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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 554 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a craft compendium. We are going back to previous segments, in which we talk about how to work with groups of characters. We’ll be looking at how pairs or groups of characters can work on separate pieces of the puzzle, then come together at the end, how to manage different storylines and the dynamics in smaller breakout groups, and how we capture the feeling of community and chemistry between multiple characters.

Our guide in this process is Megana Rao, who is not only a Scriptnotes producer but also a listener. Megana, help us out. Where are we starting?

Megana Rao: We’re starting on Episode 360, called Relationships. Craig often talks about how the most important thing is the central relationship in this story.

John: Not one character, but the relationship between those two characters.

Megana: Exactly. It’s not about the main character. It’s about who that main character’s central relationship is with. In this segment, you guys first of all talk about how to set up characters and establish backstories and the challenge of locating characters and introducing the dynamics that existed before the movie began. Then you get into how you actually evolve those relationships on screen and you go into some technical scene work.

John: Relationship between two characters is almost always about conflict. What is it that they are coming into the scene? What is the problem between the two of them? How are we seeing that grow and evolve and change? How are we exposing the inner life of not just the individual characters, but what their relationship was like before this movie started?

Megana: Yeah, and how you convey that through dialog and how people actually speak to each other.

John: Great. We have that first segment. What’s our next segment.

Megana: Then we get into Episode 395, called All in This Together. In this one, you guys are looking at how you structure a story where the team functions as the central protagonist. There’s a really interesting discussion on POV here where you talk about the challenge of this type of story is that you need to serve several different characters and execute satisfying arcs for each of them.

John: It’s not just The Goonies. It’s any movie in which you have a team of characters who are working together, so the Avengers or the Fast and Furious movies. Yes, each of those characters might have individual arcs or things we know about them, but really it’s the group dynamics that are going to change over the course of the story, so how we handle those.

Megana: Exactly, yeah. It’s not just the individual, but how the whole is going to transform.

John: Fantastic. What’s our third and final segment?

Megana: Our last segment is Episode 383, Splitting the Party. I just want to warn everyone that this is a D and D-heavy chat.

John: As all chats should be, heavy D and D.

Megana: I promise it’s worth it. In this one, you guys are talking about how to split up a group of characters and the questions that writers should be asking themselves so that it’s meaningful when those characters come back together.

John: Fantastic. We will be back together at the end of these three segments to talk about what we’ve learned a little bit but also to do our One Cool Things and all the boilerplate stuff. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we are going to be talking about Stranger Things Season 4.1 I guess we’d call it, which is all about group dynamics. If you’re not a Premium Member, for the love of Steve Harrington, you have to become a Premium Member, because Megana has some very strong opinions about the characters and what’s happened in Stranger Things this first half of Season 4.

Megana: Incredibly strong opinions. By the time this episode airs, everyone should have watched it.

John: You have no excuse for not becoming a Premium Member so you can hear the Bonus Segment. Now, let’s travel back to Episode 360 and get started with our group dynamics.

And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

Craig Mazin: Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

John: You do have feelings.

Craig: I guess I do.

John: But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

Craig: No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

John: Go for it.

Craig: Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

John: Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

Craig: Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

John: Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

Craig: Right.

John: That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

John: Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

Craig: Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

John: Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

Craig: You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

John: I haven’t.

Craig: Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

John: Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

Craig: Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

John: Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

Craig: Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

John: Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

Craig: Right.

John: You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

Craig: That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

John: So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

Craig: It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

John: Completely.

Craig: Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

John: Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

Craig: Right.

John: There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

Craig: Or an animal.

John: Or an animal.

Craig: You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

John: Yeah. Who is he talking to?

Craig: Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

John: Yep. You do.

John: So our main topic this week came up because yesterday I did a roundtable on a project and this project we were working on had not one hero but a big group of heroes. Or, not a big group, but four people who were sort of the central heroes of the story. And that wasn’t a mistake. That really was how the movie needed to work.

And it got me thinking that we so often talk about movies being a journey that happens to one character only once, and we always talk about sort of that hero and that hero protagonates over the course of the story and sort of those things. Even though we are not big fans of those classic templates and sort of everything has to match the three-act structure that tends to be the experience of movies is that you’re following a character on a journey. But there are a lot of movies that have these groups of heroes in them and I thought we’d spend some time talking about movies that have groups and the unique challenges of movies that have groups as their central heroes.

Craig: Smart topic because I think it’s quickly becoming the norm actually as everybody in the studio world tries to universe-ize everything. You end up, even if you start with movies with the traditional independent protagonist, sooner or later you’re going to be smooshing everybody together in some sort of team up. So it’s inevitable.

John: We’ve talked before about two-handers where you have two main characters who are doing most of the work in the movie. And sometimes it’s a classic protagonist/antagonist situation. So movies like Big Fish, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Romancing the Stone, Chicago, while there are other characters there’s two central characters you’re following and you could say either one of them is the main character of the story.

But what you’re describing in terms of there’s a big group of characters is more on the order of Charlie’s Angels, The Breakfast Club, X-Men, Avengers, Scooby Doo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lord of the Rings, Goonies, Go, all The Fast and Furious movies. These are movies where characters need to have journeys and make progress over the course of the story but they’re a part of a much larger team. And we really haven’t done a lot of talking about how those teams of characters work in movies.

Craig: Yeah. I actually wasn’t really a team movie writer until I guess The Hangovers, because those three guys kind of operated as a team. And then when you throw Mr. Chow in there it’s a team of four. It’s a crew. Now you’ve got a crew.

John: You’ve got a crew.

Craig: You got a crew.

John: We’re putting together a crew.

Craig: And you got to figure out how that crew works, because it is very different than just – even like a typical two-hander like Identity Thief. I mean, there are other characters but it’s just the two of them on a road trip. That’s pretty traditional stuff.

John: The movie is about their relationship. And so I’m sure people can argue that one is the protagonist and one is the antagonist. And, great, but really it’s about the two of them and how they are changing each other. Wicked is a two-hander.

Craig: Right. When you say, OK, now it’s really about three, or four, or five, or in Fast and Furious there’s like 12 of them at this point now, you kind of have to present them as this team. It’s a team sport now. So writing for a team requires a very different kind of thinking I think than writing for a traditional protagonist and let’s call them a sub-protagonist or something like that.

John: Yeah. So if you think about them as a group, if you think about them as one entity this should still be a one-time transformational event for this group of characters, for this team of characters, for whatever this party is that is going through this journey that has to be transformational to them as a group.

But within that bigger story there’s probably individual stories. And in those individual stories those characters are probably the protagonist of that subplot or at least that sub-story. So they’re all going to have relationships with each other, with the greater question, the greater theme, the greater plot of the movie, and it’s making sure that each of those characters feels adequately served by what the needs are. Bigger characters are going to have more screen time and probably take bigger arcs. Minor characters are at least going to enter into a place and exit a place that they hopefully have contributed to the overall success or failure of not just the plot that the characters are wrestling with but the thematic issues that the movie is trying to bring up and tackle.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a kind of a Robert Altman-y trick where you take an event and he would do this a lot in very good Robert Altman movies, but we see it in all sorts of movies, where there’s an event. And the event is so big it encompasses everyone. And so we kind of – we play a little bit of the soap opera game. So soap operas traditionally would have about three or four plots going at once. You would see a little bit of one, then it would switch over to the next one. And you’d have to wait to get back to the one you liked. At least that was my experience when I was home sick with grandma.

So in say a movie like Independence Day there are multiple stories. There is a president. There is his wife. There’s an adviser to the president who has an ex-wife. There’s his dad. There’s Will Smith. There’s a bunch of stories going on. And each one of them gets a little slice of the story pie, but ultimately it’s all viewed through the prism of this event. And in the end everybody kind of comes together in some sort of unifying act which in Magnolia was a frog rain.

John: Yes. Yes.

Craig: And we see that in fact as different as all these stories were everyone was connected and kind of working as a team. So individuals are the heroes of their mini-stories. And that’s in fact how those movies tell the story of the big story through mini-stories.

John: Yeah. Now, in some of these stories the characters enter in as some kind of family. They have a pre-existing relationship. In other movies they are thrown together by circumstances and therefore have to sort of figure out what the relationships are between them. In either situation you want those relationships to have changed by the end of the story. So just like as in a two-hander, their relationship needs to have changed by the end. In a team story the relationships need to have changed by the end and you need to see the impact they’ve had on each other over the course of this. So independent of a villain, independent of outside plot, the choices that they individually made impacted the people around them.

Craig: And that’s the matrix of relevance. So in a traditional movie it is about me. I have a problem. And I go through a course of action and at the end of the movie my problem is solved. In this kind of story the group has a problem. And what we’re rooting for is the group to survive. And in that sense very much it is a family. And we know that about the Fast and Furious, because they’re always telling us.

John: [laughs] It’s family.

Craig: They always tell us. This is a family. But it is. And so the hero of those movies is the joined relationship of them all in the family. And what the problem is in the beginning of the story is not a problem with one individual. It is a problem of family dynamic. And that is what needs to be figured out by the end of the movie.

John: Yeah. So let’s talk about the real pitfalls and challenges of doing a story with a team protagonist or with a big group at its center. The first and most obvious one is that sometimes certain characters just end up being purely functional. You see what their role is within this group and what their role is within this plot, but their character isn’t actually interesting in and of itself at all. And sometimes if it’s a minor character, OK, but if it’s a character who we’re putting some emotional weight in that we actually want to see their journey at all, they have to be more than purely functional.

The challenge is the more you – in a normal movie you can say like, oh OK, well I need to build in some back story for this character. I need to see them interact with other people and get a better sense of who this person is and what they’re trying to do, but you can’t do that for every character because the movie would just keep starting again and again. It would never get anywhere. So, finding ways that one character’s progress is impacting another character, which is sending the next thing forward. The jigsaw puzzle aspect of getting all those characters’ changes to happen over the course of the story can be really difficult.

Craig: It can be. Because, you know, the movie starts to turn into a stop-and-start. Action, quiet talk, backstory, my inner feelings. Action, quiet talk, backstory, your inner feelings. And it’s one of the reasons by the way these movies are so long. They are so long because everybody needs a story. It’s hard to justify why you have seven characters when only three really have lives and inner worlds and the other four are standing around doing stuff.

John: Yep.

Craig: So everybody has to have it. And they can get really long. You know, it wouldn’t kill these people to maybe, you know, kill one of them. If it’s not going well we’ll just kill them. No big deal.

John: I’m going to argue without a lot of supporting evidence that Alien is essentially one of these kind of group movies, and a lot of horror movies are those kind of group movie, and they winnow down the characters so that one person is left standing. But you couldn’t necessarily say that that person was the protagonist at the very start of the story.

Aliens is not really kind of what we’re talking about with the team movie. Even though there’s a team of great people in it, it is Ripley’s movie and it is her journey. You can clearly see her protagonist arc over the course of it. So, that’s a distinction. Even within the same franchise those are two different kind of setups. I would say – I’m arguing that the first Alien movie is kind of what we’re describing in this episode whereas Aliens is much more a classic, here is one character on a one-time journey.

Craig: Yeah. Don’t be afraid, if you need to write fodder characters you write fodder characters.

John: Oh, go for it.

Craig: I mean, people need to die. Somebody has to be the red shirt. But when you think about – Star Trek is a pretty good example I think of a kind of team story. All their movies feel like team stories to me. And in part it’s because, I mean, take away the science fiction aspect, they’re just sailors on a boat. And so we’re rooting for the boat to survive. That means everybody on the boat is important. However, if something blows up, a few people on the boat can die and we won’t miss them. It’s the people that we have invested in emotionally. Those need to be justifiable to us. They all need to be important. They’re all doing jobs that are really important. I don’t care about the janitor on USS Enterprise. They do have an important job. Really important. But not during your crisis.

John: Absolutely. And we should distinguish between, in television shows by their nature tend to have big casts with a lot of people doing stuff, so Star Trek as a TV show you say, oh well of course, there’s a big cast, there’s a team. But the Star Trek movies which I also love, that is what we’re talking about here because it’s a family. It is a group of characters, the five or six key people. They are the ones that we care about. And we don’t care about the red shirts. We want to see them come through this and survive and change and interact with each other. That’s why we’re buying our ticket for these movies.

Craig: You know what? I just had an idea.

John: Yes?

Craig: You know, so occasionally we do a deep dive into a movie. And I do like the idea of surprising people. I don’t think we’ve necessarily been particularly surprising in our choices. They’ve all been kind of classics. But you know what’s a really, really, really well-written movie?

John: Wrath of Khan?

Craig: It is. But that’s not the one I’m thinking of.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Star Trek: First Contact.

John: Oh great.

Craig: First Contact is a brilliantly written script. It is a gorgeous story where everything clicks and works together in the most lovely way.

John: Nice.

Craig: I would deep dive that. I’d deep dive the hell out of it.

