some more follow-up we got this week?

Megana: Yes. Chris wrote in and said, “I wanted to reach out and respond to the conversation you had in this week’s episode about the gains in the WGA made for writing teams in the 2023 MBA. In addition to now having pension and health caps applied to each writer instead of the project, which as a screenwriter on a team I think is hugely impactful, we also won that writing teams making the weekly minimum on a TV show will now each receive P and H contributions on the full weekly minimum, not just the half they each take home. My writing partner and I mainly work in features, but I have to imagine this is a substantial win for early career TV writing teams, so I figured it was worth making sure people know about it.”

Betsy: It’s not just early career. Everyone’s getting the contributions based on minimums in television, so it’s huge. My husband has been mostly in a writing team. I’m writing right now a pilot for ABC. Even though we’re not writing partners, we’re a team. We’re co-writing it. So it’s huge to get those full contributions.

John: Yeah, it does really matter. A lot of the gains in the contract this year really did, I think, focus on people who are at that pivotal breakpoint. Script fees for staff writers is a huge win, and making sure that we outsize increases for people who are at that first rung of the ladder, to make sure they can make it to the second rung of the ladder.

Betsy: Yes. The script fees, that is just so huge. It’s something that I have to say. John, you were there when we got that. It was such a thrill, because it’s something we’d fought for for so long. After a certain point, you’re like, “Is that ever gonna happen?” So it was really exciting.

John: Yeah, it really was. Another thing we’ve been talking about on the podcast is about locked pages and colored revisions. I’m curious what your take is, because you work largely in multi-cam – uses the same color cycle, uses the same things. A thing we’ve been discussing is that, particularly for one-hour dramas, like what Craig is doing, they’re not using printed scripts anymore at all, and so this whole notion of colored revisions and locked pages maybe doesn’t make sense.

We’re proposing, what if we just got rid of it and just started numbering stuff and doing it that way? We asked for feedback, and man have we gotten a lot of feedback. Megana, can you help us out with the two things we got this week?

Megana: Yes. I’ll start with Megan, who’s a script coordinator. She writes, “I work as a writer and script coordinator. I wouldn’t say I like locked pages, but once you hit production, I find them useful. One big reason is communication across departments. If a scene is seven pages and I need to talk to another department to quickly resolve an issue, being able to identify the exact page is helpful. And anecdotally, I know art department folks who also write notes in the margins. When a new script is published, being able to know it’s only this one page changing, versus figuring out where in a scene the change is, is helpful to them in transferring those notes.”

John: I get that to a degree. We’re not proposing that you throw out starred revisions. I think starred revisions should be doing that job. The hope is that you can see what’s changed on the page or has changed in the scene, because there’s a star that says this is something new, something to pay attention to. Betsy, what’s your first instinct there?

Betsy: I’ll say in multi-cam, a lot of times you’re just fixing a joke. I think in a half hour in general, if it’s just like, oh, we did a punch-up pass and so there’s eight new jokes, then releasing an entire new script doesn’t make a lot of sense, just because I think a lot of people do still use paper. I don’t. But I think some of the actors do. They just grab the – for the scene. Sometimes in those cases, I think locked pages make sense, because now you’re only delivering 4 pages, 8 pages to the stage, not an entire 32, 35 pages.

John: But in the case of a multi-cam comedy, let’s say there are four new jokes. What if that joke caused page breaks to change, and so you have A and B pages? Is that a hassle in multi-cam? It doesn’t matter?

Betsy: Not really. To me, it’s all wasted paper. I’ll go with the flow on anything. But I do think that it feels like there are more changes in multi-cam than there are in single-cam in general, because oftentimes in multi-cam, the script is changing every single night at such a significant rate that it’s a whole new script anyway. It doesn’t really matter.

John: The thing we’ve been speculating about, at a certain point paper’s just not the best way to capture what the current state of the script is, and so maybe people should just be looking at basically the iPad, where we’re all looking at one source of truth, because that’s what they do actually on late-night variety shows. There’s not a printed thing anymore. They’re all looking at one central, shared document, and that’s what they’re generating the run of the show off of. They’re using things like Scripto to do that.

Betsy: Look, I think it’d be great if we all got away from paper. I listened to that, and I agree. I think getting away from paper and just having a few small ones, I think it’s great. As I said, I don’t use paper anymore when I direct, and I certainly won’t when I’m working on staff. I would much prefer to have this.

But it is true, I think, that still the habit is – and this is true, again, back to multi-cam, because you have a table read and then a run-through and then a run-through – you’re watching the run-through and you’re making notes on the script, your joke pitches, whatever. The same thing on show night; you’re down there with your scripts, and you’re pitching on jokes the whole time through the show. That you can do electronically, obviously, but it’s far easier to just do it on the page.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up on that.

Megana: Sandrine, an AD, writes, “The main reason for keeping locked pages is because of breakdowns. ADs make stripboards that list what scenes will be shot each day, but department heads also make breakdowns of their particular elements, particularly props, art department, and costumes. As writers, directors, and actors, we care that Larry’s motivation changed, but props just wants to know whether or not he’s still throwing the pillow on Page 37. Costumes wants to know if he’s still wearing day 2 nightclothes even though it’s day 3 morning. Those breakdowns are always by scene, but depending on how people organize, can also use page numbers. If new pages don’t impact them, departments will often just keep working with their original script.

“Scene changes as colored pages is much more straightforward than starred revisions. If I get new pages at 11:00 p.m. and have to send off sides to actors, there’s no confusion when sending pink pages versus having to confirm that draft if it only has revision marks. With how quickly things move, particularly the micro-exchanges that happen throughout the production department and with the others, that we work really hard to shield for director and producers, that small detail of clarity can make all the difference.”

John: I welcome Sandrine’s points here. I think one of the things I would stress is that we can’t just stop doing it and not replace it with something that actually takes care of the issues. I think locked pages and colored revisions are a solution that was probably a very smart decision solution for when we first needed to do this. I just feel like there’s probably a better way we could do it now, and I don’t want our inertia to keep us from trying these things.

Betsy: Also, if you use one of those programs, you can download the starred revision. It goes right in your script. You see what’s starred. It lets you know it’s new. It’s not that hard.

John: Absolutely. Some of the software’s already there. Let’s get to one of our two main topics here. The Annual Report from the WGA is out. Over the years, Craig and I have looked at the Annual Report as it’s been published to see where trends are, what’s happening. But Betsy, I don’t think all the guilds do the kind of Annual Report we do. I don’t see the same thing coming out of DGA or SAG or any of the other places. We’re very transparent about the number of people working, how it’s all going, our finances. That’s always been the tradition as long as I’ve been in the field.

