Search Results for: flashbacks

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, in today’s episode of Scriptnotes there are enough bad words that you probably don’t want to listen to it in the car with your kids, or at work if you work at some place that doesn’t like to have occasional swearing.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**Dana Fox:** I am not John August.

**Craig:** And this is a live Scriptnotes coming to you from Hollywood, California. Folks, let them know you’re here. To set the stage for you playing the home game, we are in the ArcLight Theater in Hollywood. Big 400-seat theater. The whole thing is sold out. Everyone is here to benefit Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity that helps out kids in need. And this is something that we did last year and we’re doing it this year. Not, you know, I don’t want to go out of my way and say that last year’s show wasn’t great. It was great.

There’s no chance that it’s not going to get better this time. We had David Benioff and Dan Weiss from Game of Thrones.

**Dana:** That’s nice. That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** There you go. Yeah, that was good.

**Dana:** Those guys are good. That one guy is tall.

**Craig:** Yeah, very tall.

**Dana:** Weirdly attractive. The other guy I’ve not met yet, but also I believe to be weirdly attractive. I’m just trying to set the stage because it’s not a visual medium.

**Craig:** This is the sort of stuff I don’t get with John August.

**Dana:** I’m trying to just—

**Craig:** Ever. But tonight we have incredible, incredible guests. But first, just to kick things off, I figured we should just catch up a little. You know, John likes to do follow up. I’ll make it easy for you as we go.

Right now, maybe we’re going on strike.

**Dana:** Oh boy. Yeah.

**Craig:** Are we going on strike?

**Dana:** I don’t actually know, but I do know that like a hot minute ago I pressed send on a really not super great script that had to be handed in today before this event. [laughs] So, you’re welcome, America. I hope you enjoy that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Flash ahead to a couple years. When you’re in the movie theater you might go, “Ohh, this was what she was talking about. It’s not that great.”

We’re hopeful that there isn’t going to be a strike. If some of you are writers, and you’re a little tense, don’t worry. We all are. But we’re hopeful.

**Dana:** If anybody reads anything on their phone, definitely yell it out. Like right as it happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, like if we’re going on strike, interrupt the show. And if we’re definitely not going on strike, yeah, interrupt the show.

Well, I think we should probably get started with our guests, because we have a busy show. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk to our guests and then at the end of the show we’ll open it up to some questions from you guys, as we always do. And then afterwards apparently there is a party that only one-quarter of you may attend. So, just decide amongst yourselves. Who thinks that sounds like a good idea?

**Dana:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah, should be fine. Our first guest tonight – my cards are—

**Dana:** Your cards are amazing, Craig. You’re doing so good. I love this.

**Craig:** John does everything. You know that, right?

**Dana:** Oh, you’re doing amazing.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m doing all right.

**Dana:** You’re doing great. I love this. Go.

**Craig:** Because normally I just – normally I get to do what you do. It’s so much more fun, right?

**Dana:** Keep crushing. You’re doing great.

**Craig:** Our first guest tonight is the creator, executive producer, writer, and star of a television show that is now the longest running live action comedy in television history.

**Dana:** Woohoo.

**Craig:** So, screw you, Leave it to Beaver, or whoever they beat. I’d like to welcome to the show Rob McElhenney.

**Rob McElhenney:** Is this where you were sitting?

**Craig:** Yeah, is it nice?

**Rob:** Yeah, super warm. Are you nervous?

**Craig:** I’ve done 299 of these. This is our 299th – you’d think that we would have done the 300th like this, right? Not interested in round numbers. Fuck them. Does that answer your question?

**Dana:** You know, the penultimate episode every television show at the end of the series is always better than the final episode. So in a weird way I feel like this is it.

**Craig:** This is the one. This is the one.

**Dana:** This is the Ozymandias, or Rian will tell us how to pronounce it when he comes in.

**Craig:** It’s a very famous poem. It’s Ozymandias. We all know.

**Dana:** Clearly not John August. Like living up to not being John August right away.

**Craig:** Rob, I want to just ask you, how do you even wrap your mind around the fact that you’ve done this show that is the longest running live action comedy in television history. Does it feel that way? I mean, does it feel like you’ve run a triple marathon? Or are you like, no problem, we can keep doing this forever.

**Rob:** I certainly feel like we could keep doing it forever just because we’re having so much fun with it. And our audience seems to grow every year, which is great.

I will say that even just driving here, as I was driving down Fountain, it all looks exactly the same to me as it did 12 years ago. And I was sort of reflecting on the last decade of my life. And it seems to have gone very quickly. Even though I was obviously in a very different point in my life when I created the show.

**Dana:** I have a follow up question. Do you have children and do you know their names?

**Rob:** I do. I have two children. Two boys. And, well, I’ve been lucky enough because my wife is also on the show with me. So, we have – they have their own trailer. They’re not going to be fucked up. They’re fine.

**Craig:** You still haven’t even mentioned the names. It’s boy 1 and boy 2.

**Dana:** Boy 1 and Boy 2, super grounded.

**Craig:** Yeah. Boy and Shorter Boy.

**Rob:** My wife takes care of the names. The nanny does the schooling. No, I get to spend a tremendous amount of time with them. And, in fact, we kind of got the show down to a system now where our writer’s room is we come in at 10:30 or 11 and we leave by 5 or 5:30, no matter what.

**Dana:** I always heard that the Modern Family people had a “No Headlights Rule,” which is like they don’t leave if they have to turn their headlights on. And at like two o’clock in the morning when I was making my show, I was always so jealous of that. Do you guys have the “No Headlights Rule?”

**Rob:** No. Usually we just watch to see when Charlie’s eyes glaze over. And as soon as that happens I’m like, all right, it’s just diminishing returns at this point.

**Craig:** It seems weirdly seasonal anyway. I don’t like that rule. You know, think about a show like—

**Rob:** By the way, I’m going to interrupt you for a second, because that’s just kind of fun. I’m going to continue to do that throughout your own show. We’re not the longest running sitcom as of right now. We will be as per our current contract.

**Craig:** Who do we have to beat?

**Rob:** Ossie and Harriet.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. No problem.

**Rob:** Yeah. We just stepped on My Three Son’s necks, all three of them.

**Craig:** Nice. Because Ossie and Harriet, they’re all dead.

**Rob:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can’t come back.

**Rob:** No.

**Craig:** OK. We’re good.

**Dana:** It’s got to be a little bittersweet. What is it like to strangle your idols to death?

**Craig:** He didn’t say they were his idols.

**Rob:** I was probably born 25 years after that show was canceled.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious about, when I first – I remember years and years ago when I first started out, I was talking to somebody who worked in television and they said the key to television is likeability. The characters have to be likeable.

And even then I thought that doesn’t make any – I don’t like many of – the characters that I love on TV seem really grouchy and grumpy. And then Seinfeld came along and defined the notion of a show where everyone was unlikeable, even to the point where in their season finale they all to prison and the show is literally saying these are bad people.

You guys went, nah, nah, nah, we’ll show you bad people. I’m kind of curious, the fact that everyone is sort of sociopathic, I mean, I don’t know if you would agree with that diagnosis, but the fact that they’re all sociopathic, does that kind of – does that kind of help you just generate endless ideas? You don’t seem – like you could go anywhere with these characters.

**Rob:** Yeah. I mean, the fact that the characters don’t grow, or change, or learn anything ever is helpful because you reset at the end of every episode. So it’s a blank slate.

**Craig:** That’s tragic actually.

**Dana:** Like morally bankrupt Finding Dory sort of?

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**Rob:** That’s how I pitched it.

**Dana:** Ish.

**Craig:** Because it just seems like, you know, shows will say, well, the show was kind of going along and then it jumped the shark. You know, but you guys, I think you’ve avoided the shark-jumping because all you do is jump sharks. It’s all you do, every episode you’re jumping some kind of shark.

**Rob:** Yeah. We jumped shark within the first three minutes of the pilot.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you’re going to be fine.

**Dana:** I haven’t watched all 7,000 episodes, but have you guys ever tried to jump the shark by not doing something insane, like having it just be a normal episode of television?

**Rob:** Yeah, we’ve done a fair amount of just straight episodes. Certainly we do a lot of bottle episodes, where there’s not a lot going on. It’s just all very insular. In fact, we did an episode this season called The Gang Tends Bar. And it’s literally just about us running, operating a drinking establishment.

**Dana:** Like an actually working bar?

**Rob:** And one of the characters, it was brought up that this is like the greatest scam in history. We sell something that’s addicting to people for money. We get them addicted. And then they give us money. And we think we came up with that scam. And we’re like who came up with the scam? We’re like, we did when we bought the bar 12 years ago. And really the guys that first started creating alcohol and selling it created that scam.

**Craig:** Right. This is why you can go forever. Because you can just write an episode where they just tend bar. I mean, there’s really nothing limiting you, I mean, because a lot of shows will say, well, Simpsons did it. That’s the problem. You know, Simpsons, there’s been 4 billion episodes and they’ve done all these high concept.

You guys don’t really do, well, I guess occasionally there’s sort of high concept.

**Rob:** Yeah, we’ll do musical episodes. We did an episode this year where we turned black for the entire episode. We thought, well—

**Craig:** How’d that go?

**Rob:** It was fairly well received, thank you very much. There was a splattering of applause. See?

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re very accepting.

**Rob:** Yeah. That’s really the lifeblood of our audience is the smattering of applause across the country. Mostly in metropolitan markets. For the last 15 years.

**Craig:** It’s kind of amazing. Between the ages of?

**Dana:** But for real, like dialing in for real, how do you actually keep it feeling fresh after that many episodes? It’s sort of shocking to me that you guys are able to still be that good after that many episodes.

**Rob:** I think it’s mostly because it’s our faces that are out there. I really do believe that. I think, look, running a show as you guys know is really difficult and time-consuming, and tedious, and it takes a tremendous amount of effort. And also we’ve had the luxury of only doing between 10 and 15 episodes a season. We’ve never done more than 15 episodes a season, which I think helps.

But beyond that, the fact that we know that eventually we have to shoot it and it’s going to be our face that goes out there adds that extra element of let’s not fuck this up in the writer’s room. Let’s get it right. And let’s make sure we continue to have fun.

But also beyond that, we still enjoy it.

**Craig:** But that’s another interesting challenge that you have that I can’t really think of anybody else that has it quite like you. You create a show, you write a show, you produce a show, you star in the show, you’re married to one of your cast members. Now, over time there are inevitably moments where there’s, I don’t want to say there’s strife or anything, but there’s some conflict, or there’s competing interests, or – how do you–?

**Rob:** Between me and my wife?

**Craig:** No, I’m talking about the cast and, you know, normally if you have a problem as a writer with a cast member there’s a producer that you can talk to. Or if you are cast members having an issue with each other, you can go talk to a writer. There’s nowhere to go. You’re always there. How do you manage the blurred roles that you all seem to kind of have on that show?

**Rob:** We fight quite a bit. And we continue to fight. The truth is that over the years we’ve tried to figure out ways to sort of alleviate some of that conflict. And oftentimes what happens is when we do, the work is garbage. And at the end of the day, we realize that the conflict – the confluence of all of these very strong-willed people is what makes the show great, from the writers, to the performers, even to some of the grips. I mean, we’ve had people with us for 10, 11, 12 seasons. And we got to a point where people are free to add joke pitches.

I mean, I’ve had grips and a teamster actually gave me an idea for an episode. What you have to approach every day with is that it’s all about the work. It’s not about your ego. It’s not about me. It’s about the show being good. And as long as the fights are about the show being good and getting better and not about ego, then that’s going to yield the best result.

**Craig:** Those are good, clean fights. I mean, those are the kinds of fights that are productive. But it’s still – it is a marriage of a kind, especially with comedy, too. It just seems like, I don’t know, funny people can be tricky. And it’s an interesting thing that you guys have managed to keep that marriage. And it’s been so consistent.

You know, a lot of times these shows will go on, and then one big person leaves and they replace that person. So, you know, it’s not Sam and Diane, it’s Sam and Rebecca. And it kind of keeps going after that. But that really hasn’t happened with you guys.

