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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/what-is-good-writing-2).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 581 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what’s this?

Why, it’s a clip show. Producer Megana Rao has been working on a forthcoming Scriptnotes book and has found three vintage Scriptnotes segments, in which Craig and I try to answer the question, what is good writing, and how does one do it. Megana, can you tell us what segments you have picked, and more importantly, why?

**Megana Rao:** Great. I picked three segments that talk about the components of good writing and what elements need to be there and what immediately turns you guys off as signals of things you don’t have confidence in the writer in. We start with Episode 239, which you guys recorded in March of 2016. You guys talk about what good writing feels like.

**John:** I suspect that we were talking about good writing involves an element of surprise, confidence. It’s not just the words you’re choosing to describe a story but how much we believe that you are telling a story that we want to keep turning the pages on.

**Megana:** It’s interesting because you guys talk about how these elements function on a sentence level but also structurally. You talk about how you want to surprise and delight your readers in scene description, but also with a plot twist at the end of act two or whatever. It’s cool to see how good writing, that sort of DNA exists in every aspect of a screenplay.

**John:** Cool. Great. That’ll be our first segment. What’s the second segment we’ll listen to?

**Megana:** The next one is Episode 76, called How Screenwriters Find Their Voice, with Aline. That one was recorded in February of 2013. You guys are a little bit younger but really consistent in some of the advice that you give. It’s interesting, because you guys talk to each other about your perceptions of each others’ voices. You talk about your impressions from the first times reading each other’s scripts too.

**John:** It’s interesting, because at that point, Craig was just a comedy writer really. He was only known for the bigger, broader comedies that he’d done. I’m sure it’ll be a good time machine for people to listen to. You say we’re younger, which I’m rather offended by, but it is weird to think we’ve been doing this so long that we were actually younger back in those days.

**Megana:** You’re a full decade younger, basically.

**John:** Yeah. Wow. How about for Segment 3? What’s our third segment?

**Megana:** The last segment is from Episode 432, Learning From Movies. That one, you and Craig talk about your techniques for watching movies. You introduce this concept of mindfulness around movies. What’s interesting is, as you’re talking about the framework for how you analyze a movie, you also teach people what are the key things to be thinking about when you write a movie.

**John:** Great. It’s important to remember that before we were writers, we were all readers, and we were watchers of movies. We have a sense of what is supposed to happen in a movie. We have a sense of what we’d love to see happen in a movie. As writers, we have to be aware that our audience is doing some of that work too. Just as we’re learning from the movies that we’re watching, we are hopefully writing movies that are aware of how they’re going to be taken in, that they’re not just going into a void, they’re meant to be projected into somebody’s brain. We can learn a lot from thinking about how we watch our movies.

**Megana:** I think for newer writers, it offers a useful way of pulling out the tools to see how the sausage is made.

**John:** Cool. We’ll have these three segments. Then we’ll be back at the end of the episode to do our One Cool Things. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Megana and I will be talking once more about the Scriptnotes book and rumors of industry strife coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for picking these segments.

**Megana:** Thank you. Hope you guys enjoy this craft compendium.

——-

>**239 – What Is Good Writing**

**John:** So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.
And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself.

But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.
I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.
And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.
But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.
And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.
But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.
So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.
And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.
Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.
But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.
I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.’”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

>**76 – How Screenwriters Find Their Voice**

**John:** Absolutely. Well, the reason why I wanted to start off with voices is I thought today we might start talking about when you first discovered a writer’s voice, or sort of your own writer’s voice, and sort of what that process was like.
Because I remember reading books and reading magazines and enjoying them and recognizing that people wrote in different ways, but never really got a sense of what a voice was until I started reading Spy Magazine. And Spy Magazine, the entire magazine was written with such a specific sardonic, snarky voice. And like that first introductory “Welcome to this Month” kind of thing was written so specifically that I was like, “I want to write like that.” It was the first time I started experimenting writing in someone else’s voice.

But it got really clear when I sort of switched into having a voice of my own. Because I feel like if you read through most of my scripts, there are things I write, they’re consistent, but I’m not quite sure why they’re consistent or sort of how that develops. So, I want to talk about voice and how writers find their voices.

Aline, do you think you have a voice that persists from script to script, or is it different every time?

**Aline:** That’s all I had when I started, really, was just a way that I spoke, or the characters spoke. And, you know, one of the downsides of that is all the characters spoke the same way. And they all sounded like the scene description. And I have a tendency to put the best jokes in the scene description, too.

But, you know, I had a point of view. The other stuff was stuff that was more of an effort — the plot, particularly the plotting stuff, and differentiating the characters. But, you know, even before I became a writer I just tend to have a particular way of speaking. So, that was I would say the part that came to me the most easily. Craig?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s funny. I almost had like an opposite problem. Because the movies I was writing initially were very broad comedies, everything was about jokes. And in the jokes, yeah, definitely, there is a specific kind of joke that my wife will say, “Oh, that’s such a you joke.” And it’s funny — she’s now so good, like she’ll pick them out from trailers or from movies. She’ll just turn to me, “That was you, that was you, that was you.” She knows those things.

But, did I have a voice, like a dramatic voice? Early on, no. And in fact that was something I had to kind of get to. On the plus side, it was helpful to actually… — I never had the problem with characters sounding the same. And in a way I looked at it like it was mimicry, you know, like how does this person talk, how does this person talk, how does this person talk? Because I’m fascinated by the way people talk and I like to do impressions of people.

But over time I have noticed, and lately more so, there is a dramatic expression, maybe is the best way I can put it. There’s a certain way I like the story to unfold that is, I think, kind of like my voice. But it’s funny. It’s not like…

**Aline:** That’s so interesting. Because you have a very distinct authorial voice in your non-screenwriting that’s extremely distinct, your emails and your prose is extremely distinct.

**Craig:** Well, because that’s me. And if I’m writing a character I want them to just be true to them.

**Aline:** Right.

**Craig:** And not be me. And sometimes I also feel like I’m, yeah, I guess I just sort of go from that point of view. I’m more interested in other people, so I like to go that way. But some voice-like thing has occurred over the years.

**John:** It’s challenging with screenwriting because when we talk about voice, are we talking about the way characters are speaking? Are we talking about the authorial voice? And when you’re saying in early scripts you didn’t have the technique, you didn’t have the skills, you didn’t have the plot and all that stuff, but you had a voice is, I think, part of the reason I became a writer is I apparently had a voice, and I had confidence on the page. I felt like, you know, people would read through the whole thing. And it felt like it was all of one piece, and it was not just desperate to get to the next thing.

It was enjoyable to read on the page. And it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I had somewhat of a voice people would say, “Yeah, you should keep writing.” And so then I would write more and it sort of developed into that thing. Same way people develop styles or fashions or ways they present themselves, people get reinforcement for the way they talk.

**Aline:** Your voice is kind of badass. I mean, I had read Go and then when I met you I really expected you to be a little bit more of a hipster badass than you are.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, for sure. He’s not what you think from reading your work. Which is cool. I actually like that. You know, I mean, for me because it was comedy, you kind of get a little screwed over in comedy because people laugh. And they go, “I laughed.” But all the work around the laughing, they tend to either not see or not give you credit for, and they certainly don’t reinforce. They don’t teach you how to do it. You’re kind of left to figure it out on your own.

And in a weird way you’re left to figure it out from non-comedies. And it’s the rare comedy like Groundhog Day where you look and you go, “Oh, look how, at least I can see what’s happening around the jokes here…”

**Aline:** But it took me awhile to learn that the jokes don’t play if the scene work and the dramatic structure doesn’t play. And you know that from your own work, and you know that also from going to countless punch-ups where if the scene doesn’t work, or the characters don’t work, the jokes don’t stick.

**Craig:** The jokes won’t work. And, unfortunately, no one tells you early on, “I love this joke because of all this wonderful dramatic context around it, or character context, or the way that it served some moment in the scene to connect to the next scene.” No one ever says that. They just say, “Oh my god, that line was so funny.”

**John:** I was looking up some lines last night for this other project, and so I’m on like great classic movie dialogue lines, a lot of them were from Star Wars. And one of them was like, “You’re awful short for a Storm Trooper, aren’t you?” And that’s actually not that funny of a line, but the only reason it’s memorable is because that movie is really good and the moment worked. And so therefore that line feels appropriate for that moment. So, “Oh, it’s a good line,” but independently it’s not a great line.

**Aline:** Oh, “I begged you to get therapy,” is one of the best jokes in any comedy, and in and of itself it’s not a joke.

**Craig:** Yeah. There you go.

**John:** “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” That’s a great line independent of a really great scene, but so many things aren’t.

**Craig:** Right. I know. And also now the way that we write movies now, they’re a little less written, I don’t know how else to put it. They’re obviously written, but that’s such a written line. You’ll hear sometimes people say, “Oh, that just feels like writing. It doesn’t feel like actual human talk. No one is that witty.”

**Aline:** I love written lines.

**Craig:** I know. I mean, the problem is, it’s like so many times I see them play out on screen and I go, “Yeah, congratulations to me for being clever.”

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that human didn’t say that. And so there’s…

**Aline:** Fine line.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a thing between the audience and the line.

**John:** That’s the luxury of writing a period movie or something that’s set in an alternate thing that’s not meant to be here and now, because you can get away with those lines.

**Craig:** You can.

**John:** There’s probably not a single line in Django Unchained that an actual human being would say, but it’s really enjoyable to see in that context.

**Craig:** Or any Tarantino movie. I mean, everybody speaks, it is understood that we’ve signed a contract with Tarantino that all of his characters are, it’s like it’s opera. I don’t know how else to put it. They speak like the way that recitative is sort of to opera. It’s not human dialogue. It’s awesome.

**John:** I mean, Tarantino is a great person to bring up, because you want to talk about voice, that’s what he had more than anything else. I mean, I think there was interesting plotting and interesting stuff going on, but if you just plunked down and read one of his scripts — I remember reading Natural Born Killers as a script when it was just his script. And it was the first script that I ever read to the end, flipped back to page one and read through again, because it’s just a great voice that you love to hear. And it’s not about the dialogue. It’s about everything that’s fitting together, that the world feels.

And I think people can learn a lot of the other things. You can learn the plots. You can learn how to sort of get through the story. But, when you read a sample that has really good writing, really good voice, that’s what you sort of get to.

**Aline:** Can we all say the word “recitative.”

**Craig & John:** “Recitative.”

**Craig:** Is that right? It’s “recitative” is what it is. “Recitative.”

**Aline:** Recitative.

**John:** Oh, “recite-a-tive” is how it’s pronounced.

**Craig:** Yes, “recitative.” Why are you looking at me like that?

**John:** On NPR yesterday, or actually one of the other podcasts I was listening to, they were doing a thing about Les Mis, and they went into the “recitative…”

**Craig:** Recitative.

**John:** And they played a little clip of it. Like out of context with the whole movie it just sounds crazy.

**Craig:** It’s hysterical.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like, why is this person singing, “What’s this? It’s sunny. Where is my hat!” It’s ridiculous. But, you know, once you’re in the middle of it… — I mean, frankly, that is the worst part of Les Mis for me. I mean, when I went to go see Les Mis for the first time I’m like, stop all the sing talking, just talk, then sing the songs. I’d be much happier. I really, really would. Or, just sing the songs, [laughs], and I’ll figure out what’s going on between them. Or hand out a pamphlet and I’ll just read what happens in between them.
I would have been happier. The recitative is a tough one.

**John:** But don’t you sometimes read scripts from people who, like, are aspiring writers and they’re — you don’t know what to say to them other than the fact that like, “You don’t have a voice.” You’re like, “At least I’m not getting any sort of voice from you.” And that’s one of the hardest things; there’s no nice way to say that.

**Craig:** Well, other than to say, “Look, you’re not the only person. And it’s not fatal. Because people have pulled out of that flat spin before.” But if you read something, I mean, you’ve had this experience where you read something and you think, “Yeah, I could write the next five pages just like you did here, in a minute.” Or, anybody could write these pages. There’s no reason I need you to write the rest of this story. You’re not expressing it uniquely.

**Aline:** Right. But some people have a voice in life as they walk around. They just can’t get it onto a piece of paper.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** And so partly it’s about learning what your point of view is, what makes you interesting to people, and being confident that that’s going to interest a reader.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing right there. Because I think people are just scared that their natural expression is boring. And what they do is they chase. And everybody has to sort of start like that with rare exception. There are prodigies, but so many people start by copying. You know, that’s how we learn to speak, by copying. So, it’s natural that we learn to write by copying, but at some point you got to kind of take the training wheels off, because all you’ll ever be is a copyist at that point.

**John:** Yeah. It’s having the courage to speak as you actually see the world.

**Aline:** Some screenwriters have been incredibly influential. I would say William Goldman, Shane Black, just in terms of having a very distinct way of writing that people then imitated. I mean, Goldman was huge for a very long time and people would write in that kind of epigrammatic way that he wrote. And then Shane Black, obviously. I mean, I think people are still writing in that tone.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me, it’s the first mistake. It’s the mistake of page zero is that you’re copying. I mean, all it says is it looks like I’m going to have to go get Shane Black, I guess, to fix this script, because I just got ersatz Shane Black.

There is nothing else you can offer as a writer except that which is unique to you. If it’s not unique to you, I don’t need it from you.

**John:** I’ll say it’s useful to look through the writing that you like a lot and figure out why you like it that way. And there may be aspects of that that you can completely use. Rather than sort of aping Shane Black’s short sentences and overuse of periods, find your way of getting that scene description on the page in a way that’s meaningful. Find your dialogue that is useful in those ways.
A writer who we both, Aline and I both — I’m pointing to Aline. Pointing doesn’t do any good on a podcast.

**Craig:** Right. This one over here.

**John:** This one over here. — We both talked about Lena Dunham and how much we enjoy her stuff. And you want to talk about somebody who has perspective and a voice, this feels like, you know, her world and what’s interesting to her being nicely put together on screen.

**Aline:** And you feel like you could see a line — someone could say something in life and you’d be like, “Oh, that’s such a Lena Dunham kind of moment.” You know, she already has, at such a young age, she already has a signature style/way of looking at the world perspective.

I mean, what’s amazing about her is when you see Tiny Furniture, it was all there. It was always all there. And she has such a distinct point of view. And I think, you know, because people do start out often by copying, I think we’re going to see a lot of stuff which is…

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**Aline:** …you know, young women in their 20s. She, though, will free other people who have different… — You know, that’s what’s interesting about somebody like a Quentin or a Lena or somebody. If you have a distinct point of view you kind of give other people permission to find their own voice and to be that.

**John:** Absolutely. I get very frustrated by the knocks on Go as being like Pulp Fiction light, but I’m fully willing to acknowledge the fact that it would have been very hard to make Go without Pulp Fiction, because restarting the story twice and our structure, everyone would be like, “Well that’s not going to work. You can’t do that.” And once you’re like, “Well, there’s a very successful movie…”

**Craig:** I don’t think of Go, I mean, I don’t think of it that way. Maybe in the moment…

**John:** In the moment it was. That’s what people compared it to.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s what people do. It’s pattern bias. You know, “Well, that thing just happened so it must have caused this.” But it’s important to know the range of your own voice. There are people that have really specific voices like Tarantino or Dunham, and they write that kind of thing.

But it’s also okay to be the sort of person that is the Jack of all trades, who can kind of move in between, as long as there’s something unifying. It might not be dialogue, but unified in a way you tell a story, how you structure you out, what themes you dwell on. There’s all sorts of ways to express yourself, but you have to at least express yourself.

**John:** Now, Aline, most of your produced movies seem to fall into a certain kind of, not even genre really, but a certain kind of mold. Is that because you’ve picked those movies, or those are the movies that have gotten made? What’s the through line?

**Aline:** Well, the first couple movies that I wrote were pretty straight up rom-coms, I would say. And then The Devil Wears Prada is not, and well, 27 Dresses also is a straight up rom-com. But then I wrote a few that were sort of women in the workplace trying to balance their life. And that was just, Prada was brought to me. Morning Glory was something that I wanted to show the first time a woman has real responsibility in a workplace, so that was a different spin on that.

And then I Don’t Know How She Does It is a work/life balance thing. But, it’s funny, I don’t think of myself as being a genre writer, because I don’t think of myself — I think of myself as writing pieces that are essentially dramatic, even if they have jokes in them. Dramas with jokes.

And, so, I sort of — I did We Bought a Zoo, which is a family movie.

**John:** That’s also a drama with jokes.

**Aline:** It’s a drama with jokes. Yeah. So, some of the other stuff that I branched into, I just approach it as sort of characters/character dilemma. So, I never think of myself as a genre writer. But I don’t think anybody does.
So, it’s funny, you know, I’m doing a broader range of stuff, even though I’ll always love — I love single lead comedies. I love romantic comedies. But one of the things I’m writing is a robot movie which one of our samples today is a…

**Craig:** Yeah, a robot movie. So, we’ll get into that.

**Aline:** So, I’m writing a robot movie. And what’s been interesting is working in different genres. I mean, I think I still have a lot of the same concerns and interests irrespective of what kind of material I’m dealing with.

**John:** Because I got pigeonholed right from the very start as a kid’s book writer — the first two projects I got were kid’s book adaptations, which didn’t get made, but I was only being that guy. I’d written Go largely just to break out of that box.

**Aline:** Oh, that’s interesting.

**John:** And so I very deliberately, consciously wrote that, saying like…

**Craig:** To not be the Fried Worms guy.

**John:** Exactly. And so with that, the weird luxury is everyone saw whatever they wanted to see in it. And so they’d say, like, “Oh, you are the edgy action movie guy.” “Oh, you are the comedy guy.” “You are this guy.” And so I was able to quickly get a lot of different things.

And I don’t think it hurt my sort of craft, but it did make it harder to sort of figure out what — ultimately what box to put me for other things. Because I didn’t become a brand in comedy, I didn’t become a brand in action. I just became the guy who does the various different kind of things.

What’s weird is that when you sort of take a big step back and look at the movies that actually got made, almost all of them are sort of “Two World” movies, where like there’s a normal world and the character decides to cross into this other world that has special rules, and ultimately sort of comes back out of it. And it’s very much sort of —

**Aline:** Yeah. I would probably, in my own stuff I would play more to thematics and layers than genre similarities.

**John:** Yeah. I described your movies in the previous podcast as want-coms.

**Aline:** I remember that.

**Craig:** The want-coms. Yeah, I’ve been all over the map. I mean, I’ve been very, remarkably uncalculating in my own career for somebody that’s kind of like, I have a tendency to calculate. But really kind of I just like making movies. So, I’ve always gravitated towards what’s getting made. And I had some really rough experiences. The best things I think I’ve ever written haven’t been made.

So, I started to be more interested in just writing movies. I just don’t like writing scripts that don’t get made. It just feels so awful.

**Aline:** My husband calls that the Document Production Business.

**Craig:** Yeah, pretty much. You’re just pushing paper around and then in the end it’s a booklet that no one reads. You know, I adapted Harvey and I wrote a movie called Game Voice at Bruckheimer. I love those scripts. And they meant something to me. And I adapted a Philip Dick short story. These are all really the ones I cared about, and then it just didn’t happen.
So, I started, basically, okay, well what’s in front of me that’s getting made? And I think the downside is sometimes what’s getting made isn’t that great. But, it then got me to a place where now some of the things that are getting made I really do think are great, and I love them. You know, so, I don’t know. I always feel like, I swear, maybe it’s just me — I always feel like I’m just a rookie still. I don’t know how many times… — I always feel like the next ten years are the ten years that count. In any given year, I always think the next ten years are the ones that count.

Until I finally get to retire, which as you know I’m really looking forward to. That’s my big thing.

**Aline:** Yeah. Nobody wants to retire more than you.

**Craig:** Oh, I can’t wait. I cannot wait. So much fun to think about all the things I can do.

**John:** You’re being serious? You’re actually thinking about retirement?

**Craig:** Always.

**Aline:** He’s always talking…

**John:** Oh, god, I never talk about retirement. I cannot ever imagine retiring.

**Aline:** Me neither.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, it’s going to be the best.

**John:** Yeah. I will die mid-draft.

**Craig:** Now, listen, I’m not going to retire next year. I’m not going to retire in five years. But once I hit 50, then I’m going to start thinking about it. And then I’d like to have a nice regenerative breaking down kind of vibe towards 60. And then I’m out.

**Aline:** There’s a good recitative in that.

**Craig:** There is!

**Aline:** [singing] Here I am. I’m a…for 50.

**John:** [singing] But what will you do?

**Craig:** So many things! [singing] Anything I want. [laughs] Why do they do that?

**Aline:** Do you have enough hobbies?

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. I have a lot of hobbies, and there are a lot of things I want to learn. Like I want to learn some languages. I want to learn to play the guitar better. There are things I know how to do, just not well. And I want to be able to do them better. So, I’d like to learn things, go places, check stuff out, see my friends, hang out.