John: It’s on the list. Nice.

Craig: Put it on the list. Put it on the list.

John: Put it on the list. Getting back to this idea that there’s sort of a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a lot of things happening at once, you and I have both worked on Charlie’s Angels films. I found that to be some of the most difficult writing I ever had to do because you have three protagonists, three angels, who each need their own storylines. They need to be interacting with each other a lot. They have to have a pretty complicated A-plot generally. So every scene ends up having to do work on more than just one of those aspects. If it’s just talking plot then you’re missing opportunity to do Angel B-story stuff, but you can’t do two or three Angel B-story scenes back to back because then you’ve lost the A-plot. They’re challenging movies for those reasons. And more challenging than you might guess from an outsider’s perspective.

Craig: Well, you’re spinning plates, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You watch them when they’re actually spinning plates. They spin the plate and then they move over and they keep this plate. This plate is slowing down, spin that one faster. The one you were just spinning, it’s in middle. That one over there is slowing down, get to that one. It’s the same thing. You kind of service these things in waves. When you feel like you’ve had a good satisfying amount of this person, leave them and move onto another side story or another aspect of this group. That person can hang for a while.

If you have left somebody for a while when you come back to them it’s got to be really good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve got to go, oh, you know what, it wasn’t like we were away from that person because there was nothing for them to do. We were away from them because they have a bomb to drop on us. And so that works, too. But just think of it as just servicing plates. Spinning plates and looking for the ones that have kind of been a little bit neglected for a little too long. Because you can’t do them all at once. It’s not possible.

John: Yeah. And so this, we talk about art and craft a lot. Some of that is just craft. It’s recognizing having built a bunch of cabinets you recognize like, OK, this is what I need to do to make these cabinet doors work properly. And I can’t, if I don’t measure this carefully those cabinet doors are going to bump into each other and you’re not going to be able to open them. It’s a design aspect that’s kind of hard to learn how to do until you’ve just done it a bunch. And recognizing the ins and outs of scenes and how long it’s been since we’ve seen this careful. What are we expecting to happen next?

And while doing all of that remembering like, OK, what is it thematically these storylines are all about. What is the bigger picture that these can all – how are we going to get everybody to the same place not just physically but emotionally for this moment.

Craig: Yeah. You find as you do these things that you can get away with almost nothing. I think early on you think, well, it’s been a little while and this person hasn’t said anything, but whatever, it’s fine. These scenes are good. And then you give it to people and they go, “So why is this dead weight hanging around here? That was weird.” And you go, well, you can’t actually get away with anything.

John: Yeah. We talked before about how a character who doesn’t talk in a scene can be a challenge, especially if they haven’t talked – if they’re just hanging in the background of a scene for a long time and haven’t said anything that becomes a problem. But if a character has been offstage for too long and then they come back it has to be meaningful when they come back and you have to remember who they are. There’s not a clear formula or math, but sometimes you will actually just do a list of scenes and recognize like, wow, I have not seen this character for so long that I won’t remember who they are. And so I’m going to have to remind people who they are when they come back. It’s challenging. And you’re trying to do this all at script stage, but then of course you shoot a movie and then you’re seeing it and you’re like, oh man, we dropped that scene and now this doesn’t make sense. That’s the jigsaw puzzle of it all.

Craig: Yeah. It’s why writers should be in charge of movies.

John: Yeah. I think so.

Craig: Just telling it like it is.

John: Well, we go back to the sort of writer-plus that you’re always pitching which is that aspect of writers sort of functioning as showrunners for films is especially important for these really complicated narratives where there’s just a lot of plate-spinning to be done.

Craig: Yeah. I think television has proven this. Really it’s empirical at this point. The other thing I wanted to mention, one last pitfall, when you’re dealing with a group dynamic and you’re writing for a family you have to make sure that no one person – no one person’s personal stakes outweigh the group stakes. We want to be rooting for this whole team to survive. And they’re working together. But if you tell me also that one of their little mini-stories is that they’ve discovered the cure for cancer now I just mostly care about that person. That person has to get out of the burning building. Everybody else should just light themselves on fire so that person can get out.

So you just want to make sure that no one person’s stakes overshadow or obliterate the other ones in the group. And really the biggest stake of all which is us staying together.

John: Yep. 100%. So some takeaways. I would say if you’re approaching a story that you think is going to be a team story I would stop and ask yourself is it really a team story or is it more Aliens where it’s one character’s story and there’s a bunch of other characters as well? Because if it is one character’s story that’s most movies and that is actually a good thing. So always ask yourself is there really one central character and everyone else is supporting that one central character? If that’s not the case and you really do genuinely have a family, a group, a series of characters who are addressing the same thing you’ve made your life more difficult but god bless you. That could be a great script. But recognize the challenges you’re going to have ahead for yourself and be thinking about how do you make this group feel like the protagonist so you feel like there has been a transformation of this group by the end of the movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And I do believe that after this episode people should be able to do this. All of them.

John: Oh, all of them. Easy-peasy. Nothing hard to do there.

Craig: I mean, what else do you people want? We’ve almost done 400 of these.

John: Wow.

Craig: They should all be at the top of their game. There should be 400 Oscars a year for screenplay as far as I’m concerned.

John: Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

John: Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

Craig: Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

John: That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

Craig: Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

John: Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

Craig: Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

John: Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

Craig: It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

John: Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

Craig: Right.

John: So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

Craig: Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

John: Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

Craig: Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

John: You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

Craig: Precisely.

John: So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

Craig: Yep.

John: That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

Craig: Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

John: Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

Craig: Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

John: Absolutely true.

We are back now in 2022. Craig is gone, because Craig was never actually really here. He just, through the magic tape, was here with us. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Megana, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Megana: I do. My One Cool Thing is the Hydroviv under-the-sink water filtration system.

John: Fantastic.

Megana: I drink a lot of water.

John: I can testify you do drink a lot of water, which is good. It’s healthy.

Megana: I do, yeah. My favorite type of water is room temperature tap water. Living in LA, it’s sometimes hard to drink straight from the tap.

John: To clarify, it is safe to drink from the tap. Sometimes it’s just not what you want.

Megana: In my new apartment, I was drinking from the tap, and it just tasted like I was drinking from a pool. I feel like I always had this metallic tang in my mouth. I was like, “Oh, it’s not great.” I was looking at different options. The Brita filter is just one step too many for me.

John: Absolutely. That’s where you’re filling the pitcher again and again. We used to have those in the house.

Megana: There’s just never enough water. I was looking at under-the-sink systems, because that seemed like the best option. I found this company. I originally found out about them on Shark Tank. Because of that, I wasn’t going to go with that.

John: I wouldn’t.

Megana: After doing research, I felt like they were the best option. They’re a little bit pricier. Their pitch is that they design filters that respond to city-specific needs. I put in my zip code, and then they would send me a customized thing back. I installed it myself. It’s been a couple of months. My water’s delicious.

John: That’s great. How often do you change the filters on this system?

Megana: Every six months.

John: That’s not so bad. That’s not bad at all. Here at the house, the whole house is on one water filter system, which has been really nice and convenient. We used to do Brita filter pitchers, and we don’t need to anymore. The water in our house though is okay for you, right?

Megana: Yeah, it’s so delicious. It’s one of the many reasons I look forward to coming to work.

John: My One Cool Thing is called BLOT2046. It is a manifesto. I’m really not sure what this website is I’m sending people to. It’s mysterious. There’s a signup for a mailing list. I haven’t signed up for it because I’m not sure if it’s a cult or what it is. Basically, on this page there are 46 bullet points. They were intriguing and sometimes opaque and mysterious. I’ll give you a sampling of three of them. Point 16 is, “Hypnotize yourself or someone else will,” which I get, is that if you’re not able to introspect and see what is it that you would get yourself to focus on, someone else is going to take that attention and pull it through.

“Work in the semi-open. Translucency, not transparency,” which I think is actually applicable to a lot of stuff we do in film and television is that you cannot be completely transparent about the things you’re working on, because they’re not ready to be seen by the world. Yet if you’d want to lock everything down where it’s completely opaque and impossible to see too early on, no one’s going to have a sense of what it is you’re working on. Translucency feels like a good word to be using there.

The final point, point 42, “There’s no away, no elsewhere, not really.” We think, “Oh, if I could ever get away,” but you really can’t get away. You have to find a way to get away within yourself.

Megana: I feel like that’s a strong theme in film and TV. Is this a manifesto for how to live your life, or is that unclear?

John: It’s really unclear. I think some of them are actually about manufacturing and sustainability. Really any of them felt like good prompts for writing, actually, that you could take any of these ideas and use them as a thematic touchpoint for a piece of storytelling.

Megana: Cool. It’s a cool, spooky website.

John: It is a very spooky website.

Megana: I would recommend the click.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a vintage track by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies, which are lovely. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Stranger Things.

Megana: I cannot wait.

John: Megana Rao, thank you very much for joining me and for putting together this episode.

Megana: Of course. Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Speaking of group dynamics, there is one group we love more than any other. It is our Premium Members, so thank you for supporting the show. We are joined for this segment by Drew Marquardt, who is helping us out this summer working on the Scriptnotes book. Drew, welcome to the podcast in audio form, not text form like you’ve been dealing with.

Drew Marquardt: Thank you so much, both of you, for having me.

John: Great.

Drew: Am I Craig now?

John: You are in the Craig spot, so you have to have a lot of umbrage about all things. That’s good. That’s a good sigh.

Megana: That was a great impression.

John: It’s nice. We all just finished watching the first half of Season 4 of Stranger Things. Relevant to this episode about group dynamics, there were a lot of group dynamics at play within this first half of the season. There was a lot of place setting. There was a lot of just groups being put together and pulled apart and spread out all over. I thought, let’s talk about what we think so far of the show. Maybe start with a thumbs up, thumbs down. Megana Rao, are you thumbs up or thumbs down for this first seven episodes?

Megana: I am two thumbs up.

John: Two thumbs up. Drew, where are you?

Drew: I’m more of a single thumbs up, but I’m thumbs up.

John: I’m maybe one and a half thumbs up, if you can split a thumb, if you can divide a thumb. I liked a lot of this. I felt like the episodes were long, and longer than they needed to be in cases. I felt like they could’ve cut many of these 90-minute episodes down into 60 minutes and they would’ve been better episodes. Still, I wasn’t upset with the episodes I was watching.

Megana: I don’t know, it still felt like not enough for me.

John: You want more and more.

Megana: More and more. I love hanging out with these characters.

John: Let’s talk about the characters we’re hanging out with, because obviously this is going to be spoiler-heavy throughout. If you haven’t watched it and you aren’t planning to watch it, maybe pause this right now and come back after you’ve watched 19 hours of television. We start the season with our characters really spread out in very different places than we’ve seen before. They’re not all in our little town of Hawkins. Some are in Hawkins. Some are in California.

Megana: Some are in Russia.

John: Some are in Russia. People are spread out. Megana, controversially, you did not like any of the Russian segments?

Megana: Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready to publicly air that.

John: I think you were talking about friends of yours who had fast-forwarded through all the Russian stuff.

Megana: Friends of mine did. I watched everything. I did not fast-forward through any of the Russian plot lines. I don’t know, just where we are right now, I’m just not really interested in Russia as a villain. I just wanted everyone to be back together in Hawkins.

John: Drew, how much did they need to catch you up on who the characters were and where they were at the start of the show?

Drew: A little bit. It’s been three years or something like that.

Megana: Oh my gosh.

Drew: I felt like they did a good job jumping you right into the story. I initially felt like I was going to be confused by why Hopper was still alive. Even when Papa comes back, I thought there was going to be quite a lot of… They did a good job, I thought, of just giving you enough information to justify why it’s there and then move the story along, because we don’t really need to dwell on it.

John: I think I had a hard time remembering why was Eleven with Winona Ryder’s family and all that stuff. I knew they had left. That first episode was a lot of just putting the pieces on the table…

Megana: Totally.

John: …and reminding, okay, all these characters are still alive, and this is why they’re spread out. I thought centering it around spring break made a lot of sense, which was great. It was a lot of just reminding us who these characters were and where they are and the dynamics.

Megana: Who’s died and who’s recovering from what trauma.

Drew: I thought Jonathan had died, for some reason. I knew that Billy had died in Season 3. When he was back, I was like, “I thought he was long gone.”

John: I was ready for Jonathan to be long gone. Let’s jump forward then to the end of these seven episodes. One of the things I was talking with Megana about at lunch was I was really impressed by, when we get into Episode 7, the reveal of who the big bad is and how the big bad came to be and all that stuff. They’re actually doing the reveal split across two different plot lines and different timelines.

Megana: And dimensions.

John: And dimensions, basically, just to really expose who this character was and that this character was created by Eleven, and some strong misdirects along the way that Eleven was responsible for this horrible massacre that starts everything off this season.