**Rob:** Well, we’ve had the luxury of working with Danny, too. So, Danny, who has a – oh, he’s only an icon.

**Craig:** He’s a television legend, worth a mere smattering.

**Rob:** And he gave us a tremendous amount of perspective. I mean, you know, he was on one of the great – he played, I think, one of the top five greatest characters in the history of television, on an amazing TV show. His wife was in one of the greatest TV shows of all time. And then they both went on to fabulous careers outside of it. And Danny obviously was a huge movie star. And he would pull us aside and be like, “Look, I promise you, it’s never going to get better than this. Ever. Ever.” And I believe that. I believe it.

And so when you have somebody like Charlie, who over the last four or five years has gone on and done really, really big movies, he comes back and every time he comes back he says, “I don’t want to do that. I want to do this. This is what I want to do. So if I have to sacrifice that for this, I will do that for the rest of my life.”

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great. Good for Charlie.

**Dana:** It’s kind of emotional.

**Craig:** All right, I have kind of a looking beyond the show question for you, because you know Charlie goes on, he does these things. You, too, I know have interest in doing other things beyond the show. And the nice thing is one doesn’t have to preclude the other. You can do both. But when you think about, I don’t want to say cheating on your show, but maybe doing something else, do you run in the opposite direction from what you’re doing on that show? Because Charlie, you know, he stays in the comedy pocket pretty much. Are you thinking that’s there, I’m going to try something completely different when I branch off?

**Rob:** Yes. I mean, the project that I’m working on right now couldn’t be any different than – any more different than Sunny. And I think I never saw myself as a sitcom person. I never considered myself funny. I just happened to meet really, really funny people and I was desperate and I was waiting tables and I was like I’ve got to figure out something.

And I wrote this script that was super dark, but when I put it into Charlie’s hands, or into Glenn’s hands, they made it funny. And I realized, oh wow, this could actually be a sitcom. But the truth is I never had any aspirations to get into comedy writing at all.

So when I look for an extension outside of Sunny, I kind of run away from it.

**Craig:** Wow. Interesting.

**Dana:** I feel like there are probably people here and who are listening who would love to know just like the trajectory of how you actually made it happen. Because I think people who are as successful as you, it’s like we all sit here and we talk about the career and all the amazing stuff. And most people are out there just going like, “I just wish someone would answer my phone,” or, you know, phone call, or read my script, or whatever it is.

What was the sort of defining moment for you? What was your trajectory to get you where you are right now?

**Rob:** Well, mostly just desperation. I mean, I was working in every bar and restaurant in NYC. And I was just acting, or I was trying to act, I was auditioning, and not getting any jobs. And complaining about every script that I read, whether I thought that the script was garbage or that I wasn’t getting the job.

So, I was encouraged very aggressively by my agent to stop bitching and to write something myself. I got the Syd Field screenwriting books, which, you know, are—

**Craig:** Yeah. Page One. Page Three. Yeah.

**Rob:** And the William Goldman. And I just tried to understand the—

**Craig:** And just so I figure out if I have to kill you or not, was the first thing that you wrote It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

**Rob:** No. No. The first thing—

**Dana:** You will make it back to your car tonight.

**Rob:** The first thing I wrote was not a comedy at all. It was really super dark. Really dark. Because that was the time in my life when I was very dark. I wrote the script about a crime that took place in NYC and I wound up giving it to my agent. And he said maybe I could sell this. And we wound up optioning it to a company called Propaganda Films. Remember them?

**Craig:** They do commercial work, right?

**Rob:** Yes, or they did. They were shady. Shady people.

**Craig:** Oh, they were shady?

**Rob:** Oh yeah. Big time.

**Craig:** The name is kind of a tip off, isn’t it?

**Rob:** You’d think so.

**Craig:** Yeah, like let me tell you all about Propaganda Films.

**Rob:** They did. I will say though they wound up getting it to Paul Schrader. Paul Schrader, I don’t know if you guys know Paul Schrader.

**Craig:** Wrote Taxi Driver.

**Rob:** Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. And he signed on to direct it. So, I got to work with Paul for six or eight months rewriting the script.

**Craig:** That’s kind of cool.

**Rob:** That was really cool. Really cool. But if you know Paul’s work, the movie got darker and weirder. And darker and weirder. And then by the end, Propaganda was waiting to get paid and they didn’t really pay me anything. And by the end I said, hey Paul, like what’s going on? Are you going to make this movie? He said, “Well, I’m going to go off and do this other movie first, and then I’ll come back.” And then in the meantime Propaganda went bankrupt and the whole thing fell apart.

**Craig:** I mean, you must have one of these, right? I have one. We all have one of these.

**Dana:** Everybody has a creepy, sad story like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know like when you get that first moment where you’re like, oh my god, this is it? That company is going out of business in like a week. So your smart move is to short the stock.

**Dana:** Short the stock, yeah.

**Craig:** Just short the stock. Like whoever offers you your first gig, short the stock. Make some money.

**Dana:** But not to sound like a platitude, but I’ve always believed like it actually matters more how you get up from that one. Because like it’s going to happen for sure. And then it’s how do you handle yourself? Do you like cry like a bitch and get really mad about it and never write anything ever again? Or do you just go like, all right, pulling on my pants. I’m going to be a grownup. I’m going to start over.

**Rob:** I cried like a bitch. And I didn’t write anything for a long time. Because I was like that’s miserable. I mean, who wants to do that.

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**Rob:** Yeah. I don’t even like writing. I hate writing. And if there’s any other writers in here, you guys know that writing is the worst.

**Dana:** It’s horrible.

**Rob:** It’s like the dumbest, dumbest job.

**Craig:** We’ve said it many times.

**Dana:** It’s like sad, and painful, and thankless.

**Craig:** The only thing worse than writing—

**Rob:** No recognition.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only thing worse than writing is listening to a podcast about writing.

**Dana:** Yeah.

**Rob:** It’s so much better to say the words that someone else wrote. And then you get all the money.

**Craig:** I know. It’s amazing. They even tell you were to stand.

**Rob:** They do everything for you.

**Craig:** Everything.

**Rob:** They just point the camera and you just say the words.

**Craig:** Somebody dresses you like a child.

**Rob:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. I know. But I don’t have the facial symmetry for it. Good job, man. That’s pretty sweet.

**Rob:** I can’t help it. Anyway, so then I moved out to Los Angeles and I decided to write again, but I just wrote something. And I thought I want to write something very simple so that I don’t have to give it to somebody else. I want to go shoot it myself. And so I shot – I wrote a little short film that was very dark, but I brought it to my friends, Glenn and Charlie, and they thought it was funny.

And so we – and I was like all right.

**Craig:** Boy, did you dumb fuck your way into a billion dollars?

**Dana:** Oh yeah, that’s what I was going for. It was funny.

**Rob:** I just hitched my wagon to those two and just like held on for dear life.

**Craig:** This just blows my mind. Like you get Charlie and Glenn and Tim Herlihy, a friend of ours, when he was at NYU his roommate was Adam Sandler. I got Ted Cruz. This is unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable. Like, I must have been – you think I’m bad now, I must have been a real piece of shit in a previous life.

**Dana:** I just want to know, because you know they didn’t match that stuff up just randomly. There was some weird algorithm that thought you and Ted Cruz were like fucking—

**Craig:** It was like a Saw movie. Let’s just watch a man break down. Let’s do it. Let’s just see it happen and it’ll be fun.

**Dana:** There were cameras everywhere. You just don’t know.

**Craig:** Exactly. It was horrendous. So, you know, you’re like, oh yeah, look, I wrote a thing. Let me give it to my talented friends.

**Rob:** And I just decided I want to make this. I want to learn how to make it. So I didn’t know anything really about filmmaking, but I didn’t know anything about writing. I just got all the books and tried to – obviously I watched as many movies and TV shows as I possibly could over the course of my life.

And so I just went to Best Buy. And I didn’t have any money, but I got one of their credit cards. You know, it was super high interest rate and it was like, “I’ll pay you back.” And I did. I did pay them back.

**Craig:** You did? You paid them back.

**Rob:** And I bought a camera, like a prosumer-camera, and then I got Final Cut and learned how to cut. And then we just shot it. And then I cut it together. And it was terrible. Like, terrible, terrible. But I realized it was terrible. And then I rewrote it. We shot it again. That was also terrible. And then we reshot it maybe three or four iterations, and then I realized, oh wait, maybe this isn’t so bad.

**Dana:** The takeaway is there are no excuses. I mean, people talk all the time about like, well, I could, if I would, if I this, or if I that. It’s like you have an iPhone. Do it. Stop talking about it. Just do it. Because you’re going to suck for a very long time, so you might as well start sucking. Oh god. Sorry honey.

**Craig:** That’s Sexy Craig’s job. He handles that stuff. We don’t talk about the sucking. It’s true that that is necessary. It’s also true that a lot of people will shoot it, it stinks, they shoot it, it stinks, they shoot it. And then it never does get better. I mean, that’s the fascinating thing. That’s the thing I just wish I could go in time and watch all those little moments where people just go this way or this way. And people that have the potential and are talented, and there are some of them here tonight, who can go either way.

And they just decide to go this way. You know, because the funny thing is most of the people that insist and persist and prevail against all odds actually just never make it because they were never going to make it. It’s funny, like I worry sometimes that the people who can make it get too easily discouraged, because they’re aware. Like you said, “I know it sucks.”

**Dana:** They’re smart enough to know that it’s not good. Yeah, that’s what I was like.

**Craig:** What is it, the Dunning-Kruger effect? Is that what it is? I think we have a president who currently…anyway.

Well, that was enlightening. I think we got a pretty good sense of why it is that the show has been going on so long, and it’s because you do have that thing where you marry talent to this endless commitment. It’s really remarkable. I mean, it’s an incredible accomplishment.

Television has been around a long time. And for you to beat those records is unbelievable. And I can only presume, what are we talking about here, another 20, 30? I mean, basically until you die?

**Rob:** I guess.

**Craig:** All right. Well, you heard it here. We made news.

**Rob:** I don’t know. If you keep watching, we’ll keep doing it.

**Craig:** Keep watching it. He’ll keep doing it. Thank you, Rob.

**Rob:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Rian, come on out, buddy. We haven’t talked in a while. Looper was good.

**Rian Johnson:** Thank you.

**Dana:** I loved Looper.

**Craig:** And anything, anything since?

**Rian:** Well, it’s been slow.

**Craig:** It’s been slow. It happens.

**Rian:** It does.

**Craig:** But you know what?

**Dana:** I’m sorry. I feel so bad for you.

**Craig:** Brother Bloom was a little bit of a dip there. You got a little slow. Got a little sluggish. But then you came back. You bounce back. You’ll be fine.

Anyway, thanks for coming, Rian.

**Rian:** Yeah. Good talk. Good talk.

**Craig:** Rian Johnson, this is great. I don’t quite know how it’s taken this long. Maybe just because, I don’t – I don’t know. I always feel like, I don’t want to put you on the hot seat or anything.

**Rian:** I’m getting so nervous right now. I don’t know what’s about to happen.

**Craig:** But this is why. I don’t want to make you nervous. But Rian and I have been friends for a long time. And, of course, we all know of his story, his legend. Rian wrote and directed Brick, which came out in 2005. And he won the Originality of Vision prize at Sundance, which that year at least that’s accurate. I don’t know if it always is. That year, completely accurate.

**Rian:** It’s original. That’s like the better word.

**Craig:** It’s originality. Yeah, we’re not saying it’s good. But we haven’t seen that before. 2008, aforementioned Brothers Bloom which I actually love.

**Dana:** Bigger applause than Danny DeVito.

**Rian:** And Ozymandias.

**Dana:** And…yes.

**Craig:** And in 2012, I’m sure you all saw Looper. We’ll be having a contest later to see which one of you can explain the plot to me. But it is awesome. Also, Rian has directed some of the best of the Breaking Bad episodes, including Ozymandias. Ozymandias, look upon my works in despair.

And recently Rian has written and directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi. So what happens in it? [laughs]

**Rian:** Yeah, there’s a Jedi who is…the last in…

**Craig:** The last, possibly. OK, here’s how I want to start. You really are, when it says originality of vision, I thought that was apt. Because you are unique to me in that no matter original and, well, we’ll see monastic a lot of writers are, at some point along the way, and maybe peppered in throughout, they will work with other people on things. I’m thinking of Scott Frank, for instance. Scott always has time each year to write his own thing. But then he’ll go and he’ll work with James Mangold on Logan, for instance. And he’ll bop around and do things.