Betsy: Yeah, we always are. I think the others have to. I think their membership may not be as-

John: As engaged?

Betsy: Yeah. Writers like to look for the drama and the mystery and the intrigue.

John: Most years, I would say there’s not a lot of mystery and intrigue and drama. As we’ve gone through this, things are growing, because streaming’s growing, or the number of feature writer jobs is decreasing, because that’s just a thing that happened. But this year, there actually is bigger news.

The top line is that a total of 5,501 writers reported employment in all work areas in 2023, which is a 19.5 decline from 2022. The total writer earnings, reported for dues purposes, declined 31.8 percent, to 1.29 billion dollars.

We should say right from the start here, that clause “for dues purposes” is doing a lot of work there, because particularly in television, writers also get producer fees that are not included in the dues process. The total amount that writers in this industry are bringing in is a lot more than 1.2 million dollars, but the 1.29 is how much gets reported to the Guild.

Betsy: Yes, that’s true. Also, did you hear that we were on strike?

John: Yeah. Absolutely. Some of the blowback has been like, “Oh my god, can you see they were down 31.8 percent?” We were on strike for five months, which is 41 percent of the year no one was working, and then there was a SAG strike afterwards. So it’s not a huge surprise that writer income was down.

Betsy: There was already a contraction. I think a lot of people were saying, oh, people are scared because of a potential strike. No, there was a natural – the contraction that we’re feeling now had already begun. I remember I had pitches to take out, and they’re like, “We don’t want to take it out yet, because nobody’s buying.” That had already started. We saw this as a reflection, by the way, in our Strike Fund Loan applications and whatnot.

There were a lot of people that had not been working since 2022 already. My last job was in November of 2022. Then we came back, but the actors didn’t. There was a lot of concern about production and not wanting to maybe start production until after January 1st. The above-scale fees that television writers make, they weren’t getting.

John: A thing we should also notice is that every year this report gets published ,and you see these numbers, and the numbers go up the next time it’s reported, because basically money comes in late. This is only a reflection of the amount of money that came in. If you go back to the ’22 Financial Report, it showed a 6.1 percent decline in earnings, but when they actually did the recalculation, it was up .2 percent. Some of these numbers will actually improve a little bit over time, but it’s not gonna change the minus sign in front of the number. Clearly, writers brought in less money this last year.

Betsy: Yes. I did.

John: I did too. Funny, that. As did Megana. In the report – and we’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf – it breaks it down by TV and by features. TV took a bigger hit, which kind of makes sense, because those are things that are constantly ongoing. For features, there are people who were writing features before the strike happened, and they delivered once they could get back to work, so it didn’t take as big of a hit. TV employment was down negative 35 percent, and feature employment was down 22 percent.

I think where I get frustrated is when people say, “Oh, look how much money was not earned. You’ll never earn that money back,” and so that the strike was useless, because you’re never gonna get that five months of employment back. It makes me want to strangle people over a screen, because everything we have as the Guild, our health plan, our residuals, everything, was because someone was willing to go on strike and get that for future generations.

Betsy: Completely, I hate that too. I have also been told, “This cost me $500,000.” If that’s how much money you’re making, you’re in good shape to be able to ride this strike out in a way that a lot of other people weren’t. I try to be Zen about it. There are people that think about others and understand that the strikes are not just about today, they’re actually about tomorrow, and so this will affect me to some degree, but it’s gonna affect the younger generation far more, hopefully.

John: Writers who are not even in the Guild yet. Writers who are still in high school are benefiting from this. It was during the strike, not only were you part of the negotiating committee, you also had to work with the Strike Fund, the Good and Welfare loans. And I bless you for that, Betsy, because that’s such tough work.

Betsy: Thank you.

John: You were constantly being confronted by folks who were greatly struggling because of – as you said, it wasn’t just the strike. They were struggling before the strike, and the strike made their lives even worse. Can you just talk us through what those two programs are and how it worked?

Betsy: The Strike Fund committee, which is made up of the membership of finance committee and then we added a couple more people because of the workload. There basically are two pots to take loans from. One is the Strike Fund loan. You have to be a current active member. That loan is available to people who have been directly impacted. Their work was stopped because of the strike. You apply for that loan, and then there’s a repayment schedule. It can recur. The Good and Welfare loan is actually available all the time.

John: It’s a fund that’s always there.

Betsy: It’s a fund that’s always there. It’s a lifetime maximum of $14,000. Once you reach that, you’ve capped. You can’t get more. That does not require your work being interrupted by the strike. This could just be you’re showing financial hardship. Generally, people go to Motion Picture, and then we get handed people from that. But in this case, it was such an overwhelming need, and also, Motion Picture was so overwhelmed.

John: We should explain Motion Picture Television Fund. That’s an overall umbrella organization that helps people in the film and television industry suffering hardship.

Betsy: They were handling so many loans for so many different people and from so many different unions that their backlog was… We just then started handling it directly so that people could have answers and money quicker.

John: Great. Good and Welfare runs all the time. Strike Fund was just for this. But important to note, it’s not that we’ve burned through all the Strike Fund. We helped a lot of people, but it’s not like we zeroed out. It’s not like we ran out of money.

Betsy: I think in total, I think we had 20 million dollars in the Strike Fund, and I think we gave out 6. Some people are like, “Why didn’t you empty it out?” Because if you empty it out, then we don’t have anything for another strike. What it takes to build that fund up… It is one of the powers we have is knowing that we have the ability to help people. The AMPTP knows that. Our ability to be able to help people and weather the storm was a lot of our leverage.

John: For sure. In addition to writer income that’s happening in the course of the year, the report also talks through residuals. Residuals are this godsend that we have, thanks to previous strikes. For folks who are brand new to all this, residuals are like royalties that writers get in the film and television industry.

In 2023, the WGA collected 598 million dollars in residuals, which is up 3.5 percent. Feature residuals were down 14.5 percent. Basically, we talk about this all the time. Home video is in a freefall. It’s nowhere near the market that it was before. But this year, even streaming and new media residuals were also down for features. That’s the one place of hope people always had for feature residuals, and those were down a bit too. Again, those numbers are likely to drift up a little bit as more stuff gets reported, but it’s good to get an overall sense of where we’re at with residuals.

Betsy: I do want to point out one thing. The total amounts collected in residuals and interest from 2022 to 2023 almost doubled. It almost doubled in 2023. That’s extraordinary. The fact that it then came down a little bit in 2024, obviously year to date, is not as alarming. I don’t think it was ever gonna keep up with that pace of doubling. Part of that was because there were so many shows that had been grandfathered in to the old rates, but then we got those gains in streaming in 2020, and so for the new shows, those residuals finally kicked in. Think about the delay and once it finally is dropped in streaming. That was what was going to happen, hopefully, and it did.