And, by the way, I would still write, but I would write for myself. I would write things that aren’t screenplays. I would just do stuff because I wouldn’t be worrying about saving for my kids, and my family, and retirement and all the rest of it.
And also, frankly, I like what I’m doing right now. I do. I just feel like — this is a whole separate therapy discussion — but at some point you have to stop doing what you’re doing. You can’t do it for your entire life. You can’t.

**Aline:** You can if you’re my dad.

**Craig:** I know. You can if you’re my dad, too. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that. I’m saying you shouldn’t.

**Aline:** He loves it.

**Craig:** Yes, some people do. Here’s the thing: I don’t. Like I know, sorry — I know that I need something new at some point. I get excited when things change. I love chaos and mayhem, basically. And I think I want to change it up. You know, I can feel change coming. You know what? There’s a wind of change in the air.

**Aline:** [singing] There’s a wind…

**Craig:** Recitative. You want to talk about…?

**John:** I want to talk about one more thing before we get into that. I could imagine at some point not writing screenplays, but I’m also sort of — part of me lives like ten years in the future where there’s some movies I’ve already directed. Like I already know, like, well that’s that movie I’m going to direct. And so at some point I’m going to get to that point. So, retirement is always way beyond these other movies that I’m going to be doing.

**Aline:** You have lots of hobbies and interests.

**John:** I have a lot of interests, yeah.

**Aline:** Your hobbies are businesses.

**Craig:** You’d be better at retirement. You love making apps. You’re a little app-making elf.

**John:** But I would never stop my current career to do that. So, I enjoy it, but I want everything to happen simultaneously.

**Craig:** The world needs apps.

**John:** I mostly just want to clone myself and send out the army of John Augusts to do different things.

**Craig:** What a horrifying thought.

**John:** It would be great.

**Craig:** And army of John Augusts.

**Aline:** I think it’s already happened.

**Craig:** It might have. Which one do you think we’re talking to now? Which generation of August is this?

**Aline:** The relaxed fit.

**Craig:** Oh, this is Relaxed Fit August?

>**432 – Learning From Movies**

**John:** So Craig, one thing I’ve done in 2019 which was helpful and I’m definitely carrying it with me into the new year is when I watch a movie I try to take some notes afterwards about what worked in that movie for me. And so this first segment I want to talk through this idea of what we can learn from movies.

So I think so often we’re talking about screenplays or like reading scripts and all that stuff but really what all of us do is we watch movies and we take things from movies. And I want to have a discussion about how to be a little bit more systematic and really thoughtful about what we’re taking from movies as we finish watching a film.

**Craig:** Mindful viewing of movies. That’s a good idea. Everybody that does what we do uses other movies as examples or inspiration. Sometimes we use them as negative examples.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** But the movies that we love we tend to really think about carefully. It’s a little bit like what you and I do when we walk through one of these movies.

**John:** Exactly. And so we did our walkthrough of Die Hard and that was really trying to look systematically at what the movie was doing and how the movie was working. That’s a thing that people can do by themselves with every movie that they watch. And really if you’re aspiring to be a screenwriter, or you are a screenwriter, it’s not a bad practice to get into with everything. So if you watch a pilot of a TV show or you watch a movie, just take a few minutes and really look at how that movie worked. Because when you don’t do that it tends to be only the most recent thing you’ve watched is the only example you have in your head. And if you do it more systematically it will work for everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my questions I want to ask myself when I finish a movie is what’s working in it, what’s not working for you in it? If it’s not working why is it not working? Really troubleshoot for yourself what didn’t click for you and why didn’t it click. And what could you have done differently in that movie to make it click?

Really you’re trying to focus on the how questions. How is the movie working and how could the movie be working better if you were to have access to the engine underneath it?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this saying that people put out there about social media. Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. And sometimes if we watch movies, particularly ones that we love, and we don’t think about them in a gear-watch-works way then we may suffer from that. We may think, OK, I’m currently sitting here with a pile of tiny little gears and cogs and springs and it’s not a watch. And I just saw the most beautiful watch. I suck.

If you start to really look at it from the point of view of a craftsperson then you can see that they had the same problems and limitations you did. And it’s really helpful I think to start to strip away stuff that isn’t purely writing. Start to strip away the lighting. Start to strip away the music. Start to strip away the performances. And just think about the movements of things that were commanded by text, because that’s what you’re doing.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s start at the fundamental. Let’s start at the hero. Let’s take a look at who the hero is in this story and what the function of that hero is. So, as the viewer do you understand who that hero is? What they want? Both on a macro scale, the overall arc of their journey through the story, but on a micro level. On a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment do you understand what that hero wants? And if you do how is that being communicated? What information are they giving you to let you know what that hero wants?

And that is purely craft. That is the screenwriter’s job is to make it clear what that central character is trying to go after.

**Craig:** And it’s perfectly reasonable to study how people do that elegantly. So Damon Lindelof and his team did Watchmen which I loved and a lot of people do. And one of the things that I thought was so good about it was what I call non-expository exposition. They were so clever – and that is craft – about making the information release interesting and meaningful beyond just you need to know this. They managed to weave it into other things. Really good lessons learned from that. And I think that when we watch movies it’s fair to look at those really hardcore craft things and say, oh, you know what I’m not going to steal the way, like their movie there, but I’m going to steal their ambition. Like they clearly aspire to do better than the usual. I should, too.

**John:** Absolutely. Watchmen is a great example for my next question which is how does the hero fit the story. So thinking about what story do you want to tell and which hero is the appropriate hero for telling that story. The fit between hero and world in Watchmen could not have been better. So you had a character whose grandfather was part of this sort of long story, this long struggle, to get us up to this present moment. So she was uniquely qualified to be the central character in the story.

**Craig:** And you can sometimes struggle when you watch a movie because you’re looking at the wrong person. This is another thing that movies do all the time, we just don’t notice it until we really watch meaningfully. And that is they have us following somebody that isn’t the hero. We think they’re the hero. They’re not the hero.

Sometimes the hero is this side character or somebody we think of as a side character because they’re not occupying this huge space in the story. But the story is really about this smaller – I mean, the most famous example that people kick around is who is Ferris Bueller about? Who is the hero of Ferries Bueller? And it’s Cameron. It’s the friend. Because he’s the only one that has a choice to make. He is the only one who has a problem, who is running away from his problem, who has to confront his problem, and overcome his problem. But he’s not Ferris Bueller. He’s not in the title. Nor is he the guy we watch in the beginning, or the end. It seems like Ferris Bueller is the hero but he’s not. So meaningful watching helps you get there.

**John:** Absolutely. And finding those situations where the central character of Ferris Bueller is not the protagonist. It’s not the one that actually undergoes the transformation, the journey. So really being deliberate to look at sort of who is playing what role in the story. And once you do that figure out how are they introduced. How are you as a viewer first introduced to these characters? And how quickly do you understand who they are and why you should be interested in them. Those initial scenes of meeting those characters we all know as writers are so crucial. Well, how did this film do it? And ask yourself what are the other choices they could have made and why was this the right choice or the wrong choice?

**Craig:** Introductions are something that I think writers probably glide past all the time and should not. Maybe it’s because they think their “directing on the page.” As you know I’m a huge fan of directing on the page. I think that’s our job. And I think of movies that are delightful and how often their delight is conveyed to us through an introduction of a character. Like so when we first meet Jack Sparrow in the very first Pirates of the Caribbean movie he’s on this ship, he is a proud pirate, he seems like just one of those plot armored heroes where no wrong can. And then you reveal that his boat is sinking and he literally steps off the top of it onto a deck as it disappears below the waves. That says so much not just about him but about this world, the tone. It’s delightful.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** In the second movie I believe he shoots his way out of a coffin. It’s another just – it’s surprising. So, another excellent thing to keep an eye on for all movies. And sometimes they’re not flashy like that. The introduction of the family in Parasite–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Just the way that they’re living in a basement sort of, and how their day is consumed by trying to steal wifi. Brilliant.

**John:** It’s really talk about all these aspects, like who are the right characters for the story, how are we meeting these characters, and do we understand what they want? And Parasite is a great example of how you’re seeing all three of those things in one initial sequence that’s really telling you this is their situation. These are the people you’re going to be watching through the course of the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re watching a movie and you feel good at the end of a scene, stop. I don’t mean to say that you should do this the first time you see it. But when it’s time to watch it meaningfully and thoughtfully if the scene works for you stop and then roll back and then watch it again. And just think about the layers and why.

This is so much more important than why – I feel like our culture is just obsessed with people explaining why they hate things. They’re rewarded for it, I guess. It teaches you very little. It really does. I’ll tell you, more than anything when I watch something I don’t like I get scared. I get scared because I think would I have done the exact same thing in that situation? How would I have done it differently? I’m starting to get scared. Better to look at things you love.

**John:** Looking at any of these characters, a useful metric for me is could I describe this character independently of the actor? Do I have enough information about that character at the start and as the story progresses that I could talk about that character independently of the actor who is playing him? So I think Jack Sparrow is actually a great example. Because we think of him as Johnny Depp, but that character is very, very specific independently of the performance of Johnny Depp.
Same with all the family members in Parasite whose names I don’t know. And so they are such strongly drawn characters that I don’t have to fall back on a description of who the actor was playing them to be able to describe them as what they’re trying to do in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Disney, the folks who are running Disney very famously they knew they had hired Johnny Depp and when they saw what he was doing and what he looked like and how he sounded and walked they freaked out, because that was not some sort of inevitable thing that travels out of Johnny Depp. That was something specific and different. And it is a character that could be played by another person. It could be.
Would it have been played the same way? No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I think he was perfect. I really do. But in some alternate universe someone else is playing it and people also love the movie.

**John:** Agreed. So we talked about the hero, let’s talk about the antagonist. How does the antagonist arrive in the story? How do they challenge the hero? And in movies that work well the antagonist is so specific to the story and so specific to the hero that it’s hard to imagine them existing outside of that universe. So we talk about this in Die Hard. We talk about it in almost any of the movies we love, they have a villain or a chief character who is challenging the hero who is so specific to that story. So always look for how is that antagonist introduced and how specifically drawn are they to challenge your hero in the story.

**Craig:** And if it works for you, accept that. You know, you could fall into a trap of trying to fit things into categories and saying, well, sometimes I’ll see people say, “You know, I really liked this movie but it doesn’t follow the rule of blankety-blank.” Correct. It does not. Because that is not a rule. The rule that you just cited isn’t a rule. There are movies where the villain, the antagonist, is the weather. There are movies where it’s a dog. There’s movies where it’s a ghost. There’s movies where it’s fate. There’s movies where it’s the person you love the most.

It’s defined in so many different ways, so start with the fact that it worked. And then say, OK, I’ve just learned a new way of conceiving of what an antagonist is. The word villain, also, a bit of a trap.

**John:** Agreed. So then we have our characters. Let’s talk about the storytelling of the movie. So, how quickly and how well does it establish who is important and what they’re going after? How does the movie move between storylines? And this I think is the most crucial kind of craft question. Obviously there’s multiple things that are going to be happening. How does the movie decide how to switch back and forth between? Does it limit POV to only things that the hero knows? Or does the audience have omniscient POV? How is it working in terms of telling you its story? And how quickly – going back to the Pirates example – does it set up what its tone and genre are really going to be?

And these are fundamental things. And if the movie is not working you’re going to notice it here.

**Craig:** Correct. And that’s why it’s so important to carefully watch a movie that is working for you. Because when it is working it is designed for you to not notice any seams whatsoever. You won’t notice cuts. You won’t notice that one scene has changed to another. You won’t notice transitions. It will all seem inevitable and purposeful and of a single whole.
So take the time to now go, OK, but it’s not. So let’s be amateur magicians that are invited to the magic castle and we’re asking the really good sleight of hand guy, OK, slow it down for me. Let me see it bit by bit, move by move. That’s how you’re going to learn.

**John:** Absolutely. The last bit of technique which I think is so crucial to be monitoring is how does the movie surprise you? Because by this point you’ve watched thousands of movies. You are a sophisticated movie viewer. The movies that succeed are the ones that still manage to surprise you. That you feel like you’re caught up with them and they still have some more tricks up their sleeve. So how do they do that? How did they deceive you in a way that got you to that moment of surprise?
And those are the moments to really go back and really figure out what was the set up that got you to that misunderstanding.

**Craig:** Setups, payoffs, misdirections, but also just as important clues, hints. We will not feel as satisfied if there were no hints. I was watching, so Knives Out, written and directed by our friend Rian Johnson, which has done extraordinarily well and for good reason. I watched it again and there’s a moment that happens during the reading of the will when the lawyer announces that the old man has left all of his stuff, all of it, to Marta, his nurse. There’s one little thing that happens with one character that is a clue. But you sure don’t know it at the time because it’s a clever clue. It’s a smart clue. And I thought, OK, there’s intelligence at work and there’s also an understanding of how fair play actually improves the misdirection and the surprise.

It is, again, a very calculated, careful crafted bit. And at its best moviemaking is about marrying this really hardcore calculating craft with a kind of inspired wild creative abandon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s what good things like Knives Out do.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a crucial thing about Knives Out is to remember like, so Rian Johnson is both the writer and the director. That scene is incredibly well directed, but that moment that you’re describing is a written moment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was very clearly an idea that occurred in the writing stage of this. And so I think it’s also great to have a separate discussion about what works on a directing level, on a cinematography level, on casting, costuming. Think about all those things but as a separate conversation. Really just focus on what is it about the storytelling, about the writing that is working for you so well in this part of the process.

**Craig:** Whodunits are amazing for this. If you want to really study the craft of surprise and misdirection just watch whodunits. Because that’s all they’re about. I mean, they are about some other things occasionally. I mean, Knives Out has a certain commentary about class and what it means to be an immigrant in the United States and inherited wealth versus earned wealth. All of that stuff is there. But mostly it’s about the machinery of who did it. And that’s what’s so satisfying about it.

**John:** Well it’s also a meta examination of sort of the whodunit as a genre, because it ultimately is not so much a whodunit.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s sort of like we know who did it, but whodunit. And I love those movies because they really do instruct you. Comedies, also, I will say comedies are oftentimes–

**John:** Well, there’s setup, payoff.

**Craig:** It’s machinery.

**John:** Yeah, it’s machinery behind.

**Craig:** Study the machinery.

**John:** So we’ve watched the movie and now we’re trying to focus on it. Obviously if you have someone there to go have a drink with afterwards you can talk through all that stuff, which is great. But if you’re watching the movie by yourself what I found to be really helpful and I’ve started doing it much more for the last couple months is just one page of notes, bullet points of like these were the things I learned from this movie. And if it’s a movie that I loved, great. These are some things I loved and some things that this filmmaker was able to do in the writing that really worked for me and things I wanted to remember from this.

If it’s a movie I didn’t love, I find that also to be really helpful. This thing they tried to do just did not work, or I was confused by these moments. This isn’t a review. This is like what is it that you can take from this thing you just watched and apply to your own work. And what you said before about when you watch a movie that’s not working you get that moment of fear. Would I have made the same mistakes? And as I look at the movies that didn’t work, yeah, I definitely see some things where I probably would have tried that in that situation, too. So it’s helpful. It’s a chance to sort of have the experience of having made that movie that didn’t work and learn from it without having spent years of your life making a movie that didn’t work.

**Craig:** How nice is that, right? I mean, it’s hard enough doing these things. So if there’s anything we can do to save ourselves from a trap. By the way, we probably can’t. I mean, if we’re going to fall into a trap we’re going to fall into a trap. But studying other people’s good stuff but help I think but make us better. And if you do see, well, I guess here is how I would put it with the negative things. I do think of these things as relationships. We have a relationship with something. A movie. This is why very, very smart, cultured, tasteful people can have violent disagreements about the same movie. Because it’s not about the movie being good or bad, or you being a good or bad viewer. It’s about this unique relationship that forms between you and it, which is the sum of all of what it is and all of what you are.

So, when we watch these things and we find ourselves in a good or bad relationship, what’s worthy there is it will help us craft something that we have a good relationship with as we write. Because I’ve written things before where I just thought I’m fighting with this thing. I mean, this thing doesn’t want to exist, or it shouldn’t exist, but I’m being paid to make it exist and I am fighting with it. I am at war. And it’s not a good feeling. Figuring out how to have a good relationship with what you’re writing is something that you might be able to be helped to do by thinking about the good relationships you’ve had with other things.

**John:** Absolutely. One unique thing about the time people are living in now versus when we were starting out is that pretty much any movie you’ve really enjoyed you can read the screenplay of. And so if you have questions about how it worked on the page you can go back and look at those scripts. This is the part where you and I come clean and say we don’t read the scripts. We’re not reading those For Your Consideration scripts.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But they’re available there for people to read. And it was very important for me when I was starting to write to read a bunch of those scripts. And so definitely go out and read those scripts if you are new to the craft and learning how it all works.

Craig and I tend to watch movies and we can sort of see the script coming through there. So, obviously we don’t know what the drama was and what changed on the set, but we get a pretty sense of what the storytelling was on the page that led to that movie. But if you’re new to this that’s a great place to start. And so I would recommend watch the movie, read the script, and see how it compares. Or if there’s something that you’ve not seen, reverse it sometimes and read the script, see the movie in your head, and then watch the final movie to see sort of how the filmmakers did the job of converting that screenplay into a movie.

**Craig:** I mean, really what you’re advising people to do is their homework.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do you homework, people.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is a job. They don’t just pay you for nothing.

**John:** And I guess–

**Craig:** You got to know stuff.

**John:** In my taking notes on movies that I’m watching now I’m just sort of trying to do my homework a little bit more. I feel like I’ve been letting it slide for a few years and just like watching the movie just as a fan. That’s why I like to watch a movie just to enjoy it, but then afterwards take those notes. I’m not taking notes during it.

**Craig:** Well that’s a really good way to keep yourself relevant also. I think as people get older sometimes we think of them as losing a step or losing some zip on their fastballs, as we say, but sometimes I think all that’s happening is they’ve just disconnected from the churn of culture and what is relevant and what’s happening around us that is new and different. Because people are constantly kicking over the old stuff.

Like for instance what Rian did with Knives Out. It sort of kicks over the old stuff a bit. And if you’re not paying attention to that you will just make more old stuff. Sometimes I read things, I’m sure you have too, where a studio will say we really like this idea. It’s not quite working. Can you fix it? And you read it and you think, well, I get it. This is a good idea. It feels like it was written 30 years ago.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It just seems like whoever wrote this stopped at some point and you can’t.

**John:** Move forward.

**Craig:** Move forward.

——-

**John:** We are back in 2023. It’s time for our first One Cool Things of 2023. No pressure whatsoever. My One Cool Thing is a blog post that I saw a bunch of people linking to this past week. A lot of the newsletters I subscribe to had it. It’s called the Dangers of Elite Perception by Jarrett Walker. He is an urban theorist, a philosopher, a person who talks about public transit. His concept of elite perception is that the folks in elite positions often believe they actually understand how things work overall. They have this natural bias. They can only see what their experience would be.

The example he gives is that someone would say, “How is this new subway going to help me, a guy with a BMW parked in my driveway?” and not understanding not everyone has access to a car and that it’s not going to be useful for him necessarily. He’s not going to directly benefit but everyone else might benefit.

I think you can really broaden this idea of elite perception beyond just urban transportation to a lot of situations where it’s so easy to get caught up in the solipsism of everything in the world functions the way it functions to me and really stresses the importance of going out and just asking questions and figuring out different people’s perspective and needs and wants, because it’s very unlikely that your experience is the same as other people’s experiences.

That feels especially true for anyone writing stories, anybody who has to really think beyond what their immediate needs are. Just be aware that there’s a lot of other things out there, and just always be asking yourself, “I think it’s this way, but why do I think it’s this way? Is there some other people I can ask about how they really see the situation?”

**Megana:** That’s so interesting. It seems so obvious that if you’re designing public transit, you would be thinking about the people who are already using public transit the most versus yourself who owns a BMW or something.

**John:** I think the same thing can be applied to any industry-wide thing. We have a bunch of different people who are involved in the process of making movies and TV shows. The needs of one group may not match up with the needs of other groups. Recognize that if you’re pushing for one thing that you really want, it may have harmful effects to other people as well. Always good to be looking at what are the needs of the whole and not always prioritize what are your immediate needs.

**Megana:** I love that. I feel like as I learn more about design, it really comes down to asking more questions of people making sure that the design’s actually functional.

**John:** Absolutely. Some of the software stuff that we’re doing, I have persnickety taste, and so a lot of things in Highland or Weekend Read are very much what I want. It’s only when we actually have betas out there that other people can use or people who are trying to use the software for different things than I’m trying to use it for, that we can really see what’s useful. Ryan Knighton, who’s been a frequent guest, tests out our iOS apps to make sure they actually work for blind people, for example. We can turn on the simulators to see what would it be like for a blind person, but we are not a blind person who can use this app. He’s our guinea pig there and really lets us know what he needs.

**Megana:** Great. In keeping in theme of broadening point of view, my One Cool Thing for this week is a book by Gabrielle Blair. It’s called Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. It’s this short, funny, thought-provoking read. You could probably finish it in one sitting.