Megana: I really loved the villain of the season. I think previously the villains from the Upside Down had been just these generic monsters. I love how personal this one is.

John: Keeping the characters separated though, from California to Hawkins, has been a little awkward. Eventually, it looks like they’re going to be trying to bring these characters back together. We have the California crew. Eleven is split off from them and is in a completely different environment. We have the main Hawkins group that’s sometimes in groups of two or three, small groups within there. We’re going to the sanitarium or places. Then we have all the Russia business, which is self-contained, the Alaska Russia business. It was a lot of juggling. I was noticing that most episodes would try to touch on every plot line except for one. There’d always be one group that was dropped out of it. There’d be episodes in which none of the California crew were part of it.

Megana: The one thing that I… Maybe you guys can explain this to me. I had trouble locating the Will-Mike relationship and why there was so much strife there and felt so bad for Will, because he’s been gone in the Upside Down for years.

John: He wasn’t gone for years though. Will? No.

Megana: Wasn’t he gone in the first and second season? Am I misremembering?

Drew: I think just the first season. Then he was a shadow walker in the second season, where it’s going mentally back and forth.

Megana: Got it.

Drew: I think he has a crush on Mike, right?

John: Yeah.

Drew: That’s what I was being telegraphed.

John: I think they’re trying to tap dance around his being gay or not being gay. It’s left up for audience interpretation. It feels like it’s inevitably going to come out. They’re not afraid of having gay characters, based on other gay characters they have in the show.

Megana: Then why do you think Mike was such a jerk to him?

John: I’m not quite sure why Mike is the way he is in this series at all?

Drew: That was less motivated to me. Mike hasn’t had as strong of a character, but maybe because I felt like they had abandoned Will or they didn’t know what to do with Will after Season 1 for quite a long time. At least in this, there feels like there’s much more a thrust for his character, and he’s going after something. Mike is good. Mike is moving along the plot, but he’s not really.

John: He’s not moving along the plot very much. Curious what he does in the second half of this. Let’s talk about the new characters who were added, because it’s already a giant cast, and they add just a lot of new people in. Some of them are going to be like, oh, you were established in this episode, and therefore you’ll be dead by the end of the episode, which is a classic trope. Some of those people look like they are going to be sticking around, which is surprising to me, and yet this is where we’re at.

Megana: I love Argyle. I know some of you have very strong opinions on him.

John: Argyle is pizza guy?

Megana: Pizza guy.

John: I cannot stand Argyle.

Drew: I like Argyle.

John: You like Argyle?

Drew: Yeah.

John: To me, he feels like just the broadest stereotype.

Megana: He’s California.

John: He’s California. Tell me why you like Argyle, Drew.

Drew: It might be a fondness for the actor. He was in Booksmart too. He’s great. Something about his personality I just enjoy. For some reason, he feels like a nice foil to that, because they really do make that plot line, especially when the soldiers come into the house in Episode 4 or something like that. It’s nice to have him having a bit of levity, because otherwise I think that would be very heavy.

John: It can be very heavy. I thought these soldiers storming into the house was actually one of the most effective things they’ve done all season, where they’ve established a plan for what they’re going to do, and then suddenly all bets are off, and then suddenly there are people storming in. The thing you did not expect to happen at all suddenly happens, which is nice to see. Do I believe that the army is after their own people in that way and that that one guy’s being tortured? Not really. I did like the surprise of suddenly there’s armed weapons in the house.

Drew: I may be most confused by that little bit of storyline. Then the torturing, the one survived, the guy afterwards, I’m not quite sure what that’s all about.

John: I wasn’t expecting for them to be burying bodies in the desert, that our little high school kids are burying bodies in the desert. That’s a shift there.

Megana: They seemed to move on really quickly from that.

John: These kids have been through a lot of trauma. I think there’s just so much to work through. A thing we were talking about is that in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there’s a metaphysical explanation for why no one in Sunnydale ever talks about the weird stuff that happens in Sunnydale. There’s not a lot of acknowledgement in Hawkins that they’ve been through a tremendous amount. Somehow, nobody recognizes that something horrible is happening here. The biggest we have is the angry pitchforks mob meeting that happens. It doesn’t feel like they’re acknowledging all the stuff that we’ve seen happen in Hawkins.

Megana: I feel like if I were one of these characters, I would have a harder time keeping up all these lies that my friends and I are telling the rest of the town.

John: It’s true. Also, what’s happened to the mall? Did they rebuild the mall? What’s going on there? We never get back to the mall.

Drew: They mention the mall fire a few times. I couldn’t even remember how Season… I remembered Billy died at the end of Season 3, but I didn’t remember that that burned down.

John: Also, this season, I was impressed by… I felt like Eleven in California was really awkward. It was useful to see that she can’t do normal teen things, and she’s actually not perceived as being gifted there, but actually being slow, and so she’s undereducated and really struggling. The stuff once they actually brought her back into the lab was impressively handled. The handoff between her and the little actress who’s playing the younger version of her was very smartly done.

Drew: Do you feel like they’re challenging her character in a way that they haven’t done before? That was something that struck me but I didn’t remember in Season 2 or Season 3. It feels like this is a good escalation for her character between Vecna and all of these different things and bringing Papa back too.

Megana: I feel like I was most interested in her at school struggling, because I think the stuff with Papa and all of that… I love that she is facing and unearthing that stuff, but it feels like a place we’ve seen her before, where she’s isolated from the rest of the group, figuring stuff out with her own powers.

John: Drew, because we have you on the show, you are an actor, and so you are young enough that you could play one of these teenage characters.

Drew: That’s being very kind.

John: Are you noticing any things that they’re doing to try to seem young? They are considerably older than the characters they’re supposed to be playing.

Drew: I haven’t picked up on anything. I haven’t been acting for a while. I see them as the professionals and letting the professionals do that. I’m trying to remember. I’m really impressed with Lucas’s little sister, who I forget her name.

Megana: Erica.

Drew: Erica.

Megana: Love her.

Drew: She rules. She’s not trying to play… She’s clearly not 11 or however old she’s supposed to be in that. She’s just playing it as her age, which I think is smart, because I think to an 11-year-old too you are at the top of your intelligence all the time. She’s the person who’s coming to mind as an example of doing it correctly. I don’t really notice anyone playing younger in an awkward way or bumbling way.

John: One of the things they have to do in that first episode too is establish the baseline of this is how the characters are and how they’re going to act. We’re getting set that these characters are this age from the rest of this on. The fact that Steve seems a lot older than the rest of them, but he’s only supposed to be two years older than the rest of them, which is just… We’re going with it, for me.

Megana: He’s a couple years out of high school now.

John: He’s that old, supposed to be?

Megana: I thought so, because he graduated and is now working around town, or am I misremembering?

Drew: I’ve also lost the timeline on Steve and on Nancy, because I assumed that she had already graduated, she graduated with him, but that is totally wrong.

Megana: I think she’s still in school.

Drew: She’s still in school, because she’s doing the paper.

John: She’s still supposed to be in high school or in some sort of local college?

Megana: That kid Fred is definitely in high school, the one that she works with. I also have no idea how old Robin is. Do we ever see her at school?

Drew: That’s a good point.

Megana: I love her character.

John: I don’t know if she’s still in school or not. I don’t think we’ve seen her at school at all. We’ve seen her at school, because she is in the marching band. She’s still in school. We’ve now stalled long enough that Megana can talk about Steve Harrington and why the show should entirely be about Steve Harrington and everyone else is just there to pass the time.

Megana: I feel like I had a major funk last week where I was reading fan theories and people were like, “Steve is definitely going to die.” I’m embarrassed by how I processed that. I love Steve Harrington. I think he’s so charming. As I was telling John, he’s a big part of maybe the biggest reason that I watch the show is to get to a Steve scene.

John: Are you hoping that Steve and Nancy get back together? Is that a goal for you, or you just want Steve and whatever?

Megana: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I think Nancy and Jonathan are a good fit. I just love Steve’s friendship with Robin. The Steve-Dustin relationship/Steve and Eddie fighting over Dustin is now my favorite thing to watch.

John: Can you explain Jonathan and why Jonathan’s a character that anyone cares about?

Megana: I don’t know how I’ve gotten myself into this position. He’s a loyal older brother. I think that he’s burdened with this responsibility of taking care of his family, and he’s struggling to do that. He was more of a creep in the first season. I found him really compelling for that reason, just this misunderstood, lovesick boy who’s taking these creepy pictures of Nancy. I feel like we’ve lost that bit. Maybe him being a protective older brother.

John: I get that. Let’s wrap up with our Deadpool. Who do we think is not going to make it through the end of the full Season 4? I’ve got my opinion, but I’m curious what you think.

Drew: I hope we don’t lose Eddie, but I think we might. They’ve done a great job. I don’t know, I fell in love with him from Episode 1. I’m a big Eddie fan. I think that’s only to rip my heart out, which would be too bad, because I think he’s a really good addition to the cast. I might say Steve.

Megana: No.

Drew: I know. I’m so sorry. I think they’re going to go for it.

Megana: I think so too. I think that’s why I’m so heartbroken.

John: I’m going to guess Mike, who hasn’t done a lot this season, but I think will actually pick up a little bit. I feel like he wants to leave the show too. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to be sticking around.

Drew: That’s good.

John: I don’t know. We’ll see.

Megana: Anyone but Steve.

John: Anyone but Steve. Dustin they can’t lose. It would be very surprising to lose Dustin. I think they could lose Eleven. It would be a big shock to lose Eleven, but you could.

Drew: Maybe Will, because I think they’ve been vamping with his character for a few seasons. Now they have a little bit, but if we-

John: The problem is, you kill Will, then you’re back into the kill your gays meme, bury your gays, and that’s not good.

Drew: That’s [inaudible 01:19:15].

Megana: I did read an interesting thing about maybe Jonathan dies and then Will becomes evil or turns evil. I think that also would fall into the same meme of having a gay character as the villain.

John: That’s Willow from Buffy.

Megana: As long as Steve’s there.

John: As long as Steve’s there, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the rest of the group. Just the Steve show. Thank you guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Drew: Thank you.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 360: Relationships
• Scriptnotes Episode 395: All in this Together
• Scriptnotes Episode 383: Splitting the Party
• Stranger Things on Netflix
• Hydroviv Water Filter
• Blot 2046 Manifesto
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (ft. our summer intern Drew Marquardt and segments by Megan McDonnell) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s from.

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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/549standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/nice-to-meet-cute-you).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 540 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do we get characters to meet each other, and can we make it adorable? We’re looking at the history and mechanics of the meet-cute in rom-coms and beyond.

Then we’ll be digging into our overflowing mailbag to take a look at listener questions on brands, managers, and what a novelist should expect when selling a book to Hollywood.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll discuss onboarding. How do you get somebody started in a story, and particularly in reference to a new game called Elden Ring, which Craig and I have been dying in a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, indeed. John, I just noticed that I should bring this to everyone’s attention that because we’re going to be doing some listener questions, that means that Megana’s going to be with us. You mentioned that we had some questions on managers. I just noticed that managers anagrams to Megana Sr, so I thought it was important to share that with her.

**John:** Oh my gosh, that’s really important. Now we know.

**Megana Rao:** You have such a special brain.

**Craig:** Isn’t it?

**John:** It’s a good special brain.

**Craig:** It sure is.

**John:** We can’t get started on this show that we’re recording on the 5th day of March, 2022, without talking about the change in the world order that’s happened this last couple weeks. Your boy Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who you met doing Chernobyl, is trying to keep Ukraine from falling to the Russian invasion. It’s a lot going on here.

**Craig:** It’s such a mess, and it’s so tragic. Ukraine, which regardless of what Putin says, is in fact a nation with an incredibly long history, has been invaded for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than Putin being a dick. Currently Ukraine is fighting back. If you know Ukrainians and if you’ve been to Ukraine, that part shouldn’t be a surprise. Similarly, the kind of Keystone Cops clown party that is the Russian military is also not surprising. If you have an incompetent massive army versus an incredibly competent and small amount of people, of course it means that there are going to be and there have been Russian casualties and Ukrainian casualties, but also quite a number of civilians have died in Ukraine. This is absolutely heartbreaking.

President Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has proven himself to be just about the most remarkable leader I think I’ve seen in my lifetime in terms of a political leader. I just don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in my lifetime. There were people that you and I have been taught about in school and Megana’s been taught about in school, and they seem so fricking far away from what we’ve had. Here is this guy who’s just been absolutely heroic, dodging assassins, remaining with his people, and rallying the world. He’s a wonderful person.

He’s also one of us, John. He’s a writer. He’s a performer. He’s an actor. He came out of the industry. He very famously played the part of the president of Ukraine. He was a comic writer and a comic actor, and a very good one. I was actually supposed to meet with him again when he came to the United States a few months ago, but he had to change his schedule so that he was going to meet with Biden. There’s your answer.