Not you. You have always been Rian Johnson Industries, kind of. I write Rian Johnson screenplays and then I direct Rian Johnson movies. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t one every year. You take your time. You’re careful about it.

Then, this happens, and it’s sort of like the absolute opposite of solitude. You have now hundreds of people. And, on top of that, you also have this existing culture behind you and these other movies and characters that have been handed. How did you adapt to that new reality?

**Rian:** Well, I mean, it’s been so nice having lots of other people and not feeling so lonely. But I should actually back up and say one of the most surprising and nicest things about this whole experience has been how similar it actually felt in terms of the process to the other films.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Rian:** It was really a come up with a story that I care about, write it, and then direct it. And I had my DP, Steve Yedlin, my producer, Ram Bergman, my editor, Bob Ducsay, from Looper. I mean, people I’ve been working with for years. And bizarrely just kind of felt like a – it felt like we were just all making another movie. And creatively, because Disney and Lucas Film were so terrific, also just creatively it felt just like coming up with something I want to make and making it. It’s been weird.

**Craig:** That’s very good news, I think. Because I think sometimes people will say, well, if somebody makes their own films, they are sort of an auteur for lack of a better word, and then they get involved in some large other thing, maybe their vision gets muddled. But what you’re saying kind of is you actually just did it again.

**Rian:** Yeah. I mean, yeah, and I think because people who are much more talented than me have done stuff this size, and it can go the other way very easily.

**Craig:** What do you mean by the other way?

**Rian:** I mean, it can be a bad experience. And that’s what Ram, my producer and I, before we came into this we waited really carefully, because on the one hand it’s Star Wars. It’s this thing that you love so much. But that also means that if it isn’t a good experience and it goes south, it would be the worst nightmare in the world to be fucking up Star Wars. And to have a miserable experience making the thing you great up loving.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?

**Rian:** Exactly. I was going to say. Spoiler alert.

**Craig:** So enjoy this time. This is nice.

**Rian:** I will just be listening to this podcast on repeat. Huddled in a fetal position behind a Denny’s.

**Craig:** That’s how I met you.

**Rian:** In Pomona. Yes. Flashbacks.

**Craig:** Memories. Dana, what do you have to say about this guy?

**Dana:** I wrote some stuff down.

**Rian:** Look at this.

**Dana:** I brought a pink pen just as like a fuck you to you guys.

**Rian:** That’s good.

**Dana:** So, I asked my kids to ask you questions. So, I said I’m going to interview the director of Star Wars tonight. I said what do you want to know. And Charlotte, my two-year-old, said Darth Vader. And Oliver, my four-year-old, said, “That’s not a question. You have to ask something like what’s the new movie about. Tell me the plot.”

So, if you want to elaborate on that. And then I said I don’t think he’s going to be able to say that, so you have to ask something else. And he said, “OK, I want to know why does Daddy’s phone only have some of the Star Wars’ songs on it, but not all of it.”

And then I said I don’t think he knows the answer to that, so you have to ask one more. So he wants to know why Boba Fett was a bounty hunter.

**Rian:** Ohh.

**Craig:** Answer the question.

**Dana:** Let me ask a follow up adult-style question. How did you get over the institutional memory of it enough to actually get in there and start doing it? I mean, I feel like it’s such a coveted brand for, you know, a company, but it’s more so I think we all think it’s our own thing. Like it’s all our favorite thing. So, how did you get over that initial feeling of like how can I touch this perfect thing?

**Rian:** Yeah. I mean, from the outside just looking at it, that was a really scary thing. And once I kind of started actually working on it, it’s funny, I found that the exact thing you think could be a big burden was actually the main thing that helped the whole process. Because telling any story, and you can look at – this is definitely what Lucas did when he made the original movies, he went out there trusting his own instincts.

And he was out there to tell a story that he cared about and that made sense to him. And at the end of the day it was coming from a really personal place. And so for me, knowing that I had that grounding of from a kid these movies meaning that much to me, and being so deeply ingrained, I kind of – I felt like that kind of gave me permission to trust that and to not freak out about what it means in any kind of bigger sense. And just say, OK, I know why I wanted to be Luke Skywalker when I was a kid. I’m going to believe that that’s a good compass to follow.

And so kind of turning inward like that actually was kind of a lifesaver. And I would think is the only way you could approach something like this and make it, you know, kind of mean anything to you I guess.

**Dana:** Is it weird if I cry during this Q&A? That’s like really beautiful.

**Craig:** John has never cried.

**Rian:** In life?

**Craig:** Ever.

**Rian:** No.

**Dana:** That’s the only thing I can bring to the table.

**Craig:** When John was born he didn’t cry. He just came on out and—

**Rian:** Just clipped himself off.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yep. And then plugged himself in. Yeah.

**Dana:** Have you always trusted though that gut instinct that like your point of view mattered and meant something? Because I think for me my trajectory was going from a person who was just trying to survive and get a paycheck and have a job to someone who felt like, well, maybe my specific perspective on this is interesting. And I should follow it. Did you always have that? Or when did you get that?

**Rian:** Well, I never was like good or smart enough to like get industry work before I made my first movie really. Basically I wrote Brick right out of college. And essentially just like tried to get it made through my 20s. I didn’t make it until I was 30. But the whole time I was trying and it kept almost getting there and falling apart.

But I was working some really wonderful jobs. I worked at a preschool for deaf kids for a while. I worked at the Disney Channel producing promos for like Bear in the Big Blue House. Like really good jobs, but nothing that was like I’m making money doing what I, you know, what my sights are set on.

So, when I started doing it, it was starting with this thing that was this really personal thing. And then was very, very lucky and able to just kind of keep doing that, I guess.

**Craig:** But there’s something about you, though, that a lot of people start out, they have a dream of what they want to do. They can’t quite get there. They’re making promos for Blue’s Clues.

**Rian:** Bear in the Big Blue House.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, the what now? The Bear?

**Rian:** Bear in the Big Blue House.

**Craig:** Oh, I remember him. Oh yeah.

**Rian:** Great shows. Henson. Anyway, go ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was. It was good. So, you’re working on Blue’s Clues and you get this big break to make your movie and I think for a lot of people at that moment when someone turns to them and says, “But…” there are a couple of things you need to do that maybe don’t feel right to you. In that moment you say, oh OK, I don’t want to go back to the Bear in the Big Blue House. I want to keep moving forward here.

You’ve always struck me as somebody who would just say, well, then no. I’ll just go back to the Blue House.

**Rian:** It’s not like I had written something that had huge commercial value and somebody was going to say, “If you let us do this, we’ll make you a billion.” You know? Brick is such a weird movie. You can imagine how weird it was on the page. And with a first-time director, like it’s not like there were a ton of things like that that you’re talking about. But there were a lot of times that I would show it to different people who were producers or knew somebody somewhere or something, had that tantalizing like, you know, oh, maybe if I follow this. And they would say, “Yeah, if it’s just not set in high school, maybe then we’ll do it.”

**Craig:** I remember – can I tell a Looper story? Can I tell a story about seeing Looper? You had a few of us come to see Looper. I don’t know if you recall.

**Rian:** Oh, I recall the screening. We call you guys now the Wrecking Crew.

**Craig:** Well, we all liked it. I mean, you should have—

**Rian:** Did you, though?

**Craig:** You should have seen the Game of Thrones pilot. That was a wrecking crew. There was just blood everywhere. No, it was good. It was good. It was a little long. It was the usual stuff, right?

But I do remember that there was, and there was a bunch of us there, and a lot of good writers. I mean, I think Scott Frank was there. And I think Ted Griffin was there. And maybe John Gatins, too. And there was – you guys have seen Looper? Great. If you haven’t seen Looper, you don’t get to go to the party. And just like that, we solved the attendance problem.

So there’s a moment where Bruce Willis has a choice about whether or not to kill a child because that child may or may not grow up to become a terrible, despotic mass murderer. And he chooses to kill the child. And it turns out, wrong kid.

And there was a debate, I remember, in the room. And I remember specifically thinking, ugh, I don’t know, but I think so. It’s ballsy as hell. It’s brave. I don’t know. And I remember you just watched this whole thing. And at some point I remember thinking he doesn’t give a good sweet goddamn what any of us think about this. Not one bit. He’s made up his mind.

And that, in a weird way, is precious in our business to have an instinct and to adhere to it, even when a lot of people might say, “Whoa, that’s a little cray-cray.”

**Rian:** Yes, but, I guess. Yes, but you still need to – like for instance I was listening to you guys and I was really tuned into the fact that – like and this was actually very, very interesting. Because Looper, I had worked with some great, very famous actors before, but nobody who is like the type of star that Bruce Willis is. And a big fear going into it from the page to the screen was are we going to lose – is his character going to totally lose the audience when he shoots the kid? They’ll disconnect from the movie and say I don’t care what happens, I’m not invested anymore.

And so I was actually very tuned in and listening to every conversation I could listen to about—

**Craig:** Maybe it’s just your face looks like you—

**Rian:** That’s very possible. But, I mean, the fascinating thing is we found out it takes a lot to turn an audience against Bruce Willis. It takes more than shooting a child in the face. He shoots a child, an innocent child in the face. And like we talked to people afterwards saying like, “Yeah, but we figured he must have had a reason for doing it.” It was a very useful lesson actually.

**Craig:** Absolutely terrifying, actually.

**Rian:** Steve Buscemi in that part might not have been the—

**Craig:** No, no, that’s it. Boo. Walk out. Burn the theater down.

**Dana:** I think all of America must be like me, because I just see him and I’m like, “Dad?” Like he’s just everybody dad. So we’re like, I guess I forgive him. Maybe he’ll be a nice guy next time. Don’t worry, my dad doesn’t listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t think anyone’s does. So, here’s something that I think people here will – it’s a nice warming thought. That if you are trying to break into the business, you’re trying to get into Hollywood as a writer or filmmaker, everyone really is Rian Johnson in 1997, right? Everyone has a script. Everyone has some sort of lack of visibility about what’s ahead of them.

But what do you tell folks who come here? I mean, how to approach their own path when they are being beset on all sides by advice and–?

**Rian:** Well, it was actually listening, Rob, listening to you guys talk. You said exactly what I feel like I most often respond to with that which is – and this was my experience, too, which is I think if you put energy into how do I break into the industry, how do I get an agent, how do I – it’s putting the cart before the horse. I think that ultimately first and foremost practicing. Shooting it. And then reshooting it. And reshooting it. And rewriting. And just getting, working on yourself and getting better. But just doing it.

Like getting a camera. Getting whatever camera you can get your hands on. And making stuff. And then getting out there however you can. I really, it sounds naïve a little bit when you say it, but I actually think practically that’s the industry – you can’t say the industry will be the path to your door, but I think that’s the best way to find your career is just to do what you do and get it out there however you can I think.

**Craig:** Substance.

**Rian:** I really believe double down on substance. And that ultimately is, you know, what everybody is looking for so hard out there. Everybody wants something that’s interesting and good, I think. I hear a laugh.

**Craig:** That guy is like, “I own Disney.”

**Rian:** I may be totally skewed on this and wrong, but I feel like that’s – end up coming down on that, you know?

**Dana:** I was just going to say, do think that Brick would get made now?

**Rian:** Yes, if someone made it. Yeah. I mean.

**Craig:** That was kind of Yoda-like.

**Rian:** It didn’t get made then until they made it.

**Dana:** And how did you truly not give up after like ten years of trying on the same thing? How did you know your thing was worth something, and not that it was not, you know, people are slamming the door in your face for a reason? Like you pushed past that.

**Rian:** Well, I mean, I’m sure everyone here has a similar thing where it’s not like – you’re not always boldly up on the horse going forward. You do end up sobbing and crying. You do end up needing a weighted blanket occasionally to comfort you. But I don’t know, so it’s not a steady process, but I think ultimately like me if you’re dumb enough and have little enough talents outside of this industry, you have no other options really and have to just keep blindly moving forward, I think.

No, you just keep doing what you do, I think.

**Craig:** That’s accurate. I don’t think you’re good at anything else.

**Rian:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. Because you’ve always written what you’ve directed, and you’ve always directed what you’ve written, is there a director you’d like to write a script for? And conversely is there a writer whose work you would love to direct?

It’s one of those fanciful, rhetorical, imaginary questions.