In the book, she lays out these 20 arguments where she makes the case for why we should move the debate away from legislating/controlling women’s bodies and instead focuses on the role of men in sexual health. I think what she does so well is she takes away some of the political and religious weight that we bring into these conversations, and instead, really roots it in these biological and scientific arguments around fertility. I learned a lot from it. It was a really interesting read. I think it’s an important perspective to consider.

**John:** Absolutely. I think you’re right to tie it into this dangers of elite perception. I think we have this sense when it comes to fertility and abortion and all these things that it’s strictly just a women’s issue.

**Megana:** Really helpful way to frame this conversation.

**John:** It all comes from just an act that happened on one day that has these long repercussions, and that we should probably be thinking about that moment rather than all the other stuff around it.

**Megana:** She really gets into the science of the fertility and the difference between it. These are things that I have known and felt, but to see these arguments written out in this way was just really powerful. I think it’s really smart the way that she does it.

**John:** Great. I’m looking forward to reading it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and two of our segments were produced by Stuart Friedel way back in the day.

**Megana:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli as always. Our outro is by Martin Kubitsky. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Scriptnotes book and other things coming in 2023. Megana, thank you for putting together this episode.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, this whole episode came to be because you were working on a chapter for the Scriptnotes book. We’ve not had a lot of big updates. We’re still not talking about delivery dates and things like that, when we have to turn it in to our publishers at Crown. It’s been fun going back through the archives and seeing who we were then and what advice we had. I’m sure our writing advice is pretty consistent, but other stuff has changed. What are you finding as you’re looking through things?

**Megana:** It’s interesting to also hear how much more confident you guys are in talking about these things as time goes on. There are kernels of truth that you’ve been saying since Episode 70 of the podcast, 500 episodes ago. That’s really cool, because I think that these lessons that you’re teaching are consistent, but they’re also really difficult to learn, which is why we have to keep talking about them.

**John:** One of the goals of the Scriptnotes book is that it can be a little bit timeless, that it’s really screenwriting advice that’ll be applicable in 2023 or 2043 hopefully. There’ll be things that’ll still be the same. Other stuff does keep evolving and changing.

One of the things that you and I have been trying to figure out is that… Over the next year, we’re going to be coming up on a new WGA contract. There’s going to be all the questions of stuff about what happens around that. That’s a difficult thing for us to do on the show, because we’re not that timely of a show. We record a week in advance sometimes. We can’t be especially responsive. We have international listeners and listeners who are listening just for the fun of it, who don’t necessarily need to know about the intricate details of WGA stuff. It’s not cool for them.

What you and I have been talking about is maybe just doing short little side-cast episodes that are not a full hour, not our normal thing, but are just about WGA topics that come up related to this new contract that don’t have to be about everything else. If you want a normal Scriptnotes episode, you’ll get your normal Scriptnotes episode on Tuesday, but there may be some extra little bonus things that come out not on a Tuesday, about just this WGA stuff.

**Megana:** Absolutely. I think the one common thing of everyone in Hollywood is they’re incredibly dramatic. As we are coming up to some of these conversations, I have been hearing crazy, wild takes. I think it’ll be nice to have a really measured, responsive way of hearing what’s true or not, because you’ve had so much experience with the WGA, at least negotiations, to shed some more light and insight into what’s actually going on.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve been through many negotiation cycles. I’ve been on the negotiating committee. I’m on the negotiating committee this year. I can’t comment specifically about some stuff in this negotiation, because that’s just not appropriate. The only place that you’re going to hear the real scoop from the WGA side is going to be from the WGA itself and from the folks who are in charge of things. What I can hopefully do is offer some just broad frameworks for thinking about the timelines of things, how stuff works, because there’s terminology that is just facts, but it’s not necessarily obvious to someone going through it for the first time. I see here in the Workflowy you have two questions from people who’ve written in already. Maybe we can try to just break the seal with these two.

**Megana:** Chris wrote in and asked, “I’m a new pre-WGA arrival to LA and have been taking some general water bottle tour meetings with execs at various studios and production companies. During my last three conversations, the execs all mentioned that they were concerned about the uncertainty of a pending writer’s strike in May, with two of the three saying they believed it likely to happen. I’ve not heard this possibility discussed on any recent Scriptnotes episodes, and I’m wondering if you can share your thoughts.”

**John:** What Chris is experiencing is probably what Megana’s experiencing, what I’m experiencing too, is that when you have conversations in general meetings with people who work in the industry, film or television, they’ll ask like, “Oh, it’s getting crazy. There could be a strike.” People will weigh their percentage odds on what that’s going to be.

Here’s the very general thing that people are looking at and talking about timeline-wise is that the the WGA works under a contract with all the studios, all the big studios, everyone who makes film and television. That contract is renewed every three years. We have a negotiation to update and revise and renew and approve a new contract with the studios. The existing contract runs out May 1st.

In the time leading up to that, you would expect there to be negotiations with the studios between the WGA and the studios to figure out what that new contract will be. In some years it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a very contentious contract. In some years it feels like a more contentious contract. There’s a lot of discussion this year about what’s going to be in that, but there are no proposals from either side. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. I just think there’s a general feeling that it looks like there’s a lot of stuff to be figured out.

We’re not the only people negotiating contract. It should be noted that IATSE, who represents most of the below-the-line decisions, they’ve already negotiated a contract. The DGA may be in negotiations to work on their contract. SAG, the actors generally go after us. There’s a lot of negotiations happening this year about contracts. It’s very normal for someone like Chris to be hearing these conversations as they go in and have these just general chitchatty meetings about what’s going to happen and thinking about head to if there were to be a strike, what that might look like. Megana, are you hearing these conversations too?

**Megana:** Yeah, and I would say that they’re a little bit further, where people are banking on the inevitability of it. I just heard someone at a party recently saying that they were planning a vacation around when they think the strike would happen, because to me that feels like putting the horse before the cart. Wait, no, that’s where you’re supposed to put the horse.

**John:** The horses generally do go in front of the carts, but you do you.

**Megana:** Putting the cart before the horse. You and I had an interesting discussion about this. I was hoping you could talk about why we shouldn’t presume an inevitability of a strike.

**John:** I don’t think this idea of inevitability helps anybody, because I think what it could do is back some producers and some studios into rushing or making some hasty decisions that they’re going to regret. I also think it doesn’t do well for writers, because if everyone assumes there’s going to be a strike, then maybe the other side isn’t negotiating with best intentions of actually averting a problem. I just don’t think inevitable is a great word to be thinking about, especially when, again, there are no proposals. There’s no deal to be discussing. It’s just a lot of speculation at this point. I don’t think it’s especially great to be doing that.

Listen. All writers I think at some point have this dream list of like, what if there were a snow day and I didn’t have to do my other work and I can just do whatever I wanted to do. That’s natural. That’s a natural fantasy in film. I’m sure executives have that too. Presuming that there’s going to be a giant blizzard and that the school’s going to be canceled for a period of time isn’t a great way to be approaching the works that you actually need to be doing.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh, and it sets you up for so much disappointment.

**John:** I don’t think inevitable is a great word to be throwing around here. I see a second question here from Liliana.

**Megana:** Liliana from Los Angeles wrote in and said, “A few episodes ago, Craig mentioned a potential writer’s strike next summer, and it made me curious what you all think it means for assistants. I currently work for a writer under her overall deal, and she warned me about the strike as well. If her deal ends, I’ll be out of a job. What can pre-WGA writers/assistants do to prepare? What was it like for them in ’07 and ’08?”

**John:** I can’t speak specifically to how things worked for below-the-line staff, writing staff, in ’07 and ’08, folks who were writers’ room assistants, who were showrunners’ assistants. What I will say is that I think given Pay Up Hollywood and our general better awareness of the issues faced by folks who were working in those rooms, there will be some more awareness of how do we keep those people solvent during any sort of work stoppage if it were to happen.

There’s not a lot I can advise Liliana to do other than to be frugal with her money, which is a hard thing for me to say, because I know she’s not probably being paid a lot, to be aware and open, and to be maybe ready to shift to something else if she needs to during a time if work were to ever stop, if there were to be some sort of strike or some sort of other action.

If there were to be a strike or work stoppage or a lockout or anything like that, if there is to be a disruption, it stops for everybody. Studios will look to trim costs where they can, and they will fire people. They will not employ people. In some cases, they are able to keep productions going for a little time, but it’s tough. Liliana could be out of a job for a time. I do recall something from the last strike that I was involved in. Things also ramp up really quickly again. It’s not going to be like the pandemic where you just don’t know what is possibly going to happen. We do know how to get out of these things and how to get back to things.

**Megana:** Resuming production after the pandemic had so many questions, and we introduced this whole new role of the COVID safety officer, but you’re saying that this is like, as soon as it’s back on, it’s on.

**John:** Yeah. After the ’07-’08 strike, the next day, rooms were reopening and things were getting back into shape. Did people need to figure some stuff out? Sure, but a lot of stuff did just resume, pick up right where it left off. Not everything. People did lose overall deals. There were other things that were trims and there were [inaudible 01:32:11]. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but it did kind of get back to the way it was, and just with a better contract. It certainly is doable. It won’t necessarily feel like a dramatic change if there’s a stoppage and then it comes back.

**Megana:** Got it. Basically, you’re saying maybe don’t think on it, but also put more money in your bank from your savings for the first part of the year.

**John:** Yeah. To go back to the storm metaphor, don’t count on a blizzard that’s going to close schools, but you should also have some emergency mac and cheese in your cupboards in case it does happen.

**Megana:** Yeah, or study for the English test that you’re hoping will get canceled.

**John:** That’s exactly it. Somehow I have a feeling, Megana, you were always prepared for those things. Do you long for snow days or do you rue snow days?

**Megana:** I think it depended. I loved a snow day, but if I had a big test, I’d rather just get that over with, because you’re delaying this terrible thing you have to do. We would usually have one really cold week in January where we would just have a week full of snow days, and that is incredible.

**John:** I loved a snow day where it was enough to close school, but I could still get over to my friend’s house and hang out. Those were the ideal snow days for me is the ones where… They were less fun as I got older. I just remember the grade school snow days just felt like, “Wow, this is a thing I can’t even believe has happened.” I definitely agree with your point where there’s times where you’ve crammed for the test and you’re so ready, and if you had to delay and then cram again, it just felt like wasted work, because you knew that you weren’t going to hold onto those facts about chemistry.

**Megana:** Yeah. This is all short-term memory. None of this is being-

**John:** None of this is sticking.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** Now, our poor kids these days, they can just Zoom into school or they have to just turn in their paper digitally.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** They don’t get it.

**Megana:** Oh, wow.

**John:** It’s unfair. The world has become unfair.

**Megana:** That is one of the biggest joys of my childhood.

**John:** Hopefully, there’ll be no snow days that derail the delivery of the Scriptnotes book, but that is another thing. We’ll be working on it very hard. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to ship, but we know our delivery day is going to be sometime this year. We have a lot of work ahead for us. I’m not saying I want any sort of labor disruption, but if there is a labor disruption, that’s a little more time we can be working on the book.

**Megana:** I feel like that’s what we just advised against talking about.

**John:** I’m not saying I’m looking forward to it. I’m just saying a writer can’t help but theorize, if something were to go awry, this might be something I would do in that gap period of time and that might be something I’d work on in that gap period of time if it were to happen.

**Megana:** That’s fair. I just feel wizened from the pandemic that I know that that will never happen for me.

**John:** Absolutely. You always think, “Oh, I’m going to have all this luxury free time.” Then it’s like, no, I’m not.

**Megana:** Absolutely.

**John:** If there’s a strike, I’ll be marching outside of Paramount like I did last time. Who knows? Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 239 – What is good writing?](https://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 76 – How screenwriters find their voice with Aline Brosh McKenna](https://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 432 – Learning From Movies](https://johnaugust.com/2020/learning-from-movies)
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* [Dangers of Elite Projection](https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projection.html) by Jarrett Walker
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/581standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it. Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 553 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Station Eleven was one of my previous One Cool Things. Today on the show, I’m very excited to chat with the series creator, Patrick Somerville. Patrick, welcome.

**Patrick Somerville:** Thank you for having me, John. 553, intense.

**John:** 553. 553 episodes.

**Patrick:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot of podcasts.

**John:** We finally get to you. Now in addition to Station Eleven, we should also say you are a TV expert, because you wrote on Leftovers, Maniac, Made for Love. You’re writing a new thing called The Glass Hotel, based on another book by the same author. I’d love to talk to you about adaptations in television and getting into it. You actually started as a novelist. Isn’t that right?

**Patrick:** I did. I never actually had any plan or thought that getting into TV and film was even possibly, honestly. I think 12-year-old me went down to the Brown County Public Library in Green Bay, Wisconsin and got George Lucas and Steven Spielberg biographies and desperately wanted to be a movie director and wrote letters to both of those gentlemen. I think when I was 16 or 17, I think being from Green Bay, just not having connections, I just was like, “Writing fiction seems like the way to go if you have no resources, no connections at all.” I went all in in that direction. It wasn’t until my early 30s after I’d published 4 books that a manager cold-emailed me and asked if I liked TV, and I said, “Yes, I do.” Then I ended up in Hollywood.

**John:** That seems impossible. I do want to get back into the origin story of you and how you started writing for film and television. I want to actually really drill in deep on Station Eleven and the process of going from here’s a book you read to here’s a book you’re adapting to assembling a writers room, putting this show up on its feet. I really want to do a deep dive in that. We haven’t had a chance to really deep dive on a project for a while. Also, we have some listener questions I think are right up your alley, because there’s TV stuff that I won’t know the answer to, but you definitely will.

**Patrick:** Maybe. We’ll see.

**John:** If you’re willing to, in the Bonus Segment I want to talk about making a pandemic show during a pandemic, because that just feels like an extra weird complication on top of complications.

**Patrick:** You’re right. That’s exactly what it was.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get back to… You were growing up in Wisconsin. You are a kid who reads books, like pretty much everyone who’s listened to this podcast. I’m guessing you were always a writer, you were always singled out for being good at writing, and yet you didn’t have any way to approach film and TV writing, so you started working in books.

**Patrick:** A lot of those details are exactly right about me. I decided to be a writer when I was seven, standing in I guess my 1st grade classroom. I had written a short story called How to Be a Molecule. I loved writing it, but the thing that got me was reading it out loud to the audience, to all my fellow students, and them clapping afterwards. Something in there, in that whole mix, just sparked me in a way nothing ever had and hasn’t since then, honestly. I didn’t know how to do it, but I think my heart knew what I wanted to be really early, which is a gift. There’s lots of people who I meet now in our business and otherwise. I think there’s something about those 10 years of insane teenager energy devoted to being a writer that I actually think matters.

**John:** If you were a person who was great at basketball and you didn’t spend those 10 years playing basketball, you wouldn’t have developed all the skills and the muscle memory for how to do these things. Like you, I was the kid who was writing in 1st grade and declared myself a writer. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, but I definitely knew I was a writer, because that’s the thing that I was good at that people kept telling me that I was good at.

**Patrick:** You were good at it. I think it wasn’t just feedback. You had some special ability with the language that put you ahead.

**John:** Now, did you study writing? Did you go through a writing program? How did you go from this kid who was writing a story in 1st grade to a guy who published four books?

**Patrick:** I was standoffish about the profession of writing, especially growing up in the Midwest. There’s a bit of an eye roll when you say, “I’m going to be a writer,” just because like, good luck, kid. My dad was a doctor. I had this plan that I would go and be an English and biology major and go to medical school and then also write fiction. I don’t know if it was my cover. Actually, I think I believed it until about sophomore year of college, when I just dropped the bio part, because fruit flies, counting fruit flies, John. I was like, “I am guesstimating these fruit flies right now. I don’t like this. I’m not detail-oriented in the right way. I’m going to kill someone if I’m a doctor, because I’m going to, I don’t know, eyeball something that I shouldn’t be eyeballing.”

I didn’t really get the idea of creative writing as a subject. I just was an English major. I just was like, “If I want to be a writer, I should just read as much as possible.” I was an English major. I didn’t really take creative writing classes, but I did then move to New York for a year in 2001. I was a waiter, and very quickly realized that I needed to be back in academia to somehow insulate myself from the job market and the regular world. It was also 9/11 three weeks after I’d moved to New York. It was a strange moment. I applied to MFA programs. I got into Cornell, which was a great one, and went up there for three years.

**John:** My perception of writing programs, and this is probably a broad stereotype, it’s just a bunch of people who were always told they were good writers, who were then put in a hothouse environment to… I don’t think it’s a Survivor situation. You’re theoretically trying to help each other, but at the same time there’s a competitive aspect between you guys. What was it like being in an MFA writing program?

**Patrick:** It’s a bit that, but for Cornell, it’s a very small program. The cohort is only four people of total fiction writers and four poets coming in each year. There’s eight total in the program. Unlike other programs, everyone’s totally funded. There isn’t a tiered list of funding. Everyone has the same deal. Everybody’s getting paid and getting a stipend to live in Ithaca and teach and write. We weren’t competitive for resources. We were friends. It was a pretty good vibe there, even though there were different approaches maybe to using the time from different people. I was young. I was 23. Everyone but one other incoming writer was 27 or 28 and had been in the workforce. I just was in psycho devoted writer mode. I would just hole up in my apartment for 12 hours, not see the outside world, and write a short story over and over and over again. I was feasting on my hermit fantasy of writing.

**John:** What was your output during that time? You say you’re working on a short story and rewriting it. On a given week or a given month, how much were you generating?

**Patrick:** A lot. More than is realistic to be good. Too much probably, but my imagination was really firing. I think it was that moment when your technical skills starts, just to get to a place where you’re like, “My taste thinks this is good.” It’s very frustrating when you’re young because you can’t… I couldn’t make it feel like the books that I read when I was writing yet, but it was coming. It’s just slow. In the end you leave with a thesis, which became my first book, Trouble, pretty soon thereafter. I probably wrote three times as much as that thesis.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a thousand pages of fiction while I was in my MFA program.

**John:** Circling back to what you’re saying there, you were describing what Ira Glass describes as the crisis where you have taste, but you don’t actually have the ability to reach that taste. You know that you’re not quite good enough. Maybe that program gave you the chance to actually get your skills up to what the level of your taste was.

**Patrick:** It helped. Also, I’m funny in that my taste was stunted, I think, which was a gift also. It took me a while. I was behind in cultural matters, I think, in a lot of ways. Also, just the way my brain is built, I don’t overwhelm myself with self-criticism that much, which I think is unusual for writers. My problem’s in the other direction. I think everything is good. Then it takes a little while for my taste to settle in and be like, “Actually, that’s not good, Pat.” I didn’t crush myself, but I did know that my technical skill as a prose writer was a ways off from the caliber of fiction that I wanted to be producing. To me it’s just read and write and read and write and do reps in that time.

**John:** You started writing prose fiction. At what point do you become aware of screenwriting, or at least the form of screenwriting, and what it’s like to write for film and television? Was that during this program or after?

**Patrick:** No, it was 10 years later. One thing that was happening at Cornell, it was right when the last season of Sopranos was premiering. I got cable, I remember, so I could watch that. The Wire and Deadwood were both on then too. I was like, “What are these shows?” because I had loved a choice selection of TV shows, like Northern Exposure, growing up. What else? Six Feet Under. I guess Dream On from the old HBO days, The Larry Sanders Show. I had glimpsed kinds of TV that I loved. That year it just was like everything on HBO was as good as any book that I was reading. I was like, “This is the same.” I watched those then. I just continued on the fiction road. It wasn’t until that manager, Brian Steinberg from Artists First cold emailed me and asked me if I was interested in writing for TV that I read a script, I think. Then I downloaded Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Six Feet Under and Sopranos I think. I read them all, and I wrote a pilot of a TV show.

**John:** Right now, a bunch of listeners are throwing their phones across the room, that a manager cold emails you, a person who’s not even a screenwriter, to offer to represent you.

**Patrick:** He didn’t quite do that. He had read one of my novels, and he had noticed that the dialog I wrote lent itself to screenwriting and was curious. I was like, “Are you real?” I had to look up… I felt like it was a phishing scam or something, but it wasn’t. It took I think a year and a half to actually get repped by them and another year maybe for WME to decide they wanted to sign me.

**John:** You’ve now downloaded these scripts. You’re reading these scripts. You’re learning about the form. What were the first scripts that you wrote?

**Patrick:** The first script I ever wrote was called Very Honest. It was a pilot. It was an idea I had for a short story that I did as a show. It was about a right-wing radio guy, Bill O’Reilly at the time was the comp, who received a phone call from a Speak and Spell that basically said, “I know what you did. Tomorrow on your show I want you to say, ‘I am a fucking asshole,’ and I want you to turn your show into a show about how you are a fucking asshole. Unless you do this, I’m going to reveal what you did.” The guy’s such a dick that he has to make a list of the 10 people it could be who are blackmailing him. Then the shape of the show is him trying to figure out whether it was someone inside his family, his son, his daughter, his wife, or various people he’d run afoul and had problems with in the past. He does, in the end of the pilot, lean into his mic and start talking about what a dipshit he is, which I think is very wish fulfillment on my part at that time.