John: The big things that the Guild does money-wise is it’s setting minimum rates, it is collecting residuals, but it’s also going after and enforcing the contract. The enforcement is real dollars here. For 2023, the Guild collected 75 million dollars in underpaid residuals, along with 2.3 million dollars in interest. Already for 2024, it’s collected 45 million dollars, and 1.7 million dollars in interest. That’s money that – no one else is gonna get that for you. The Guild has to go out there and shake people down and say, “No, you owe this money.” God bless. Some of our ability to do that, both in residuals but especially in late payment, is because we now have contracts for everybody, and we can see, “No, this person was due this. You gotta pay them.”

Betsy: The Guild just did a press release about just the late pay, just the fees that they went after because they had the contracts. They were able to actually enforce something without even needing the member to do anything. It was a benefit of the agency campaign. It was something that we won when we renegotiated that contract. It’s been huge in terms of getting writers late pay. Also, this is a thing now that is in the Guild’s system to be able to constantly be policing.

John: Absolutely. The email said the Guild collected more than 1.5 million dollars in interest for late payment for more than 1,000 writers. Some examples would be $14,400 for one individual feature writer. You add all those up, that’s a huge change for somebody, like, “Oh, here’s money I didn’t know I was owed. Here’s a check for $14,000.” That’s great.

Betsy: I would like that.

John: I would like that. Everyone would like that. This is also why you have a guild, because your agency is never gonna collect that money, or your manager, because they have relationships with those studios and they don’t want to piss them off. The Guild does not care about pissing off anybody. The Guild’s not mean, but the Guild’s gonna get money for its members.

Betsy: That’s the only thing they do. Literally, the people that work in that building, this is their entire career is just worrying about writers. I think when you’re on the inside, which, John, you having been on the board and negotiating committees – you really get to know the staff, and you really see how much long, hard work goes into trying to protect writers, deal with them in the kindest and most helpful way. It’s a staggering achievement, I think, what that building does on a day-to-day basis.

John: 100 percent agree. Let’s wrap this up. The back part of the Annual Report talks about the Guild’s financial situation. You’re on the committee. You’re a person overseeing this on a regular basis. Total assets, 137 million dollars. Total liabilities of 37 million dollars. That works out to 100 million dollars left around. I looked it up in 2022. That equivalent figure was 92 million dollars. Even despite the strike and everything else, we’re doing good.

Betsy: We’re doing great. The fact that we weathered that strike and we still have this kind of financial stability is because of the assets and the investments and very, very careful… It’s why we have the Strike Fund. The finances of the Guild are really healthy. I know that was one of those great rumors that people liked to spread during the strike, like, “Oh, this is gonna bankrupt the Guild.” The whole time, I’m like, “I’m looking at the figures every single month. We’re fine. We’re good.”

John: We’re good. Let’s get to non-WGA topics. Let’s talk about multi-cam, because over the course of doing this podcast for 12 years, we’ve talked to a lot of feature writers, lot of TV writers, but they’ve mostly been TV drama writers, or they’ve been single-camera comedy writers. We’ve talked to very few people about multi-cam. Multi-cam is your bread and butter. That’s where you’ve made your –

Betsy: It’s a mix. I do both. I think it’s partly because a lot of them are dead.

John: That’s why we’re not finding so many of those writers. But we definitely grew up on them.

Betsy: For sure, and they still exist.

John: They’re still exist, and they’re still hugely popular in reruns, but the current ones are still going. Big Bang Theory is a classic multi-cam.

Betsy: But also, The Neighborhood’s been on CBS – I think this is Season 8, 7, something like that. Night Court’s been a bit hit for NBC. There’s a new one just got picked up on ABC. Tim Allen. He’s a new talent that they decided to give a shot to.

John: A rocket ship to the stars. Definitely, I could see him. Really, it comes down to him and Glen Powell. Who is the hot new face? I made Betsy laugh.

Let’s talk through development process, because we have a sense of how stuff works in one-hours now, where there’s a writers’ room that’s putting stuff together, and then you build up a bank of scripts, and then you just go forth and shoot. You try to keep on top of stuff while shooting. Classically, multi-cam has been much more week by week by week, like we’re putting a thing up on its feet and then we’re writing the next one. Is that-

Betsy: Accurate?

John: Yeah.

Betsy: I think to some degree, yes. But I think you hope that you bank a bunch of scripts before the beginning of the year. It’s done a lot of different ways. I worked on a show called Superior Donuts. The way that show worked is we all group-wrote, which I think is really how Chuck Lorre does it too. By nature, you have to have several rooms going, because you’ve got one room who’s working on a script, a future script, you got one room that’s working on the current script on the stage, and so you have that.

It necessitates, I think, a lot more collaboration, multi-cam, because the problem is – it’s not like single-cam, which is why I like single-cam, because you write your script, and it goes to the table read, you have several days or whatever you need to do that rewrite, and then you’ve got your shooting script and you’re off to the races.

But in multi-cam, you get your notes from the network or the studio and everybody. “Okay, here.” Now, you do table read. Table read, you get notes. Then you do a rewrite. You have to get it done by the morning, because it’s gotta be on the stage when the actors get there at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. That’s why sometimes you’re there late at night, because by the time –depending on when your table read is – and you get notes, and you get back to the room, and it’s 3:00. And then you gotta get Pinkberry, and so now it’s 4:30. It’s easy to be there at 11:00 or midnight. I think in many ways, multi-cam is a lot harder, in my opinion, job.

Then the next morning, you gotta be working on breaking Episode 3 or 4 or 5 before you go to run-through, which is at 2:00. Then the whole thing, you get another rewrite, another set of notes, rewrite. Same thing Wednesday, and then you get another set of notes. And then Thursday’s pre-shooting and camera blocking. So you need to have basically as much of a locked script as you can. Then you shoot on Friday. Let’s just say that’s the week.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between multi-cam versus single-cams. I think about a Modern Family as a single-camera show. In theory, they could’ve written the script well in advance and they made up a schedule. These are the sets we’re shooting. This is how we’re making this whole thing work.

When you think of multi-cams, you think of, okay, now the whole writing staff is there for tape night and where you’re actually shooting the whole thing and you can make those changes on the fly. But generally speaking, multi-cam’s all done in just one shot. You’re just doing the whole thing at once, versus splitting it out like normal production.

Betsy: Yes.

John: Those shooting nights must be really exciting but also terrifying, because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and you’re screwed.