**Rian:** Well, I mean, there are so many directors that I love, but writing, like you said, writing sucks, writing is terrible. I hate writing.

**Craig:** Welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Rian:** I feel like directing is the fun thing. No, writing – you love writing—

**Craig:** If I go through the pain of writing, then I want to direct it?

**Rian:** Exactly. Yeah. If you go through all that work, then why wouldn’t you get to make the film?

**Craig:** Interesting. Directing seems so hard to me.

**Rian:** No, it’s so easy.

**Craig:** Because you’ve got to wake up.

**Rian:** It’s so easy.

**Craig:** Every day you have to wake up. And all the questions. These glasses or these glasses? This tie or that tie?

**Rian:** Those glasses. That tie.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**Rian:** What was hard about that?

**Craig:** Film School with Rian Johnson. OK, I have one last question for you. Not to bum everybody out, but Carrie Fisher was not only our first princess and wonderful actor and a huge part of our culture, but she was a great, great screenwriter. And when she passed away, John and I talked about that. She was one of us.

And so I just thought I would invite you to share any thoughts you had about Carrie, because you were probably the last director she worked with, right?

**Rian:** Yeah. That’s how we connected as writers. And that was just an instant thing. The very first time I met her, I ended up just spending hours at her house. And she was like, “Tropic of Cancer. I’ve got it here somewhere.” And we ended up, even after she read the script, you know, that was kind of our bonding experience. Sitting together for hours, going through all the different lines.

Anyway, she had a brilliant mind. And I really loved her, man. I’m very, very, very sad she’s not around to give me a piece of mind – give me a piece of her mind about the movie when she sees it. She’s wonderful. I’m happy that we have a wonderful, beautiful performance from her in the film. And I’m just really happy and grateful I got to meet her and have her in my life, even briefly.

**Craig:** Fantastic answer. Thank you, Rian. Maybe we could open it up to some questions and answers for Rob, and for Rian, and for Dana.

**Dana:** Please, let’s not be weird about it, guys.

**Craig:** We have some microphones we can hand around.

Audience Member: The Last Jedi has what I think is one of the best posters ever. Was there any point where you send it back and send this poster sucked? What level of involvement did you have with it?

**Rian:** Well, no, they – I had little to nothing to – I had nothing to do with it, really. So I can agree with you and say it’s a gorgeous poster without being an asshole.

And really the way it worked, I walked into a room just with like 40 posters on the walls of all of these different ideas. And it was me and Kathy Kennedy and some other folks. And we all – it was like magnets. Our eyes just, whoop, right to that one.

Then there were just a couple tweaks to it, but really right off the bat they just made this. I agree, I think it’s a stunner. I’m glad you like it.

Audience Member: My question is for Rob. You mentioned that it took a lot of encouraging from I think you said your agent to get you to finally write something. And I was wondering what finally got you to do it, or now when you don’t want to write, or when it’s hard, because like you said it kind of sucks, what gets you to finally do it? What helps?

**Rob:** Desperation. I mean, because the truth is I hate it. If I didn’t make that clear. I hate it. It’s the worst. It’s the worst. The worst. And I wasn’t working. I was working in a restaurant. And I just got sick of it. So I started writing. And now I do it for money. And when there’s a deadline and I have to do it because we’re shooting. You know, and the truth is when I’m really – when we get into it and things are happening and things are moving forward, there’s not a greater feeling in the world, because as you know if you’re a writer, staring at a blank page or a blank computer screen is the absolute worst, but when you fill it up and when you read it back through, and you truly believe in your heart. And you know that it’s good, you created that.

And it’s the only art form in our industry where you create something from whole cloth. And what can be more satisfying than that? So I still fucking hate it, but I derive an incredible amount of pleasure from a finished project.

**Dana:** Yeah, and also a little practical advice, too. Just like take your pajamas off. Because if you don’t look like you’re at a job, you won’t feel like you’re at a job. And if you don’t have real pressure, create fake pressure that you actually are so fucked up you start believing in. Because if there are no deadlines and if you don’t have to do it to get paid, and if none of that stuff is there and you’re just in a vacuum going what should I do, it’s all just this wonderful blank page.

The last strike we had, I was like, oh, this is going to be amazing. I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write this spec that’s inside me. I did not write one word. Because there were no constraints. Nobody was saying like it has to be a little bit of this, and do your best job making it that. So just create fake constraints on yourself.

And even if that is doing an It’s Always Sunny spec so that you don’t feel the pressure of I have to have my voice figured out. Just figure out how to write a good scene the way that that show writes a good scene. And study their show, you know, study a bunch of their episodes and try to do your best at that. And that will just get you in the muscle of it.

**Craig:** Got any advice for the blocked or the reticent?

**Rian:** No. I think that it’s, I don’t know, it sucks. There’s no cure for it. Except I find literally just switching and thinking about something else for a while or if you don’t have the luxury of doing that, yeah, then staring at the wallpaper until it starts peeling off. And I’m just going to describe the rest of Barton Fink right now in detail. This is going to take two hours, but it’ll be worth it.

**Craig:** That is very Swedish. He’s our little Swede. I’m a big fan of the shower. I don’t know for whatever reason. Taking a long shower lets me kind of imagine. I don’t like writing—

**Rob:** How environmentally responsible of you.

**Dana:** There’s a drought in California, Craig.

**Rob:** The worst drought in the history of our state. Oh, you just take your long showers.

**Dana:** Craig created the drought.

**Rob:** Because the world needs more of your movies.

**Craig:** More, exactly. They’re not even – it’s not even water. It’s hand to blood. It’s awesome.

Audience Member: Excuse me. I lost my voice last weekend, so I have to growl like Batman. Batman wants to know, it’s for all four of you, is there one pilot or one movie that you wish you had written or directed?

**Craig:** Oh my god, just one?

**Rob:** Man, I watch Mad Men, and I’ve watched that series through twice. And then started a third time. And I’m just fascinated by that show on every level. Insofar as it is not a subject matter that interests me at all. There’s not much that actually happens. There’s no hook. On paper, having not read the scripts, I just mean in terms of like a one-line pitch, it seems boring as all hell.

And yet I was riveted more watching that show than almost certainly Game of Thrones. I’m going to tear them apart.

**Craig:** I mean, I like the show. I just don’t like them.

**Rob:** I actually hate them. I happen to love Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad, and I was riveted watching all those shows, but I’m inherently interested in watching a chemistry teacher turn into Scarface. I’m inherently interested in watching dragons going and kick ass. I’m not inherently interested in watching a bunch of guys smoke cigarettes and drink whisky and talk about marketing.

And yet I was thoroughly riveted at every moment of every episode. And humbled by the fact that there was a person and/or people out there that were able to do that with the writing.

**Craig:** What about you, Rian?

**Rian:** Paper Moon is the – I love a lot of movies, but if there’s one movie that I watch and I feel like, god, this feels so close to everything I love. It’s Paper Moon.

But what Rob said, I mean, I think – like I just saw Certain Women, the Kelly Reichardt movie, recently and it’s – like I find myself fascinated by things that are so outside of my skill set. And it’s a similar thing where it’s such a gentle, such a – you know, such an observational film and yet you’re riveted every single second. More so than in most Hollywood blockbusters. And that’s magical to me, because I don’t know how it’s done.

So, yeah, that’s, yeah, similar.

**Craig:** What about you, Dana?

**Dana:** Don’t patronize me. Nobody cares. No, because Rob said – I’m kidding. I’m sitting next to Rian. Because Rob already said Mad Men, I would have to say The West Wing, because I’m in love with shows that are about people having a work family and loving their work so much that they have these relationships that are not sexual at all, but that are like deeply loving. And I find that fascinating. That’s what I loved about Mad Men is I was so obsessed with the Peggy Olson/Dan Draper characters, because they had this beautiful love affair that was totally platonic.

And because they loved their work. Craig, what do you think?

**Rian:** Nobody cares.

**Craig:** I’m going to say Toy Story. And I’m going to say Toy Story because it was, I think – maybe it was the first time that the technology of storytelling finally perfected narrative. It was just perfect. There was nothing there that was wrong. Everything was right. Everything worked. Everything fit together beautifully. And Pixar has done it over and over and over.

But I remember seeing Toy Story and thinking that’s a flawless thing. Even if it’s not, you know, I know it’s not Taxi Driver, but it’s a flawless thing. Who wouldn’t want to have that, to be able to say I did that? That would be remarkable.

**Dana:** And I have kids, so I can tell you that if you’ve watched it 147,000 times, it doesn’t get boring.

**Craig:** There’s no mistakes.

**Dana:** It’s perfect. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** There’s just not one mistake. It’s just a remarkable thing.

Audience Member: Hey guys. Myself, like many in this room, I’ve written a lot of screenplays, gotten attachments, or good notes, or lots of nice things, and all these breadcrumbs of hope that have never led to a sale or a film necessarily getting made. So, I guess I’m just asking the four of you, since clearly you’ve seen success and know what you’re doing, what are some enduring qualities that we all need or should hone in on and strap in for, because I know that even once you get a sale, or you get something made, it’s not like your problems go away.

So, can you maybe talk about some of those qualities?

**Rob:** Qualities in a script? Or qualities—

**Craig:** I think he means in him.

Audience Member: Oh, I’m sorry. Just as a writer/producer, just person living and working in this city?

**Craig:** Well, I’ll tell you one thing that you’re going to run into, people are going to read your work and then they’re going to say things about it. And they’re not, even if you’re working for them, and they’re paying you, or they’ve purchased it already, they will say things like, “That just doesn’t work.” And it will feel terrible. It will feel much worse than you think it will feel.

It never stops feeling terrible in a weird way. It’s a strange thing to have that, you know, I always think like if actors dealt with what writers deal with, it would just be one take after another of, “Nah, that’s not, no.”

**Rob:** We do. It’s called auditioning.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, there is that. That’s to get the job. We also do that. It’s called pitching. But you are going to have to learn in those moments to put that pain second, because where a lot of young writers, new writers go wrong is they cannot handle that emotional dissonance. It’s hard. And they become either defensive or discombobulated.

And in the end people have choices of who they want to work with. And you don’t want to be unpleasant. And it’s not our fault, it just happens. It’s human. But I think having some kind of emotional resilience is a really important thing.

**Dana:** And congratulations on having breadcrumbs. I mean, that’s more than most people have. So, keep going, dude.

**Rob:** Certainly resolve is something that Craig was just talking about, but I think it’s also just a lack of cynicism. And Mazin is like one of the most cynical people I’ve ever met to comedic effect, but the truth is he wakes up every day – I believe this is true. You can correct me if I’m wrong. But you still have a sense of wonder and joy of the fact that you are living your dream.

And I think you have to remind yourself of that every single day. Whether you’re getting paid for it or not. Because you could be working, you know, on a roof somewhere laying grout. You know, you’re not.

**Craig:** Flashing.

**Rob:** Flashing?

**Craig:** You could be flashing a roof.

**Rob:** Sure. Whatever profession Craig was headed down.

**Craig:** Flashing. On a roof.

**Rob:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the stuff that goes—

**Dana:** Around the thing. It plugs the holes.

**Craig:** Nah. It’s more like, some of you know what I’m talking about. Some of you have spent time on a roof like I have.

**Rob:** Anyway, it’s really easy to get cynical. And to get hardened. And to become so angry at the world or at the industry or, you know, whatever – whoever you need to blame. But the truth is that if you wake up and what you love to do is write, or what you love to do is make films, you can do that right now.

And you are doing it already. And I think that takes a certain sense of innocence and maybe naïve joy and sense of wonder. And if you lose that – and even the most hardened, I’m pointing to Craig, of professionals, I still think keeps that.

**Craig:** Oh, this is, you know, a lot of these people I assume have been listening to the show for a long time. You start to realize that I’m – John is actually the hard one. I’m a mush. I really am. And I am endlessly amused and fascinated by what we do.

When you do get to walk onto a sound stage, every single time I walk on a sound stage I get excited. Every single time. And when I see dailies, and when I see things like movie posters, I get excited. And when, I don’t know, when it becomes real, even storyboards get me excited. And the truth is what no one can ever take away from us is we get that time on our own where we’re completely in control of it. And in those moments, you should feel nothing but passion for it.