**John:** Now, this very much feels like it was in keeping with the HBO shows at the time. You have this antihero at the center of your story, a person who should be unlikable, and yet because we are laser focused on him, we can see through the bad stuff into the good side.

**Patrick:** I think actually what you just said is why it wasn’t a good project ultimately, because I didn’t have the vision yet to see the wall I was going to run into about how my political anger was aligned with the blackmailer, not the protagonist. I think ultimately that was going to end up having to make me humanize a bad person that I didn’t want to make a whole show or write a show about or watch a show about.

**John:** After this script, how many more scripts had you written by the time you got repped, by the time you started meeting on shows to be working on?

**Patrick:** I probably wrote a half dozen pilots in that period. This is right after my son was born, my first son. I was 32, 33. We were living in Chicago. We had no intention of ever leaving Chicago. It was Pat’s dabbling around in Hollywood things, I guess. When you’re a fiction writer on that side, you tend to get real skeptical of like, “Oh, someone’s optioning my novel. Oh, someone wants to work with me.” That stuff comes and it seems like it’s life-changing when you’re on the fiction writer side. Then you realize when you get here, oh, that was just someone taking a shot at something. There was never any chance of that turning into anything. When you’re a fiction writer, you’re like, “My life has changed forever. I am going to be rich. They’re making a movie out of my novel.” The movie didn’t come ever.

When I did actually get a job suddenly, on The Bridge on FX, via a Skype meeting with Meredith Stiehm and Elwood Reid, I had to go home from my office and tell my wife I’d just been hired for a job in Los Angeles that started the next Monday.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** She said, “What the fuck?” I ended up commuting for a whole year. I flew to LA on Monday mornings, went to the room all week, or set, came home Friday nights and helped my very, very brave and loving wife take care of our son.

**John:** The first show you’re working on is The Bridge. I know Meredith. This is an adaptation of a Scandinavian show. It was a show in its first year, right? This was still all being figured out. What did you learn being in that room for the first time? Being a novelist is always a solitary job. You’re just doing this all yourself. Suddenly, you’re having to be in a group environment, figuring out this show. What did you learn?

**Patrick:** So much. It’s almost like waves of learning, because I had no context. Unlike the other track of assistants, I think, witnessing rooms for a while and then getting it, getting the language, I was completely in the dark. I think I learned that listening is really good early. I learned that it was very, very, very good for me to come in at the staff writer level way down on the bottom rung and have to learn and do the work to learn how to be a screenwriter, because what I also learned is I had no idea how to be a screenwriter. I was good enough I think to earn my place in that room that first year. I didn’t really know what pitching was. I didn’t really know what a scene was. It took me that year of watching it and listening to understand that the fundamentals of fiction writing are just not the same as screenwriting. There’s an overlap, sure, but I needed to pay my dues. I think that first year was paying my dues.

**John:** The Bridge, you were on that for just one season, and then what was your next job after that? How did you get from that to your next job?

**Patrick:** I was at The Bridge for both seasons. Right around the end of the first season of The Bridge, Meredith introduced me to Howard Gordon. He had a need for a young writer in the 24 room for the limited series, the last episode of 24 that Jack was in. I went over and met those guys one day at the Fox lot. I was like, “What is going on?” because I love 24 and that kind of storytelling, more specifically, just the intensity and drive and clarity and just like da da da da da da da da da da. I didn’t know how to do it. I was a literary fiction writer, but I was a fan. That’s how I met them. They offered me a job. Right when I was coming back, I had to tell my wife I got another job. That’s when we decided to move, when we moved to LA. I went right from the 24 room back to The Bridge Season 2 room.

**John:** Great. That was between two seasons you were doing this 24. Was Leftovers the next show after The Bridge?

**Patrick:** It was. The Bridge got canceled in the summertime I think of 2013. I was always wanting to get to the showrunner level and not ready, but wanting nevertheless. I think when The Bridge ended, I was going down that road. I wrote a cop show set in Chicago that I was into and trying to get set up. Then The Leftovers came around. That show in particular, the combination I think, Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, and also just it had everything that I wanted in terms of what the next step was. I didn’t think I was going to get that job. It took 400 meetings to even get to Damon to have lunch with him. We hit it off when we met. I think it was only after spending two years in that room with so many amazing writers that I realized I wasn’t ready for anything at that moment before Leftovers. I needed that time. I needed those two seasons to really learn the last things I needed to learn before I took a crack at it.

**John:** We’re working on the Scriptnotes book right now. Just yesterday I was reading through the Damon Lindelof interview I did a zillion years ago where he’s talking about The Leftovers room. It’s weird to hear Damon talking about this. This is pre-Watchmen. Leftovers was still on the air. He doesn’t send writers to set. He believes that he wants writers in the room. He himself doesn’t seem like he wants to go to set. He’s a creature of the room. How different was that from your experience on The Bridge or on 24? It just feels like there’s so many different ways that showrunners run shows.

**Patrick:** It was the complete opposite as what Meredith and Elwood did and thought. I was sitting on set within a month, and I didn’t know what to do there. I had too many jobs to enforce and not enough context. It’s a great way to learn, especially if you’re humble about it and read the room well and understand it’s the director’s set but you’re there to support the script. It was great. The thing about Damon’s point of view that I think is right is it does make it so the script has to be the script. That requires a very complicated system to make that true. It was good for me to have that two-year period where it was very room-centric, but now I am not like that at all as a showrunner. I am very present on set. I very much believe in having the writers come to set too. I couldn’t for Station Eleven because of the pandemic. I’m active on set, in rehearsal, in the dialog with the HODs and with the actors.

**John:** Now, I want to get to Station Eleven, but I don’t want to skip over completely Maniac or Made for Love. What were those experiences like? My hunch is that Maniac was completely scripted before it was shot, but maybe there was some stuff along the way. What were those room experiences and development experiences like?

**Patrick:** Different. Both of those shows were specific situations and different setups. Maniac was ordered straight to series before they had a writer. That was complicated. We incubated all 10 scripts in a room, the way I had learned it. They changed a lot once we got into prep. That largely had to do with the collaboration with Cary, my creative partner on that show. That was a whole different kind of experience that I would characterize probably more like a movie.

Made for Love, we had a great room and did a lot of the work up front. I think that’s the one where I learned, I think, about budget and production realities and how you have to protect your show and your people by acknowledging the cost of scripts at the front end and insulating them from being deconstructed during prep, because that’s a dangerous thing.

**John:** When you say acknowledging the cost of scripts, basically acknowledging what in the script is going to be expensive, what is going to push it over the edge, that’s going to force dramatic cuts or compromises down the road?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I think putting your producer cap on when you’re in the writers room or privately doing it, because it infects the conversation if you do it too much. You won’t end up in the right creative place. I think I was coming from more maybe a purist point of view where we don’t talk about that when we’re in the room, we’ll figure it out after. Now that I’ve been through it a few cycles, and I can even feel it, the way I pitch, the way I think about scripts now is some part of my head is always thinking what’s this going to cost and what’s the core of this beat and how are we paying for it in another part of the season, how do we get it back or how do we do it in the one tenth of the cost way. I think that’s just about experience too. You learn a new layer of this business every time you go through the cycle. That one, I was learning about being a producer at the front end.

Then Station Eleven came along right on top of the beginning of Made for Love. I transitioned over to exclusively being the showrunner of Station Eleven when we were in prep in the fall of 2019 in Chicago.

**John:** I want to talk to you about how you came upon the book and whether you knew from the start the shape it was going to be in. This is a book by Emily St. John Mandel, which I’d read early on in the pandemic. I think my first conversation with you, I DM’ed you on Twitter saying, “Hey, just read this.” I think my question was, “Does COVID exist in your world?” I was just really fascinated by how you were going to do this thing. How did the book come to you?

**Patrick:** I just loved the book. I read the book when it came out, because I very, very barely knew Emily from the fiction world. We had read together once in Chicago and had a great conversation, in which I said, “I don’t think I can support myself and my family or pull my weight as a fiction writer, even though my books are getting reviewed in the New York Times.” I was successful by all metrics, at least that I’d built for myself. I was broke. I was like, “Emily, math doesn’t make sense.” She was like, “I know. I’m going to try to write one more and see how that goes.” I went to the Bridge job, and about a year later I see her book just everywhere and on the bestseller list. I was like, “Oh, okay, Emily figured it out.” When I read it, I just loved it. I loved the element, the weird combination of post-apocalyptic Shakespeare at Hollywood, the idea of, I don’t know, the minutia of everyday life in the apocalypse instead of death over and over again. I loved it.

**John:** For folks who haven’t read the book or seen your show, what’s the quick elevator pitch version of the story? How do you describe it?

**Patrick:** This is how I pitched it. Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic show about joy. I think story-wise, a flu descends very rapidly on the world in our modern era and wipes out 99.9% of the population. Most of the book takes place around the Great Lakes with a traveling group of artists putting on Shakespeare plays to little villages 20 years later. It’s not about the horrible survival times. It’s about the rebuild times. It’s actually life-affirming, even though so many people die in the beginning.

**John:** It’s not The Walking Dead. I think whenever you hear post-apocalyptic, you assume it’s going to be this. I would say some of the choices you made in the adaptation make it a little less ominously The Walking Dead. You made some clear choices. I’m wondering when those choices came about. For example, keeping Jeevan with Kirsten through much more of the story, the changes with the prophet, who Miranda is and how she comes upon the graphic novel. How early on into this conception of like, oh, if I took this book and could make it into a series, when did you know you were going to make those changes?

**Patrick:** Right after Maniac, I called Emily, because I had heard that the book was coming available again. They’d been trying to make a movie script out of it and failing. I got a meeting on the books with Scott Steindorff, the producer who had the rights for something else. I just went to his office, and I was like, “Hey, Station Eleven, how about a limited series?” I told him what I thought it should be, and he agreed, and we made a deal with Paramount. I was in an overall with Paramount then. They paid for a mini room for me. It was just two weeks.

All those ideas, the big ideas that you’re talking about, the Jeevan Kirsten stuff, their separation and reunion, the change of Tyler as a standard cult leader into a different kind of cult leader, and how to handle the airport, the big ideas, we cracked a lot of the huge ideas in that two weeks. That was enough to help me write the first two scripts on my own. That’s what was the document that I sent to Hiro when he signed on. Then we sold the show, all on the energy of that early development.

**John:** Hiro Murai, who’s the director who did the first two episodes.

**Patrick:** Yeah, and really a creative partner at the development level for months and months and months beyond his duties doing prep for those two episodes. It was a very close partnership I think to crack that show, the tone of that show.

**John:** I want to go back to this mini room you put together, because it’s two weeks. How many writers did you have together to tackle this?

**Patrick:** It was just four writers. It was Nick Hughes, Gina Welch, Mauricio Katz, and Kim Steele and me.

**John:** I recognize two of those writers who wrote scripts later on on the show. What were you actually doing in that room? Was it just filling up whiteboards of stuff? Was it chatting? What happened in that room?

**Patrick:** There was one whiteboard. There was a big couch and a table and one whiteboard. We just would chat. We were just talking. They had all read the book. We just came together and like, “How would we do this?” It was just putting the big ideas up on the board.

**John:** The end result of this two weeks, you come out of there, and did you then need to pitch to Paramount and to other places about what the show’s going to be? Obviously, Paramount had gotten involved here, but had it already been set up at HBO Max? What was the status of the show at this point?

**Patrick:** It was not set up at HBO Max. It was an in-house Paramount development. I’ve always gravitated more toward writing scripts than pitching verbally. I think I’ve gotten much better at pitching verbally, but I like to lead with the text to show people what the show is. I wrote those two. We talked with Scott and the early producers about them. Eventually, right in there, the head of Paramount Television changed over and was just a reset for everyone who’s under an overall. Nicole Clemens came in and really doubled down on Station Eleven and endorsed the project and said she was very excited about it. We lined up the pitches once Hiro was attached and went around and pitched in April of the following year. I sold Made for Love in between in that story.

**John:** Just to make sure we’re clear on the timelines, so you’d gotten together this writers room. Two weeks coming out of it, you had a whole bunch of notes. With those, you wrote two scripts. You wrote these first two scripts, then attached Hiro to direct, and then went out to pitch?

**Patrick:** Yeah. I wrote Episode 1 while the room was going, in the background of the room. Then we internally talked about it, the producers and the studio, and everyone decided we wanted a second script. That took another month. I think I was on my own for that. Then Hiro, and then we went and pitched.

**John:** The decision about the second script was that the first one was entirely in present day, and the second episode jumps forward 20 years. You really could get a sense of what that world was going to look like and feel like.

**Patrick:** We needed the second world, but we also needed to understand the lead, adult Kirsten.

**John:** She’s not in that first episode. She shows up at the very end.

**Patrick:** Yeah, we needed a full episode with her. I was into it. It was hard. It was daunting to do it by myself, especially because you are faking the world building. When you’re there, you have guesses, and you have the novel. I didn’t know some truths about the traveling symphony or about the characters yet. You have to leap of faith your way through a script in those early days.

**John:** You’re taking us around to the various streamers and networks. How quickly did you end up at HBO Max? It sounds like based on your experience in the shows that had informed you so much, HBO felt like a great home for this.

**Patrick:** HBO Max didn’t exist.

**John:** That’s right, so just HBO.

**Patrick:** The first day we pitched was to HBO and to Warner Media, which I didn’t really know what the difference was. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they did. Then throughout the next week, we pitched to all the places and had a number of offers that coalesced down into Netflix and Warner Media. We went with Warner Media for a lot of reasons. Sarah Aubrey was there, who I knew from The Leftovers and also from the sale of Made for Love. They felt like a good home for the show.

**John:** Cool. I want us to start talking about the pilot script for this. In the show notes for this, people can see, we’re going to have links to the pdfs of all eight episodes so people can read through the scripts and really see what the show looked like on the page. I really want to, on this episode, talk about the pilot script and some things I’ve noticed from this. Episode 1 of 1, Wheel of Fire. Why is it called Wheel of Fire?

**Patrick:** There’s a burning Ferris wheel at the end.

**John:** That’s true. There is a burning Ferris wheel at the end. There you go.

**Patrick:** That term has some older connotations as well. The wheel was going to be a motif and theme.

**John:** For the traveling circus.

**Patrick:** For the whole show. I wanted it to be in there. I just thought it sounded cool too.

**John:** It does sound cool. Do you call this a pilot or not a pilot? If it’s a limited series, does it actually have a pilot or it’s just the first episode?

**Patrick:** I don’t know. It depends who you’re asking, because they ordered the series straight to series, but that doesn’t mean straight to series, I think. There’s always an opportunity for the streamer to bail at any time. I did call it Episode 1 on principle. I think collectively 1 and 3 operated as pilots for the show.

**John:** Just because we’re not looking at TV production scripts very often, this second page is revision history. The draft we’re actually looking at is the third white revisions. As I look through this revision draft, there’s 12 revisions here. There’s a noticeable gap here. The second pink revisions were December 1, 2020, which would’ve been production-ish. Then more than a year later, we have second yellow revisions on 1/4/21, which would’ve been production post-pandemic or once you can get back into development. We show also what pages are revised in each of these scripts, which is so helpful, so people can zoom right to what might be different.

**Patrick:** You know what happened between 12/1/20 and 1/4/21.

**John:** The actual pandemic, the thing that eclipsed a lot of what you were trying to talk about in the show.

**Patrick:** Yeah, but we also shot the episode between those two dates. The reason it kept getting revised after we had shot it is there was one piece left to do in Canada. We had to keep adjusting and adjusting and adjusting that.

**John:** What is the sequence that was left over from that first episode?

**Patrick:** On page 53, after we’ve gone to space, we’re coming back, and scene 47 we land on a stage, different version of a stage than where our story began. We see wagons. We hear actors. We’re hearing lines from the play King Lear. Then we’re finding people playing King Lear, but not at all in the context that the episode began in Chicago. This is the traveling symphony out in the wild and Kirsten playing the same part Arthur played at the beginning of the episode. That was the wheel. We were trying to close that loop in the script.

**John:** It was meant to be a clean bookend, where it starts with King Lear and ends with King Lear. That’s not how the actual episode ends, as I recall what I watched.

**Patrick:** It’s not. It’s not at all. We shot this. Our costume team made an amazing new set of costumes for Lear, and Jeremy shot the shit out of it. Mackenzie and company crushed it. When we put it all together, we didn’t feel like it was quit capturing the bang of the year 20 feeling that we needed. I think actually, this is so superficial seeming, I guess, but simple, I don’t know. We shot this at night. That was a problem, I think, because all of Episode 1 is dark and night. I think we needed it to be day. We needed to see the green, and we needed to see the lushness of year 20. We needed to know, just to know that that was Kirsten inherently.

**John:** You needed someone to yell Kirsten and her to look over.

**Patrick:** Yeah. That’s actually a piece from Episode 4 that Helen Shaver shot. It’s a scene that we come back to by Episode 4. One of our editors had that idea. What’s so great about it and what Hiro loved too is that the book is there. That is the linking piece that has been the thread through the whole episode.

**John:** The book plays a much more important role in the series than it does inside the book, I think partly because it’s a visual medium. Seeing who has the book, who has exposure to the book becomes incredibly important in the series. You’re letting the audience know, pay attention to this graphic novel.

**Patrick:** Who wrote the book was the other thing. We had to write the book, basically, to make the show make sense to us.

**John:** That’s a lot. Second page of the script, or sorry, third page I guess, is the cast list, so showing who is in our episode. We have a scratch through for the conductor, Lori Petty, because she’s no longer in that first episode because of changes that you guys just described. That makes sense. Locations list, this is where you’re talking about the producer hat and where the money’s going. Locations that you’re only going to see once that are expensive are costly. People that are getting the script, who is going to be focused on the location list? Obviously, your location manager, but why else is this page important in the script?

**Patrick:** I think your production designer and art department is going to sit down and get a feeling for this spread of the episode. We talk about world building in terms of big fantasy and big tent pole stuff, but every episode has world building to it. What is the world of Episode 1?

I think for Ruth Ammon, our production designer, Frank’s apartment was critical, not just for this episode, because we have a big VFX shot in it, but for the whole series. Lake Point Tower is a very specific building that we fell in love with and communicated a lot about the show. You can see it stacked there, how many Lake Point Tower locations there are. That’s a pretty quick sequence. That’s on the way in, which we shot really there. In the lobby we shot. To the elevator we shot. Then we built Frank’s apartment. That one is on our stage. The hallway we also built. The stairwell was a different stairwell. It’s a very important sequence, stacked as dense as the theater, which we also constructed out of four Chicago theaters.

**John:** As you watch the whole run of the show, you start to realize, oh, these are the standing sets that we’re coming back to. Frank’s apartment is an incredibly important standing set that we’re going to come back to. The airport is incredibly important standing set that we’re always going to be able to base ourselves around. Even as a person who was just watching the show, the producer brain does kick in, and I start to realize, okay, these are the things they actually built or found or headquartered in versus some place they traveled to to shoot for a couple days.

**Patrick:** Actually, the crazy thing about Frank’s apartment is we trucked it from Chicago to Toronto during the pandemic and rebuilt it as well. It traveled. Our standing set traveled.

**John:** Anything can travel. On this last page here is a day and night breakdown. Tell me, who is responsible for making these pages that are going at the front of the script? Who was doing these pages?

**Patrick:** Katie French, who had gone from our writers assistant in the room to our script coordinator through the whole run of the show and who ultimately was promoted to staff writer right at the end of production. She’s in the mini room for The Glass Hotel now.

**John:** Fantastic. Finally, on the sixth page of the pdf, we’re actually at the first page of the script. Some things I notice right from the start, you are a double spacer. You hit that space bar twice after every period. That’s fine.

**Patrick:** That’s correct.

**John:** Some people do.

**Patrick:** We can talk about it if you want. We don’t have to talk about it.

**John:** There are no wrong choices about spaces. I used to be a double spacer. I famously gave up my double spacing and never looked back, but nothing wrong with-

**Patrick:** I’m not as passionate as I once was.

**John:** You might be the last one. You might be the last one.

**Patrick:** That’s fine too. It’s just I think that I’m wrong. I actually think that I’m wrong. I keep doing it. I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why.

**John:** Because you have muscle memory. If you try to stop it, it’ll feel weird for a sec, and then you’ll get over it.

**Patrick:** What happened to you? Are you a fundamentalist now? Are you open?

**John:** I used to be a fundamentalist about double spacing, to the degree which I would actually do a find replace in my script before I turned it in, make sure all the spaces were double spaced. Then I started to realize I’m the only person left doing this, because double spacing went away completely on the internet. Html actually gets rid of double spaces. At a certain point I was like, “You know what? I’m going to stop fighting this fight.” I gave up. It’s smooth sailing. Here’s the reason why we don’t need to do it anymore. Our eyes are used to seeing capital letters start sentences. We don’t need that double space anymore. It’s just a vestige of how we used to do things with typewriters, truly.