Betsy: Yeah. There’s a famous story I’m gonna butcher, but it illustrates this. I think it was Bob Newhart. I think The Bob Newhart Show, in the episode, they had a character, and they kept calling him back. I think his name is Mr. Nakamura. I think I’m right, but I just pictured all these comedy writers going, “That’s not it!” The very first joke died. The writers were all like, “Oh, no. We have four callbacks coming.”

Sometimes it doesn’t go well, or you get a groaner or you get something and you’re like, “Uh-oh.” Then everybody furiously is getting together to try to figure out – “Let’s fix it. Let’s fix it.” In general, I think jokes are what you want to be fixing, not like, “Oh, they don’t understand. They don’t even understand this plot point.” That’s really bad. I’ve not been on a show like this, but I know friends, from what I’d heard, they would shoot the show, let the audience go, then rewrite whole scenes and reshoot them completely differently.

Megana: Wow.

Betsy: That gives me anxiety. I can’t even imagine that. I like to be prepared. Not that they weren’t prepared. I can’t work that way. It’s too chaotic for me.

John: Yeah, that sense of, this was the plan going in there, and it’s suddenly not working, and you’re just under such pressure, because you actually have your entire cast, you have the entire crew, and then in theory, a studio audience. Talk to us about studio audiences now. The shows that have laughter in the background, are most of those shot with audiences now?

Betsy: Yes. They have been. People talk about the laugh track, but the truth is, it’s not really a track. There’s mics. That’s what the studio’s done. Sometimes if you’re using something from the pre-shoot date – oftentimes you’ll pre-shoot scenes, get them in the can, and then you shoot it once in front of the audience, just to get their response and their reaction. Sometimes the audience show performance wasn’t as good or the camera had a bump on it. For some reason, you need to use the one from the – so somebody will borrow the laugh from the – even though that’s not what was under the original. It isn’t really a laugh track. It’s a falsehood. Those laughs are all from the audience itself.

John: Melissa McCarthy was talking about how on Mike and Molly, they would pre-shoot some stuff. If there was a scene where they were driving in a car, they would pre-shoot that, but then on the night of actual filming, they would just be sitting on apple boxes and doing the same scene so they could get the laughter and get the real audience reaction from that.

Betsy: That’s right. Some stuff you’ll play back, and then you’ll get the audience laughs for the thing you’ve played back – that car scene.

John: Shooting some multi-cams, because you’ve also directed, can you talk to us about how you approach shooting a multi-cam scene? Because we’re so used to the camera’s here or the camera’s here, but you’re having to watch a bunch of stuff simultaneously. You’re trying to make sure the performances make sense, but also that the cameras are capturing the performances in the right way. What are you thinking about as a director looking at a script?

Betsy: I was a theater major, so multi-cam is really natural for me, because it’s just a recorded play. That’s really all it is. You’re in this set. The way I always work – and I do this a lot of times with single-cam too – is I go to the best joke in the scene and I work backwards from that.

John: Interesting.

Betsy: Because I always feel like you want to make sure that that thing that it’s building to is landing in the best possible way. A lot of times I’ll look at that and I go, “I know I want this here. I know I want him leaning over the kitchen counter and grabbing for her at this moment.” Then I’ll try to go, “If that’s where I’m ending, where do I start, and where do I have everybody go?”

I like to have a lot of movement in scenes. There are directors that just put two people on a couch. As a writer, that’s death. I know how many scenes have died because a director… Because let’s face it – no offense to actors – with the exception honestly of Helen Hunt, who always wants business and wants to move, a lot of actors are happy just to be sitting on a couch.

John: Park and bark, yeah.

Betsy: I think if you let them do that, sometimes a scene can really die. I always try to keep a lot of life. I like it to feel like it’s natural, not like it’s artificial. I try to help the actors by giving them business that feels organic to what they should be doing and gives them purpose. That’s the other thing that I always think about when I’m directing is figuring out…

Then I also like to be flexible, so that when we get to rehearsal, I can say, “I was thinking this was my plan. What do you think of this plan?” Sometimes they love it and they’re like, “I was feeling like I didn’t want to walk on this moment. I wouldn’t want to be near him.” You’re like, “Great, then don’t do that.” Then you gotta just be flexible with the plan.

John: I want to rewind back. Let’s say this is a script you didn’t write, but this is a script you’re gonna be directing. You’re handed the script. You’re visualizing in your head, “This is the biggest joke. This is where I would see this going.” Are you then having a conversation with the writer, with the team, about putting that stuff in the scripts, putting the business in the script, or is that something you’re holding onto for yourself?

Betsy: No, I just have it, because we’re gonna rehearse, and it may or may not work. We may not like it. They’re gonna see it the next day. They’re gonna either go, “God, that scene worked great,” or…

Occasionally, if we’re deeper, it’s Wednesday night, I’ll say, “For him to get to the door in time to open the door and she’s there, I need one more line, because it’s too big a cross. He can’t get there.” That stuff I’ll say. I try to go up to the writers’ room after on multi-cams. I try to go up after our rehearsal day and go, “Everything worked great. This was beautiful. This thing is wonky. You’ll see tomorrow. But I think we’re missing some words here,” or whatever. I’ll give them a head’s up, because I liked that as a showrunner when I would get that head’s up, because it helps you start to think about and prepare as you go through the rewrite.

John: How do you as a director interact with the showrunner or other writers on rehearsal day? Basically, we recognize this thing isn’t working. Is it their responsibility to notice that and point that out? Is it your responsibility as a director to figure it out? What is the communication there?

Betsy: I would say it’s normally just like you put up the play, the thing, and then the writers are looking at it like, “How do we fix the script to make it better?” I think there are times where they’ll say, “Hey, we actually were thinking this instead of the way you staged it.” They’ll say that to the director. Then sometimes I’ll say, “I tried to make this thing work. We had it this other way. Do you want me to show you that? That didn’t feel right either.” We have a conversation.

I would say because I’m a writer – and I would even say I would identify as a writer principally. That’s where my heart is. That was my first guild. I always try to make the script work as best as I possibly can, and I’m super collaborative with the showrunner. I’m always like, “Come down to set. Come watch rehearsal. Do you want to just come down and be here for this scene? I can let you know.” I like to have them as involved as they possibly can be.

The other thing that sometimes happens with actors occasionally is, there can be some badmouthing of jokes or a little bit of eyerolling. I don’t like that. No one tried to do anything but a great job in the script, so you gotta give them what they wrote.

John: You talk about it’s basically putting up a play, but the difference is, of course, you then can go into the editing room and change the play after it was put up. Can you talk to us about the editing process as a writer, as a director? How much flexibility do you have in the editing room to improve something that was like, eh, on the day? Have you found things in multi-cam where that didn’t really work in person, but then it just killed in the edit? Is that a thing that’s possible to do?