I mean, you guys all seem to hate writing. I love it. And I love it even when it’s hard. I love it because it’s just, I don’t know, it seems like the most wonderful mode of living. I think if you just stayed in there, obviously it would be bad. They would find you days later. But that’s, you know, that is so much preferable to me than I don’t know what are the other options. Like heroin, I guess? Just something to make everything else go away?

**Dana:** And more practical advice. If you have to have a job, like most people do when they’re trying to get into the business, you have to like pay the bills. Give your good hours to your writing. And don’t tell John August, because I was actually John August’s assistant. I’m sure he won’t listen to this. Wah. Sorry John.

But I used to wake up. I worked for John, and I would get to his house at like 9:30. And I used to wake up at 4:30 in the morning so I could write before I got to work. So, then I was like answering his phone like, [slurring] “This is John August’s office.” And I did nap a lot. He did see me napping a lot.

So, you can’t always do that. But if you can do that, I would recommend not saying to yourself like, oh, I’m going to do my writing when I get home from work in like the two shitty hours where I’m exhausted at the end of every day, because that’s like saying you’re going to become a surgeon in your spare time, you know, on your lunch break or whatever. That’s not doable.

**Craig:** All right. I think we’ve got time for one more.

Audience Member: I have a question for Dana. I’m sorry that it’s probably the question you get a lot. Do you feel like you had to work harder breaking in as a woman? And what advice do you have for young women screenwriters.

**Craig:** Let me answer that for Dana.

**Dana:** No, no, no, Craig, you don’t understand. I’m going to answer it, and then you’re going to tell me why I’m wrong. You’re going to explain it to me later why I’m wrong.

First of all, no, I don’t think I had to work harder because I was a woman. I think I just had to work really, really, really hard because this business is really hard. And anyone who wants to do it has to work really hard.

You know, there have been times where I think being a woman is not awesome. For example, you’re getting ready to pitch something and you have to go get a blow out and that takes a fucking hour. And no guy has to do that. And then you’ve got to worry about your outfit, because you’re like do you think he’s the kind of guy who likes tits or doesn’t like tits? And does he hate his ex-wife, or does he love his wife? Like I don’t know. Do I remind him of his daughter, or his wife, or you know, it’s like, ugh. So that’s a fucking drag.

**Craig:** Did you know that was going on? I didn’t know that was going on.

**Dana:** I mean, you have to think about it. So, you know, there’s that.

What I will say is that there was a certain point at which I stopped tap dancing and like pretending that it was every guy’s idea. Because I did a lot of that for a long time. Like I would plant things in guy’s heads and then they would say it back to me. And I’d be like, “Oh my god, you’re so smart.” But that got kind of exhausting. So I stopped doing it. And I think my advice would be just like work harder than – it’s the same advice I would have for me which is like work harder than everyone else. I was always wherever I had to be before everyone else. And I always stayed later than everybody else. And I always treated every single meeting and every single interaction I had with anyone like it was an audition to get invited back into the room the next day.

And no matter how much success I’ve had, I still feel like that. Every single day I treat my job like I’m the luckiest person on earth that someone is paying me to do it. And I better just leave everything on the field, or not on the field. How does sports work?

Do you want to leave it on the field? Or do you want to take it off the field?

**Craig:** Do they like tits? Do they not like tits?

**Dana:** Do they like the boobs? Do they not like the boobs?

**Craig:** It’s basically the same question.

**Dana:** It’s very complicated.

Oh, and one thing that was hard was when I started running my own TV show, and I was the boss of like guys who are a lot older than me. That was weird. So, you know, you do have to deal with that kind of stuff. But I’m sure you guys have had your version of that. You look like a 12-year-old. You probably still have that. Like a hot 12-year-old.

**Rob:** I leave my boobs on every field I go to.

**Craig:** I think that pretty much covers it. And that’s our show.

As always, Scriptnotes is produced by Godwin Itai Jabangwe. Godwin. And it is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our awesome, fantastic intro. Matthew.

If you have questions, you know where to find us. For short questions, you can reach us on Twitter. I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust. For longer questions, such as the ones that were posed here, you want to email those to ask@johnaugust.com.

Show notes for this episode will be at johnaugust.com. Transcripts go up four days after. With that, I want to thank so, so much my cohost, Dana Fox. The amazing Rian Johnson. The incredible Rob McElhenney. John Gatins, and all the folks at Hollywood Heart, it was such a pleasure. Thank you guys for coming out and supporting this great cause.

Thank you very much.

Links:

* [Rob McElhenney](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0568390/)
* It’s Always Sunny: [The Gang Tends Bar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsR2n7vI72U)
* [Rian Johnson](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0426059/)
* [Looper Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AXwtch744A)
* [The Last Jedi Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB4I68XVPzQ)
* [Dana Fox](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1401416/?ref_=nv_sr_1)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_299.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 269 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we will be looking at mystery versus confusion and how you might have more of the former, with less of the latter. We will also be answering listener questions on flashbacks and capitalizing on festival success. Plus we have three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. It’s going to be a big show.

**Craig:** It does already sound, and I don’t want to jinx us or anything, like the best show we’ve ever done and we’ll ever do.

**John:** You know, I’ve been scrolling through the little outline here, Craig, and you’ve got a lot of really good stuff in here. So, we will see if we can — we’ll see if we can finish as strong as we start. How about we start with a correction because I actually messed up in last’s week’s episode? I know this seems impossible because I don’t make mistakes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I did make a mistake in the very first minute of last week’s episode. I referred to Jane Bennet in Darcy. I was referring to the principal characters of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Bennet is a sister, she’s not the principal character. I really did mean Elizabeth Bennet but I think I was conflating her and confusing her with Jane Austin, the author of Pride and Prejudice. So I just wanted to actually get that out of there and make it clear that I have read Pride and Prejudice. I really do know who’s the main characters in Pride and Prejudice.

**Craig:** It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

**John:** It’s a feature. Also, I wanted to make sure that the other Jane Austin, the one who you actually get when you Google it, she’s a professor of political theory in the US and she’s going to be really confused when her name shows up in the Google news alert later today.

**Craig:** Wait, Jane Bennet is or Jane Austin is?

**John:** Jane Bennet. Did I said Jane Austin then?

**Craig:** Yeah. So again, I have to say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

**John:** Feature. So somehow, I have a form of aphasia that is limited to Jane Austin references.

**Craig:** That is so specific.

**John:** It is but it’s all I can do.

**Craig:** You know what? Should qualify you for Make a Wish.

**John:** Yeah absolutely.

**Craig:** Anything you want and —

**John:** I’m — clearly, I’m a dying child in some way. My inner child is dying.

**Craig:** We’re all dying. I have a little bit of follow-up myself. So I believe it was in our last episode where we talked about writers who had broken in from not Los Angeles, not New York, not London. And one of them was Chris Sparling. And he had mentioned in his comment that one of the things he missed was that sense of camaraderie. And I said, “Well, next time you’re out here, drinks are on me.” Guess who I had a drink with last night?

**John:** How nice.

**Craig:** Last night, it’s — very last night, Chris Morgan and I and Chris Sparling all sat down, had a drink. I didn’t even have to pay because Chris Morgan paid, which is great.

**John:** Well, he’s got that Fast and Furious money, so he should kind of always pay.

**Craig:** Yeah, he paid and it’s his own money, too. I mean, it’s got Vin Diesel’s face on it and everything.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** But it’s legal tender. Anyway, great guy, had a terrific evening with him and he got a little bit of it, a little taste.

**John:** Yeah. So do you think you’re going to get him to move out to Los Angeles? Was there any sense of that he’s going to leave Rhode Island to get out there?

**Craig:** I did broach the topic. It doesn’t seem so. First of all, he’s got a six-year-old daughter and a four-week-old son.

**John:** Yeah, that’s young.

**Craig:** So that’s, generally speaking, you’re not going nowhere and, you know, his whole thing is, look, it’s basically working, you know.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** He said every now and then it’s a little annoying, but he was out here pitching a show. And so he can always jump on a plane and get here. But I think he’s very happy living where he lives. His family is happy living where they are and it’s working for him. So I think, probably, he’s going to stay right where he is.

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Before we get to our big marquee topic, which is mystery versus confusion, we have two questions from listeners. So I thought we might bang those out quickly. So first, we have a question from Matt Nai. Let’s take a listen.

Matt: So I’ve written a horror feature that I’ve submitted to a handful of film festivals and screenwriting contests. It has placed as both a finalist and quarter-finalist in four competitions so far. I’m waiting to hear back from a few others and this got me thinking, can this good news be used as any sort of leverage to pitch to studios or do they have to seek out the material? How can you make the most out of a festival win when you don’t have many contacts in Hollywood? Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

**John:** So this sort of fits with the pattern of people who are able to get started while they were not living in Los Angeles, New York, or London is sometimes they had something that did well in a festival and it sort of started getting them some attention. The question is, what attention could Matt really expect off of some wins in these festivals?

**Craig:** Well, not much. Depending on what the festivals are. You know, we did hear from Peter Dodd the other week who said essentially that winning the Nicholl gets you at least a read. Not much else going on. Part of the problem with these festivals is that there are too many. So, essentially, none of them mean much. Everyone, it seems, has been a semi-finalist or finalist in a contest somewhere. And a little bit like that for films, too. I mean, there’s gazillions of these little film festivals. So every independent film will have 14 stamps on it with laurel leaves but you don’t know what any of it even means exactly. Is there leverage to be imparted because you’ve finished well in some festival? Not really, I mean, no. I don’t think so.

**John:** I think you’re wrong, Craig, because I think the leverage is not with like getting a studio to read it or getting a studio to consider you for other projects. I think the leverage is finding a horror filmmaker to actually make that script. So, Matt’s winning these festivals, they’re probably horror specific festivals. He needs to go to them. He needs like to see who the good directors are. This is all based on the assumption that Matt is not trying to direct this himself. But if he’s looking for a director to direct this script or one of his scripts, this is your opportunity.

So find who are those good directors, who are the ones you think can actually do something and just reach out to them because a lot of times people who are making horror films at these tiny budgets, they are looking for other good new things. And if you are that good new thing, having that stamp of approval from winning this festival might actually mean something to the people who were at that festival. So that, to me, is an opportunity. You also may have a chance to network with some, you know, other writers who actually are represented, who have managers, who have some other sort of next step and it’s a chance to sort of figure out what those options are.

So while I don’t think winning these things is going to get to you the agent, it’s not going to get you the reads at the studio, it may get you some of those early steps with meeting with a filmmaker, a meeting with a manager, something to get you going. And that’s what you should really concentrate on is how do you get something made. And it sounds like you may have written something that could get made, so try.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I can’t quibble with that. I’m just — it’s one of these things where you kind of have to look at the progressive scale of odds and ask where you are on that scale of odds. And are there other things you could be doing beyond the festivals or are things that are unrelated to the festivals that could improve your chances. And to that end, I think, figuring out how to get your script into the hands of that one person who actually can make a difference for you. That person may or may not be at that festival. If they are, that’s fantastic, and absolutely, yeah, leverage your win at the festival within the festival. Sure. But it’s unlikely that that’s going to be as valuable, I think, as, say, being in Los Angeles and handing the script to somebody who can read it or, you know, I don’t know. It’s tough. I take a little bit of a dim view on this. There’s so many festivals. Everyone is a semi-finalist. Everyone. Everyone’s born a semi-finalist of 14 screenwriting festivals.

**John:** So here’s — if a year from now, Matt has a film in production, here’s what I think would have happened, is I think he would have found a director who did something really good, who was like looking for his next thing. And someone who had done a teeny tiny thing, who is stepping up to do like a Blumhouse movie and read Matt’s script and said like, “Oh, this is great. I want to do this.” I think that is the point of inflection that he might be at, and so I think it’s worth pursuing that. But our standard blanket advice is probably accurate for Matt, as well as everybody else, is it’s going to be easier to do all of those things if you’re in Los Angeles. It’s going to be easier to do these things if you have other stuff to show rather than this one script that’s gotten some awards at festivals.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. All right. Let’s hear about Adam Tourney has to ask.

Adam Tourney: Hey, John and Craig. I wanted to get your opinion on a re-playing audio or video from earlier in a film to clarify a character’s revelation later on. Examples that spring to mind, are Steve Martin realizing that John Candy is homeless in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, or the final Keyser Soze scene in The Usual Suspects. Can this device be used effectively today or is it a clichéd cheat?