**Patrick:** As insane as I am about the way the script looks personally, I don’t care also. Every writer who’s ever been in my room is rolling their eyes right now because I made them do it. I think I’m done fighting this fight. It’s stupid.

**John:** I want to talk about how good this first page looks, because I answered a question on Twitter this last week about… Someone said, “Is it wrong to not have any dialog on your first page?” Here’s a first page that has no dialog on it.

**Patrick:** Not a great sign. Not a great sign, I got to say.

**John:** If you’re going to have a page without any dialog on it, your choices of when to bold stuff is helping a lot. It’s helping me get my eyes down the page and make me less terrified about reading just a wall of text. A thing I notice as I read through this, because I just read this this morning, versus watching the show, is we have post-apocalyptic guy, post-apocalyptic boy, who are set up as these recurring characters throughout the pilot. They don’t actually recur throughout the pilot as shot or as shown to us. When did that idea drop down or diminish?

**Patrick:** In post we shot them. Hiro was having an instinct that there was something wonky about them coalescing in his head. He liked them too. It was almost too cute in the way that it was pretending to be The Walking Dead. They looked unlike any of the traveling symphony people. they looked ratty. They looked like the dad and the kid from the road. We were trying to tell a little bit of a story with the boy. I think Hiro’s instinct ultimately was the right one, which was it’s too much story freight to be asking the audience to track too soon about people who don’t matter in our story. Hiro I think also knew that these opening moments are about place, not about people. The ferns were doing the work. We didn’t need a boy and a dad too.

**John:** A thing you do on the second page here… I’m going to just read aloud this paragraph. “Somehow the boy didn’t even hear that. Watch out, boy. Where is your father? You are about to be eaten by a man in rags who has teleported from another network’s very earnest, self-serious prestige cable limited series about pain, starvation, and how all humans are horrible at their core.” You spent five lines just talking to us as the reader about what your show was opposed to another post-apocalyptic show would be. I like it. It reminds me of… Lost scripts would do that, where they would actually just really give you a sense of, this is what it’s meant to feel like as a person watching the show.

**Patrick:** I think obviously I watched Damon do that for years. I had been doing maybe a version of it myself. It fought the screenwriting advice that’s pretty standard, which is don’t do that. I think the reason I do it, I have to do it, because my writing is really, really dependent on tone. Whether or not a scene, any given scene I write works is entirely up to getting the tone right. Therefore, I think I need the person reading the script to understand it a little bit more than what the very skeletal version of the scene would do.

Some of it maybe reflects my anxiety changing over from the novelist to the screenwriter and not knowing how to make tone happen because of the scene, if that makes sense, or I’m still learning, I think, in that regard. I think part of it is also these are sales documents. You have to attract your crew. You have to attract your actors. You have to get people to want to buy it. The script has to be a read in and of itself.

**John:** Yeah, because you’re asking someone to take an hour of their day to read the script. You’re trying to make it a worthwhile hour of their day, and not having them skim, not having them skip through things.

**Patrick:** In this case too, post-apocalyptic genre comes with a lot of baggage. I think very early I wanted to make it very clear that we both had a lighthearted and wry point of view about all this, and we’re not doing the thing that that genre often did do.

**John:** I don’t want to talk about every page. There’s a moment you have happening on page 8, near the bottom of the page. “Jeevan moves away, crosses past Arthur’s body, and asserts himself between it and little Kirsten, who’s still staring, fascinated and unable to look away.” You’re doing some very specific blocking of two actors. It works really well. I remember that moment working as shot. On the page I can see he’s trying to physically do something here to keep this girl from seeing this. We’re learning about both Jeevan and Kirsten in this moment. I just wanted to single that out, because it’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of writers feel like, “Oh, that’s overstepping my boundaries. I’m directing too much from the page.” It’s not at all. It’s absolutely essential to make that beat work.

**Patrick:** Blocking is unbelievably important. Whole scenes can crumple when the blocking changes. On top of all that, this is just how I imagine. I think that blocking says a lot about Jeevan and who he is and how he’s safe and how he’s driven fundamentally by concern for the well-being of a stranger. That’s happened twice now in the last couple pages. I think in terms of the director conversation, any confident director will just say, “That blocking sucks. Let’s do it this way.” Any confident writer showrunner who knows what they’re doing will either say, “You’re totally right,” or, “No, we got to keep it.” I think if you’re all there doing the same thing, the blocking will end up what it needs to be.

Hiro, Christian, every director, Jeremy, they all knew they could change it if they needed to, from what I did. I often was lurking too. I would be like, “The problem with that though is this line doesn’t make sense anymore.” We worked together. Half the time I’m wrong on the page here, but I was doing it for a reason all the time. I think that’s the key in the collaboration. If everybody knows that, then we’re good. We changed a ton of stuff left and right.

**John:** What you’re doing on the page has set the tone. It’s the pre-tone meeting in terms of what is this scene actually really about. You can tell because of the specific stuff that you put in the scene.

**Patrick:** I find directors, actually that’s what they’re looking for, what is the core essential truth in this scene. I think the hard thing about being a director in Hollywood is getting scripts that just don’t speak to that at all.

**John:** We could focus for another hour on the script, but let’s actually turn our attention back to the room, because you’ve now set up the series. You are going to be going straight to series, but you need to actually write all these scripts. This is where you’re assembling a new room to put together the scripts for this 10 episodes. How many weeks was that? How did you find your writers? What was the process for putting together a room on Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** It was a 20-week room.

**John:** 20 weeks, that seems like a lot.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t enough. At the same time, yes, in today’s conversation I think that’s just… Leftovers, Season 2 was 42 seeks, and Season 3 I think was 44.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** We moved slow. When the script came out of those rooms, it was the episode. There wasn’t any fluctuation in prep or in production. That was the show. We moved slow. Damon really believed in collective consents. We wouldn’t move forward if someone was bumping anywhere. We would overcome it as a group. You often would bog for three days on one scene because of that.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** The problem though I faced at the beginning of this fall of 2019 was that because of Hiro’s coming schedule with Atlanta, because of my various entanglements in Los Angeles where Made for Love was shooting, the room was starting, and we had 20 weeks to go. We had 2 scripts, and we needed to output a bunch of them. I was getting pulled to Chicago and a set in LA. We had originally planned to shoot Station Eleven much later but had to pull it up into the fall of 2019 because of what Hiro’s coming schedule was going to be. It’s crazy to think about it, because it created a very difficult situation for the room. I was not in it all the time. I think that made it hard for the room sometimes. It’s crazy to think, had we not done this, we never would’ve made Station Eleven, because there’s no way in hell HBO Max would’ve said go ahead if we had shot nothing and the pandemic descended.

I built the room out of writers I knew and new writers to me. Nick Hughes came, a writer named Shannon Houston, who’s brilliant, who I’d been talking to for a while, Cord Jefferson, Kim Steele, Will Weggel. My former assistant also came in. A few other people. We were underway together, and September rolled forward for about a month before I started popping around to different places, and they tried to keep hacking away at it.

**John:** Looking through, just on IMDB, some of these people who I don’t know, it felt like the room was bottom-heavy. So often with small rooms, you see here’s a consulting producer or these are near showrunner levels. These were a lot of people who felt newer, or newer to their career.

**Patrick:** That’s true.

**John:** A deliberate choice?

**Patrick:** Sarah McCarron I forgot to mention, who’s also a brilliant writer. A deliberate choice? Maybe not consciously aware. I trended that way. Honestly, all these people are brilliant people who are in the room. We had plenty of brain power to get the show baked enough. I think a mistake I made as a younger, inexperienced showrunner was often to do this, and I think honestly reflects more than anything my own insecurity being able to run a room and being intimidated by the idea of someone more experienced than me in the room with me. I think this room reflects the end of that time for me when I was starting to realize that it was a mistake to not embrace as much experience as I could around me and take the wisdom and help of people who’d done it and been through 10 cycles of production. It was silly, but I think I didn’t quite know that that was happening consciously. I don’t think if I time traveled to me and confronted me about it, old me would admit that that was what was happening. Does that make sense?

**John:** Absolutely. We had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show recently. They were talking about the rooms for their two limited series and how incredibly important it was to have a writer on it who’s like, “Okay, that’s all well and good. Here’s how we make a TV show.” It was important to have a writer who just really knew how stuff got done. That was useful.

**Patrick:** I thought that was me. I think I was overestimating that too. You need help. You need experience. You need people who have gone through it a bunch of times who can guide you. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a good leader, I think. I think it probably means you’re a better leader to know that.

**John:** What internal documents or tools were you using to get the show figured out? I assume there was a whiteboard, because you’re actually recording this in the room where you put the room together, I guess. You have whiteboards, but what were the internal documents or what things were you guys looking at as a group?

**Patrick:** We had a bunch of stuff going at the same time. If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve started in a different order. We had whiteboards. We had a board that had a guess at what the 10 episodes were wanting to be, what the flow of the season was wanting to be. One thing that was very right was Episode 103 firmly planted as Episode 103, which later became a point of discussion a lot about whether that was the right place for it. We always thought that Miranda’s story needed to be right there early, even though it was a departure from the central story. The break was going for whatever episode we were on. Damon always likes to do a scenes we like board, which was the pre-break conversation for a few days. There was that going. We only got through the break of Episode 5 before the show was in production, 5 or 6.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** What happened was the amount of world building was unbelievably gigantic, more so than I think I ever thought it could be, between Tyler, the airport, the way to separate Kirsten from the troupe, the way to reunite everyone, the scenes of the show. There was a lot to talk about. I think it was like, “I’m going to go out for a hike,” and then walking up to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and realizing at the last minute that you hadn’t brought some important climbing gear or tents and stuff. Do you relate to that experience?

**John:** Oh my god, yeah. Backstory behind all of this is that my first and really only experience running a television show was a disaster, back in the year 2000, 1999, where I was the hotshot young screenwriter who set up a show at the WB and was running the show that I had no business running, and just this slow-motion car crash of trying to do all this. I’m nodding as you’re saying that fear of having more experienced people in the room. I didn’t have more experienced people in the room. I surrounded myself with just the wrong folks.

**Patrick:** In my case, I was surrounded by the right folks, but I think I needed to be surrounded by more folks.

**John:** Exactly. You were too lean.

**Patrick:** I’m not sure my health was okay as those months of prep continued and I kept flying back and forth on red-eyes and not sleeping. I definitely was thinking that I was totally okay, but I was, I think in hindsight, slowly getting pulled into a whirlpool down. I think it was one of those things where we had just enough. I had the support I needed at the critical times I needed it. I think Hiro and his team and Christian and the HODs we had hired together in Chicago were so good. They were so brilliant and so pursuing the right questions, the times I wasn’t there in Chicago. The studio and the network ultimately had my back, just enough to get us rolling.

When we were rolling, I don’t think we ever missed on a day of dailies. I don’t think there’s a bad take in anything Hiro shot for the first 28 days of production that he directed 1 and 3 for. I think that’s when the Schrodinger’s box of is this showrunner a conman or not gets opened and that you start to show episodes, and they work and they’re good. Our cast also, they were so incredibly grounded and on it emotionally. Everyone knew what they were playing so well, so intuitively that I was learning from them as they shot scenes, to tell you the truth.

**John:** You said before, you couldn’t have actually waited any longer, because the pandemic would’ve happened, and you would never be making the show. The show would not have existed if you hadn’t started shooting before the actual real-life pandemic. In a perfect world, what would you have wanted to do or what would you want to do in the future. Would you want to have clear separation between the writing phase and production phase? What would’ve been different about how you would set up a show like this?

**Patrick:** Station Eleven is special in that the way in which things happened in the wrong order created the magic of it. I don’t mean to say that it should be that way. It’s hard to think about… For example, Danielle Deadwyler shot the end of Episode 3, her speech in the boardroom in Malaysia on day 3 of our shoot.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Patrick:** I had that to aim for as an idea of the show always. I couldn’t have written some things without seeing what Danielle did. The right way to do it to me is the room outputs all the scripts that are at production draft level and ready to shoot before prep starts. That’s the right way to do it, I think.

**John:** That’s the fantasy. You’re actually prepping a thing you know how to make.

**Patrick:** Stability too, for the actors, for the sake of the departments and everyone’s ability, because people below the line in our business can pivot amazingly. Sure, they can do it. Do you want to do that every day to people? No, it won’t get you the best show. It’s not okay. It’s ultimately the showrunner’s responsibility to be good at his or her job and prevent that from happening. I’m learning. I’m trying to get better at that.

**John:** My cohost, Craig Mazin, has been away for the better part of a year making his own show up in Calgary. He’s obviously having to do a lot of writing on set and producing on set. Talk to me about your experience of being on set as the writer, creator, showrunner, and what you see as your function there.

**Patrick:** There needs to be someone there who just knows the answer. That’s both a creative thing and I think a leadership thing and a morale thing too. Scripts were still changing all the time, even the next year when we were in Toronto. Somehow in that year gap and having the two episodes and having written it all, something had internalized in me where I just understood the show. I felt like I was ahead of everyone in a weird way, because I just had been in the scripts. I felt like I could come to set, I could see if something was off, maybe with the blocking or with set deck, or someone needs to be there with the director when he says this scene isn’t quite right in the writing. There’s got to be one person on set who knows. I felt like every scene of the show, there’s some little nudge or change or alteration that I think I’m not sure it would be unified in the right way if I hadn’t been there.

**John:** Talk to me about post. Were you posting while you were shooting? Was post up in Chicago and then Toronto or was it back in Los Angeles? How did all that work?

**Patrick:** The first part of the show, the Hiro episodes, we shot them and then we posted them linearly. That’s when the pandemic descended in the middle of the post process for those two eps. Then post came back up online in January right when I flew to Toronto. A few weeks into the shoot, here’s my morning. It’s 5 a.m. in Toronto. It’s dark. It’s 1 degree. Go to the stages, which is an airport and a facility near an airport. I enter my trailer, because it’s COVID. I have three monitors up. I have post back home, which will come online at noon. I have the sets, which is 150 feet away from me, but I’m not in it, because it’s COVID. I would need a reason to be in it, which usually just means your rehearsal and then I go back to my trailer. Then I have prep meetings on the third monitor happening about concept meetings for Episode 9.

**John:** Zooms.

**Patrick:** Yeah.

**John:** Wow.

**Patrick:** My day is in there and then going to set and then coming back into the trailer and then going to set, in that case when Lucy needed me. We shot Episode 7 first.

**John:** Throughout all this whole process, what is HBO Max seeing? What is Paramount seeing? Are they getting outlines? How do they know what the show is that you’re making?

**Patrick:** By Part 2 in Canada, they had all 10 scripts.

**John:** That’s true.

**Patrick:** On Part 1 when they had a total of 3 scripts. They had 1, 2, and 3 when we shot 1 and 3. Soon after we started, I published 4 and 5. Then I published 7 during the January and February shooting period. I went and gave a big presentation and pitched the entire season out right after we wrapped that first iteration. We got behind in the room. We were supposed to have outputted more than that. That’s not on the writers room. That’s just on me not wanting to publish a script that felt not right yet. You know that thing, where it sometimes feels like it’s going to do more damage to your show to publish the wrong script than to publish no script? Like I said, the world building feat was just more gigantic than I think I had realized. That was what was happening slower back in the room, back in LA. Ultimately, that’s what I used to write the rest of the show, the work that the room did.

**John:** At what point do writers who are in that room get assigned, “Okay, you take this script. You take that script.” When is that decision made?

**Patrick:** That was pretty early. I think everyone in there got a script, and everyone knew what their script was going to be. It was tougher for 7, 8, 9, for Kim, Sarah, and Will, because the break, we really had only gotten to an outline place for those ones by the time the room was wrapping. What I think the room ended knowing and getting right was what emotionally each episode needed to be and a basic break of it. Then I think in all those different cases we continued, or I continued to do the writing.

**John:** Great. We have a listener question here which is right up your alley. Megana, do you want to help us out with that?

**Megana:** Nicole asks, “I have my first interview ever for a staffing position on a legal drama. I listened to your episode Advice for a New Staff Writer and was just wondering, do you have any tips for preparing for the interview? This is a new series that’s just been ordered. Any tips of advice would help.”

**John:** Pat, you’ve been through both scenarios here. You’ve been the new person interviewing for a job, and you’ve had to interview someone who wants to be a staff writer on a show. What advice can you give for Nicole? What should she be thinking about as she goes in that room?

**Patrick:** I’m thinking back to that Skype I had with Meredith and Elwood. I’m trying to remember. I’ll say it this was as the hirer. I think what I want is someone who seems to be both sophisticated socially, someone who can read a room and feel their way through a situation, just getting the sense of that, the life skill, and then someone who seems to have clear ideas, whether or not they agree with me. I think it’s very easy to get into this thinking that you’re supposed to serve the showrunner. Then sometimes that feels like without critical thinking. I don’t know. You need to show them that you’re not necessarily pliable, you’re not just there to please their imagination. It’s a tough needle to thread, honestly, because you got to be a good worker too. You got to, quote unquote, get it, whatever the fuck that means.

**John:** When Nicole goes into this room for staffing, how quickly does she bring up how much she loves the script that she read, the other writers’ previous work? What are the kinds of things that Nicole should just have cued up, ready to go when she walks into the room?

**Patrick:** I think if someone’s read the script, and if someone says one sentence… It doesn’t have to be, “I loved it.” It just has to be something that catches me like, whoa. If someone says, “I think this show is about blank,” and it dings a bell in my head as the creator, then I’m really paying attention. If someone has a thematic understanding of the story in a way that feels new to me, that’s really great. I don’t think it’s about praising it. It’s about understanding it. That’s when I feel as a showrunner someone’s going to come in the room and really help me.

**John:** Great. As the showrunner, you’re looking for somebody who can help you. That doesn’t just mean flatter you. It’s somebody who actually can bring something that you sense that you need. How could Nicole communicate that I guess is what I’m trying to get to. What does she say?

**Patrick:** I think it’s about the read of the script, honestly, what do you think this show is about, because the person doing the hiring in that situation doesn’t know the answer yet, usually. I think the anxiety best served is how do I help the showrunner know what this show is and find her vision, find his point of view.

**John:** Wonderful. It has come time in our podcast for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I’ve just read this last week about the time in Ethiopia. I know that different cultures will have different calendars, just for cultural reasons. If you’re in Ethiopia, 1 a.m. is when dawn happens. Dawn is 1 a.m. It goes through 12 hours and then starts over again after 12 hours. It just made me realize it is so arbitrary that we start our days at midnight, in the middle of the night, as opposed to starting it at dawn, which feels like a very natural way to start your days.

**Patrick:** I got a good one.

**John:** Tell me.

**Patrick:** I’m not an expert, but this is what I’m doing lately in the last week. I saw a tweet last week that was a quote from Bell Hooks about friendship. I texted my friend who knows a lot about Bell Hooks, and I asked her about the quote, and she put me onto All About Love. What the quote was about, and why I’m fascinated, I’m about to dive into Bell Hooks, I guess, what she was saying is we live in this world of systems right now that we’ve already lost in a lot of ways in terms of power, just as a democracy. This is why friendship is so important, that we should treat friendship like the stakes are as high as anything else.

In the pandemic, I found it was really easy to let go and not put energy into a certain tier of friendships, the kind that you would maintain in regular life. I don’t know, I just started to feel that loss as very important, myself personally. Showrunning does this to you too. You can’t keep up with friendships properly, which it’s nefarious. It’s actually really important to find a way to keep balance in your life. Read All About Love, but also listen to Bell Hooks on friendship. That’s my one thing.

**John:** Your show is a lot about friendship as well. Arthur’s friendship and the trials that he goes through with their relationship is crucial story points there.

**Patrick:** It’s weird stuff for TV. It’s like Clark saying, “I miss friendships. I just miss friendships,” which just kills me still the way David Wilmot did that, because I do. There’s usually not a good way to frame that in TV and movie storytelling, but it’s a powerful emotion if you can get to it.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is Pedro Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Patrick, what are you on Twitter?

**Patrick:** I am @patrickerville. It’s Patrick E-R-V-I-L-L-E.

**John:** Fantastic. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find all eight episodes of Station Eleven scripts that you can download and read at your leisure. You’ll find the transcripts there and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we are about to record talking about making a pandemic show during the pandemic.

**Patrick:** Don’t try it.

**John:** Thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Patrick:** Thanks for having me. 553 represent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re back. Patrick, as I said in the main body of the episode, I first reached out to you during the pandemic because I had just read Station Eleven and wondered how the hell you were going to make a show about a pandemic after a pandemic had happened, whether you were going to acknowledge COVID. I think you said, “We’re in a separate timeline where that pandemic never happened.” Is that where you ended up?

**Patrick:** Yeah. What’s crazy was that our date I think for the pandemic was December 12, 2020.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Patrick:** That was just what we had done well before it was even happening in Wuhan. We were shooting then in January in 2020, and then the show premiered December 16, 2021. I had no idea when you texted me or when you tweeted, DMed me… You couldn’t tell. We were watching cuts of our own show and being like, “I literally can’t tell if this will be tone deaf or not a year from now.”