Betsy: Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s less likely in multi-cam. I think there’s definitely more in single. Smash cuts don’t really work in multi-cam the way they do in single, but I will say there’s a couple things that do matter. I worked on a show called Outmatch. They would oftentimes be pretty long. The cut would come in long. I started saying to them, “If you think you’re gonna lift this page, you won’t be able to do that in editing, because people are making crosses.”

What I hate is, unlike single, it can be very difficult to make cuts, because people jump space and because it is a play. You have to be a little more disciplined as a writer to get a little closer to time. Obviously, you want a little bit of fat. Then I always try to think, “What are some things that might go away?” and making sure that two people are not moving during that, so if you want to take that lift, it won’t be hard in the editing room.

John: It’s a thing I hadn’t really considered, but shooting multi-cam, you’re not gonna have the clean singles often that you could use to jump people around in space. They would exist naturally.

Betsy: Yeah, you don’t have as many options.

John: When you are doing multiple takes in multi-cam, let’s say you run that, like, “Oh, that’s pretty good. We’re gonna do it again.” Will you change up cameras just so you have more options in editing?

Betsy: We do. The idea is you got the four cameras. Sometimes it’ll be like, the best two shot is over here actually of these two, so we’ll do a single and a single, but even maybe we’ll do I’ll say a two. But we work with a camera coordinator, and they really helped. You say, “I know I’m gonna play this joke in a two, so let’s make sure we get that in front of the audience the first time,” because it’s the first time they’re seeing the joke, which tends to be the biggest laugh. I don’t want to start in a single. I want to start in a two shot, so I make sure I have that.

John: It does feel weird that we bring in an audience to watch this thing and they’re seeing the action in front of them, but you also want them watching the monitors.

Betsy: It is, yeah.

John: Because that’s the show.

Betsy: I think in general they do seem to watch the monitors. They’re watching the actors, but I think when you’re rolling, I think they go to that, which is good, because a lot of times you need somebody in a close-up for something to play.

John: Now, Megana, you’ve been reading through a bunch of sitcom scripts. Can you talk through about what you’ve learned? We’ll put some of these examples scripts in – put links to them in the show notes. Talk to us about what you’re seeing on the page, because they look different than what we’re used to in single-camera.

Megana: Yeah, they look different. The ones pre-2000s are all two acts with a cold open and maybe a tag, and formatted differently. The action lines are all capitalized, mostly interiors. I was very surprised, roughly six scenes in a script.

Betsy: Depends. How I Met Your Mother was one that really broke that, where they had a lot of scenes. It was a single-cam multi-cam. Yes, the old-school way to do it is to do far fewer scenes. By the way, that makes for a lot more fun show night also, because you get through it quickly. The audience is completely engaged. If you don’t have to wait for a wardrobe change, if you’re able to keep it in that, it really makes the show, I think, really sing.

Megana: Much more characters, I’ve realized, than in most of the single-cam scripts that I’m reading. In a multi-cam, obviously, you’re gonna have a bigger ensemble, typically.

Betsy: Yeah, I think that’s true. When I think about my favorite moments in multi-cam, I directed a few episodes of The Carmichael Show, and there were some scenes in their living room which were hard to stage, because it’s a lot of people in that scene. You have Tiffany and Lil Rel and Jerrod and David and Loretta. It’s not that big a set. You’re also like, “How do I keep it where not everybody’s just sitting down?” because then it gets stagnant. It was really hard to direct.

Those scenes, sometimes they were seven, eight pages long. That’s a lot for actors to get through. Old-school ones, David and Loretta, who come from theater, who come from the stage, it’s not as difficult for. But I think a younger generation, they’re not used to that, particularly if you’ve not come from stages. But those scenes just pop. The audiences love them.

Megana: You mentioned being able to do smash cut jokes in single-cam. Are there any other differences you think of between multi-cam versus single-cam comedy when you’re writing?

Betsy: I worked on a multi-cam called Abby’s that was short-lived. Mike Schur was the EP. Josh Malmuth created it.

John: Is that the one that was all in a backyard?

Betsy: Yes, with Natalie Morales. Josh had a little bit of multi-cam experience when he was much younger, but I think I was the only other person that really had… The rest of the staff was young, and they only had had single-cam experience. I found myself a few times saying, “That doesn’t really work, and the reason it doesn’t work is because you have these run-throughs.” To stage a smash cut is weird. It’s like, smash cut to the car. Where is the car? We don’t have that set. Then you’re having two actors run over to sit in a… I don’t know. It can be really awkward, which doesn’t mean that you can’t do it in the cut. But it can be awkward in terms of the run-throughs and things like that.

Megana: I didn’t realize that all of these scripts were filmed sequentially when you shoot them in front of the audience. I don’t know why I didn’t put that together.

Betsy: Yeah, they are. There are also things that they’d say, “Oh, and then he blows up the mailbox.” I’m like, “How is that gonna happen in front of an audience? It’ll look terrible, because we can’t really do… ” I think there are ways to do things in multi-cam with special effects in post that didn’t used to exist, so I think there’s a lot more flexibility now, but there’s a reason that the great multi-cams were Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers. They were people just doing their thing, walking through telling funny jokes and leaving.

John: Absolutely. I want to talk about entering and leaving, because I think that’s actually a difference, because there’s the expectation in multi-cam that people come in, people enter, and they exit. That’s a thing that actually happens, which you just don’t see as much in single-cam. People are already seated or they’re already in the middle of a thing versus walking into a thing. Entrances and exits are so important and so funny, hopefully, if it works well.

Betsy: I think it probably comes from the energy that that brings to a scene, because again, it’s just like theater. If you’re watching a theater scene of four people sitting around a table for 10 pages, it’s fine, but it’s a different energy when somebody walks in with news, somebody walks in with a complication. It has a really different energy.

John: A lot of the things we’re gonna be linking to are older things, so Cheers or Friends. But this Night Court reboot is new. It’s from 2021. A thing I do notice is underneath the scene header, in parentheses, it says which characters are in the scene. Is that a common thing?

Betsy: Yeah, always.

John: Always. Cheers and Friends don’t do it, but this one does.

Betsy: They must’ve added it later, but it is part of what the coordinator does. Obviously, it’s because it gets back to this thing of all the departments want to just see, “Who’s in this scene? What cats do I have wrangle?”

John: The decision to make dialogue double-spaced, it looks so terrible to me, but it’s convention.

Betsy: It is. It’s a lot easier for an actor to read when they’re walking through with their script, because they don’t have it memorized. All these run-throughs, they’ve got their script.