**John:** Craig, what do you think? Effective or cliché?

**Craig:** Possibly but, well, certainly cliché, possible effective. I think that all clichés are one slight twisty thing away from being okay. Sometimes, and we’ll talk about this in our main topic today, sometimes when those moments happen, they weren’t intended to happen. It’s not that someone sat down and said, “We hear these things now.”

What happens is they show the movie to an audience and people say, “We don’t get it.” And then they go, “We have to do the cliché thing so that people get it.” And if you are properly stunned in a reveal, you don’t really mind the cliché because you’re stunned. You’re like, “Wow. This is cool,” you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And because you’re actually learning what happened and it’s a big twisty surprise to you. Where it gets really clammy is when you know what it is, then the cliché is brutal. I mean, there is a certain value to that. It does work. It works when the twist works.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it has to be the twist. It has to be like look at the magic trick I just pulled on you. And like then, it’s like, “Oh, I see what that is. I see how I was misinterpreting that.” That’s great. Because then when you’re seeing that scene again, it’s not just reinforcing that idea, it’s actually reversing that idea. It’s actually showing you like things weren’t what you thought they were. And so the things he cited are, I think, great examples of replaying previous scenes to give you a new sense of the moment that you’re in right now. And I say don’t be afraid of cliché if it’s really effectively serving that moment in your story. And I think you’re going to be — you will have set out to write the kind of movie that wants to have that scene. You’re not going accidentally back into writing that kind of scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. I mean, the value of a great twist is that it re-contextualizes everything that you’ve seen. So part of the fun is to enjoy that re-contextualization and the only way to do that is to replay something and just be happy in knowing that you’re replaying it but seeing it differently now. Don’t worry so much about being cliché or being not cliché. You know, I think sometimes people get caught up in that. If you have a great twist and that’s the best way to reveal it, it’s just when it’s clunky that it’s clunky. I don’t know how else to put it, it’s kind of a goofy thing to say but that’s how I feel.

**John:** Let’s talk about what that looks like on the page. So if you’re writing those moments in, you want the reader to have a sense of like, really, we’re still in that current moment or I’m just flashing away to those previous things. So sometimes you might repeat these scene headers from where that thing came from. So if it’s otherwise unclear. But sometimes you’re just going to repeat the action lines or the dialogue, it may make sense for your script to put all that stuff in italics just to sort of make it stand out, make it feel like this is a different texture that we’re really into a kind of flashback moment.

You’ll know what feels right for your script. You want to give the reader sense of like, “I’m doing something special here. Pay attention and it’s all going to make sense when I’m through with this section.”

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. Anything to echo the dreamy quality of the dream that you’re doing, I mean, right, because all of these moments are dreamy. You’re being very internal to the character. This is something that’s inside their mind so give us that sense and then you’ll be fine. You know, there are ways to do it that aren’t quite so down the middle cliché, you know. Things that you can do or you can even describe in terms of the visuals. They almost look like they’re a water painting or they’re de-saturated or they’re in black and white. You just do something but, yeah, you know.

**John:** You will do it. So a genre which I see this in a lot are sort of the Agatha Christie mysteries, which at the very end, like Hercule Poirot, like piecing together what actually happened and we get to see like all these little snippets from previous things like, “Oh, that’s when all the stuff was happening.” Which ties very well into Craig’s marquee topic which is mystery versus confusion. So, Craig, get us started why should we care about mystery?

**Craig:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers we’re trying to do something and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything?

Well, because, oh well, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things. And we get maybe a little distracted by the word mystery because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative. The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?” Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character,” or “Why did she say that,” or “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more because we want to see what’s happening. And so often they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human, it’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious, we insist upon knowing certain things. If you walk down the street and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, you want to — there’s no decision to want to know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right? So, let’s as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of like the crowd outside the store and it’s blacked out windows, if our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating and we would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing.

Which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered, or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient, and sort of frustrated, and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much and that’s the thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished in general because people are too busy staring at boobs and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part.

So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs because then it just — it’s like, I’m confused, I’m distracted. So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction — and I know you’re distracted, I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery, it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story.

And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then, it’s not really mystery, then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows. This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it and I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways, I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking. I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening and I don’t know why they’re happening so now I’m getting really worried and distracted. And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** If I’m watching a David Lynch film and [laughs] suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be confused — this is abstract, okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think I’m not supposed to be confused right now and I am so confused.

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie and that can be a real thing, that can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved. And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form what moments were you confused in a bad way? Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that like pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for like this wasn’t just — this wasn’t intriguing, this was annoying. I didn’t know what was actually happening here.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. What — there is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away. And that answers will be revealed and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Everything single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful. And what you said before about you feel like if I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion. And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery and after you’ve seen one of these movies you recognize like, in the third act, they will confront the mystery and they will — there’ll be little tiny mysteries but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour you’re going to know who the killer is and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long, arc stories of an Alias or a Lost where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling, that you had a sense of like are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important I think to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment. And so very kind of broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, okay, who’s her? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do? Very simple, very easy, and, you know, then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” Did you do it? I did it. And? It was hard.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s it? Oh, I have to know. [laughs] What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our pick a card, any card. People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s a flashbulb. It’s not even a — it’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that will never solve for you. Just like what does Scarlett Johansson whisper — or Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It doesn’t matter because you will never know and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to and the situations where I see it is, you enter into like two characters having a conversation and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or like how the actors actually changed some words but it makes it seem like they’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, wait, is — are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is? So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery but if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people, we — I mean, when you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right? You are now involved and that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved. There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that I’m personally — I love this version when I see it and every now and then I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at any, you know, at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something and the character lies, and we know they’re lying because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here and I’m curious what that is. Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all, it’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just like look at the lines and you’re like, oh, wait, he says this but on this page with this and the other page, if you don’t somehow single out that like this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap. I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will like forget like oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there, that’s a lie there. And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.

So this is a case where the slightly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores like that she’s a terrific liar. Something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, like, remember, this is not actually the truth here.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s later on when you want to think, okay, maybe somebody has forgotten or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie, are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, so if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, okay, you’re a liar, why? [laughs] I need to know, right? So this is a good little mini mystery.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** You can have — similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object like the briefcase–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** –in Pulp Fiction. Or, you know, someone is like — you got a camera looking — here’s a little mystery at the end of Inglourious Basterds. You have — I mean, it’s not much of mystery because you can pretty much see it coming but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak actually. I think it’s a–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak, looking up at them, looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa and they’re talking about it and we are the perspective so we don’t know what it is but they’re talking about it and then we reveal the answer to the mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is just — listen, it may seem inevitable to you because that’s how you saw the movie, it was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do and it’s the what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information.

So in this idea, someone asks someone a question and they get an answer and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us and that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it, creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” and the person goes, “Oh, yeah.” And the person asking the question says thank you, walks outside and starts crying.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What? Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Why does George — what — who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things could get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment — like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectation. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” Like no you’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not-not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do — we should do and must do everything we can, to create that movie and if that means that we are directing on the page — in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

Does that mean — I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle — no. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen.

So the short-term mystery, so there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?”

Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person which is okay or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are for some reason slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Well, okay, I — what’s — why are they doing that? And obviously they’re going to light it up but why are they going to light it on fire and what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries — I kind of think of those as like middle of the movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on and there are some characters with relationships who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t, they know secret motivations, they know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it. This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward.

It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So these are good little middle of the movie things. The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident,” you know, but—

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah. But typically they are slightly more interesting than that and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term hang a lantern on things and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice like I’m doing something here — so yes you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here and I’m going to be doing something with it later on.

Like — you are like — you are marking this for follow up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. Like you’ve done the right job there because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful and that’s a great way of like the mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or you — your main character has a scar and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, hmm, and then maybe somebody else asked “Where did you get that?”

If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar — it won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to be — then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing, if I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the kind of character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? Like they are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie like we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about like a plot mystery and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little, meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water which is in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it but there’s a long-term mystery that — which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that like you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it.

Like, yes they’re doing it to get money but there’s — there clearly is a specific reason and there’s a plan but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time — like much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s like it’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on like what their actual plan is, is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, like practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s do it. Let’s take a look at our Three Page Challenge because two of these actually have that sort of mystery versus confusion issue as I read them, so let’s see what you guys think.

So the Three Page Challenge, if you’re new to this, every couple of weeks we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts that they send in. So these are scripts written by listeners. They’re almost always features, sometimes they’re TV pilots. If you’d like to send in your own, you can visit johnaugust.com/threepages and there’s a whole set of rules for like how you submit your pages.

If you’d like to read along with us, the PDFs of these pages are attached to this episode. So you can go to the show notes at johnaugust.com or just scroll your little player and you’ll be able to click the link and like read along with us as we take a look at these.

So most weeks, you and I read aloud these descriptions, and it’s honestly one of my least favorite things to do because it just feels so boring for us to be just reading these descriptions aloud. So I thought it’d be fun to have somebody else do this for us and so I wanted to turn to a familiar voice — a trusted voice — a voice who is beloved by Americans for many, many seasons now, it is Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor. So he offered to read these descriptions aloud, let’s start with On Tic by Gabrielle Mentjox.

**Jeff Probst:** We open on a door. Crystal, a woman in her 20s, opens the door and exchanges cash for two small tinfoil packages. This repeats a few times until one dissatisfied stoner charges inside the apartment claiming he’s been ripped off. Crystal tries to get him to leave but the stoner isn’t budging.

Crystal’s roommate, Chantal, overhears the chaos. She turns on the stereo and joins Crystal in the hallway. She asks what’s going on. And as they argue back and forth, a dog starts growling in the background. Chantal mentions how Bruce is hungry and doesn’t like strangers.

The stoner bolts. Trouble averted, Crystal and Chantal smoke weed from a homemade bong.

Outside, a crappy Nissan drives on the streets of small town New Zealand. Chantal rummages through the kitchen for food while Crystal messes about on Instagram. A car pulls up. An orthopedic shoes steps onto the pavement and we reached the bottom of page three.

**John:** How cool is that?

**Craig:** Well — I mean this is the best version of Survivor there is, right? I mean, it’s better than people on an island. These are — they’re writing things to survive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you and I may take their torch away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ah, Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst. Craig, what did you think of On Tic?

**Craig:** Right. So first all, I’m fascinated by Gabrielle Mentjox because I’m trying to figure out like how do you pronounce Mentjox? It can’t just be Ment-jox. It’s got to be — I don’t know — something else.

One thing that was really interesting was that Gabrielle, I believe, is from New Zealand and her story takes place there. And she includes a little mention of the specific slang on the cover page to describe what a Tinnie is. And a Tinnie is 20 dollars’ worth of marijuana wrapped in aluminum foil, which I actually thought was kind of helpful.

And a good example was somebody going like, “Oh, I don’t really care what the orthodox nonsense is. I need people to know what I need them to know.” So generally speaking, I thought this was pretty good. I mean it was — I saw everything. I really enjoyed the description of Crystal. It hit all of my hair, make-up, wardrobe notes.

So I could see people and the scene moved in an interesting way. I was moving around the space in an interesting way. I was feeling and seeing things. Ultimately my issue with the scene is just that I have seen it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ve just seen this. There is something generally dissatisfying I think about overpowered heroes. And this situation where it’s like, “Well, we’ve got a dog. So beat it.” And, “Oh, God. Okay.” It doesn’t feel very dramatic. It just feels kind of, you know.

**John:** So Craig, here’s a mystery versus a confusion question for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The way I read it is that there is no dog and that she was turning on the stereo and have a recording of a dog but there’s no actual dog and that’s why Gabrielle like singles out that the roommate Chantal goes into the next room and turns on that stereo. I think that was what was actually playing is the recording of the dog. Is that not what you read?

**Craig:** I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that at all. Because dog — maybe it’s – the problem is — I mean, I suppose that’s possible. But she turns on the stereo. What year is this? Maybe that’s part of the problem, like who has a stereo that they turn on and then there’s — that’s the dog recording on the stereo.

I would have to see — I would have to hear the sound of it right then and there for the reader, at least I think to know, “Oh, okay the sound is coming out of that.” Especially because the dog sound gets louder as they’re talking. So–

**John:** Yeah. So my belief was that Chantal as she was coming into the room, she turned that on and it’s basically they have a plan. They basically have this dog recording that gets louder and louder that they can use to freak out people who are like thinking about breaking in to the house.