**John:** He made choices. It’s a tough choice but he made his choice.

**Craig:** There’s your answer. Anybody was wondering who’s more important, me or the President of the United States, Joseph Biden, the answer is Biden. I’m very grateful that he’s still alive. For all the people that I have met in Ukraine, I’ve talked to a few of them who are there or have left but are safe and sound, I’m very pleased that they are all still alive. I don’t pray, but I surely do hope fervently that this ends quickly.

**John:** Watching this over the course of the last week, I’ve just really been struck by the degree to which it does feel like we’re seeing history being made, because clearly, one order is falling and a new order is beginning. Whenever you’re seeing history happen, you’re always wondering, okay, how is this going to end. You try to think of this as a story, try to think of what are the next beats, how does this all go. It’s a natural instinct. I was frustrated by the desire to cast the movie at the very start, because it’s just in the opening pages of this.

It can be useful to look back in history and find the story in it, but finding the story in the moment as it’s actually happening I think can be a very dangerous and destructive thing, because it can take you away from the actual realities of what’s in front of you, because then when reality doesn’t match the story you’ve had anticipated, you’re caught flatfooted. I felt caught flatfooted by when Russia clearly going to invade, I kept thinking every morning I was going to wake up and see, okay, Ukraine has fallen. Then when I didn’t, I was like, oh, it’s awesome that they didn’t. Then it sets this pattern for… I keep trying to rewrite the story and it doesn’t match my expectations, rather than looking at what the actual facts are on the ground. Stories are fantastic, but facts are more important.

**Craig:** Just the way that when you and I were kids, nobody really cared about the Box Office. The news didn’t report the Box Office. Then suddenly it became something that everybody talked about and cared about. The adaptation of history into the dramatization has become so prominent and so frequent, and the window between event and dramatization has shrunk so dramatically, that people immediately start doing this. I find it rather upsetting actually. People are fighting for their lives, and I’m getting tweets like, “You should do Chernobyl part two.” I’m like, guys, that’s not how this works.

**John:** When we do a How Would This Be A Movie segment, obviously we’re not doing one on Ukraine. When we do those, it’s because there’s a unique slice of story that is finished, that we can look at and have some relatives to things. I don’t think anything about the Ukraine situation is finished to a degree that we should be looking at the adaptation.

**Craig:** No. There are small events or interesting bits of true crime or weirdness that you can just go ahead and make a story about, but when you’re dealing with unfolding history, the most important gift to the dramatizer, assuming that they are doing the right thing, is perspective. Perspective requires time. How in God’s name could anybody write a… You can’t write Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List in 1943. It’s insane. We need time to see what happens and to absorb it. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but in the long run I have to believe that Ukraine, a nation and a people that have suffered dramatically throughout the 20th century and now here in the 21st, will prevail. That’s just my great, great hope. I don’t know how, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, and I don’t know what it’s going to look like.

**John:** All you can do is watch and take the actions that hopefully will get you to the place you want to end up, rather than assuming the story’s going to end up there.

**Craig:** You know the way people now will go back, listen to early episodes of our increasingly long running podcast and say things like, “Oh my god, listened to you guys before Donald Trump was elected, ha ha. Lol so innocent.” That’s the point.

**John:** We didn’t know what was going to happen.

**Craig:** No, and we don’t know now. If you’re listening to this 12 years from now, you might be giggling at how absolutely stupid we were, because it turned out that everything ended on… They recorded it on March 5th. March 6th the Russians left and then blah blah. Then it turned out that Zelenskyy was terrible.

**John:** Zelenskyy was not who you think.

**Craig:** I’m sure you are laughing at us. That’s the point. We don’t have perspective yet at all.

**John:** That’s why you should not even be thinking about making the movie now or telling the story now, because there’s not a story to tell.

**Craig:** What we’re saying, Megana, is stop writing the script.

**John:** Stop your adaptation.

**Craig:** Stop it, Megana.

**John:** Megana, what you can do for us is give us some follow-up. We have a letter here from Derek in Provo, Utah.

**Megana:** Derek wrote in and said, “In Episode 536 you gave a lot of great explanations for why the movie is never as good as the book. I just watched a really interesting video that explained the human mind’s bias for thinking that, even when it’s not statistically true. Here’s where the bias comes in. We humans don’t generally care about bad adaptations of unremarkable books. When thinking of adaptations of good books, we can think of lots of good and bad examples. It’s likely that the only adaptations of bad or unremarkable books you could think of right off the bat are all pretty good, because that’s the only situation in which that kind of adaptation would be remarkable.

“It turns out this is a phenomenon that applies to various attribute relationships called Berkson’s Paradox. That means these biases act sort of like a filter, accentuating the correlations that are already there, to the point where people feel totally comfortable making ridiculous claims like the book is always better than the movie, or even Hollywood ruins books.”

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** I wasn’t familiar with Berkson’s Paradox, but it also reminds me of the phenomenon of silent evidence, which is that you can see these two things and say, oh, there must be a correlation here, but then also you’re not actually looking for all the other examples of things that would show those aren’t correlated or that there’s other things out there that you just haven’t paid any attention to because they weren’t what you were looking for. That does feel true to this idea that all book adaptations are bad book adaptations, because you’re only looking at the ones you happen to notice.

**Craig:** That is really interesting. Thank you for sharing that with us, Derek. Let’s file Berkson’s Paradox under our big header Our Brains Stink, because they do. Every time I hear about one of these things, I do think, oh, I’m going to try and avoid doing that.

**John:** I’ll push back. Our brains don’t stink. Our brains were designed to do very specific things. They’re designed to keep us alive, to regulate our body temperature and our internal processes and to make sure we didn’t get eaten by predators. The things that we were selected for got us here. They’re great, but they’re not really good at judgment calls about which book adaptations turned into movies in a good way and whether that’s systematically true.

**Craig:** What’s more important than that though?

**John:** Nothing’s more important than that. Literature to film adaptation, the cinematic history of that is the most important thing. It’s much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, absolutely at the top, or the base. It’s the whole pyramid.

**Craig:** We can do calculus, and that’s super amazing, but we’re blowing this fundamental requirement we have to properly analyze the relationship. Anyway, I like hearing about these new biases and logical mistakes that we make.

**John:** We’re all fallacies. We’re all fallacies. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is the meet-cute. This is based on last week’s installment of the newsletter Interesting, where Chris looked at the original of the term meet-cute. It turns out, I didn’t know where this actually came from, but it goes back to 1941. I thought it was much more recent. There’s this book, this mystery novel, Case of the Solid Key, in which a character says, “We met cute, as they say in story conferences.” It’s already in existence by 1941.

From Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter, a character explains, “Dear boy, the beginning of a movie is childishly simple. The boy and the girl meet. The only important thing to remember is that in a movie, the boy and the girl must meet in some cute way. They cannot meet like normal people, perhaps at a cocktail party or other social function. No, it is terribly important that they meet cute.”

**Craig:** I actually thought that this phrase meet-cute or this term meet-cute was older than that, because it is so damn weird. It has always bothered me. It should be meet cutely or cutely meet. Why is it meet cute?

**John:** Cute may be one of those words that can function adverbially.

**Craig:** It cannot.

**John:** Maybe it could at one point. I think that’s why you thought it was archaic.

**Craig:** I refuse. I will not use cute as an adverb. Also, it’s backwards. It’s German. Instead of cutely meet, it’s meet cute.

**John:** Meet cute.

**Craig:** It’s meet cute. It always bothered me. It was one of those terms, Megana I’m curious if you have had this too, when you first get to Hollywood and people start throwing jargon around, I had no idea what the hell they were talking about when they said meet cute, to be honest with you. I also didn’t know what a set piece was. They kept talking about set pieces, and I was like, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” In my mind I’m like, “What’s a set piece?” Megana, see, back then we did not have the internet. Actually, there was an internet, but it wasn’t really the internet. There wasn’t even Google. I don’t know, Megana, now does everybody know everything because of the internet before they get here?

**Megana:** You would think, but I don’t think that the internet has really helped people.

**Craig:** That’s curious.

**John:** I’d be curious whether a non-screenwriter person would know what a meet-cute was. Is that just a thing that’s just out there in culture? I think we’re going to commission a Scriptnotes survey of a thousand households and figure out whether they know the term meet-cute and if they’re involved in the film industry at all. It’d have to be a non-Los Angeles sampling of people.

**Megana:** As rom-coms have become more self-aware, I feel like they do reference them in The Holiday, the Nancy Meyers classic. They have a whole scene about the meet-cute.

**Craig:** It’s become meta, in other words. Got it.

**John:** When we had Greta Gerwig on the show, she was talking about the structural changes she made to the adaptation of Little Women so that she could introduce the eventual love interest very early on in the story, because she said that the first person you see that character with is the person you feel like they need to end up with at the end. I think that is also just what we’ve learned about romantic comedies, watching romantic comedies. She recognized that the audience was not going to be happy with her ending up with this guy who showed up late in the story.

**Craig:** That makes total sense.

**John:** They need to have a meet-cute.

**Craig:** They need to have a meet-cute. I guess part of this concept, and it connects back to what we were just talking about with stories and history and things, when we meet other people in a non-meet-cute way, another couple, eventually someone’s going to say, “How did you guys meet?” with the expectation that there’s going to be good story, when in fact it’s never really good.

**John:** Almost never. Puts weird pressure on things.

**Craig:** You know how I met Melissa? I was running across the street because I was late for a big meeting where I was going to get a promotion or be fired, and she was running the other way with an armful of books, because she was on her way to an exam, and we smashed together and everything fell down and I picked up and I met her in the eyes. Then somebody honked at us and we laughed and then we left each other and then I had to find her. No.

**John:** I met Mike on a gay dating site that doesn’t exist anymore. He had a profile. I responded to it. We had talked on the phone before we actually, because pre-texting. We exchanged emails. We talked on the phone. We met for a coffee at The Abbey.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The Abbey was not even a bar at that point. It was just a coffee shop.

**Craig:** It was a coffee shop, I remember.

**John:** Before they had a liquor license. That was our first. That was our meeting.

**Craig:** The Abbey was such a coffee place that I would just go there for coffee sometimes, because it didn’t feel like a club. If I went to The Abbey now, I think I would feel like, okay, I’m–

**John:** You would have to push all the bridal parties out of the way.

**Craig:** Oh my god, there’s so much bitterness smashed into that sentence. So much gay bitterness. Get out of my club. This is how it functions. It’s not cute. Of course, the entire concept of a romance or a romantic comedy is the enormous lie that gives us the most, as you said, adorable, heart-swelling, awe golly gee version of human relationships possible, so of course it must start in a wacky way.

**John:** Let’s take a look at first the rom-com meet-cute and then let’s generalize it back out to any two characters meeting each other, because that’s going to happen in all of our scripts. We’ll start with rom-coms. There’s basically four different patterns you can see with this character meets that character and what is the dynamic there. Sometimes they immediately have chemistry. You can see, oh, they should be together and there’s an obstacle in the way. A great example of that would be Her, is that you have Joaquin Phoenix’s character and you have the AI character, and they clearly have a spark and a thing, but she’s just an AI, so there’s an obstacle in the way there.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be an obstacle for you.

**John:** No, not for me. Just 100%, just plug right in there.

**Craig:** Just one subroutine running into another one.

**John:** They have their mutual attraction. There’s also the mutual hatred of each other. When Harry Met Sally is a great example of that. We meet the two characters at the same time. They just do not like each other.

**Craig:** (singing)

**John:** Another dynamic that’s common is one is really into the other, and the other can’t stand the first person. The Notebook is very much that, where he’s a stalker pursuing her and eventually wears her down. Then the fourth dynamic I’d say is when they don’t know who the other person is. That’s what they did in Big Fish. That’s also Romeo and Juliet, where these two characters have this immediate spark. They don’t recognize what the obstacle is between the two of them. They can’t find each other.

**Craig:** All of these are way outside the bounds of normal human relationships. It’s actually quite rare that people meet each other and hate each other instantly or people meet each other and one hates the other instantly. The only time in my life I think I met somebody and hated them instantly was Ted Cruz. Instantly. Does that count as a meet-cute? I don’t think so.

**John:** It would count as a meet-cute if ultimately you did, down the road, fall in love together.

**Craig:** Exactly. All the vomiting has just happened. In general, when people meet each other and hate each other, they will continue to hate each other. What we like about these circumstances is the notion that we as humans just can’t quite get to where we belong, and so God or fate is going to nudge us together, because like most of the stories, ultimately it boils down to fear. I’m afraid of something, and so I am not living the best life I can. I’m living according to a different theory. Fate smushes me together with another person. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a story. It actually has to be hard.

The point is, the nature of the meet-cute sets up, in a way, or exemplifies, in a way, the problem, that one or the other or both people have. That meet-cute is a little microcosm of why they are not with somebody that they love. By the end of the movie, they will overcome their problems and be with each other.