John: They’re just holding it.

Betsy: They’re walking through the scene on the run-through day, reading from their script while – “And I love you too, sweetie,” and then they… We encourage them to not try to memorize it, because we want the words. I don’t want an approximation of the words. I want to know the exact words, because then I know what I have to fix. Somebody’s saying, “I really like you too, sweetie,” that means something very different.

John: Parentheticals are part of the dialogue block itself. Things just look different in ways that just feel arbitrary.

Betsy: I know. I know.

Megana: Your scripts end up being 40 to 60 pages long.

Betsy: Hopefully not 60. That’s really long. But yes, I would say in the 38 to 42 is the sweet spot, depending on the show. Then some shows, they spread. Who knows what? They just spread, and so it’s just better to have shorter page count. Other shows can get away – I think Friends scripts were usually pretty long, because that dialogue just went so quickly.

John: Let’s say you’re a listener to the show who really loves the multi-cam format and wants to work in that. Would you recommend they write a multi-cam script, or should they write something that’s more single-camera-y but has funny jokes in it? What’s gonna be a better thing to get them noticed and read?

Betsy: A time machine.

John: That’s a good one. First, invent time travel. Then show them your Friends script.

Betsy: I don’t think it matters anymore, from what I can gather. I just had this conversation with my husband last night. He said, “I hear spec scripts are coming back.” I was like, “Really?”

John: Specs of existing shows?

Betsy: Specs meaning specs of existing shows, so you write a Night Court. My friend Corey Nickerson wrote her spec years and years ago. She did a spec Mary Tyler Moore.

John: So exciting.

Betsy: But it was R rated. It got her a lot of attention, because it just was a really cool way to reinvent that idea. For example, I think if you wrote a Modern Family spec, I think that’s gonna work for a multi-cam just great. I don’t think you have to do one or the other. I think if you wrote a Baby Reindeer spec, I’m not sure that’s gonna really translate to the Tim Allen thing.

John: Yeah, somehow, yeah, I could see that being a talent. A guy who we were on the negotiating committee with was working on the new Frasier. That’s another example of a present-day sitcom that’s out there.

I remember when my daughter was young, she was obsessed with one of the Nickelodeon shows, and so I got her onto the set of one of the Nickelodeon shows. It was very much a classic sitcom-y kind of thing, but they filmed it arbitrarily in the afternoons. There was a laugh group. It was just a bunch of people in lawn chairs who’d sit at a TV and laugh with the jokes. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.

Betsy: I’m trying to think of what the equivalent is. It feels like there’s some sort of sex worker equivalent. As a copywriter, you feel so cheap, because you’re like, “I didn’t earn that.” That’s what we had in COVID. We had the laughers in COVID, because you couldn’t have an audience. They would hire these, because then you could test them all. They could be properly COVID tested in the audience. I think it bothered all of us, and particularly actors or standups who are used to earning those laughs. It feels real dirty just to get a big guffaw. You’re like, “It wasn’t that funny. Now it feels like you’re mocking me.”

John: I just remember the producer would walk over to laughers between, like, “Can I get a bigger laugh on this joke?” I’m like, oh, no. Finger on the scale there.

Betsy: It is. It’s got real fake orgasm vibes.

John: It does. Let’s talk about some listener questions. Megana, can we start with this one from Annie?

Megana: Annie writes, “I hooked up with a director who loves one of my scripts, a feature film. He’s put a lot of work into moving the project forward and recently found a producer who’s on board. I trust the director’s taste, and we have good communication. The producer, not so much. I don’t want to be all precious. After all, a script produced is better than one on your hard drive. On the other hand, if the result is completely awful, then what? Any tips on how to navigate this process?”

John: I think we’ve all been in situations where like, “Oh, I really like your perspective, and this other person’s, I don’t, and I am stuck with both of you.” It’s a tricky place to navigate.

Betsy: My advice would be talk to the director as politically savvily as possible. Just say, “Here’s where I’m struggling. I feel like we’re very much in the same page of what this movie is. I’m not feeling like the input from the producer is rowing in the same direction. Tell me how you feel about their notes, how you’re experiencing. Maybe I’m not understanding something or I’m not seeing something,” and see if they can be – because they may be feeling the same way, and by you saying that, be like, “You know what? I actually feel the same way.” Or they may say, “Oh, I’ve worked for this person before, and take this with a grain of salt.”

John: The opposite situation is worse, when you agree with the producer, and the director has terrible notes and terrible instincts. Then you’re gonna get replaced and things are bad. It’s not gonna work out well. Ultimately, that director is responsible for executing your script. Yes, the producer’s gonna have an important function, but you’re better off seeing eye to eye with the director than with the producer.

Betsy: Yes.

John: A question here from Cayenne.

Megana: Cayenne asks, “Sometimes when writing dialogue, I find my characters being sarcastic or deadpan, saying what is phrased like a question but flatly and more as a shady statement. I like to write these with no question mark, because it feels like it makes their tone much clearer. For example, ‘Oh, really?’ versus, ‘Oh, really.’ But I’ve had a friend proofreading catch these, insisting that they’ll snag a reader out of the scene more than help. Do you have any opinions on when or when not to break grammatical norms to communicate tone?”

Betsy: I use punctuation however the hell I want. But also, you can say “flatly.” You’ve got parentheticals available to you. I usually do a combination of parentheticals and punctuation. I don’t know. I hear what the person proofing it feels, but I also think I want to know what the tone is more importantly than anything else.

John: I agree with you. I think if it’s crucial, then that parenthetical could be in there. But I do like that question marks actually kind of have a sound now. Putting a question mark on or taking a question mark, you can kind of hear it. We mentioned a couple weeks ago, someone had two question marks at the end of a sentence. I can hear what that sounds like. It felt appropriate.

This last week there was a press release that came out from Kamala Harris’s campaign, and one of the bullet points was, “Trump is old and quite weird?” with a question mark. That question mark was absolutely perfect. Choosing to put the question mark there or put a question mark on a thing that’s otherwise a statement is a total valid choice. Everything on the page matters. Don’t worry about it being grammatically perfect.

Megana: Just an example to look at, because we’ll probably link the Friends pilot in here, they set up Chandler as droll, and he doesn’t have any question marks in his sarcastic statements. It’s just a period.

John: Let’s do one more. This one from John.

Megana: John writes, “I’m writing a screenplay where, in Act 3, the protagonist is hit with a massive flashback of memories while standing in a room with other people. Like 5 to 10 pages of flashbackery. It’s important stuff and informs what happens next in the story. My question is, during the flashback, what’s happening in current time and space? Has it been presumably caused? If so, can you return right from a flashback and assume no time has passed? Is it better to return by jumping forward a bit in time, or is there a better way to handle this?”