So I read these pages with that in my mind and like, “Oh, well, that’s kind of clever. Like these girls are smarter than, you know, your average young drug dealers.” Maybe. Or at least they have a plan. But if you didn’t catch that, and you just thought like was there a dog there somewhere — meh — it’s lost its spark.

**Craig:** Yeah. To be honest with you, now that I’m reading it this way where that’s what’s going on, I’m also a little bit meh about it because it feels frankly like a very thin plan. What it does is it makes their foe, angry stoner, not quite formidable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If now I live in a world where people are easily faked out by stuff like that. And I don’t know. You know, here’s the thing — I liked all of the writing, you know.

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

**Craig:** So I think that the good news is, Gabrielle writes characters well. They were — they were distinct. It moved around. It was visual. It’s really what it is that I think the scene is missing like plus the concept now. You just want to plus that concept.

So if the idea is how can I show that these two women are really good at dealing with problems, even problem they cause, like ripping people-off, I want them to be smarter than this. This just isn’t that smart. So I need more clever, you know?

**John:** Cool. I do want to single out some of her good writing. So, this is on Page three, and this is a description of the residential strait.

“A hypnotic doof doof base blasts from the stereo. We’re in a beat-up Nissan, cruising up a typical street in small-town New Zealand. We pass paint-chipped state houses sitting atop bare quarter-acre sections.” Great, I got a visual there, I got a sense of what this feels like. I like the doof. This felt good, this felt competent. I do think Gabrielle can write. I’m just curious to see what would happen next, and where is this all going? It reminds me a bit of Go, my first movie, in a way that I really like. I love sort of young plucky dealers. It’s sort of my thing.

**Craig:** Young, plucky drug dealers are great, New Zealand is great. By the way, I started watching Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Yeah, Kate & Kate, one of the Kates’ One Cool Thing.

**John:** I do want to single out some things on page one, which needs a re-look. So first paragraph, a “young woman’s face peers out, eyebrows raised. This is CRYSTAL (20s, skinny, eyebrows plucked super thin.” Just repeating eyebrows twice, didn’t feel like the best choice. Like we’re only three lines in and we repeated a body part.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The same thing happens about midway through the page. Angry stoner’s parenthetical says, “Arms folded, staunch,” and then like Crystal stands up, staunched trying to block this guy. Staunch is sort of weird word anyway. So to use it twice in such close proximity, find some different adjectives there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. And even if staunch weren’t a weird word, you kind of have to do put separation between these things. No big deal. There are a lot of arms folded, and standing tall.

So the angry stoner has his arms folded, staunch. And then, Chantal has arms folded standing tall. So there’s quite a bit of that. And I don’t think that’s probably that necessary. There are ways to do these things sometimes, for instance — and sometimes, you I think about how the lines are falling. On the bottom of this first page, the action says, “Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner.”

Now the word stoner has spilled over to the second line. Wonderful, we now have the rest of that line to do stuff for free. [Laughs] So Chantal strides down the hallway towards Crystal and angry stoner. She gets big in the doorway, as big as she can in the doorway, you know, stares him down. And then, we can get rid of that parenthetical and just have what seems to be the problem here.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** That sort of thing. So yeah. You should be on duplicate patrol as you’re going through. You know, just again, take a look at this dialogue in the middle of page two, and if you’re going to stick with the dog, when they’re talking about the dog, maybe it would be better here if they weren’t so on the nose about their own rouse, or by the way, not rouse if it’s not a rouse. I think Bruce is ready for his walk, or was it his feed. Oh, oh god, the dog is going to eat me. Isn’t it more of a con artist-y thing, if one them was like, what is wrong with the dog? And like — I don’t know. Well —

**John:** Did you feed him?

**Craig:** Exactly. No I didn’t feed him. Did you fed him yesterday? Oh my god, I didn’t feed him yesterday either. Oh, oh, sorry. We got a very hungry, very big dog in there. I’m sorry what were you asking about? You know, like there’s got to be a more — they just got to be smarter I think. If they’re going to be pulling one over on this dude because then I’m more impressed. Because right now, really, instead of being impressed with them, I’m just unimpressed with the angry stoner.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say is if I’m reading this correctly and the dog is just on the stereo, let us know that’s actually the case, because right now there is nothing to indicate that. So I would say, she turns on the stereo, oddly, there’s no music, like you can say like oddly there because it gives us a sense of we’re going to hang back a bit and it’s weird like that there’s no actual music playing, or at some point there’s a cut away to the stereo and we see like the little bars going up and down. That the dog is just on a stereo.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Otherwise, there’s no pay-off to something that, I think, your setup that could be quite clever.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s go back to our favorite host of a reality TV program. Jeff Probst who’s going to talk us through The Beast with 1,000 Faces by Jesse Gouldsbury and Brendan Steere.

**Jeff Probst:** 17-year-old North Stewart is confused why his parent are sending him away to space camp. His mom explains that North needs some time away. His dad says they need a break, too, especially from North‘s 19-year-old sister, Triss. Triss teases North for getting sent to space camp until she finds out, she’s going too. She’s pissed but she knows there’s no way out of it.

After a bus ride, we find North and Triss in a space shuttle. They’re in space, yet it all looks quite ordinary, much like a standard airplane, passengers sleep with their windows down. At the bottom of page three, we arrive at a common room in the dormitory.

**John:** Great. So Craig, this to me had some real confusion issues. Not mystery, but confusion. I didn’t know where I was at as the story ended. I didn’t know if I was in space or on a bus and that’s really a problem on page three.

**Craig:** I got that I was in space. And, well, first, I was on a bus and then I was in space.

**John:** I don’t think you’re in space at the end there, Craig.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** So we’re going to skip to the end here. So let me talk you through – I’ll actually read aloud what happens on page three. So North and sister are being sent away to camp. So then we’re exterior, road — day. North rides along, looking out the window of a school bus. Match cut. Interior, the shuttle — day. North is looking out the window of a space shuttle, in space. He’s sitting near his sister in what looks like a run down, but very commercialized space shuttle. Things look no more extreme than people flying in an airplane. Most people are sleeping, windows are down, etc.

North listens to his headphones, our camera rotates 360 degrees around his face as we hear J-pop beats.

Title card: “The Beast With 1,000 Faces”

We push back into North’s face. Match cut to INT. COMMON ROOM — DAY. The middle point of the ships with four walls, each side with a door. Looks like a dormitory common room designed by that RA who loves Star Trek.

So I read this as the match cut to the shuttle was his sort of fantasy version of like being on the bus, and then we’re in the common room of the ship’s four walls. Then like, this is all like a set basically. This isn’t real. That was my confusion three pages in, partly because I didn’t believe we’re in a world where they could be in space, because the first paragraphs felt so real world grounded.

**Craig:** Okay, you may be right. Now, I read it as he’s going to space and that going to space is a very mundane thing like taking a plane to study abroad in Madrid. And so, now, I would have made a bigger deal out of the reveal of space because — I mean, I think it’s okay to show that the characters themselves don’t give a damn. But we need to make clear like, just throwing on “in space” at the end of a sentence is probably not great also. I don’t like it when people talk about day and night in space, because it is very confusing to everybody. Really. If I start a slug line with INT. THE SHUTTLE – DAY, I think, okay, they’re on a launching pad. They’re going to be launching.

So I think that that’s what going on. I think that the idea here is we live in a time in the future when going to space is no big deal, it’s like going to camp.

**John:** But see, I’ve got no evidence that we are in the future whatsoever at the start. I think that’s my frustration is that if we are truly in space, there was nothing to tip me off to the fact that we could be going into space in the first two pages. Because what we’re given is INT. NORTH’S LIVING ROOM — NIGHT. Close on his face basically. We have his mom and his dad, but we have no information that this could be something other than present day. The most that we have is that, the room around them looks like it was decorated by someone raised in 2005. Okay, I guess that could be a person — I guess, we could be in the future– maybe that’s how they they’re trying to tip me off that like, we are in the future, but there’s nothing else that’s telling me that I’m in the future. So then when I’m suddenly in space, I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you are definitely dealing with confusion there. So mystery is why are these people talking about sending their child into space? And the child is reacting like petulantly as opposed to with shock and fear. Okay, this is going to pay-off certainly. They are in the future and people go into space in the future. What is confusing is when you decide that it would be funny if your future people had retro-style because now it’s just — now, you know what a room that looks like it was designed by people raised in 2005 looks like? It looks like right now. Because we don’t know what the hell that means. It just means now.

**John:** Yeah. So the writers could totally choose to do that, but at some point between leaving that room and getting on the bus, at some point you got to show me something. We’re like, we’re driving by like, you know, in the first Star Trek movie, the first of the new series of Star Trek movies, like the motorcycle goes by this giant like quarry kind of thing where they’re building a spaceship. Like, that tells me like — oh, okay we’re in the future. But nothing here was telling me the future until I’m suddenly in space, and I don’t believe that I’m in space.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also there’s this thing that happens I think where Jesse and Brendan are trying to get this across again, on page two, when North’s sister Triss says, “You listen to classic rock, North. You like that turn-of-the-century crap, you weirdo.” But, you know, classic rock wasn’t turn-of-the-century. It was like ‘60s and ‘70s, so did they mean, turn of the century, the next century? But then, that wouldn’t be — is that what the classic rock is? Because then she says, Wheatus and I don’t know Wheatus. So maybe it’s a hundred but that’s a lot of math you’re asking me to do, and I don’t want to do math. I just want to absorb and engage as I can.

**John:** Don’t make me do math.

**Craig:** Don’t make me — here’s another thing that happens on page two. Again, these are the choices about how to indicate to us what’s going on. So they’re trying, right? It’s just not quite landing. Triss is complaining about the camp, the space camp that they’re being sent to. And by the way, space camp can’t possibly be what people will call space camp in the future. Space camp is what people that don’t have space camp talk about space camp. So she’s going to —

**John:** It’s like a tautology. It’s actually completely true and brilliant, but like you know, space camp is only for people who don’t have space camp.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. Once you have space camp, it has a name, that’s a more interesting name than space camp. Because presumably, there’s more than one space camp. Even they say, there’s more than one space camp. So how could you possibly call it space camp? It’s like going to shopping mall. But she’s complaining about the space camp that they’re sending her to. And North says, she’s kind of right, though. It has the lowest FLERP score out of the orbital camps. Okay, so I get it, we’re in the future now. There’s orbital camps, but —

**John:** Craig, Craig. By the way, Craig is right. I’m reading this now, clearly, we are supposed to be in the future.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re in the future, but FLERP score is not good. Because it’s not funny, but it’s definitely not serious.

**John:** Yeah. It has a joke-oid problem where it kind of feels like a joke, but it’s not actually funny. So therefore, it feels like a joke that didn’t work.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it also has a tone problem and these are — remember, we always say that these are the pages where you’re instructing the audience how to watch your movie. And what you’re telling them here is, this is a silly movie. The reality is silly. It’s so silly that they call space camp “space camp.” And there’s a score called the FLERP score. Nothing matters here.

**John:** So let’s talk about stuff on page one and this runner about things. And so mom says, “Well, we thought it would be fun for you and your sister to have some time away from things. And for us to have some time away from things, too. Mostly your sister.” So from this point forward, things is referring to the sister, but I think we’re going to need to stick in some quotes for a moment there, because otherwise it’s too easy to miss what they’re actually trying to say. So when dad’s line says, “Well, you’re a responsible young man, and when you’re both up there, we’d like you to keep an eye on things.” You have to break that word things out, it could be like with dot dot dot. It could be with some quotes, but you have to indicate that we’re not saying things as a throwaway place holder, it really is meant to refer to the sister who’s sitting right there.

**Craig:** Yes. Part of the struggle that I think you were having and I had, too, in terms of placing this in a sense of time is that this discussion that they’re having is so mundane and weirdly 1950s. That you’re so confused about the time of it all. They are talking like 1950s parents. Weirdly, there are these little subliminal problems that are occurring. His mom and dad (50s — Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly). So already the word 50s is in my head, which is a bad thing for a movie that’s set — I got 50s then I’ve got 2005. Also, you keep telling me who these actors are.