**John:** In any rom-com or any romantic movie, the premise of the whole thing is that central relationship. It’s understandable that there’s such a spotlight on how those two characters meet. Of course, all of our scripts and all of our stories have characters meeting each other for the first time.

Let’s generalize this to look at how you introduce two characters to each other. This can be, a few examples that Megana and I were thinking through, 21 Jump Street, how those two guys meet the first time. Only Murders in the Building was all about how those three characters meet and get hooked up. There’s this whole special mentor meet-cute situation, Training Day, Devil Wears Prada. In all these cases, you’re setting the audience expectations for where this relationship is going to go. Even though it’s not a romantic relationship, we know that that relationship is going to be important, we’re going to be following those two characters and ups and downs together throughout the course of the story.

**Craig:** For our friends out there who are writing, hopefully most of you, let’s talk about how we start. As is so often the case, we have to think about how we want it to end, and then go all the way backwards, as far as you can, as close to 180 degrees as you can get. It doesn’t have to be 180 degrees in some obvious way, but really more about the internal thing. Don’t think so much about how they care about each other in the beginning of the story or how they care about each other in the end. Think about who they are in the end. Think of who they must therefore be in the beginning. Then you might get a sense of what would be the most natural kind of thing. Even though the meet-cute is an extreme circumstance or a weird circumstance, the characters in that moment behave in the most them way possible. That’s the problem for them. That maybe will help you build your meet-cute.

**John:** Indeed. Obviously, we talk about protagonists. These are the characters who have to grow and change and face the obstacles. You can also think about that relationship as being the protagonist, the idea of that relationship growing and changing over the course of the story and facing struggles. If you think about that as idea as the protagonist, you can maybe really see the arc of what that relationship is changing to over the course of the story.

Let’s think about the situations in which characters meet. The most common one in our stories is that the audience knows one character, generally your hero, and is being introduced to the second character. That’s going to happen not in every scene, but so many scenes, where we’re getting information about this new character the same time the character, our hero is getting information about it. As a writer, we can just choose what information we want to get out, because we don’t need to tell the audience anything new about our hero necessarily. Our hero is pulling information out of this other character, or if anything, we are seeing some new side about our hero about how they are describing themselves, how they are introducing themselves to this new character.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting question, I guess, listening to you talk about that. Are there examples or would it be advisable at this point, given how many meet-cutes there have been and how now, like Megana says, there’s a meta meet-cute discussion that happens in these movies, to meet not cute, even to disregard or violate the rule that George Axelrod laid out and say meet boring? Is there value in a meet-boring?

**John:** Megana and I were talking about this. I think there’s an example of characters who know each other, but over the course of the story, that overlooked character or recontextualized character becomes important. That red shirt in Star Trek who actually does have a name and becomes useful, Hermione when she shows up in the dress. She was always just a friend. Now you’re seeing her now as a romantic character. Paul Rudd’s character in Clueless, which is that he wasn’t perceived as being a romantic character, so therefore he doesn’t get a meet-cute really as we introduce him into the story, I think very cleverly, not making him seem like a potential love interest down the road.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting method is that it’s not so much about a meet-boring, it’s about a not-meet-at-all, that even though characters are meeting, there are meetings and there are meetings. If you happen to be introduced to somebody, along with three other people in a scene, then you haven’t met that person in a meet scene. Now you just know them. That’s an interesting notion of just avoiding. It’s not so much the cute you might want to consider avoiding. It’s the meet itself.

**John:** Now, we were trying to think of examples of situations where we as an audience meet both of our central characters at the same time. This is how we’re getting information now. When Harry Met Sally is basically that situation. We’re with Billy Crystal for moments before they get in the car together. Licorice Pizza from this year literally just is this long tracking shot where we’re meeting both of these characters for the first time. They have this very long conversation, where we’re getting all the information about both of them. That’s an example of they really are setting this up as a two-hander, like these are the two people we’re going to follow and we’re starting this on equal footing.

**Craig:** As we get smarter and smarter and more and more sophisticated, because we have seen more and more versions of the same things over and over, the idea that maybe the way we approach shopworn but necessary moments like two characters meeting is to just fling ourselves in one direction or the other really far, just triple down or underplay it completely, because I don’t know if there’s room any more for Matthew McConaughey to bump into Jennifer Lopez in the middle of the street. I don’t know if we can do it anymore.

**John:** There’s no way to do it without making it feel like it’s that kind of moment, where just you can hear the music behind it. I was watching Worst Person in the World, which is I think one of the best movies of the year. I really absolutely loved it. Norwegian film. Everyone should check it out. Nominated for Best Screenplay for the Oscars, which is pretty remarkable. It does a really interesting thing about the two love interests, the two men that she meets up with and connects with over the course of the movie. Both of those meet-cutes are handled in… The first one’s just an offhanded way. She’s just talking to different people, and she talks to this guy, and that becomes the guy. The second one is a much bigger spotlight on this meet-cute moment that just extends and extends and extends in a way that’s really rewarding. The example of the first one slips in through the back door and the second one is just really aware of the tropes that… The characters are aware of the tropes that they’re entering into, which is fun.

**Craig:** That’s good, because I think smart filmmakers, smart television makers are aware, at least in part, of all the stuff that’s come before them. It’s harder and harder to say I’m doing something in a new way that hasn’t been done before, but that’s not necessary. Sometimes you just need to let the audience know that you know. I never want people to think, does he not know that that already happened a thousand times? Does he think he invented that? Because that’s just an annoying, prideful sort of thing.

**John:** Last scenario. We talked about the audience knows one character’s meeting another character for the first time. We’ve talked about where the audience knows neither character. The last example is where the audience knows both characters separately, and then we see the characters meet each other for the first time. This happens a fair amount. It happens, obviously, if you’ve seen the villain separately, and you’ve seen the hero separately, and they’re suddenly crossing paths. Think about Jack and Rose in Titanic. We establish both of those characters for a long time separately before we see them together.

**Craig:** That’s a good point.

**John:** Crazy Ship of Love does that. You’ve Got Mail does that. Even later seasons of Game of Thrones, it was just really weird when Jon Snow and Dany finally met. We spent years with these characters and they’re just meeting each other for the first time. It’s a thing that does happen.

**Craig:** That was weird.

**John:** It’s also just strange how we are so ahead of the characters in that moment, that if they were to talk about where they came from, what this stuff was, it’s not interesting to us, unless you can find a way to make that interesting, because all that we’re learning new about the characters is how they interact with this character we’ve already established.

**Craig:** It’s funny, I was just thinking about one of the strangest and most effective meet-cutes in cinematic history is in Titanic. I don’t think you would be able to do it like that today.

**John:** Remind me of the actual scene, because I’m not picturing where they first meet.

**Craig:** Rose is going to kill herself. She’s preparing to throw herself into the ocean to avoid having to marry this awful man. She is seconds away from committing suicide. Then Leonardo DiCaprio wanders out, being all cool and everything and like, “It would sure be a shame for you to suicide yourself there.” Then he pulls her back and she’s like, “Oh, sir.” The thing is, I don’t think you could do that today. On the other hand, for the tone of that movie it was perfection, just utter perfection [crosstalk 00:27:24].

**John:** Everything being elevated to where it was going.

**Craig:** You got the sense that she wasn’t actually going to jump, that she actually suddenly panicked and didn’t want to jump, which I think was very important for the tone of that, but you remember it. Actually, you didn’t.

**John:** I forgot in the moment.

**Craig:** I remember it.

**John:** Gave me an extra 20 seconds, I would’ve remembered it.

**Craig:** There you go. Very good.

**John:** It’s got that iconic imagery there. Takeaways from meet-cuting, I think it’s useful to think about all the ways characters meet in rom-coms, because if you’re writing a romantic comedy or something that deals in the general space of a rom-com, you’re going to be dealing with all the expectations of what that initial meeting’s going to be, but then to just generalize it back out to your characters are always meeting each other, so what are the situations that they’re meeting, and can or should this be an interesting, unlikely, surprising way of these two characters meeting, or should you deliberately not do that, because otherwise it sets this expectation of some kind of future for this relationship which may not be realistic.

**Craig:** Certainly don’t think that you are limited to this question for romances. There are meet-cutes across almost every genre, but in particular, when there are people that are partnering on a job together, when they are thrown into some sort of collective dramatic scenario that they didn’t know each other and now they do, whatever it is, it doesn’t have anything to do with romance. It’s really about relationship. It’s about two people who are going to have a relationship. It doesn’t matter if there’s romance. It doesn’t matter what their age is, gender, any of that stuff. Think about the meet-cuteness of things and how to apply it to the specific situation that your characters are in, as it relates to who they are and what their damage is.

**John:** Last takeaway I’ll give you is that whenever you’re introducing characters to us as the reader, as to the audience, and there’s another character there to talk with, don’t do the thing which I’ve seen in so many bad movies and so many bad scripts, where characters feel like they’re introducing themselves to a character they already should know, where you as a writer are trying to get information out, and so they’re saying it to a character who would already know that. That’s just a bad habit we need to get out of. You can feel the development notes that got into that.

**Craig:** “It’s John, the assistant DA in Trenton. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you. As I recall, we didn’t get along too well last time.”

**John:** “How’s the wife and the kids? How’s your dad who’s suffering from PTSD?”

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Boo, don’t like it.

**Craig:** Boo.

**John:** Now, we’ve done a lot of shows. I kind of feel like introducing a new segment to the show.

**Craig:** Great, let’s do it. (singing)

**John:** Love it. Megana, do you have a question for us?

**Megana:** I do. I had a busy week this past week.

**Craig:** (singing) On to our next thing.

**Megana:** For me, because of my entry point, I think of the writing behind a project as the genesis. I guess I had this naïve assumption that everyone else also thought that the writers and their idea or take was the most important part of a project, the foundation, but through some of my recent conversations, I am realizing that that’s not necessarily, in fact it’s very rarely the case, whether it’s this hot piece of IP or a talent attachment that’s driving the project. I guess I just had this moment where I was like, oh, that’s the shiny thing, and the writers are just this tool you can slot in to make the shiny thing shine. I’m curious whether that’s always been the case. Is that just normal for the industry? Is it normal to feel that way? Is this a more recent shift? Have I just been sheltered?

**John:** In the context of general meetings or meetings on a project, to realize, oh, okay, I’m not the most important part of the project, yes. I would say yes, certainly at my early stages in my career, but even as recent as this past week. There was a project that was sent to me. It was a book adaptation, a good book. I wanted to meet with the producers ahead of time to see what is it about this book and why are they coming to me. It became very clear that these producers, they like me, they like this book, but man, they really, really, really like this director who’s attached to the book. That was the most important part of the project, really, honestly. That was fine. That’s the way sometimes these projects go. It did influence my decision about is this a project that I should necessarily pursue based on relative value of things? At an early stage of my career, but even as of this past week, yes, I’m rarely the most important part of the project.

**Megana:** To Craig’s earlier point about jargon that you learn in Hollywood, mandate is a fairly new word for me.

**Craig:** What the hell? What does that mean? Oh, like the company’s mandate is to create a franchise-friendly event film that blah blah blah?

**Megana:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Oh, lord. You mean like what you want? Mandate.

**Megana:** I’m not saying this against… I’ve met such lovely people. This isn’t anything about them. It’s more like this coming-of-age realization where you realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and Hollywood does not revolve around writers.

**Craig:** This is fascinating. This never occurred to me. I always presumed that I had to work my way up from the baseline, which was here’s a writer that we don’t care about, who we want to spend as little money on as possible, and unless they save everything for us and make a green light happen, we want to fire them into the sun. It never occurred to me that I would be the most important part of anything. Now in television, yes, if I say, “Look, here’s a project. I want to do this thing. It’s going to be this many episodes. I will be the showrunner. I will write the episodes. I will be there every day,” then yeah, okay, clearly then I’m the producer, I’m the boss. I’m the most important part of the thing. In movies or anything else, it just never seemed possible.

**Megana:** I don’t know, we’re all writing heads over here. Even if I wasn’t in this industry, the storytelling is usually the thing that I am most attracted to in a movie anyways.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Megana:** Not that I as the writer would be the most important thing, but that’s what I think is most important. It’s a weird recontextualization where, oh, actually nobody else feels that way.

**Craig:** I’ll pretend to.

**John:** Everyone pretends to. Here’s the useful thing I think you can take out of that, is that in any project, you can just look for what’s really driving it and what is the reason why this project is exciting to this studio, these producers at this time. It goes back to what you’re asking about a mandate. What are they trying to do? What is their overall stated goal of the things they are trying to do? What things are they trying to not do? For example, this place is like, we’re not doing musicals. That’s just clearly a mandate. It’s like, great, it’s good to know that musicals are not part of it.