**John:** It came out at just the right time. It came out at a time where it’s like, oh, it’s beautiful, and a memory of a different world, in a weird way. The most jarring moments for me watching your show were when we were in the hospital with Siya, his sister, and no one is wearing masks. I’m like, “Of course they’d be wearing masks.” At the time you were shooting that pilot, that first episode, it was reasonable that they wouldn’t be wearing masks.

**Patrick:** The other crazy thing about that scene is the kids are wearing masks. That was the thing in the script. It got erased by the pandemic. What was chilling about that scene was the idea of seeing children in masks. Now that’s normal. It doesn’t read right anymore, but it doesn’t matter.

**John:** I’ve finally gotten to the place in watching film and television where I don’t bristle at, “Oh wait, these people are standing too close to each other in the elevator.” I’ve gotten past some of that early pandemic fear. A question for you is how far were you into shooting, what was the last thing you shot before you had to shut down because of COVID?

**Patrick:** I think our last day of shooting was Arthur’s house at the dinner party. We were finishing up the dinner party and the fire. That was the pool house on fire. That was somewhere around February 20th or 25th of 2020. What’s crazy to me is the first shot of the show, the theater that’s full, that’s practical. You can’t shoot with that many people in a place anymore. That’s 300 people. Our before is the before, if that makes sense. We shot all that in the time when no one had heard of COVID yet.

**John:** That’s wild. Talk about the day when you had to shut down, because I’ve talked with other friends who’ve literally had to… They got the call, and 10 minutes later they’re packing up the trucks. What was it like for you?

**Patrick:** We were in post. It was very memorable, because post is a place where you go down into this hole, and in reality it doesn’t exist. It’s alarming to say this, but that morning, Friday the 13th, my wife had stopped by with my two-year-old daughter to say hi in the morning. It was like, this feels scary, but we don’t know what’s going to happen. We had just I think heard the term shelter in-place a day or two before when San Francisco closed down. That’s how oblivious and not at the same time we were.

Hiro and I, we had really been grinding. We were at some microscopic stuff in 101. We worked all day with Isaac Hagy and the editor of Episode 1. Right around 5 p.m., Hiro’s producing partner and one of our EPs on the show, Nate Matteson, just burst into the bay. His hair was just wild and everywhere. It was scary, because you could see a person who had been spending the day in a different world, and he was like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” That kind of energy. He had to come down, I think, to properly communicate to us that we had to go. It was scary. It was really human. We’d been through a lot together making the show. I hugged Hiro goodbye in the parking structure. I don’t know when the next time I saw him in the flesh was, a long, long time. We got back to work I think a week later online and continued editing Episode 3.

**John:** This was in Los Angeles or this was in Chicago?

**Patrick:** That’s LA. That was all in LA.

**John:** That’s LA. You were basically the grocery store cashier, and someone had to come and tell you, “Oh no, no, you should probably just leave. The world as you knew it no longer exists.”

**Patrick:** Is this that thing, that flu thing? Greatest day player of all time, that dude. Holy shit, he’s good. Yeah, that was me. That was all of us. We were at work. We were head down in the show.

**John:** Talk to me about the decision to go back into production. Were you ever worried that they were just going to pull the plug and say, “We’re just not going to make the show at all.”

**Patrick:** As much as everyone was about everything.

**John:** Because of the subject matter. Basically, you were thinking-

**Patrick:** No. That part I wasn’t worried about, because 1 and 3 were just too good, I thought. Also, we always were set up to be… If any show was going to be continued, it was going to be ours, because it was about rebuilding. It was about connection and joy. It wasn’t about pain exactly. I think if either of those episodes had been distressed episodes, that would’ve been a problem. I think Hiro, the cast, everyone delivered. I think people just wanted to see the show. What we had to decide was where to shoot. We had to wait for a while, and then we had to make a choice about where to go, because it didn’t feel like Chicago was going to be safe on the timeline they wanted to shoot. That was the big conversation over the summer.

**John:** Had there been no pandemic, you would’ve done those two episodes and then immediately gone into shooting the rest of the show or was there always going to be a break between the two episodes that had been shot and the rest of things?

**Patrick:** We had eight weeks more prep in Chicago and time for me to write. We were going to come back up in the late spring and shoot year 20 stuff with Mackenzie in and around Chicago. That plan went out the window.

**John:** All the prep you’ve done for Chicago is moot, because you had to prep completely from scratch in Toronto to figure out here are our exteriors, here are our locations, here’s how we’re going to do everything.

**Patrick:** It wasn’t moot. It wasn’t moot, because the prep we’d done in Chicago was conceptual about the show. It was about the space station. We hadn’t even gotten to the wagons and the airport yet. It was deeply valuable, that prep in Chicago. The loss of those eight weeks was-

**John:** You knew what you wanted to do. You didn’t know what the specific locations were and such.

**Patrick:** We hadn’t scouted yet for the next stuff, so we didn’t lose that. The loss of that eight weeks was horrific. We needed that. We got some of it back in the summer online with art and costume. We needed all of it. We were playing catch-up all through the shoot.

**John:** I wish you no pandemics for the next things you’re going off to shoot. You’re in the room right now for the next Emily St. John Mandel book?

**Patrick:** We’re working on The Glass Hotel. We’re working on a different version of The Glass Hotel that fits into the Station Eleven world that we made.

**John:** It’s set around Miranda, right, so a character who exists in Station Eleven?

**Patrick:** Yeah, that’s right. I think unlike in the novel, the role that Miranda plays in the story is much bigger.

**John:** Great.

**Patrick:** It’s the financial collapse in 2008. It’s new zone for us. It’s also, this is my favorite, it’s a mystery. We’re learning all those new kinds of story moves, but in our way.

**John:** That’s great. How far are you into the process of the room, this new product?

**Patrick:** We’re early. We’re finishing up what’s been a six-week mini room. We’re going to output the first two episodes and we’re going to go talk to HBO Max about making the show.

**John:** That’s awesome. Good luck with that. Absolute pleasure talking with you, Patrick.

**Patrick:** Thank you, John. This has been great.

Links:

* Follow along with the [Station Eleven pilot](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/S11_101_3rd-White-Revisions_6.15.21_Collated.pdf) discussion! Read all of the Station Eleven scripts [here](https://johnaugust.com/library).
* [Station Eleven](https://play.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYZWoOQ6F9cLDCAEAAABP?camp=googleHBOMAX&action=play) the series on HBO
* [Station Eleven](https://bookshop.org/books/station-eleven-9781594138829/9780804172448) the book by Emily St. John Mandel
* [Patrick Somerville](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5821126/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/patrickerville?lang=en)
* [All about Love: New Visions by bell hooks](https://bookshop.org/books/all-about-love-new-visions/9780060959470)
* [Time in Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Pedro Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/553standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/dating-your-writing-partner).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 559 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we will ask the eternal and perhaps most important question, How Would This Be a Movie? We’ll look at stories in the news and from history and discuss how to move from facts to film.

We’ll also answer a bunch of listener questions, because that’s another thing we do on podcasts quite frequently.

**Craig:** Yeah, and for good reason. People are curious.

**John:** They are. For a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, Craig, we have to figure this out live because we did not discuss this ahead of time. Some possibilities here. We have one additional story we can talk about, which is about live action role-playing in Poland. We could talk about retirement. We can talk about fandom, perhaps that new Zack Snyder article. What do you want to talk about for the Bonus Segment?

**Craig:** How about we don’t talk about the Zack Snyder thing? How about we just live our best lives?

**John:** I was going to say we could put that in the Bonus Segment so it’s all behind a paywall.

**Craig:** Eh.

**John:** Nothing’s really ever safe, is it?

**Craig:** No. I’m okay not going near that. I’m cool.

**John:** You know what we could talk about, and this is a thing we talked about just before we started recording, is how do you keep track of all the people you meet?

**Craig:** That’s a great question.

**John:** I’m dealing with it now. You’re dealing with it now. Best practices we’ve learned so far for keeping track of people involved on a project.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea, because ideally, we are talking to a lot of people who not only want to sell some work or be hired to write things, but want to be in production. When you get into production, or even if you just get into a writers’ room, there’s a lot of people.

**John:** A preview of what I want to talk with you about is really showing up on a set that first day, and there’s like 50 people, and you’re like, “Oh my god, I’m never going to remember everybody’s names.” We’ll figure that out.

**Craig:** Exactly. You won’t. That’s the big secret. We’re going to get into tips and tricks on how to remember as many as possible.

**John:** We’re going to start off this episode on a down note. Eric Webb. If you’ve ever come to a Scriptnotes live show over the past 10 years, you probably saw Eric Webb, and hopefully got a chance to talk with him. He was a jolly guy, a bigger fella, always wore I guess you call it a pageboy hat.

**Craig:** It was a cabby hat or a newsboy hat kind of thing. That sort of thing.

**John:** Big round face, always smiling. A really great guy. We learned this last week that he passed away actually in June. He was great. I’m so sorry that I’ll never get to see him at one of our live shows again.

**Craig:** He was a lovely, sweet man. We’ve talked on the show before about… Megana introduced us to the concept of parasocial relationships. Back when we would have live shows, and I would imagine perhaps we will be there again soon, you would see some people over and over, and some for better, some for worse. Eric was such a sweetheart and just a lovely guy. It’s sad. I think he would’ve gotten a kick out of us talking about him this much on the show. I think he would’ve enjoyed that. Adieu and RIP to Eric Webb.

**John:** Absolutely. I want to send our sympathies along to his family and his fiance. To get on to the main meat of the show, I thought we might mix it up and actually start with listener questions before we get to the How Would This Be a Movies, because we got some good listener questions here. Megana, would you start us off?

**Megana Rao:** Dangerous wrote in and asked, “On a recent episode, you discuss breaking up with a writing partner, a friend one. My question is, should you date a writing partner? My writing partner and I have sold features and pilots together and have been a team in rooms. He’s a great friend. The problem is I’m married, but things with my husband are in a really rocky place and have been for months. Now my writing partner swoops in to tell me that he’s in love with me and thinks we should give it a shot. He listed coupled/married writing teams as an example of how we can make it work. We could be writing partners and romantic partners. WTF? We have a great thing going as this productive, work-focused team. I really don’t want to lose that. I’ve seen firsthand what can happen to a close relationship and how it can become petty and bickery and horrible. Hello, my marriage. But would it be amazing? Have you guys ever seen it work out? If you were staffing for a room, would you ever staff a couple, or would you run from the drama that could ensue?”

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** This could be a whole episode by itself. I could think of several writing partners that became couples and are still in very happy marriages. Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa are friends of mine who’ve done that and have had a very successful career and marriage and family, which is terrific and fantastic. I also know writing teams that have broken up when romance entered, or they got married and they split apart. That also happens as well. I think no matter what Dangerous decides to do here, something is going to change, because she’s going to have to talk with this partner, talk with the husband about what it is she actually wants in life. Craig, what’s your first instinct here?

**Craig:** I agree with you on the factual basis. There are lots of married couples that write together.

**John:** The Wimberlys.

**Craig:** I myself am so thrilled that I don’t have that, that my life partner and wife partner does not write with me. I think that would be a disaster. It depends on the people. It depends on the couple. Would it be amazing? That’s the question that’s most concerning to me, because you’re in a rocky place with your husband. I don’t know if it’s going to make it. I don’t know if you guys are going to get divorced. When people are in rocky places, they are rocky inside. When people are rocky inside, that’s when stuff happens. You are vulnerable. You are probably feeling quite a lot of things all at once. Your writing partner clearly is feeling a lot. You are looking perhaps to go from a boat that’s sinking to a boat that looks fresh and shiny and new. That doesn’t mean you’re going to like that boat that much in a month or a year. It doesn’t mean the boat won’t sink. I think probably most people would caution you about getting into a new relationship while your current relationship is unraveling, especially if it might re-ravel, but even if it doesn’t.

You have a productive writing partnership. I got to be honest. I think this dude has thrown a rock into that pond. It is no longer the same pond. When you ask, “Would it be amazing?” you should know the answer to that. I’m worried that you’re grasping, Dangerous. It feels like you’re grasping. You’re grasping in hope, like hey, maybe this is the answer to the things that are making me sad or miserable. It might, but I wouldn’t make that change now. I think if there’s any way you could pause on that and punt it down the line a bit, that would be great, but probably your writing partner has made that impossible. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but I am concerned that, much like a narrative, your writing partner has introduced an inciting incident, and now the narrative must proceed to a conclusion.

**John:** Inciting incident feels right because this does seem like a plot. It seems like a romantic comedy plot or some other kind of drama plot. You are now the protagonist who has to make a difficult choice within this. You have to have two conversations. You have to have a conversation with the husband where things are not going very well and figure out what’s not going very well. Is there counseling or something else that can get you to a better place? Because you did once love this person and things were once good. Is the problem related to the writing partner? Is it related to some other things? Does your husband sense that there’s another man encroaching there? Possibly. Figure out what that is. That is a conversation that needs to happen.

Obviously, you have to have a conversation with this writing partner to acknowledge his feelings. I would say don’t commit to any next step with him on that romantic pathway. Just say, “Listen, you’re going to figure out your own stuff.” You hear this, but you’re not willing to pursue anything with him at this moment, because I agree with you, it seems so tempting to just like, this isn’t working, so I’ll jump over to this safe place with a guy who I get along with, who we seem to have good chemistry. That’s not going to ultimately solve having this problem.

**Craig:** Any time someone says, “Maybe that’ll make me happy,” all of the hackles rise. Where are your hackles, by the way?

**John:** I think my hackles are down my back, but I’m not really sure. Where do you think your hackles are?

**Craig:** I thought maybe the back of the neck.

**John:** I was thinking neck down to mid-spine. That feels like where my hackles are. If you see some dogs when they get angry, it puffs up there. That feels like hackles.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it now. Indeed, hackles are the erectile hairs along the back of a dog or other animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed, although you can also get hackles on the neck or saddle of a domestic rooster or other bird. I think probably the other one. We were right. It’s the back of your, if we were dogs, what would be our necks and backs.

**John:** Hackles feels like it’s a defensive, it’s a postural, it’s a sense of aggression. Hackles are not nervousness. It’s something like ah. I’m going to be itching to fight.

**Craig:** Dangerous was probably really into this until we started going off on some etymological discussion of animals, and then she was like, “Wow.”

**John:** “This is not helpful for me at all.” Let’s get back to her actually question. “If you were staffing a room, would you ever staff a couple, or would you run from the drama that could ensue?” I would absolutely staff a couple if I felt like they were the right people for the room, had a good vibe for it, they seem like good writers, they seem like they have something really cool to bring to it. I’m not going to discriminate against a married couple.

**Craig:** No, certainly not. When you hire a writing team, you’re hiring a couple. There’s drama that can ensue with any partnership, whether it’s a romantic and professional partnership or just a professional partnership. Also, I think there’s honestly drama that’s going to happen regardless between everyone, because drama people are dramatic. I’ve talked to enough people who run rooms and have heard enough stories. There is a certain aspect to it that is the proverbial herding of cats, dramatic cats that sometimes love each other, sometimes hate each other. They feel very strong feelings that come and go. There’s collisions of cultures and work styles. There’s always drama. Frankly, a nice, stable married couple, if they had been married for 15 years, that sounds like a dream, honestly. They won’t be dramatic. They’re just going to sit there and do their work.

**John:** The last thing I want to point out about this question, this thesis put out here by Dangerous is I don’t see anywhere where Dangerous says that she’s attracted to this writing partner, that she feels a spark there, other than that she feels like she can trust him. Is their chemistry really there? That’s a question worth asking, because if he’s a nice guy, but he’s not a person you would date otherwise, that’s not going to be a match.

**Craig:** I noticed this too. That’s why I really zeroed in. Her question, “Would it be amazing?” You should know that already. I love that the writing partner did make a case though. “He listed coupled and married writing teams as an example of how we can make it work.” This is a very debate style wooing.

**John:** 100%, like, “Let me list the three things.” If it was a PowerPoint presentation, then I’m completely sold on the writing partner. Megana, I’m honestly curious your perspective on this, because you are probably encountering some of these situations in your own life or friends who are going through this kind of thing where romance and writing partnerships are entangled. What is your instinct, if this were a friend who was coming to you?

**Megana:** I’m just trying to think, because my instinct is to not pursue at all, but I also really empathize, because I think finding someone that you have chemistry with is rare and special and wonderful, but it sounds so messy. As Craig said, dramatic people are dramatic, and this just feels like so many chaotic red flags to me that I just want to send this woman on a yoga retreat somewhere.

**John:** I respect that very much. I think we’re all in agreement that she needs to focus on what she wants first, rather than going to jumping into this new relationship. Work on herself.

**Megana:** It’s that thing you guys always talk about when people give you notes or stuff. If you are writing to the negative, that is a much less helpful note than writing toward something positive.

**Craig:** That’s a great point that works here as well. It sounds like she’s running from something, not necessarily toward something. I’ll tell you what, Dangerous. Obviously, we are therapists. We’re just not licensed or educated. Of course, we’re fake therapists. We’re also fake lawyers, people know that about us, and fake doctors. Let us know, let our fake selves know, how this all turned out. It doesn’t have to be next week. Take a few months. Take a year. Let us know how it worked out, because there’s a world where you and this writing partner end up having the most incredible life together. There’s also a world where you blow it all up, where you blow everything up and you’re left in the rubble. I’m excited. You have begun a movie, and we need to know how it ends.

**John:** Absolutely. The inciting incident happened, and now we need to know where the story goes.

**Megana:** It seems like there’s two options, but I do just want to remind her that there’s option three, which is none of the above.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Girl. I love it. She ends up with a totally different person or solo permanently.

**John:** Also valid.

**Craig:** We’ll see what happens.

**John:** Let’s do something that’s actually a little bit more screenwriter-focused. Can we get another question, Megana?

**Megana:** Yes. Peter from Berlin asks, “I recently relistened to Episode 152 where you talk about the importance of tone in screenplays, and it made me wonder about something. We all know movies that have fallen apart in development because key people had competing creative visions that were at odds with each other. In that regard, how important do you think the voice or tone of a script is in aligning those different visions? Do you feel a script with a clear, strong voice is more resilient against directors, producers, actors, other writers, etc who try to introduce new elements that are tonally incongruent with the rest of the story?”

**John:** I have a strong answer. I’m curious what Craig’s answer is. I think tone and voice are incredibly important to attract people to a thing, but once the trains start moving, tone and voice will not be any defense against the whims of the people involved.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s no bulwark, there’s no great wall you can build of tone. The whole point of other people coming in is usually to adjust the tone to some extent. What will happen is you may get a call and say, “Okay, I need you to come in and just make these scenes better.” In that case, you often stay within the tone. You’re just trying to give the scenes more structure and more interest. You’re trying to make them more clever. You’re just trying to make the writing better, literally the dialog, that it should be more poetic and more captivating. A lot of times when things are in trouble, what they’re saying is this is too cheesy, it’s too funny, it’s not funny enough, it’s too broad, it’s too subtle, we need it to appeal more to families, we need it to appeal more to women, we need it to appeal more to blank blank blank. Then your job is to adjust things that always go to tone. Development hell has many different kinds of fire, but the fire of destroyed tone is a hot one that burns bright.

**John:** In my experience as a screenwriter, never has a studio executive or producer said, “No, we can’t touch that, because the script is perfect.” No one has ever [inaudible 00:16:27] the A-list talent and said, “No no, you can’t change that. The script is perfect as it is. This has a strong voice. We cannot change that.” No, they will change the thing, because they’re trying to make the movie. They’re not trying to make the script. They’re doing whatever they need to do in order to make the movie happen. That could be changing fundamental things in the script or changing tonal things or adding a scene that maybe doesn’t really need to be there or making a character shift.

Also, the fact that you have to cast people in those roles changes those roles. Sometimes you’re adjusting things because what worked on the page for one theoretical actor doesn’t work with the actual actor who was cast in that role. It’s hard to both say… Tone and voice are so crucial. They absolutely are. At a certain point in production, they become much less important, much more about how we’re going to get this movie to actually happen.

**Craig:** It’s why there are a lot of questionable films.

**John:** Another question, Megana.

**Megana:** Learning to Treat Yourself writes, “How do you celebrate or reward yourself for finishing a first draft? I’ve recently finished writing the first draft of my first feature film. I enjoyed the process, but by the end, I didn’t make much of it. I took a week off before working on the second draft. I think it’d be nice to celebrate a project getting through a certain stage, and would love to hear what other writers do, if anything.”

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting question. I have a terrible answer. You probably have a great answer.

**John:** I have a terrible answer.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** You go with yours first, because mine’s not going to be better. I promise.

**Craig:** I don’t do anything.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** I do nothing. I do nothing. You know what I do? I worry that maybe it’s not good enough. Also, finishing, what a lie. I think actually I tend to get slightly down when I finish things. There’s a postpartum period there where I don’t feel very good. I’ve always envied people who go on Twitter and they’re like, “First draft done, the end,” going out with friends, getting drunk, doing this, having fun, “Treating myself to a day at the spa,” blah blah blah. I’m just like, “I deserve nothing. I deserve nothing.” You can’t have a worse answer than that. There’s no way.