John: I definitely have felt this, where I was like, “Oh, wow, we’ve been gone a long time. Was he actually in real time experiencing all this together?” If you’re gonna be gone for more than a minute, I think you gotta return to the present tense with some sense of, okay, just tell us whether he was experiencing this too, or was this flashback for us, or was it the thing that he was experiencing at the same time.

Betsy: I agree. I would also say use it to the advantage of the scene, in other words that time didn’t just stop for everybody. But it’s like, were they boring? Was somebody in the middle of telling an incredibly emotional story and you just went into flashbacks? Then you come back and they’re like, “And then he died.” You can use it in all kinds of different ways. I would say I always try to think what is the real. Then the real is, if I’m going into a bunch of flashbacks that take three minutes of screentime, that’s three minutes the other person has been doing something, or the other people have.

John: It is weird to do the introspection of what was actually happening while I was having these thoughts. Sometimes it’s in a place where nothing else was happening. I will time travel while I’m in the shower. Nothing else was happening. But if I’m time traveling during the middle of recording this podcast, you two would notice that.

Megana: It happened a few times actually.

John: It has, where I’ve just been like, “I’m not in here anymore.” It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this article by Mary HK Choi for New York Magazine, or The Cut. I always get confused what’s what there. The headline is What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained. I’ve seen other people talk about adult diagnosis of autism. It’s like, okay, sure. But her description of where she was at and how it made things click together was really fascinating. Then I like that she also pushed beyond to say, yes, but also I’m an immigrant and some of what you’re seeing here is also just a pretty understandable response to what my situation was. Yes, there’s probably some brain stuff, but there’s also probably some cultural stuff there, and it’s impossible to disentangle them.

I thought it was a really great article. There were so many things I wanted to highlight and underline. She’s a workaholic who’s, quote, “bad at Christmas,” which is such a great character description.

Betsy: That is great.

John: It’s so good. This is a article by Mary HK Choi. Everyone should look it up.

Megana: Awesome. My One Cool Thing is Season 2 of Unstable.

John: Tell us about Unstable. You watched the whole first season, and you should watch the second season now too?

Megana: Yes, I watched the whole first season. Everyone should watch the second season. This is the show that I had to leave my beloved Scriptnotes producing job for.

John: Absolutely. You can see Megana’s name on screen as a staff writer on Unstable Season 2.

Megana: Yes. It is a single-cam comedy on Netflix starring Rob Lowe and his real-life son John Lowe. There’s also Fred Armisen, Sian Clifford. This season has Lamorne Morris. It’s a delightful, quirky comedy. The episodes are 20 minutes long. Check it out.

John: Delightful and very exciting. Here’s the secret about Netflix, which we should just tell everybody. Start watching it and just watch the whole thing, because they really care about things being completed. Be a completionist. If you don’t have a chance to watch it all when you first sit down, maybe just let it play, so you get credit for it. Then you can go back and watch the episodes again.

Betsy: Who has time to watch an entire series in one sitting? I’m lucky to get through one.

John: I know.

Betsy: I don’t know. I guess people who don’t have kids. I don’t know.

Megana: I have a lot of time to do that.

Betsy: If you’ve had a couple glasses of wine at dinner and it’s… If it’s 9:45 and I’m not on my way to bed, something’s wrong.

John: You and me, we’re right in that zone. I could start watching something, but it’s already 9:00, so soon that means I’m gonna be tired and I’m gonna want to be upstairs.

Betsy: That’s exactly right. I feel bad, because you guys had cool things. But you could prepare. All I’ve done – this is a callback to the flashback.

John: Please.

Betsy: All I’ve done this entire time you guys were saying yours was – my brain was racing through, “Come up with a cool thing!” I barely heard either one of you. You know what I saw that I really enjoyed is a little movie called Wicked Little Letters.

John: Tell me about this.

Betsy: It’s a English movie – as John knows, we love all things English – with Jessie.

John: Jessie Buckley?

Betsy: Yep.

John: Jessie Buckley from Chernobyl.

Betsy: Yes. She’s delightful. It’s Olivia Colman.

John: Come on.

Betsy: It’s written by this fantastic writer, who’s also an actor, named Jonny Sweet.

John: Great.

Betsy: That we’re somewhat obsessed with. It’s a delight.

John: Great. Wicked Little Letters.

Betsy: It’s on streaming now.

Megana: It’s on Netflix. I’m glad you recommended it, because I saw it and I was like, “This looks really good,” but I haven’t heard people talking about it.

Betsy: It’s a delightful romp. It has some serious stuff, and it’s also loosely based on a true story.

John: Fun. You’ve not heard anybody talking about it until Betsy Thomas shows up to talk about it. Now, that broke the dam.

Betsy: Exactly. I just made Jonny Sweet a billionaire.

John: Absolutely. The little title will go to the top, what’s trending now on it, just because of your recommendation.

Betsy: Exactly.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with, this week, special help from Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. A special outro in celebration of the Olympics. It’s Scriptnotes themed in celebration of the Olympics.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and other gear that’s all great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on golf. I want to hear about golf.

Betsy: That’s the least honest thing you’ve ever said.

John: Betsy, as always, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Betsy: I had a blast, you guys. Thank you so much.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: I actually am genuinely curious about golf, because there’s things that I probably never would do myself but I’m still curious about, and golf is one of those, because this is my perception of golf: It’s hot and sunny out, two things I don’t like. I’m gonna go walk around carrying a bag of things, trying to hit a ball poorly while talking with people. None of these things are clicking for me, but they do click for you. Tell me, what got you into golf?

Betsy: First of all, the birthplace of golf, it’s not hot and sunny. It’s actually the opposite.

John: It’s Scottish.

Betsy: It’s cold and windy and rainy. What is it? A lovely walk spoiled is what I think somebody called golf. Of course I can’t remember who. I’m trying to think of how to say to somebody who doesn’t play golf what’s good about golf.

Golf takes extraordinary amount of skill, practice, discipline, mental tenacity. You are always kind of just playing yourself. Even when you’re playing in a match, you’re playing competitively, the person you’re trying to beat is usually the person in your own head. That’s what I struggle the most with.

You have however many shots to get to the hole. But there are so many different versions of those shots. Tennis, you’ve got however many you have. But golf, it’s so much more complicated and more difficult. It’s a game that is very difficult to master. You can continue to play it until you’re old. It’s very social. You get four to five hours with your loved one, your friends, whoever.