If you can go into a project and get a sense of what are they actually looking for and who is driving this and are they trying to make this kind of movie or that kind of movie, is incredibly helpful just in terms of both which projects you’re going to pursue and figuring out how you’re going to pursue these projects and whose notes you’re going to listen to the most. Is this really being driven by the producer? Is it being driven by that director? Is it being driven by the studio head, the actor? You got to know those things, because that’s going to really influence the work you’re going to be doing for them.

**Craig:** Megana, have you ever seen Barton Fink?

**Megana:** No, I haven’t, actually. It’s on a long list of movies.

**Craig:** It’s on a long list of things. Move it up to the top, because aside from being an absolutely brilliant film by the endless brilliant Joel and Ethan Coen, it is a fantastic exploration both of what it means to be a writer in Hollywood and what writing is and what writers block is about, and about managing your desires with what is required of you and also managing your own romantic notions of writing with the reality of writing. It’s brilliant.

There’s a couple of scenes with Tony Shalhoub. John Turturro plays a playwright, loosely based on Clifford Odets, named Barton Fink, who’s brought up to Hollywood in 1941. He’s brought out to Hollywood, which was often the case. They would bring out these playwrights to put them to work, like Fitzgerald, also a novelist. Of course these brilliant people were then put to work writing nonsense, and really struggled with it. John Turturro’s struggling a little bit. He’s been assigned a job. He’s supposed to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture, which would be the equivalent of a Steven Seagal movie now or 10 years now. He’s struggling with it. Tony Shalhoub plays his producer, Ben Geisler, who basically says something to the effect of, “What are you talking about? It’s Wallace Beery. It’s men in tights. He hits him, he falls down. Write it.”

This is where Barton Fink just suddenly realizes, this is machinery. I’m in a machine and nobody cares about me at all. The way that the more sinister studio head, played by Michael Lerner, makes him feel like he is the center of it, and then what happens after is so brilliantly, wonderfully true. Highly recommend it. It’s a very funny movie. It’s a very weird movie. John Goodman is incredible in it. Strongly recommend Barton Fink.

**Megana:** I can’t wait. My new analogy for how I’m feeling is like a sunglass salesman at the beach. You know when you’re hanging out at the beach and these guys come up to you with their tarps full of sunglasses? I just feel like I’m going up to these different companies and I’m like, “I can unroll this and show you all the cool things that I’m working on.” They’re like, “Yeah, I’m good. I actually brought sunglasses to the beach.” I’m just going to continue bumbling down.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s also a moment in those meetings where they are unrolling their sunglasses. It’s like, “Here are the sunglasses that we have that we like.” You’re not sure if you’re actually allowed to touch them or put them on. They’re talking about the things they’re working on. I do find though, looking at their sunglasses that they have laid out gives me a sense of what I could actually provide for them and what they think they need. That’s useful as a part of that conversation too.

**Craig:** It’s like some weird singles bar, where every time you show interest in somebody, they run away from you until they finally show interest back, at which point you run away from them. It’s so weird. The worst thing you can do in Hollywood is actually get what you wanted, because I always feel like… John, you’ve had this thing where people pursue you and they’re like, “Oh my god, we need you, we need you, we need you. You’re everything,” blah blah blah, “Anything, anything.” Then you’re like, “Fine, I’ll do it.” Then they’re like, okay, now we’re going to treat you like crap.

**John:** 100%. Situations like there was an animation project that was stalking me for so long. I finally said, “Okay, yeah, great.” I went back in and pitched them the thing. They were like, “Oh yeah, I don’t think we could do that.” It was like, ah, so much time has passed doing this.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** So much time.

**Craig:** Basically we’re all Barton Fink. (singing) and it was good.

**John:** Let’s do our other listener questions. Let’s start us off with Katie here.

**Megana:** Katie writes, “I’m a novelist and an avid Scriptnotes listener. My husband’s a screenwriter. While my career has taken off, a book deal with the Big Five, healthy advance, lead title status, and a film TV agent at WME, my husband’s has not. We both understand that we’re just at different stages right now, but I have so much confidence in his talent. I know with hard work, he’ll break through. I’m at the beginning of my career, so I’m reluctant to shove his scripts at my agent. At a certain point, I’ll feel comfortable doing so. How do creatives at different points in their careers manage the early/late/staggered arrival of success? How can I practically support him when screenwriting seems so much more Sisyphusean than traditional publishing?”

**Craig:** I don’t know the answer to this, because I’ve never had any experience with it.

**John:** No, but it feels like a good story. I can visualize the tension between these two people, in one person being successful, one person not being successful. I guess Marriage Story had a bit of that, where her career was taking off in one way, his career was taking off in another way, but not as quickly. You don’t want to be in a story. You want actual practical advice right now. I can’t give you great practical advice right now other than to be there and positive and supportive to what he’s doing. Make sure that it never feels patronizing. Help him where you can help him. Introduce him where you can introduce him. Also, he’s going to have to find his own way into his screenwriting career, and just as you found your way into your novel writing career.

**Craig:** There’s some danger here, Katie, it seems to me, that you have to be aware of. While you’re asking the right questions, I would strongly advise you to be directing these questions towards a professional, rather than your favorite podcast hosts, because this is the kind of thing that can wreck stuff.

Don’t think that if I just say or do the right things in the right order, it won’t wreck stuff, because it can, because what happens is, you are people who have dreams and desires and hopes. You meet each other and you fall in love with each other, and then it happens to somebody and that person is changed because of it. I’m not saying you’re changed because suddenly it went to your head. Not at all. It’s just your life changes. When you become successful at this particular thing, your life changes. Your partner can feel left behind or shut out or less than if they’re trying to also change their life in the exact same way. The cascade of issues, I don’t have to list them for you, quite large. Regardless of who gets there first, there are so many issues.

I would urge you, if you have concerns about this or if you feel like your husband has concerns about this now, start talking about it now with somebody. I think that’s the important thing is communicate. Really communicate about this. Honesty is incredibly important. What you will never want to feel, I think, I hope, is a sense that maybe anything that does befall him was only because you begged and somebody threw you a bone.

This is a storyline we did in Mythic Quest where a woman gets married to a man, she becomes this incredibly successful novelist. He is not. He only publishes a series of books that are not well-read, and only with the publishers that she was publishing with. Clearly, people were throwing him scraps, and he knows it. This can be a real issue. I feel for you. I don’t know the answer myself, other than to say take it seriously. Don’t let this fester.

**John:** I would also want to acknowledge there’s a gendered component to this. The valance shouldn’t be any different, but I think societally the valance does feel a little bit different when the woman is so successful and the man is not successful. I agree with Craig that I think getting some help now and just talking through it will be helpful down the road. Also just make sure, Katie, you’re not ever self-sabotaging to make this feel better, because that is another worry I would have is that you might not take some opportunity because you feel like it’s going to feel bad for your husband.

**Craig:** Just take it seriously. It sounds like you are. I would say escalate it. You’ve called the first level of customer service, which is your favorite podcasters. You haven’t said that we’re your favorite podcast. I’m just deciding. We’re going to escalate this to a supervisor, aka therapist.

**John:** Next question, Megana.

**Megana:** Baggage asked, “For the first time in my career I’ve been asked to be on set for several weeks of international filming. Do you have any packing advice or travel hacks? Should I only bring athleisure and sensible shoes, a jacket for every possible weather? Are there certain items you’ve learned to never leave home without, things that can help make an extended stay in a hotel feel more cozy?”

**Craig:** Oh boy, I wonder what this would be like, to figure how to live somewhere else for a long, long time.

**John:** For a long time. A couple things that Baggage is already suggesting is that you need to make sure that you’re going to feel comfortable on set, and so wearing stuff, honestly dark clothes that you can keep wearing a lot can work great. You may not always have great laundry facilities, so always be thinking about, okay, if I need to use hotel laundry that takes two days to get back, how I’m going to get through that. Make sure you have enough changes of clothes.

Make sure you have something nice to wear out to the occasional dinners with actors or producers and anyone else who comes in. Depending where you’re at, that may mean a jacket and a tie or it may mean a dress or whatever it is that you need to wear to be a little bit more formal.

Shoes for on set, just think about you’re going to be on your feet a lot. Think about how to not be on your feet. Think about actually sitting down where you can sit down. Just be comfortable. I would say layers is good, and if you’re any place that can get cold, just anticipate being cold, because being on a set is honestly standing around a lot, and that can just get really cold.

**Craig:** I suspect that Baggage is a lady. Men generally are slobs and have way less… We just get caught unaware all the time. We just show up somewhere and it’s freezing, we’re like, “I got my hoodie.” Here’s the thing, Baggage. When you’re on set for several weeks, you will have access to the lovely folks in the costume department. If you need a hat or something, they’ll just give you one. You can’t keep it, but they can lend you something. Don’t feel like you need to cover everything. You don’t. Cover the basics. Make sure you’re comfortable.

Going to dinner with actors, lovely, happily, most actors that I go to dinner with are also slobs, so everybody can be a slob together. Sloppiness, it depends on your role. If you are a producer, executive type of person, generally yes, you do dress a bit better. Everyone expects the writer to dress like Barton Fink.

I am a big believer in comfort items. Here’s what I have learned to bring with me: my slippers, my robe, because my slippers and my robe are my morning things, and my pillow. I like my pillow. I want my pillow. I don’t want their pillow. I want mine. Then just remember the little things, sometimes it’s just easier to just buy them there. Yes, you can absolutely pack your luggage full of every possible little, tiny, tiny thing you would need, or you can just remember that unless you’re going somewhere particularly remote, you can just buy some stuff that’s cheap there and you’ll be okay. Just remember, you’re not going to the moon. You’re going probably to a place that has lots of other stuff.

**John:** If you’re filming Mad Max: Fury Road, then yes, you’re going to the moon, but anywhere else, you’re in a city where you can do stuff. I was thinking about a pilot I shot up in Vancouver. I thought I had rain gear, but I did not have Vancouver rain gear. I did not have Vancouver production rain gear. I needed the absolute, not just breathable GORE-TEX it needs to just be pure rubber that you’re wearing and the rubber boots and the rain pants and everything. That stuff you get there, because that’s the place where they sell it. The producer just sent me off with a PA, saying, “Go get him… ” I went, tried on the stuff, put it on the card. That became my rain gear. Some stuff you’ll just pick up locally.

Do think about what’ll make you comfortable. For Craig it was his slippers and his robe. Maybe the kind of tea you like that’s hard to get other places, pack a bunch of that so you’ll at least have the tea that you like there and have a way to get started in the morning or wind down at the end of the day, something like that to enjoy yourself.

**Craig:** Way more important to have those little things than 14 different weights of pants.

**John:** I will say, we do travel with our Apple TV. Apple TV is a nice way to get all the stuff that I want to see at home. It’s a little bit of a hassle to set it up on a hotel WiFi, but I’ll put a link in the show notes for how to get your Apple TV to connect to hotel WiFi, because when you don’t have the ability to type in the WiFi password, it can be a hassle, but there’s ways to do it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Another question.

**Megana:** Luke from LA asks, “I’m another aspiring screenwriter currently doing a screenwriting graduate program at UCLA. The other day a professor in class said something that troubled me. He said when we’re starting out, we have to know our brand.”

**Craig:** Oh for God’s sakes.

**Megana:** “When trying to get an agent, the two or three scripts that we show them should be of the same type/genre, instead of, for example, trying to show our versatility, and go with a couple of different types of products. That way the agent can quickly see how to sell this new writer.”

**John:** The question is should your samples be similar to each other or should they be wildly divergent? I remember at the Austin Film Festival we had an agent and manager on the stage with us, and we were talking through that, did they want to see the range of what you can do or do they want to be able to target and focus you. I think the answer we got from them was a little bit more focused. It wasn’t all that dissimilar to what this professor in the class said.

**Craig:** The dissimilar part was that, the key was you had to have a script that they could sell. If you had five scripts that were all B minuses, then they were probably going to look at you and say, “I don’t know what you are. I don’t think you know what you are.” That’s not about brand. That’s just about your voice. If you walk in and you have an A-plus script and a C script, they’re going to say, “Okay, guess what? We actually don’t like that script at all, no big deal, but we do love this one. We’re going to put you out there with this one. You may get offered jobs in the genre that this one is in because it’s a good script.”

My thing is, how in the hell are you supposed to know beforehand? How do you know beforehand? If you write two or three scripts that are all the same genre and type, they might also say, this person really just is writing the same script over and over again. Maybe one day a professor at one of these places will say something that I like, but we’ve been doing it a long time, and I just find that all of this advice is circling around the most obvious thing, which is they don’t sell you at all. They sell a script.

**John:** I’ll put an extreme example, but an example that could make a little more sense here. Let’s say your samples are here is a historical war drama, it’s a retelling of 1812, battles of 1812. They have a half-hour multi-cam script, and they have this weird quirky sci-fi indie thing. That is a hard thing for an agent or manager to put their hands around and say, oh, you need to read this writer, because, oh, I’d love to read another thing, something completely different that won’t actually validate this experience.