**John:** Panda Express.

**Craig:** Oh, shit.

**John:** That was my treat for finishing a draft as a young guy with a studio apartment and no bed. When I would finish a draft, I would treat myself to Panda Express, the two items plus egg rolls if I had actually finished a draft. It’s generally a Friday treat. This is me driving out to Century City shopping mall, going to Panda Express there and getting that. That was like $11 to spend on a lunch, which was a lot. That was treating myself for having done the work.

**Craig:** When you went to Panda Express, what did you get? Two items is not clear enough. I need more information.

**John:** I’m sorry. I would get half white rice, half chow mein. That’s the base. I would get Buddha’s Delight, which is the tofu thing, and then mixed vegetables, because at that point I was a vegetarian.

**Craig:** Wow. Wow. I am disgusted. Look, here’s the thing. In my mind, that is more self-abusive than what I did, because you went to Panda Express, which the whole point of it is orange chicken, and then you got the two healthiest things there were there. You just didn’t do it. You went there. You were like, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to a sex club. I’m going to go to an orgy, but I’m just going to stay in the vestibule where you just check in. I’ll check in. I’ll read the rules. I’ll give them my credit card.”

**John:** “I’m going to make sure everyone’s coats are well taken care of.”

**Craig:** “I’m going to think about going in there, and then I’m going to leave.” I’m outraged.

**John:** Sometimes I would also like to see an afternoon movie, which also feels like cheating, to see a movie in the afternoon.

**Craig:** Megana, save us, please, for the love of god. Please tell me you do something that’s good.

**Megana:** I just ran into this this last week. I like to get an ice cream cone.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Megana:** I realize that I go before I finish the draft.

**Craig:** That’s just called eating ice cream.

**John:** It’s a pre-warning.

**Craig:** That’s just called depression.

**Megana:** I had two scenes left to write. I was like, “How am I going to do this if I don’t have energy? I need the ice cream now.”

**Craig:** You’re not using it as a reward, but really more of a motivation.

**Megana:** Yeah, but then after I finished, I felt so proud. I was like, “I need to celebrate.” I was like, “Do I go back to Salt and Straw?” Then I was like, “No, you’ve don’t his wrong, Megana.”

**Craig:** I see. You didn’t go for the second ice cream.

**Megana:** I didn’t.

**Craig:** I’d like to point out that what you didn’t go is go to Salt and Straw and ask for a cup and a spoon and no ice cream, which would be the John August method.

**Megana:** If I asked for some sort of sorbet, that feels like the equivalent of Buddha’s Delight.

**Craig:** “I got the nondairy whipped air.”

**John:** It’s delicious. Delicious whipped air.

**Craig:** “With natural orange essence in it.”

**John:** This actually came up a few weeks ago. I set up a project that’s not been announced yet. Megana did point out, “Wait, are you going to do nothing to celebrate?” I was like, “I don’t know. I guess I’m not.” It really was that the deal finally closed. That’s one of the things too about our business. It’s not like you win the lottery, and so they’re like, “Oh, you won the lottery.” It’s like, “Oh, they’re going to buy this thing.” It’s like, “Okay.” Then take nine weeks to make the actual deal. The deal finally closed. I was like, “I could go out and celebrate that the deal closed.” I was just like, “I got other stuff to do.”

**Craig:** You’ve had too many deals that closed. That’s the problem.

**John:** That’s what it is. It’s all the success. Success [inaudible 00:22:01].

**Craig:** It’s actually quite a bummer. We’re now going to wander into annoying successful guy chat, so everybody just-

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** … close your ears for a second. When I was young, back in the day, John, you remember that Variety was a physical publication.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** There was a website called variety.com. When you would have something happen, there would be a usually very tiny blurb in Variety that said so. I would buy the Variety, which cost like a hundred dollars a copy then, so stupid, and then cut it out and frame it, because I didn’t know if it would last. Now my goal in life is to not be mentioned in Deadline, ever. That’s my goal. There is a joy in the early celebration. Now John, congratulations on whatever this is. I assume you’re going to… You did announce it. You just announced it.

**John:** Yeah, but I’m not going to announce what it actually is. I announced a thing that is potentially happening, but the actual announcement is being saved for some future time, for reasons outside of my control, which is great, I’m delighted about.

**Craig:** We will wait patiently.

**John:** Anticipation.

**Craig:** Anticipation.

**John:** Let’s do one more question before we get to our How Would This Be a Movies.

**Megana:** Max from LA asks, “My question relates to character chemistry and connection. A note I often receive is that the chemistry between two characters who are love interests is, quote, ‘not on the page.’ The characters have banter, incidental physical interactions. Maybe they tease each other. Once actors are involved, I think their connection will come through. How do you put this more on the page? Are there certain types of interactions that show a connection between characters, that set up the will they, won’t they dynamic? Other ideas I lean into are things like remembering details about the other person, going out of the way to do something the other person would appreciate, or causing that person to laugh. What other tools do you use to show the reader that people are falling for each other?”

**John:** That was a nice question. My instinct here is that folks who are reading Max’s screenplay, they’re not seeing the whole movie, because if they actually saw the scenes as filmed, we’d see those little interactions between people, like the glance that they don’t really notice the other person is there. These are little, small moments. I think Max may not be putting those literally on the page. He may not be scripting those of those moments in, so they could be bantery dialog. We’re not seeing the small, little moments in the scene description that are really showing there’s a growing connection and chemistry here, even if the characters themselves are not aware of it.

**Craig:** There are things you can do that are simple. For instance, in action description, you can describe things that you want there to be, them getting closer, then someone touches an arm. Also, part of writing is writing scenarios and situations where we go, “Oh my god, they’re into each other.” That’s not really anything to teach. I will say, Max, that the things that you’re listing are romantic, but they’re not hot. Do you know what I mean? Remembering details about the other person, it’s all a bit sappy, but it’s not hot. It’s called chemistry for a reason, because we can’t see it. It feels hormonal and pheromonal and in the air. The two people that have it are living in their own weird bubble. You have to create situations where we can be part of that bubble like a little fly on the bubble wall.

**John:** Here’s a good exercise for Max to try is to take a look at some scenes or movies where characters have real chemistry, like body heat or some other-

**Craig:** Out of Sight.

**John:** Out of Sight, fantastic. Looking through those scenes, and don’t look at the script, just look at the scenes, and then figure out how would you script those scenes that you just watched. How would you call out the things that are happening in there that let us know on the page this is what’s happening between those characters? That may be a good exercise for you and just give you some hints for what’s going to actually be helpful to be thinking about script-wise for showing that chemistry.

**Craig:** Sounds good to me.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our marquee topic here, this How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories that are in the news, stories from history that our listeners have suggested to us, saying these could be filmed entertainment, either a mini series or a live-action feature or an animated feature. We got a bunch of suggestions that came in. Thank you to everybody who sent those in. So many people suggested the backstage drama at Funny Girl.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m so proud of our listenership for being into that story, a very Broadway story.

**John:** It’s a very Broadway story. Are there any heroes in this story? I’m not sure there are.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s Broadway.

**Craig:** It’s Broadway.

**John:** It’s Broadway.

**Craig:** It’s Broadway.

**John:** Broadway. It’s a warm hug and long knives. That’s Broadway.

**Craig:** That’s Broadway.

**John:** People are also talking about the January 6th hearings. No, that’s not a movie. That’s not a movie.

**Craig:** That’s not a movie. Just refer back to All the President’s Men. That’s the movie version of something like that. The hearings are a part of the plot, but they are not the plot. The plot is investigation and intrigue and risk and exposure.

**John:** First story suggestion was by Kay McCue sent this in. This was Phil Hoad writing for The Guardian about the mystery of the buried owl. I liked this one. I Googled and Googled, but I could not find it. I think we talked about a similar kind of thing before where a person had buried a thing and hidden it, and there was a huge treasure hunt trying to figure out this thing. This is the French version of it, I guess.

**Craig:** There’s been a few of these. There’s one I know that was in the US that got solved. There was one that’s referenced in here, that involved I think it was a hare, H-A-R-E, that inspired this one. This one is the story of a French puzzle creator who buried a small bronze owl somewhere in France in April of 1993, and then he and another author put a book together that included I believe it’s 11 riddles. If you could solve the 11 riddles, which they list as, “A combination of fiendish linguistic games,” which I love, “cartographical ciphers,” interesting, “historical illusions and mathematical brain teasers,” then you would be able to find the small bronze owl sculpture. At that point you would win an identical sculpture made of actual stuff that’s worth, in today’s money, 150,000 US dollars. I know that because it says 150,000 Euros, and as of today…

**John:** Parity.

**Craig:** Parity.

**John:** There’s lots of angles into this. Obviously, you could imagine a bunch of different characters, a big ensemble movie with people trying to find this thing. It could be wacky and fun. You can imagine something about what’s really behind the secret of the owl, whether the whole thing was some sort of scam. The guy who created this whole thing and buried the owl has now died, and so there’s a whole controversy over the other author and should the person reveal the secret, is there actually an owl to be found. What’s your instinct, Craig, for a movie? Is it a movie or is it a multi-episode piece of entertainment?

**Craig:** I’m struggling for it to be either, and I’m the puzzle guy. I love puzzles. That’s the problem. The problem is puzzles are fun to solve. They’re not so much fun to watch other people solve, because inevitably what happens is you’re just waiting, and then someone goes, “Wait a second. Hold on.” You can do a few of those. The National Treasure movies were a string of those things. You could do a few of them in that regard. Note that with National Treasure, so much of it was about character, relationship, redemption, reclaiming your good name, plus villains and all that, and looking for something that was inherently important to our nation’s history. This is not. It’s arbitrary. A guy buried a thing and then said, “Try and find it.”

The other issue is this is not a good puzzle, because it hasn’t been solved. That’s my honest opinion. There was a very famous sculpture in front of the CIA that included a cipher that took many, many years to crack. I get that. That’s like, hey, you’re the CIA. This isn’t for entertainment. Let’s see which one of you is the best. This is for entertainment, and no one solved it in 30 years, which means it’s too damn hard. When somebody finally does, it’ll be like, okay, got it. Either when you’re watching the movie, you’re going to say, “I don’t know what any of these things mean,” and then someone will be like, “Wait, I know what it means,” and you’re like, “Okay, I guess the script told you that,” or it’ll be too easy. Then you’ll be like, “Why are they having a hard time figuring that out?” You’re just watching people walk around and digging. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is a fun movie. You would have to invent so much that I don’t think you would need any of the details of this.

**John:** That’s what it really comes down to for me, because right now in the story, there are no stakes. There’s money, but that’s not really stakes. You’re going to have to create stakes for the characters. Why do they need to win this thing? What is it about them that either winning that money or the achievement of having solved this unsolvable riddle will change their life in a meaningful way? That really comes back to focusing on who are the characters we’re following. The article that we can read has some people in there who could be interesting characters, like a pregnant woman who was obsessed with it and couldn’t stop focusing on it, even though she was about to have a child. There could be some interesting characters that do that or someone who’s just ruining their life to do this thing could be meaningful.

Just last night we watched The Dawn Wall, which is this amazing rock climbing movie about this ascent on one of the most difficult El Capitan faces. It was a years-long quest of this guy to do this one thing. It was meaningful to him because of stakes that were clearly set up in the course of the film. Yes, you could maybe do this with this, but I don’t see why using the real story is going to be more helpful than creating your own quest here.

**Craig:** Put your finger on the possibility of a good documentary. That could be terrific, because then it is about the quirky, weird people who are trying to do this. It’s about their obsession and not at all about where the damn thing is. I could see that. Documentaries are really good at that sort of thing. I don’t see a fictionalized version of this being particularly captivating. I can certainly see a fictionalized story about a treasure hunt being interesting, but easier said than done.

**John:** Our next story is about Rodney Stotts. This is sent in by Jeff Myers. This story actually ran in The Washingtonian. It’s an excerpt from Rodney Stotts’s book. Basically, Rodney Stotts grew up in DC in the ’90s. He started selling drugs, needed a legitimate job to get a lease, and so he ended up working at this Earth Conservation Corps cleaning up this river and became really involved in preservation and conservation. He ultimately was sent to jail for a drug-related charge. When he got out, he wanted to become a falconer. The article goes into what falconry is and how you train to become a falconer. The details I thought were really cool, because you have to be an apprentice to an experienced falconer, and you have to catch your own bird. He seemed like a really fascinating character. Craig, is there a story here that could be a movie, a series? What did you think of the Rodney Stotts story?

**Craig:** It could be a movie. I think a robot could write that movie, because that movie is required to follow a very well-trodden path of inspirational story. He’s written his own story. The thing about individual inspirational stories is that they are inspirational. Once you get into movie-ville, you start to get into inspirational movie as opposed to inspirational person, which is different. You can just see how this movie goes. It would be not particularly satisfying. I would much rather again see a documentary about this. Also, falconry is not…

There was one thing that really made me lean forward, that I didn’t know, that I thought would be a great scene. That was to become one of these falconers, you need to trap a falcon or a hawk or something. Good luck. You drove around. On his days off, he drove around rural Virginia and Maryland, trying to trap a falcon. Then there was the day it happened. That was an exciting scene. I was really into that scene. Then he just did falcon stuff. He’s a great guy. He works in this really great program. He turned his life around. I think that’s lovely, but we’ve seen that movie. I just don’t know how to make it different.

**John:** We haven’t seen the exact details of this movie, but we know the shape of the movie-

**Craig:** We know the shape.

**John:** … and the classic thing of it. Thematically, there are some really nice things. You have a person who feels trapped, who was literally incarcerated, who then has to trap a bird. The bird adds a symbol of freedom and being able to fly free, but also rules and restrictions and navigating within the system. We have issues of racism and prejudice. Basically one of the only Black falconers out there. All those things are cool elements to a movie. I do worry that it can be too predictable. I’ve never seen falconry this way. I’ve never seen the relationship. I’ve seen so many men and dogs. I’ve never seen a man and the falcon. That could be cool.

**Craig:** There’s the great character on Saturday Night Live, the Falconer.

**John:** There’s the Falconer, yeah. Will Forte played him.

**Craig:** So good. The trick here is how to do this without… Honestly, it’s a movie. Yes, it’s a movie. You could write the movie. You could write it. I could write it. Anyone could write it, because you would just follow the paint by numbers method of how these movies go. Here’s the issue. I’m not really sure how to do it not paint by numbers. I don’t know what the other way is, because ultimately, there’s not a lot here beyond the inspirational story of a guy who used to sell drugs and went to prison and then came out and got into this other thing. You can write the scene where the racist falconers, which seems like it’s a redundant comment, because who else gets involved in falconry? Now I’m tarring all the falconers as racist. You can see a bunch of white men like, “What? You, falconry? Don’t be ridiculous.” I’m already tired of this movie, because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that scene a billion times.

**John:** It’s a weird situation where the movie’s both obvious and incredibly execution-dependent, because to not be the obvious version of it, you need to have a really great execution. The one thing I think we’re missing here is, because this is told from his point of view, because he’s actually writing the article that we’re reading here, we don’t have an outside perspective on what’s interesting about him as a character. I don’t get a sense of what his voice is, how he carries himself. There could be other details that are really specific and interesting. I think back to King Richard. If you’d just told me the story of Venus and Serena Williams’s father and what he did, I’m like, “Great, that’s impressive that he did that,” but his actual background and his weird voice and his strange approach to things is what made the movie scene by scene interesting to me, rather than just being the paint by numbers story.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. We don’t necessarily know what Mr. Stotts sounds like. We know what he looks like. He’s very thin.

**John:** He’s got a great, great face.

**Craig:** He’s got a great face. He’s very thin. He’s got a falcon on his arm, which is cool. I love the way that he had his little falcon children and how one of them was his favorite. The details feel stock. That’s a weird thing to say about somebody’s life, because he’s lived it. Of course that’s why he has a book deal, because the details are… They fit into a certain kind of story that people do appreciate. I do think it can be a movie. The trick is can you make it better than what we think it’s going to be. You can. There are movies in this genre of inspirational stories, particularly when it comes to race in America, where they’re better than you think they’re going to be. Hidden Figures was better than I thought it was going to be, because it transcended its genre and was just really, really interesting and good. That’s what would need to happen here.

**John:** Agreed. In this case we are saying you do buy the book. This book is Bird Brother. It’s written by Rodney Stotts and Kate Pipkin. If you’re going to make this movie, you obviously buy this book, because that’s how you get entrée into his life, 100%.

**Craig:** For sure. You need all the notes. You need the life rights, so you can get more information and etc.

**John:** 100%. Our next story comes from Erin Brokovich. We know Erin Brokovich. She was the lawyer. She wasn’t at the start a lawyer, but she became a lawyer, who did all the things with the water pollution, that became the movie Erin Brokovich, written by Susannah Grant. This is a story that she wrote called “This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron, but he’s in jail.” This was sent in by David McPherson. It ran in The Guardian. It tells the story of Steven Donziger. He’s an attorney who specializes in going after oil companies, most notably Chevron. He was able to win this giant $9.5 billion settlement against Chevron in Ecuador. Chevron turned around and sued him and basically got him disbarred and all sorts of bad things and put under house arrest. All sorts of bad things are happening to Steven Donziger over the course of this. I thought there was some really interesting stuff here. Craig, is this a movie? Is this a series? Where do you think this lives?

**Craig:** This was interesting. I think this could be a series. It could also be a movie a la The Insider. It was less this article that Erin Brokovich wrote that interested me as much as then just going, “Something’s not quite adding up.” Even if you postulate what I think is a fair postulate, that American oil companies are dreadful, Chevron seemed to be going completely ham on this guy. You’re like, “It can’t just be pure evil. There’s got to be something else going on.” Then you read a little further, and you’re like, “Steven Donziger may have actually done all those terrible things.” It doesn’t look good. It’s not clear, but it’s not good. Even his friends are like, “Eh… Steven, why?”

The thing is, it sounds like it could a really interesting limited series, where you start by going, what Erin Brokovich is saying, which I think is the blunt end of the tool, evil corporation goes after crusading humanitarian attorney. Then halfway in, you’re like, wait, humanitarian hero attorney may be a very bad guy or is doing very bad things, and maybe the oil company isn’t so evil. Then you come back around to everyone’s bad, and nobody really effectively represented the poor people who were suffering. That’s intrigue.

**John:** Absolutely. You and I don’t have enough background to really say the other side of this. We can only look at… I’ve read the Erin Brokovich thing and the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia should be kind of neutral on this. I agree with you, there’s something really fascinating, because it looks on the surface like, oh my god, this is Erin Brokovich, but what if they put Erin Brokovich in jail. Then clearly, there’s more stuff that’s happening behind the scenes here.

I think the real interesting thematic question I would want to dig into as the writer on this is to what degree is Donziger… If he does some of these things which are criminal, is he doing them for the greater good of the Ecuadorian people or to win the suit or for some other reason? To what degree is the ambition to win this potentially corrupting? Those are fascinating questions, which I think you could do as a movie, you could do as a limited series. Both could work. You could do it as Liz Meriwether did for The Dropout or you could do it for a two-hour movie. We’ve seen some really good versions of that story.

**Craig:** Of note, Erin Brokovich was not endlessly pursued by the corporation she was going up against and then thrown in prison, for good reason. She didn’t do any of the things that would normally have that happen. Look, she’s written a very one-sided point of view here. I hope no one takes this as me going, “Chevron’s nice.” They’re not. They’re terrible. They’re horrendous.

**John:** To stipulate, they clearly did bad things.

**Craig:** Of course. They’re Chevron.

**John:** They are Chevron. That’s right.

**Craig:** They’re doing bad things today. By literally existing, they’re bad. They did bad things, no question. The fervor with which they pursued this was not a mistake. I guess it was not random that there was something going on here which with the way this guy handled this what was… In reading more about Steven Donziger, it started to get shadier and shadier. That said, perhaps I’m just a victim of Chevron’s incredible PR machine. I don’t know.

**John:** Let’s talk about Chevron’s incredible PR machine and legal machine and why some outlets would think twice before publishing this story, because you don’t want to anger this company that obviously is incredibly litigious. Either as an independent producer or going to a streamer, you might have concerns going into this. Those concerns might be ameliorated by just doing very careful research and being able to document everything you’ve done. Obviously, you were able to do it for The Dropout and for other projects. I think it’s worth noting that some places are going to be very skittish about doing this just because of the size of the company involved.

**Craig:** Sure, but movies and television have gone after large corporations before. The Insider had no problem going after Philip Morris. I could certainly see a case where the studio might say, “Let’s not call them Chevron. Let’s call them OilCo.”