Now in general, I’m not going to freak out about this when people say think this person, think that person. But if you’re setting a movie in the future and you’re trying to play a little bit of a confusing mystery game about what year this is with people, this will not help you.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Because when you get to Triss and you say think Anna Kendrick in Pitch Perfect, I’m now thinking it’s 2015, that’s who I’m seeing in my head. Plus she has headphones on. Do they have headphones in the future? I mean we don’t even have headphones now, right?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. Here’s the issues, like the writers are trying to have it both ways. So like you say Janeane Garofalo and John C. Reilly like, oh, okay, those are maybe people you would actually cast in this movie, but you can’t cast Anna Kendrick as 19 years old because she’s not 19 years old. So are you sort of giving us the casting suggestion? Or are you showing us a type? And you kind of can’t do both. You’ve got to make one choice here and like this is not a realistic choice. So like Triss, 19, like the world’s worst Disney princess. Like give us something like that that give us an overall type for her. But I would not like try to give her an actress call out because it’s just not going to make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we got some problems here.

**John:** We got some big problems here, but guys, thank you for sending it in.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go to our final Three Page Challenge this week and hear what Jeff Probst has to say about this untitled script by Mitchell LeBlanc.

**Jeff Probst:** In the vastness of space, we encounter a large derelict starship. The quarters are empty, as are the crew quarters, and the social area. The only sign of life is Atom, a humanoid robot. Atom tinkers with a disassembled computer, ripping out fried parts and using a replicator to produce new ones. He puts it all together and it works. Sad music plays throughout the ship. Atom moves on to the upper quarter, where he cleans the observation deck, then back to the social area where he makes a meal he can’t eat.

Later Atom plays ping-pong by himself, and chess. He paints a perfect copy of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. His battery runs low, time for sleep. He turns off the music, hours pass, then another day begins.

**John:** So Craig, I kind of loved this. I’m hoping that you liked it as much as I did. My biggest concern which I suspect will be everyone’s biggest concern is that I saw the movie WALL-E.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it kind of feels like Mitchell also saw the movie WALL-E. And so that is a reasonable concern that you have a robot who’s just going about the business of trying to live a normal life. And yet, I really enjoyed these three pages. And I was curious to read what was going to happen next. And I liked Mitchell’s overall writing style. It was a very spare kind of thing. It felt kind of like animation, but in a way that I kind of dug. What did you think of these pages?

**Craig:** Listen, I’m with you. If I had not seen WALL-E, I would be dancing a jig right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And listen, it’s not like there isn’t value here, but so much of the value does feel borrowed. I’m struggling to give as much credit as I would here, because it just feels the pace, the moments, the tone, it all feels borrowed. It feels like I’m watching a copy of another thing.

Now, I love how much white space there is, I love it. I love this kind of writing, I love the way that Mitchell uses bold to best effect and puts little dashes in, and onomatopoeia, and italics, and lot and lots of hitting the return key, I love that. I love, love, love. These were a joy – actually, these three pages read so easily and breezily. But, I’ve seen this movie.

**John:** But the thing is we may not have seen this movie because like at the bottom of page three, we’re just setting up the basic world of this character. And so like Sam Rockwell in Moon is sort of like in a WALL-E type of situation. There’s other movies where like, you know, we’re in a spaceship and things are kind of this way. I mean the start of Passengers, I haven’t read the script, but it might feel similar kind of way. So we’re only seeing through page three, so I think my good news for Mitchell is I really want to see pages four through 10 to see if your movie is WALL-E or if it’s actually very, very different. And it could be delightfully different, it could be a romance, it could be something I’m totally not anticipating. And I’m very curious to read those next pages because I really liked what I have read so far.

**Craig:** Well, sure. And I agree with you on that. I mean, look the WALL-E problem isn’t — you’re right, there are a lot of movies about someone alone in isolation, sadly whiling away the time. What set WALL-E apart was that it was a robot. That was the thing, right? So it’s — that’s this. Even if it’s not WALL-E after this, it’s a problem that it’s WALL-E now, pages one through three. Because anyone in the world reading this script is going to go, oh, it’s WALL-E. That’s not what you want, you know, when you’re starting to read a script. You just don’t want that.

**John:** You don’t want that. So if you’re concerned about the WALL-E, which I think you should be aware that it’s going to be a concern, I would look at sort of like removing like the sad music playing. Pick certain threads and like, you know, look at sort of how WALL-E sets things up and like just go a different direction. And so like take out that sad music, take out a little of the art, take out a little of something. Make us curious about this character more than just sort of like marveling at this person’s beautiful loneliness.

**Craig:** Yeah. Precisely. It just felt so, so WALL-E. I will say this is a great example of what I think of as good mystery, that we’ll call is a good short term mystery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The vastness of space –first of all, in the black, the vastness of space, not space — day. So thank you. In the black, the vastness of space and then clink. Then interior, bios II, echoing through the large derelict starship, which by the way is clever in itself. You interior something, what the hell is that for the reader. And then, you answer, large derelict starship. The corridor is empty. Clank. Nobody in the crew quarters. Clink. Or in the medical bay. Clink.

I know what you’re doing here, I can see the movie, I see these big like Kubrick-style wide shots of just empty rooms with a little electrical hum. But then, there’s this noise, what is that noise? Who’s doing the noise? And then we find Atom. It even sounds like – like Atom, Eva, WALL-E, clank. A humanoid robot tinkers. His casing resembles a white spacesuit. Cute. A digital panel for a face, but it’s powered off. I wasn’t quite able to see what that meant, a digital panel for a face.

**John:** I think it basically has an iPad for a face, but there’s not – it’s just a black glass.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. WALL-E. WALL-E

**John:** WALL-E. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if I have any of like word objections, it’s literally the second line of clink. The minute I hear clink — what do you think of a –what clinks?

**Craig:** Ice cubes.

**John:** Glasses, ice cubes, it’s all about like a drink. And so if it started with a clank rather than a clink, I know this seems like so petty and minor, but if it went clank, clink, like starting with a clink makes me think like someone is toasting with Champagne. And so it pulled me out of the next couple of lines, because I thought like, oh, wait, is it glass? No, it’s something else. So I know that’s so tiny and unimportant, but literally starting with a clank would have helped me out here a little bit on page one.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I like a nice clunk.

**John:** Yeah. Clunks are good too. The other places where I wanted a little bit more — and so all of this is so spare on the page. If you are not reading this, you know, because you’re driving your car, it’s worth pulling this up as a PDF because almost everything we’re seeing here are single lines. On page two, the daily routine. Atom, gardens in the oxygen garden, cleans glass in the observation deck, analyzes readouts on the bridge. These were the only places where I felt like I was being shortchanged a little bit. What does an oxygen garden look like? Throw us a line about the oxygen garden, throw us a line about the observation deck, throw us a line about the bridge.

We need to have a little bit more painting of our world here because at this point you’re just like, you know, what? Are we supposed to look at the storyboards? Like, gives us a little bit better sense like what is specific about your ship versus the sort of Kubrick ship that I’m picturing in my head.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. Also, if you can avoid the — on top of page three, passing an old photo of Atom with the crew. Where are they? If you can avoid the photo, if there’s another way, even if it’s just a wall that shows captain, dadada, like you know, employee of the month kind of wall, something. There’s something about the old photo that is very cliché. So if there’s another way around it.

**John:** I would love to see like a burnt section of the wall like even if he just goes pass that. Like something to say like, oh, something really terrible happened here. I’m not trying to write his story for him, but like something that indicates like, oh, there’s something really bad that we could go to.

**Craig:** Atom, drifts through a blood soaked room.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Finds his way to a ping-pong table. Very good.

**John:** I really hope — I hope Atom killed everybody on the ship. That’s my secret hope.

**Craig:** Well, listen. Clink.

**John:** Then it’s not WALL-E.

**Craig:** Clink.

**John:** I heard the first cut of WALL-E was much darker, a lot murder.

**Craig:** There’s just blood everywhere.

**John:** All right. So those are our Three Page Challenges for this week. Thank you to all the writers who wrote in. And thank you for the people who have written in with samples that we have not gotten to on the air. You’re all fantastic. Godwin does read all of them, so he picked these three, but he might pick yours next time through. Extra special thanks to Jeff Probst for reading aloud these descriptions. That was so much fun. And again, if you have your own Three Page Challenge that you want to send in, it’s johnaugust.com/three page. And if you want to read what we just talked about, those are in the show notes for this next week.

It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing this week is a book that I’ve been reading for forever. And I kind of put it down, I pick it up, and I’m like, oh, I could still keep reading this book. It is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s already a bestseller, you know, Obama recommended it. And people compared it a lot to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Did you read that, Craig?

**Craig:** I did.

**John:** Yes. Did you like it?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** Everyone likes it except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I found it weirdly — I didn’t like it. I won’t even go into why. I was unimpressed with its lack of self-critique.

**John:** I suspect you would like parts of this book and disagree with parts of this book. But the parts I liked so much about it were really getting into the origins of humankind. So a hundred thousand years ago, there are a lot of competing strains of humans running around the world. So like we know about the Neanderthals but there are other kind of humans that could have come to the foreground and they didn’t. And so he’s really looking at sort of why our little branch of this big tree became so dominant. And it wasn’t just our hands and our brains and our language. But he makes a compelling case that it’s our ability to hold metaphor is a crucial aspect to sort of why we were able to organize into such large societies.

So if you have a small group, a tribe, like it can only get to a certain size because there could be a leader, and if that leader is not there, it sort of all falls apart. But with our ability to have metaphors, we can think of a king who we’ve never met. And that we can be in service to a person we’ve never ever seen before. We can have these bigger structures.

And he makes the case that our ability to have metaphor is something really unique of all animals, and that’s probably the reason why we’re able to do so many things we’ve done in such a very short period of time. So as I was reading it, I kept thinking about sort of the acceleration of culture and how as screenwriters and storytellers, we are so responsible for pushing things forward and pushing things faster, especially in our science fiction. We keep describing these things that don’t quite exist and I think because we describe them, we sort of pressure them into existence even faster. So I really dug that section of it. So if you have it on your Kindle and you’ve not read it yet, I would say, open it up and take a look at it. So Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

**Craig:** Excellent. Sounds good. I’ll check it out.

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

**Craig:** Jeff Probst.

**John:** Jeff Probst, all right.

**Craig:** Jeff Probst. [laughs]

**John:** Are you watching the new season? I just started last night. So he sent me like a code for like an all access thing, but we already bought the season on iTunes, so we’re watching it here in Paris.

**Craig:** No, but I believe my wife — I don’t watch TV, John. I think we’ve established that. [laughs]

**John:** I always forget. That’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** Or listen to podcasts. [laughs]

**John:** This season is Millennials vs. Gen X. And I will say that after the first episode, I found it strange that like it’s as if Gen X is like the greatest generation. Like it’s as if like we fought a war or something. Like we’re the ones who work hard and do all that stuff. It’s like, no, we were kind of lazy and entitled in our own time, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just compared to Millennials, we’re the greatest generation. [laughs]

**John:** Ahhh.

**Craig:** Millennials.

**John:** Our show is produced and edited by two Millennials, Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli, our editor.

If you have an idea for an outro — not an idea for an outro — if you have actual music as an outro, you can send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. I’m on Instagram, also @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this and all episodes at johnaugust.com, just search for the episode title. It’s also where you’ll find our transcripts. I think we are going to get the transcripts back on schedule in a week or two. So if they’re not there, hold tight, they will be coming. You can find all the back episodes on scriptnotes.net, which is $2 a month for all the back episodes and all the special episodes, and the dirty episodes, everything we’ve ever done is basically at scriptnotes.net. You will find it there. There’s also a USB drive, which are now back in stock. There’s a link in the show notes, but it’s just store.johnaugust.com. And we’ll send you a USB drive that has all that stuff on it as well.

And Craig, I think that’s our show.

**Craig:** Fantastic show.

**John:** Fantastic. Craig, may your torch not be extinguished in the spirit of Jeff Probst.

**Craig:** I know what that means. [laughs]

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Three Pages by [Gabrielle Mentjox](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/OnTick.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jesse Gouldsbury & Brendan Steere](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BeastWith1000Faces.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Mitchell LeBlanc](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/UntitledLeBlanc.pdf)
* Send us your [Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind](http://amzn.to/2d3iavK)
* [Jeff Probst](http://www.jeffprobst.com/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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