The other thing, I’ve talked with a lot of writers who are thinking about, oh, I want to be starting TV, give me examples of some things you think I should be writing for this. I often say, I love to read a sample that is so, so good that I cannot wait to meet this person. Then when I meet this person, I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly the person I hoped wrote that script.” Something that feels like it introduces you and your voice and why you would be asked to be in that room, these are great things. Writing something that is unique to your experience is a great choice if you’re thinking about how am I going to be an asset in that room or on this project. If my script can give a sense of what my personality is like, what my unique voice is like, that’s great. There are going to tend to be things that will speak to a genre.

**Craig:** I don’t see it that way.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** I just think that basically everyone is reading a fire hosed volume of crap every day, every script stinks, and then one day they read one that’s good. I don’t think they’re going to even care what the other ones are. They’re so happy that they found somebody who can write. If that person has written other scripts, and they’re like, “I want to read another thing that you wrote,” and it’s completely different, then that person might say, “Okay, you know what? I just like this one.” Reading two scripts and going, “Okay… ”

Here’s the deal. If you can write a good script, you’ll write another good script. Any good writer can write at least something that is competent in any genre. I may not say I want to make this movie. You give me a genre to write, I’ll write it. At least I will apply basic writing skill to it and things like characters and relationships. Everyone’s trying to figure out the secret or the way you’re going to get through. The way you’re going to get through is you’re going to write something good. I’m not sure if you have a script that you love and you wrote, and then someone’s like, “You got to write it again in that genre,” and you want to write something in another genre, your thing in the other genre might be even better. I would never dissuade anybody from that, nor would I ever ding anybody for having things in different genres. I guess then again I’ve weirdly become the poster child for somebody whose genres are completely all over the place.

**John:** Now I will say I was hired and getting work before Go, and my script was a romantic tragedy. It was funny enough, but it wasn’t a great sample for some of the things I was getting, which were How To Eat Fried Worms and Wrinkle In Time, kids book adaptations. My other sample was the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which was not a laugh riot. The useful thing about the script for Go was that people could read it and see anything they wanted to see in it, and so it could serve as a sample for any kind of genre you wanted to put me out for.

**Craig:** It was good.

**John:** It was good. I would say just write Go, and then your problems are solved.

**Craig:** Write Go and then add an OD to it and you’re there. Just write something good. That’s your brand, good writer, because literally everyone else’s brand is bad writer.

**John:** Megana, another question.

**Megana:** Cranky Screenwriter writes–

**Craig:** That’s me.

**Megana:** “I started working with a manager a year ago. My manager has not set up a single meeting for me in this time, although there’s always an excuse, and usually ignores my emails unless they pertain to projects on which director she also represents is attached, meaning the manager would get paid twice if they’re successful. Recently she had me write a treatment for a remake of a major studio picture for a Hollywood super producer with an all-around streaming deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I was not paid for this treatment. My manager didn’t provide notes, nor did she ever even confirm that it was even sent to the producer. Obviously, there’s no meeting forthcoming either. Is this sort of behavior normal and do I just need to be more patient, or is it time for me to cut her loose and find someone who will work harder on my behalf?”

**John:** Craig, I don’t know, it sounds like… Cranky Screenwriter is so lucky to have a manager. I don’t know why they’re… Why are they emailing us? Because listen, you’re so lucky you have a manager.

**Craig:** What’s the level below cut her loose? What can you do that’s even more extreme than cutting her loose?

**John:** You need to fire her into the sun.

**Craig:** Fire her into the sun. By the way, this behavior is normal among terrible, predatory, crappy, peripheral managers. She’s awful. She’s awful. Having her as a manager is worse than having no manager. She is exploitative. She’s not helping you at all. While she’s hurting you, she’s also not even balancing it out with help. She’s terrible and you should, yes, cut her loose.

**Megana:** Angel of After School Specials asks, “Last year a script of mine was produced for what I thought would be a streamer, but ended up being a cable channel. I was a little bummed, as it wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but something made is a win, right? Another script was recently optioned is gearing up for production on a streaming service, but through their TV arm. Two scripts, two TV movies. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to be nervous, but something just happened that has me wondering. I’ve sold two projects and pitches, one to a major studio and another to a streamer. Yet, I just had a call with my reps about a project I’m really excited about. I saw it as a big theatrical play, but they told me I should aim for cable, again. I’m not sure if that’s because that’s where they have more relationships or if this is the box they’re putting me into, but either way, I’m not happy about it.

“Honestly, I’m scared. Currently, I have a team. That sounds good. It feels safe. They know me, and I don’t feel like I have anything to prove. Honestly, no other reps have shown interest. When you’ve had success that’s quantifiable in sales, but not produced work, how do you move up the ranks, and what should my expectations be? I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.”

**John:** A lot going on here. Angel has some self-doubt, but also some success and some perspective, but also is feeling frustrated and trapped. It’s the flip side of our last question. You don’t have a terrible manager. The manager’s getting you work. Stuff’s selling. That’s great. You got a career started, but you’re also getting pigeonholed as being a cable person, and you really see yourself being able to do bigger, more exciting things than that. Craig, what do you advise?

**Craig:** Angel of After School Specials, the one thing that you said that made me the most nervous for you is at the very end. You said, “I think my biggest concern is that I see myself one way, but they’re pushing me into a smaller category because that’s where my work actually belongs.” I want to tell you, that is not why they’re doing that. Your work doesn’t necessarily only belong on cable. By the way, cable used to be good. We’re talking about smaller cable channels here.

You may feel like, am I missing something? Is there something super cabley about what I’m doing? No. They’re moving you there because that’s who’s paying them. That’s who’s paying you, so that’s who’s paying them. Representatives in general will take the path of least resistance to money. There are some that are smart enough and have enough perspective to take the long view, to turn things down, to aim higher. Most, especially when you’re starting out and you’re early on, do not. They just want to go where they know it’s easiest. What they’re telling you is that’s what’s easiest. Certainly when you say, I want to write a theatrical play, what they hear is, oh, we’re not getting paid at all, because–

**John:** [Unclear 00:58:34].

**Craig:** 99% of theatrical plays don’t generate a penny. They’re saying, look, over here are people who basically they have a checkbook out and they want to do it again. Let’s go over there where the checkbook’s at and let’s do it again. I understand why you’re scared. It is scary. Here’s my very practical advice for you, Angel of After School Specials. You can divide your time and work and energy into two modes. You can write things that you know are going to get picked up and put on that thing, table, and you’ll get money in your pocket and you pay your bills, but write the other thing. Write the other thing too. See what happens. If you see this one as a big theatrical play and they say aim for cable again, you can say, “You know what? I actually am going to aim for cable again with another thing that’s very cabley, because I like getting paid too.” Then you work on your big theatrical play.

You can’t live only by one way or the other. You won’t survive if you’re just writing passion projects for yourself that nobody’s going to pay you for. You also won’t survive if all you do is what you’re being told to do. Carve out some time, one for them, one for me. It’s a classic bit of advice that I probably should’ve heeded sooner in my career than I did, and protect that. You will feel much better. If they don’t get it and they don’t want you to do that, they don’t even need to know about it, do they?

**John:** No. I agree that you should be doing this, writing the stuff that you actually want to see happen on your own time. Make sure you’re splitting your time. I agree with Craig with that completely. I think there’s an opportunity to switch agencies though. I think that time is probably going to come pretty soon. It sounds like you have another thing that’s going for a streamer that’s ramping up to be in production. Once that’s in production, once that’s closer to coming out, that may be a good moment for you to start meeting with other places.

How do you find those other places. How do you find people who might be interested in working with you? It’s talking with the executives and on projects you’re working on or projects that are in development, to see, hey, where do you think is a good place for me to end up, or talking to other writers who are having good experiences with their agents or managers, because switching agencies, Craig will tell you, I will tell you, is an opportunity for a bit of a reset in terms of how the town is seeing you, going out on new generals, meeting with new people, and getting people re-excited about the next thing that you want to do. I think you need to do the work for yourself, but then you also need to really look at changing agencies, because it’s going to be hard for you to make that change at the same agency where you’re at, because they’re just used to you being a certain kind of client.

**Craig:** There’s going to be a space open with Cranky Screenwriter’s manager soon.

**John:** That one seems fantastic.

**Craig:** Sounds amazing.

**John:** Those are our questions. It’s now time for our One Cool Things. Craig, start us off. What’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is just a little shout-out to a very faithful listener of ours over the many years. Her name is Cara Anderson. I’m just flagging her for everybody, because she is also not only a listener, but a fantastic member of our special effects squad on The Last of Us. She’s based out in Vancouver. Special effects people spread out all over the place, because they have their laboratories where they’re blowing things up and then they have their places where they’re buying things and moving stuff in and out of warehouses. Then of course we have our team that’s on set blowing things up in person or spraying blood on things. I’m giving away stuff. Spoiler alert, there’s blood in The Last of Us.

**John:** I can’t believe I can’t watch the show anymore.

**Craig:** Let’s see if [cross-talk 01:02:22] deadline. Cara Anderson has been doing such a good job for us for so long. I just wanted to say hi to her and let her know we’re very happy to have her as a listener.

**John:** Now Craig, just because you brought this up, special effects versus visual effects, at what point in the pre-production process do you figure out which team is handling this thing that you’ve written into the script, like this is an explosion. When do you know that it’s going to be special effects being done on set versus something that’s being done later on in post?

**Craig:** The interesting thing is pre-production never ends when you’re making television. You’re always in prep and production and post-production. This conversation never stops. Once the script comes out, everybody breaks it down, goes through it. The first AD usually spends a little bit of time with the effects and special effects, asking the questions. Some things are obvious. Some things are clearly going to be visual effects. Some things are going to be special effects. A lot of times the real question isn’t should this be special effects or visual effects, the question should be is this going to be visual effects or should we just build it or should we be there? That’s more of a discussion. The special effects stuff is pretty well defined. There was one, actually just shot it last week, the sequence where there was a huge discussion about whether it should be special effects or visual effects, and where we landed was it should be both, and indeed it will.

**John:** Nice, I love it. My One Cool Thing is the half-marathon, just the half-marathon as a concept. This last week I ran a half-marathon in Las Vegas.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** It was really fun. It was called the Run Rock and Roll Half-Marathon. What I loved about it, it was a nighttime one. I hate the sun. It was nice to be able to run at night, and the Strip is a fun place for that. I don’t like the sun.

**Craig:** You look like you don’t like the sun.

**John:** I’m a very pale person. This was fun because it was all on the Strip, and it was pretty well lit. You could see things. It was a giant crowd. It was fun for all those reasons. I want to talk about the half-marathon as a distance, because I think it’s actually one of those really good benchmark things, because it’s difficult but it won’t kill you. I don’t think I could ever do a marathon, but a half-marathon I can do. It’s 13.1 miles. If people are curious about running, because I was never a runner until [unclear 01:04:37] so during the course of this podcast I became a runner.

The first app we used was called Couch To 5k, which basically just trains you how to start go from walking to actually being able to run short distances and ultimately run a 5k. During that first year, I did a couch to 5k, then 5k to 10k. I ran my first 10k. I ran a 15k. Now I’ve run two half-marathons, which is 21k. Running is pretty great. I’m surprised to be saying this now, because I was never a runner before this time, but human beings are uniquely well-designed to run. Once you learn how to do it, it just feels great to have that kind of fundamental skill under your belt. If you’re curious ever about running a marathon, I would say don’t. Don’t run a marathon, but try to build up to run a half-marathon, because it’s a thing I think most people could probably do.

**Craig:** It’s just a quirk of history. Maybe the half-marathon should be the marathon, and the marathon should be a double marathon.

**John:** Sure. That would make a lot more sense, because a half-marathon’s, it’s 13 miles, but 10 miles is also a pretty good distance. It’s a lot of work, but again, it’s two hours of your day, rather than four hours. In fact, four hours really kills you in a marathon.

**Craig:** Four hours and heat stroke.

**John:** Heat stroke, yeah, all those things. Never good. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** You know it.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. A special thanks this week to Chris Sond [ph], who put together all the initial research for the meet-cute segment. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. Almost all the T-shirts we’ve made, you can now get as a pullover hoodie. Our special zip-up hoodies are… Craig, I guess you still haven’t gotten your zip-up hoodie.

**Craig:** Not yet.

**John:** Our special zipper hoodies are back to print. For the next two weeks, you can order a zipper hoodie. You can find those 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 onboarding. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, this week as we were preparing to play Dungeons and Dragons, you and I got into a long discussion about Elden Ring, which is the new video game that we’re playing. I think the short review of it is that it is a gorgeous-looking game, it is a game in which you die a lot. You know that you’re going to die a lot going into it. We were also both struck by the weird onboarding and, to me, unsuccessful onboarding in this game. I thought we’d talk about onboarding as it relates to video games, but also of course every movie and every TV show has an aspect of onboarding too, where you’re getting the audience familiar with how your show is going to work.