**John:** GasCo.

**Craig:** “Let’s change Steven Donziger’s name to something else.” I think the spiciness is the real people and the real company.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** I think that movie companies and television networks have loads of attorneys who do nothing but deal with this sort of thing all the time. Part of it is making sure that when somebody writes the script or the limited series that everything is annotated and all the research and the claims and things are based on stuff that’s out there, at which point they really have no case. They can waste their time, and then the studios can waste theirs. They all own lawyers that can do this. I think if people really wanted to make it, I think actually they would get excited by the thought of the free publicity.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s a Streisand effect if they get sued over stuff.

**Craig:** If I were a lawyer at Chevron, I would say, “Let’s just not comment on this and hope that it just stinks and goes away,” because it sounds like a homework movie anyway.

**John:** In this case, you’re not buying Erin Brokovich’s article clearly here.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I don’t think you’re buying anything.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** If there was an incredibly good book that had reporting about stuff that you just couldn’t find other places, that would be a compelling book to probably buy. Otherwise, I think you’re doing research and you’re making your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, unless you really wanted to tell the story from Steven Donziger’s point of view, in which case you would go to him, get life rights, and deal with it from there. I think you would be opening yourself up to trouble.

**John:** I agree. This last one I think is just delightful, and I want to see this movie. I applaud the pluck of the people involved. This is a story suggested by Michael Weinreb. The article ran in the New York Times, written by Sameer Yasir. Here’s the lead. “There are floodlights, high-definition cameras, and umpires with walkie-talkies pinned to their shoulders. The cricket players wore colorful uniforms. The broadcast had the voices of recognized commentators and a logo of the globally recognized channel The BBC.”

This is a cricket match that is being televised, or people are watching it on YouTube. It’s in the Indian Cricket Premier League. Unfortunately, that league does not exist. They were trying to confuse people with the Indian Premier League, which is an incredibly successful league. Brought in $6.2 billion in broadcasting rights. Basically, these guys in India staged a series of fake cricket matches of Russian betters who thought they were betting on actual legit, big cricket matches, when they were not. They were betting on a bunch of farm boys playing in the field.

**Craig:** What a weird scam. I watched some of it on YouTube. It’s weird. I’m not sure how anyone got fooled. The crowd noise is absurdly fake, and they never show the crowd.

**John:** Let’s give a sample here of the crowd noise. Let’s play this here. I didn’t fade down the crowd noise. The crowd noise fades down every 30 seconds or so, because it’s just a sample of crowd noise. If you’re watching this thing, you should notice, hey, why did the crowd suddenly get quiet and then suddenly come back at full volume again?

**Craig:** Why is there one camera? Why is it so far away? Why do the cricket players seem so low-energy? It’s really remarkable that this fooled anyone. Then again, based on the money that there was, it wasn’t like it was a super successful scam either. They were I guess just really fooling the dumbest of Russian betters. It does imply you can absolutely be inspired by this to write what I think could be a very fun and again super paint by numbers comedy in the vein of Cool Runnings, where you have a group of guys in let’s call it rural or semi-rural India, who are down on their luck.

There’s a wonderful tradition of movies where a town loses a factory or tries to gain a factory, gung ho and so forth. The town is in trouble, and they need something. They come up with this scam. The scam doesn’t work very well at first. They find down on their luck former cricket players who were good or are good except they’re held back by something. Hello, Major League. Then they get together to do this, and suddenly it’s a big hit. They get good. They get challenged by somebody. Then the problem is if they rise to the challenge of actually playing for real, then the whole thing will be exposed and everybody will go down. What do you do? That movie again almost writes itself, and someone should make it.

**John:** I think Samuel Goldwyn or Gold Circle is the financier behind that. We see it. It’s delightful. It’s playing at the Sunset 5. It gets some buzz. I think there’s definitely a version you could make, with just an approximation of this story, shot in India or shot in a country that plays cricket, where you’re keeping the basic vibe there. I do wonder if there’s a version of this where you could move to the US or Mexico or someplace more domestic, where our heroes and some people we’re following are still trying to pull something over on the Russians, who I think are a great foil for this. They’re staging a sport to make it seem that it’s Major League Baseball or that it’s some sport that we are more familiar with than cricket, because one of the challenges of cricket is that you have to teach the audience everything about cricket. Maybe that’s part of the joy of the movie. I think using a sport that the US already knows could be helpful.

**Craig:** I can hear someone saying that, for sure. I’m sure somebody would. To me, the fun is the fact that I don’t know it. I didn’t know… What was it in Cool Runnings? Was it the toboggan? What the hell was it?

**John:** Yeah, bobsledding.

**Craig:** Bobsledding, luging. I didn’t know any of the rules, and so learning how it worked was part of the fun, that there was something exotic about the sport itself. Also, cricket is a massive and emerging sport, especially in Indian Pakistan. I don’t know. There’s a much larger audience for movies there than here.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** This is something that I would think about wanting to do as a co-production with an Indian company probably, an Indian studio, and to release it as a film that’s largely international. I think it could catch on. It’s not expensive to make.

**John:** It’s not expensive to make.

**Craig:** I think it’s easy to make.

**John:** I think you make a very good point. All of the streamers have their own local language production kind of things too. Netflix India makes it, and it turns out great and it’s a big hit in Netflix India, but it also comes over to the rest of the world, just because Netflix is global. The right version of it can be a breakout hit.

**Craig:** I think everybody’s global at this point. Every streamer at this point has some ability to reach around the world. Maybe because it’s not inspirational, it’s just fun formula, I think this could be fun.

**John:** In this case, I don’t think there’s anything to buy. We don’t need this article. You just need a bunch of research on what happened there. You’re making up most of it anyway.

**Craig:** Exactly, you’re making most of it up. You would be inspired by this, but I don’t think you would need to buy anything.

**John:** Craig, in the history of How Would This Be a Movies, I think this was the most movies we’re actually going to probably get made out of here. At least we had the highest hit rate of things.

**Craig:** I think so too.

**John:** The buried owl I don’t think is happening.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Absolutely valid to make a movie in this vein, but we don’t need to make this specific one.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Rodney Stotts, someone is going to buy the rights to that.

**Craig:** Someone’s going to buy the rights. I don’t know if it’ll ever turn into a movie.

**John:** The Steven Donziger Chevron movie or mini series.

**Craig:** If only because Erin Brokovich is the person that wrote it, it’s certainly going to get a lot of attention. Somebody will buy the story in one way or another for a limited series or a film.

**John:** Fake cricket, I think we both agree someone should do it.

**Craig:** Fake cricket, we’re just lobbing it out there to the world. Somebody should try that movie.

**John:** Here’s a free movie. Take it.

**Craig:** Here’s a free movie idea. Why don’t you go ahead and write it. Let’s see how much influence we have, John, because this is a little bit like when there was that massive blackout in New York in 1977, there was a baby boom that occurred about 10 months later. Let’s see if about 10 months from now, Hollywood is flooded with fake cricket scripts.

**John:** That’s what we want to see. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Listeners of the show know that Craig is an accomplished puzzler, solver. He is a screenwriter at times as well. He plays video games. What people probably don’t know is I think his true calling is to be the host master of ceremonies for games of Mafia. I’ve witnessed one of those. They are things of beauty. He’s really, really good.

If you don’t have Craig Mazin to do it, I would recommend you try out this game that we tried here in the office last week called Werewords. It’s the game Werewolf, which is of course a variation of Mafia, where you’re trying to figure out who is the werewolf among all the different players. It’s a social deception game. The clever thing they added to this game Werewords is that the mayor of the town is choosing one secret word shown on a phone. The mayor of the town and the werewolf and the seer all know what this word is, but the rest of the players have no idea what the word is. You’re trying to guess what the word is. It’s a 20 Questions-y kind of thing to guess this. The social deception aspect of it is really important, because you’re trying to not reveal how you got to what the secret word was. I thought it was just a very brilliantly designed game for a group of 5 to 10 people probably.

**Craig:** I love this game mechanic that one player knows who the werewolf is, or the word, sorry. One player knows the word. That player you’d think can just say it or just obviously guide the other players toward it. The problem is if the werewolf knows who that person is, then they win the game just by identifying them as the seer. That seer has to be-

**John:** Very careful.

**Craig:** … very careful and not obvious. They have to seem like not the seer while guiding people towards the thing that the seer knows. That’s very clever. That’s a smart idea.

**John:** Smart idea.

**Craig:** Werewords.

**John:** A good game. Inexpensive. For your next game, I recommend Werewords.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a recipe. I made tiramisu for the first time.

**John:** Tell me, how’d it turn out?

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I’m not surprised. Did you make your ladyfingers from scratch or did you [00:56:22]?

**Craig:** No, I don’t think any sane person would do that. Yes, maybe some people do it. That really is unnecessary. The reason it’s unnecessary is because the ladyfingers are going to be very quickly subsumed in some espresso and a little bit of rum, at which point it becomes semi-mushy. In fact, you have to work very quickly so it doesn’t fall apart in your hands. It’s no longer a crispy little biscuit. It’s something else. The one thing you don’t need to do, I think, is make your own ladyfingers. They’re available in packages at most stores. The New York Times has a recipe that worked gorgeously. It seemed like tiramisu would be super damn hard. It’s really not.

**John:** Basically it’s like a trifle essentially. Ladyfingers are soaked in stuff. Then is it whipped cream, or what’s the cream base of that?

**Craig:** There’s a little bit of a debate. There are two ingredients that everybody agrees need to be in there. Three, sorry. Sugar, of course. Egg yolks and mascarpone cheese.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Those things must be in there. Then the question is… Some people are egg whites, a meringuey kind of thing. Other people are a whipped cream kind of thingy. The New York Times went with a whipped cream kind of thingy, which is maybe less of a purist, purist method, but it sure tasted like regular and excellent tiramasu to me. You just do your layers. Honestly, it’s really easy. Then just shake a little cocoa powder on the top. Suddenly, you feel like you’ve made something that you’ve seen in a restaurant. The one bit of advice I will give people, if they do make this recipe… In the recipe they have you mixing the mascarpone cheese into the whipped cream, which a lot of commenters mentioned was a disaster.

**John:** The textures are too different.

**Craig:** It basically broke the whipped cream. Commenters suggested strongly that you whip the mascarpone into the egg yolks and sugar, which worked great. That’s what I did. It did end fact work great, because then you end up combining it all together anyway. I will throw a link on there to the New York Times recipe for tiramasu. Way easier than they think. The one thing to keep in mind is that you do want to make this at least 24 hours ahead.

**John:** It’s one of those sit in your refrigerator, congeal kind of things.

**Craig:** Sit in the fridge and have the flavors combine. That’s the big deal.

**John:** I have to say, the New York Times recipe section and the recipe box and how they do stuff, they’re really good. They’re well-designed recipes. I’ve enjoyed most of the things I’ve tried making out of the New York Times.

**Craig:** They are good. They are nice enough to allow comments. You can read through the comments. Invariably, a few people will trial and error their way to something better.

**John:** I love the comments that are just like, “Can I make this with shortbread? Can I make this tiramasu with Oreos and cottage cheese?”

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “Will that work?”

**Craig:** There are always people who are like, “I tried it and it didn’t work. I followed the recipe. The only thing I did was instead of using egg yolks, I used ham.” You’re like, “Idiot. Of course it didn’t work.” The vast majority of people seemed to enjoy it when they made it. Like I said, to me, if you can find a recipe that is easy and awesome, go for it.

**John:** Go for it. Love it. That is our show, which was easy and delicious.

**Craig:** It was easy and delicious.

**John:** This was the tiramisu of episodes for us today. It was produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You could find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on how not to forget the names of the people you’re working with. Craig, I’ll never forget your name.

**Craig:** Aw, thanks, Jim.

**John:** Megan, it absolutely is a pleasure.

**Craig:** Megan Arao.

**John:** Megan Arao. We’ll see you guys next week.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Bonus Segment. Let’s talk about the people you’re working with and who are showing up in your emails, who are calling, who are on Zooms. You have to remember who are these people. Craig, what is your strategy? What was your strategy on Last of Us for all the people you’re meeting, so the studio executives, the production folks? When you go on a set, how are you remembering names?

**Craig:** You can’t. There are too many people. When you’re making a production, any kind of production, there’s too many people. A large production, there’s absurdly too many people. You can’t try too hard. If you try too hard, suddenly all day long all you’re thinking about are people’s names. More to the point, no one expects you to know their name, certainly not early on. Then later down the line, if they don’t interact with you frequently… There are people that I probably never talk to. There are definitely people I never talked to on our set, because they were busy doing other things. I didn’t interface with them, so I don’t know their name. They’re professionals. They don’t walk around saying, “I can’t believe that the guy I never talk to, who never talks to me, doesn’t know my name.” It takes time. The God’s honest truth, what happens is it takes time, and you start to learn. It’s weird for me to think about how many people I know and how many names I know from the crew of the Last of Us and how I knew none of their names in the beginning. In that first week, if I need help with a prop, I don’t know who to talk to. Hey, how about this? Everyone’s wearing a mask. You just do the best you can. That’s it. I am considering that for my next production, whatever it is, that maybe for the first couple of weeks we do name tags.

**John:** I believe in name tags. I think it helps everybody. It ask the truth that you cannot remember everybody’s names. I like name tags. I like that as a thing. Would you have name tags that are stickers on people’s shoulders or on a badge kind of thing?

**Craig:** We had badges. The problem is the badges would flip around, inevitably. They would always show the wrong side. Also, you just didn’t want to, “Excuse me, hold on, I need to see your badge,” because it’s in a weird spot.

**John:** Then you’re looking down, so it’s clear you didn’t remember their name.

**Craig:** My point is we all don’t remember our names. I want to give everybody freedom to not know each other’s name. Wear the name tag and also what your job is, because I don’t know. I’m meeting a lot of people for the first time on day one. Oh my god, our dimmer board operator, Jameses. His name is James and then S and then something. It was a whole thing with the gaffer calling him Jameses. We love Jameses. I don’t know who Jameses is on day one. I don’t know his name, and I don’t know what he does yet, because I just see him walking around. Now if he gets behind the dimmer board, then yeah. Is that a special effects guy, or is that a props guy? Is that an electrician or is that a grip? You don’t know. Name and job. Do the best you can. You’re going to say “bro” and “buddy” and “pal” a lot.

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Craig:** You’re going to say “sir” and “madam.” Generally speaking, people forgive you. If you are saying to your A-camera operator after four months, “Sorry, I don’t know your name, but can you get tighter?” then you’re an idiot. Otherwise, yeah, just give yourself a little bit of a break. It’s not possible.

**John:** I’m not in production yet, but I am in a lot of Zooms with a lot of people. They’re the kind of Zooms that will happen every two or three weeks. I’m not seeing people all the time. I’m seeing people enough. I need to remember, oh crap, who is this person? What I’ve taken to doing is, for this project I just have a page in Notion which is basically who’s who. It basically lists the names. I’ll grab a photo off the internet so I remember what they look like, and a few things about them, what their job title is at this company, anything that’s interesting I know about their history or a thing, just so I’m not starting from absolute zero every time a Zoom starts up here, because sometimes I’ll have a follow-up call with my agent, say, “What did you think of this person?” I’m like, “I have no idea if that person was on the Zoom or not.” This way, at least going into it, I have a little bit better sense of like, okay, these are the people.

Other thing I’ve found really helpful is that with Zoom invitations, you see who is invited to the meeting. I can just take a look through that list. It’s like, do I know who these people are? If there’s a person who I don’t know who they are, I will Google them to see what is this person’s function on this project. Otherwise, I can forget, oh, that’s actually a high-ranking network exec, and I just didn’t know.

**Craig:** Certainly, you want to know who the quote unquote important people are.

**John:** If this were a physical meeting, whose office would I be in.

**Craig:** There are people that when you’re dealing with let’s say the studio or network, especially when you’re in larger meetings where it covers multiple departments, then there are going to be people on there that you don’t know personally. They also don’t expect that you know them personally. To me it’s okay to know the names of the people that you’ve been dealing directly with. If other people break through the name barrier, then I say well done, name barrier breaker-througher. I’m also perfectly happy to play these… We’re older now, John. We can just be slightly doddering about it.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Megana, you can’t get away with that. You’re in your crisp 20s. You can’t not know people’s names.

**Megana:** I do know people’s names.

**Craig:** See? Look at that.

**John:** See? Absolutely, because she’s met so many fewer people than you and I have. Here’s a plead. Can I just ask all of Hollywood and all of the world? On your Zoom, put your actual name as your name. Don’t put some little short thing they can’t pronounce. Put your actual name there. Mine says John August, because my name is John August. It doesn’t say august75007. It says John August. People can remember, “Oh, that’s John August. He’s the writer guy.”

**Craig:** Carolyn Strauss, at some point someone changed her Zoom name to something. She was involved in some kind of charity that was benefiting Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Her Zoom name was something like HBCUFoundation4. Now, I know who she is, but every time I see her, I’m like, “What’s up, HBCUFoundation4?” Somebody needs to fix her Zoom, for the love of God. Also, I’ve been on Zoom with friends and changed my name to something horrendous and then forgot.

**John:** I love that.

**Craig:** You go on Zoom later, and it’s still your name. I think Zoom should have a thing where it just resets back to your regular name each time.

**John:** 100%. For D and D, we use our characters’ names for our Zooms, if we remember to use our characters’ names for Zooms. Thank God I’m using our iPad. It resets and it doesn’t remember that I changed it.

**Craig:** That might’ve been it. I was in a meeting, and someone’s like, “Why is your Zoom name God of Vengeance?” or something like that. I was like, “Oh, right, so I’m a Dungeon Master. Long story. I’m a dork.”

**John:** Megana, you’re meeting with everybody in town. You’re going off on tons of meetings. Are you doing anything to keep track of who you meet with?

**Megana:** I feel like this is revealing such big gaps. I have the email communication with my agents though.

**John:** That helps, because back in our day, when I was first taking those meetings, it was before emails. I would get phone calls. I’d go to this place, and there was just no record of what it was. Or I’d get faxes. I remember faxes.

**Craig:** Faxes.

**Megana:** I guess something I learned from you also is afterwards I’ll send a summary of what we talked about to my agents and then have that all searchable by email.

**John:** That is another big help. If I have a general meeting, if agents set up something, afterwards I’ll send an email saying, “We had a great meeting. We talked about these three things. I really liked this person,” just as a reminder. It’s helpful for them, but it’s mostly helpful for me when I want to search back.

**Craig:** My whole system was just writing words on small scraps of paper that piled up on my desk.

**John:** Then you eventually threw them away.

**Craig:** Then I eventually threw them away, and in throwing them away learned an important lesson. It’s fine.

**John:** It’s all fine.

**Craig:** You know what? If someone’s going to give me money, I learn their name real fast.

**John:** Funny how that works.

**Craig:** If they are relying on me, they’re going to learn my name real fast. Everybody else, whatever. By the way, I’ve met people before and then subsequently, some time later, I run into them at something, and they don’t remember meeting me. That’s fine. I never say, “No, you know me. What?” I just go, “Nice to meet you,” because why make them feel bad over something that’s incredibly human? It’s my fault. I didn’t break through.

**John:** I was at a party over the weekend. There was a guy who worked at a studio. I said, oh, blah blah. He’s like, “Oh no, we actually have met before. It was five years ago. I was the junior person in the room.” Thank you for taking the spin off that, like it was my fault for not remembering him, because he was the junior guy in the room. I only focused on the decision maker in the room.

**Craig:** That’s totally fine. If someone says to me, “Hey, I did meet you once with so-and-so,” I’ll just be honest. I’m like, “I don’t specifically remember that, but I hope that I was pleasant.”

**John:** There was a case where on a Zoom, they made a big point about like, “I used to work for,” insert name here, “and I learned everything from here.” I wanted to say, “I will never work with you, because if that’s who you hold up as your ideal and your model, that’s bad and dangerous, and you’re a terrible, terrible person.”

**Craig:** I would admire the absolute gall of somebody who said, “I used to work for Harvey Weinstein. I learned everything from him.”

**John:** “He’s a hero.”

**Craig:** “He’s my hero.”

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, thanks for the tips.

**Craig:** Thank you for your tips. Thank you, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, guys.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Eric Webb’s Twitter](https://twitter.com/salaciousscribe) and [Memorial Fundraiser](https://www.gofundme.com/f/lay-a-beloved-writer-friend-and-partner-to-rest)
* [Mystery of the Buried Owl](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/13/the-mystery-of-the-buried-owl-the-30-year-treasure-hunt-baffling-french-puzzlers) by Phil Hoad for the Guardian
* [Rodney Stotts Used to Hustle Drugs in Southeast DC. Now He’s One of the Few Black Master Falconers in America](https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/02/09/rodney-stotts-one-of-the-few-black-master-falconers-in-america/) by Rodney Stotts for the Washingtonian
* [This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/chevron-amazon-ecuador-steven-donziger-erin-brockovich) by Erin Brockovich for the Guardian
* [It Really Wasn’t Cricket: The Strange Case of the Fake Indian Premier League](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/world/asia/fake-indian-cricket-league-russia.html) by Sameer Yasir for the NY Times
* [Werewords](http://werewords.com) Game
* [Tiramisu](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018684-classic-tiramisu) Recipe in the New York Times
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Owen Danoff ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/559standard.mp3).