John: A thing you brought up today, which I’d never really considered, is it’s less like poker and more like Solitaire, because you’re really just playing yourself. It doesn’t really matter how everyone else does. Ultimately, you’re gonna compare your scores, but you’re not playing against each other directly, the way you are in tennis or really almost any other sport.

Betsy: You are in match play. I’m playing in our club championship this weekend. Tomorrow’s my first match of match plays. It’s a bracket, and you have to win. When you are playing somebody else in a match, you are playing them directly. Hole by hole is what you’re winning.

John: How they perform really has no bearing on how you perform directly.

Betsy: No, except for if they’re on the green in two and they’re putting for birdie, and I’m in the fairway, I’m like, “Uh-oh, I have to get up and down, or I’m gonna lose this hole.”

John: Megana, you said your dad is a golfer?

Megana: He is a golfer. He’s a big-time golfer.

John: Did he golf before he came to the States, or how did that all start?

Megana: No, it’s really a hobby that he picked up, gosh, I think when I was like – it was once we moved to Ohio. Him and his friend just started golfing. Now they’re out there on all of the hot and sunny, humid days in Ohio, because there’s very limited days that you can golf there.

John: Your dad’s a doctor, so that also ties in. I think about doctors golfing.

Megana: Yeah, I guess some of his friends who are doctors also golf. My mom’s gotten into it recently.

John: Oh, interesting.

Megana: It’s a cute thing they do together.

John: My dad golfed some. I remember my mom decided, “I’m gonna take lessons so I can golf with him.” I would sit in the car at the edge of the golf practice range where she’d have her lessons. She just hated it. I really respect my mom for just stopping. She was like, “I don’t like this.” She just stopped. Learning it’s okay to quit was just such an inspiration to me.

Megana: I do feel really inspired when I see that. Betsy, when did you start golfing?

Betsy: I got clubs for my 30th birthday.

John: So not as a child then.

Betsy: So four years ago.

John: Four years, you’re already playing in the championship. That’s really great.

Betsy: Yeah, I’m the wunderkind.

John: Why did you get clubs? Did your husband golf?

Betsy: No, my friend JB Roberts, who is a manager here in LA, but we went to college together, he just decided I should be a golfer. I was an athlete. I was always an athlete. I was a tennis player. I played lacrosse growing up. I had hit the golf ball. I’d hit around a little bit. But I was not a golfer. I had no clubs, whatever. He had decided I should be a golfer. He got my friends to all pitch in and buy me clubs and lessons for my 30th birthday. That’s what began it. It was great though, because I really did enjoy it.

Then when I met my husband, Adrian, he is a very good golfer. We found that out on our first date. Then that gave us a thing to do together. We’ve been able to have that, and now our son is an excellent golfer. The three of us do golf trips all the time. We’ve been to Scotland. We get to travel.

One of the things I love about it is, A, you can drink. It’s like, oh, I’m getting my steps in and I have a vodka tonic. But here’s the terrible thing about the elitism of golf. It has some of the most beautiful land in the world – are golf courses. You get to see spectacular places wherever you travel. You get to see some of the most gorgeous landscape. As a family, we travel, and we always have this thing that we do together.

I know it sounds weird. It’s like, how is that romantic? Adrian and I are going to Ireland in October for our 25th wedding anniversary, and we’re gonna play golf. It’ll be just the two of us walking around a course together for five hours or four and a half hours. It’s actually beautiful and lovely. I know it sounds strange, but it is weirdly romantic.

John: You’ve done a really good job selling golf. I actually am much more appreciative of a thing now. The other perception I have of golf has always been people making deals over golf. How useful or not useful has it been in terms of the industry that you work in to play golf? Do you golf with industry folks? How does that tie together?

Betsy: I don’t really, but I think it’s more of sexism, because there aren’t that many women that play golf. I think that it’s a thing that guys do, because the guys all play Saturday morning together. In the club we belong, there are a lot of showbiz people. I don’t really have that, because I play with my family or I play with the ladies. We’re not normally doing that kind of thing. But I do think that is a real thing. I think there’s a lot of friendships that are formed through that.

John: Megana, was your dad golfing – do you think it was also part of, not even assimilation, but just a way to become more American? Was that a goal at all?

Megana: That’s an interesting question. I’m from the suburbs in Ohio. There is one really big golf course in the middle of our town.

Betsy: Where?

Megana: It’s Yankee Trace Golf Club in Centerville, Ohio. Are you familiar with Ohio at all?

Betsy: I am.

John: You’re saying you and Adrian are not gonna be traveling to Centerville, Ohio on your next romantic golf trip?

Betsy: I don’t think so. I’m not thinking. But there are some amazing golf courses in Ohio, actually. That’s why I was asking.

Megana: Yeah, there’s the NCR Country Club golf course, which is the National Cash Register, which is a huge part of Dayton, Ohio lore.

John: I love it.

Megana: But a lot of his friends that he golfs with are Indian, so I don’t know if it was totally an assimilation thing. He really wanted me to get into it because it is such a mental game. I don’t know. I was just such a hormonal teenager. I think he was like, “This will help,” and it did the opposite. It made me so mad.

John: It wasn’t a Venus and Serena Williams situation where suddenly-

Megana: No, absolutely not.

Betsy: I will tell you about the doctors thing that it is one of the great things. There actually are a lot of doctors who play golf, and it’s one of the great things about golf, because I turned my ankle really badly and couldn’t put weight on it, and it was like, “Oh good, there’s Dr. Dave. He’s head of orthopedics at Children’s.” I was like, “Hey.” He checks it out. Then the guy we were playing with is actually an acupuncturist and a Chinese medicine doctor. He took me into the gym, and he did a bunch of pressure point stuff on me. I said to Dave, “What should I do?” He’s like, “Ice and vodka, in any combination.” See?

John: Absolutely. The cure for most issues though really.

Betsy: That’s so true.

John: Betsy, an absolute delight having you on.

Betsy: I just had a great time.

Megana: Thank you.

Betsy: Unstable, I’m gonna watch it.

Megana: Please.

Links:

• Betsy Thomas on Wikipedia and IMDb
• Megana Rao on Twitter and IMDb
• WGA West Annual Report
• Writer Earnings Fell $600 Million Due to Strike and Industry Contraction, WGA Says by Gene Maddus for Variety
• Cheers – “Give Me a Ring Sometime” by Glen and Les Charles
• Cheers – “Father Knows Last”
• Night Court – “Pilot” by Dan Rubin
• Friends – “Pilot” by David Crane & Marta Kauffman
• What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained by Mary HK Choi for The Cut
• Unstable – Season 2 on Netflix (hooray Megana Rao!)
• Wicked Little Letters on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
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• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.