**Craig:** This is a term I’ve become obsessed with ever since I heard Neil Druckmann say it. This is a concept in video game production. How do you get the player from I just hit start for the first time to where you need them to be to start playing the game? We deal with this all the time. Somebody sits down, presses play, probably on their iPad or their television or weirdly maybe sits in a movie theater, and they have to go from nothing to something. You have to get them there so it’s okay. Elden Ring is an extension of the Dark Souls series, which the company FromSoftware is notorious for this kind of brutal format where you’re constantly dying. I knew that part was [unclear 01:08:39] but what I didn’t expect was that I would have no goddamn idea who I was, where I was, and why I was. It’s really weird, because there’s an incredibly long opening sequence that you have to watch.

**John:** Written by George R.R. Martin apparently.

**Craig:** It explains nothing. No offense to George.

**John:** It’s like, what is the Elden Ring? I have no idea. Is it a person? Is it a place? Is it a thing? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I can’t blame it on George, because he probably wrote quite a bit, that then they took and put together. There’s so much happening. It was the weirdest thing, because they told you everything and nothing at the same time, because there was no progression. I think about how the Lord of the Rings, I still think about how brilliant that screenplay was for Fellowship of the Ring, because they onboarded you through this narration by Galadriel and an explainer about the rings and what they were, who made them, why there was a problem, how there was a big fight, how one of the rings got lost. By the time you get to the hobbits, you basically know what you need to know.

I think, weirdly, everyone’s been chasing that forever, and now it’s at a place where there was so much of that crap in there and none of it connected to anything. It felt like it was written by somebody who didn’t speak English, to be honest with you. I thought it was a bad translation maybe.

**John:** It felt poetic. It was a poem that took me to a good place. One of the real challenges here, and we should both acknowledge that we’re in the early stages of playing the game, and so as I look at these reviews, everyone’s just like, oh, 40 hours in you realize, oh my gosh, what a big world this is and how it all fits together. I’m like, I’m looking forward to that, but also, just as the screenwriter in me, I think I should be beyond the inciting incident by now. I don’t think I am. I don’t know what my objective is. I don’t know who I am or what these forces are around me. That is frustrating. Now, it’s unique to video games but also to apps, because I am building Highland for the Mac. There’s also an onboarding process where you’re teaching people how to use the controls, how to do the things that they want to do with that.

**Craig:** Tutorials.

**John:** Tutorials. There are tutorials in Elden Ring, just as there are tutorials in Highland to get you started. I largely figured some stuff out, but I think I would not have been able to figure them out if I didn’t have my phone next to me and I could Google, how do I do this thing.

**Craig:** It’s a failure of onboarding then.

**John:** Is it a failure of onboarding in 2022?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have an expectation that people can look stuff up. I just feel like they were expecting I would look some stuff up other places because I couldn’t figure out where these controls were.

**Craig:** That’s just crazy at that point, or just say to people, “Google it.” Literally have the video game by like, “Sorry, Google it.” I’m okay with them wanting to throw you in the deep end and everything, but for instance, in Elden Ring, after you watch the endless and indecipherable prologue, you’re asked to choose what kind of character you want to be.

**John:** Essentially a character class.

**Craig:** What character class. You have no idea what any of them mean. They don’t tell you what is interesting or special or good or bad about any of them. It seems almost like it’s just a random choice.

**John:** Of course what I did is I Googled to see what do the choices mean, what are they good for.

**Craig:** My whole thing is, no, you owe me.

**John:** That’s not how it works.

**Craig:** I bought this. You owe me. What’s next in television or movies? We put up a card that says, “Press pause here and Google what is confusing to you,” or, for instance, at the end of the second Matrix movie, it should just say, “If you didn’t understand what the architect said, please Google it.” No. That’s a failure. In my book, it is a failure of onboarding.

**John:** I do get and acknowledge that. The other experience of onboarding I had recently is I switched over from using Mac Mail to using Superhuman, which is a web-based mail system which I really like a lot. They do not let you use the app until you go through onboarding with a live person on Zoom talking you through how to do it. This seems incredibly restrictive and silly, because I should be able to figure it all out just through the app, but you can’t, or you could figure out how to do it, but you wouldn’t actually recognize the smart ways to do it. It’s like in Elden Ring, someone came to your house and sat beside you, Craig, and said, “Okay, let’s talk through this and let’s figure out, get you really good on controls. Let’s try to do some dodge rolls and do a guard so you can actually get that power attack in there.” It was strange to have this experience with Superhuman, because honestly kind of great, because I feel like I’m a really good user of the app now, because they forced me to go through that training.

**Craig:** Do you think that I would like it?

**John:** Superhuman?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I’ve told you about this before.

**Craig:** I know. I remember. I think I probably stumbled over the, sorry, you’re making me do what? I guess I would say to you, is it way better than the other experiences? I ditched Apple Mail years ago.

**John:** I would say it’s way better. In terms of the actual being able to replay to things and get down to inbox zero, just not have stuff sitting there, is really good. How it filters stuff out, and your important stuff and your not important stuff, is really good. It’s worth a shot. Should you stop your life right now to do it? Maybe wait until after you’re done with some production.

**Craig:** Done ruining my life.

**John:** It was Rachel Bloom who put me on to it. I think that she and I both agreed it’s a good app.

**Craig:** Rachel Bloom was already a superhuman, so it makes sense.

**John:** Back to our Elden Ring experience, I feel like also part of what you’re dealing with with any video game or any sort of piece of entertainment is you’re dealing with expectation. I have certain expectations about what buttons are going to do what kinds of things. I find myself drinking all of my potions because I’m expecting the square button to be–

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s not just me.

**Craig:** No. It’s so frustrating. Megana, I know that you’ve literally slept past into the ninth level of coma at this point, but hear me out. You’re wandering around in a world where you have no idea where you’re supposed to go really and whether or not you’re facing off against creatures that are way too strong for you or not. All you have to keep you alive are three swigs of your potion.

**John:** Your vile of crimson tears.

**Craig:** Which they don’t tell you that’s what it is, but you eventually figure it out.

**John:** It was red so of course it’s [crosstalk 01:15:11].

**Craig:** It was red, yeah. The way they’ve said, usually in these games, you’ll have to hit a button to bring up a little menu, and then you press a button to drink it. You can’t mistakenly do it. In this game–

**John:** Glug glug glug.

**Craig:** The button that generally is crouch for every other game is drink your very, very limited amount of health potion. I’ve done it twice. I’ve drank two health potions within seconds and just wanted to just jump out my window.

**John:** I’ll be in the middle of a fight and my character will stop to drink a health potion and I’ll get stabbed in the back. That’s what’s going to happen.

**Craig:** I’m at full health. Everything’s fine. I’m walking across the thing. I come to something, and then I just drink a health potion for no reason. The other thing is, most video games will not let you drink health potions if you’re at full health. They’re like, no, you don’t want to do that. This game’s like, do it, lol.

**John:** Lol.

**Craig:** Lmao.

**John:** We’re going to get so much email about this, because we’re–

**Craig:** Video game players.

**Megana:** No.

**Craig:** Sorry, Megana.

**John:** Megana’s going to get so much mail about this.

**Craig:** Megana, if it makes you feel better, the fans of FromSoftware games are even more intense than most video game fans. The thing is I’m going to keep playing it. It is gorgeous. I can see where after 40 hours, once I get out of this training area, that I’m also ill-equipped to survive in, it’s going to be amazing. Neil Druckmann has been playing it, and he tweeted some things. He’s gotten pretty far. He’s really good at video games, isn’t a big surprise.

**John:** No surprise there.

**Craig:** He’s gotten pretty far, although now that I’m thinking about it, I’m like, hey, I emailed him the other day, and he was like, “Oh sorry, it took me a while to get back to you.” I’m like, you know what?

**John:** Game.

**Craig:** I know what’s happening. I know what’s going on here.

**John:** I limit my time to 30 minutes. I will set 30 minutes on my watch when I play and then I will just stop at a certain point, because otherwise hours just dissolve.

**Craig:** For me, I don’t think I played more than one hour at a time, because it’s so frustrating. Instead of setting an alarm on my watch, I just listen to myself wanting to kill myself, and then I think, oh, I should probably stop playing this right now.

**John:** I’m playing this video game.

**Craig:** This video game is way too frustrating for me. There are some wonderful videos online of people almost beating a guy and then losing it and freaking out. It’s wonderful. Sorry, Megana. I apologize for everything, Megana. I got to be honest. Everything. Everything we’ve just talked about.

**John:** That’s Megana’s job to apologize for everything.

**Craig:** She’s like, I’m sorry that you’re so sorry. We’re sorry. We’re all sorry.

**John:** Everyone’s sorry.

**Craig:** Everyone’s sorry.

Links:

* [Volodymyr Zelensky](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/volodymyr-zelensky-profile-cmd-intl/index.html) and the ongoing war in [Ukraine](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/07/russia-ukraine-war-news-putin-live-updates/)
* [Does Hollywood Ruin Books?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUD8h9JpEVQ) by Numberphile on Youtube on Berkson’s Paradox
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://us9.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f&id=aeb429a997) and the [Meet-Cute edition here](https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=2b0232538adf13e5b3e55b12f&id=edbc06bed5)!
* [Scriptnotes 433: The One with Greta Gerwig](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig)
* [Elden Ring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elden_Ring) (https://www.fromsoftware.jp/ww/products.html)
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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 Nico Mansy ([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/540standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-home-stretch).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 524 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We don’t have Craig today but we do have a very full show because today’s episode we’re going to be talking about endings. We’re going to start with a segment from Episode 44, Endings for Beginners, where Craig and I look at how you plan for a successful conclusion. Then we’ll have Aline join us for Episode 152, The Rocky Shoals, where we look at the particular challenges writers face around page 70 every script, when you start shifting gears into the end game. Then in a segment from 392 we will focus on the final moment, the punchline and the payoff. So it’s a whole episode about endings. It’s not really a script from A to Z. It’s more from R to Z, or maybe S to Z. But it should be a very useful thing as you’re thinking about your script.

As always, if you want to hear these full episodes you can find them in our archives available to premium members at Scriptnotes.net. And if you are a premium member stick around at the end where Megana and I will chat about nighttime rituals for creative folk. Enjoy.

[Episode 44]

**John:** I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start we start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first ten pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ending are… — Like I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last ten. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything.

I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

**John:** So, I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we are talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you, it will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”

The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line, it’s the resolution, it’s the triumph. And so often it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first ten pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last five, ten pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. And so those last ten pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started.
Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.

My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

**Craig:** Yeah. I like what you say about contract, that’s exactly right. Because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling depending on your perspective towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying it had to go like this.

That ultimately the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. You know, I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected — it always seems to me — it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.

That’s the point is there is an expression of faith in something that has changed. But there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie they are not the same person they were in the beginning.
**John:** Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re going to get to. Like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations.

Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

**Craig:** I’d like to see that movie.

**John:** That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence…

**Craig:** Well, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie she leaves home. She runs away.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away, you made a stand, you thought you were a grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”

That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. And the whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending… — It’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “Well, you know, the ending, it’s they’re mocking us. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.”

But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious, you know.

The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re going to cross the streams.” [laughs] “We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

**John:** Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. So, sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often it’s expressed by what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally, or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

**Craig:** Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about, you know, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly there’s not much more reason to watch movies. [laughs] You know?

**John:** And we are talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. One of the first things we see, or how we meet those characters. You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

**Craig:** No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing… — And frankly if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

**John:** In one of our first screenwriting classes they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10 you can write your whole movie because you know — you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, with sort of coffee momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.

And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness if I don’t have… — If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

**Craig:** You know, I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean, I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end. Why that difference is interesting. What decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.

When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be, or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life.
And, you know, Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. And I went, I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where he had — Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. You know, he brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back. And I like that but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go.

And they design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as “man on airship with boy scout, flying, talking dogs, and a house tied to him.” No problem; you can make it work.
**John:** And example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines, and the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die.
The question of the movie is, “Will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?” And so quite early on I had to figure out like, well what is it that the son — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? Well, the son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing, like, that’s going to be incredibly difficult, an emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel that.

Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, well what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to what are the steps that are going to get me to that point. And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, it’s Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, “Well, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement?” “What are the conversations along the way?” Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identify Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that — that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. That to me — it’s all about the ending like that. So, looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.

**John:** This talk of endings reminds me of… — I met John Williams. He was at USC; the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. And when they were rededicating it John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.

And John Williams made this really great point, was that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you, it’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s — that’s your ending.

And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

**Craig:** Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, you know, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “Well, it’s not really a 98. At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up.”

But, you know, if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, just like the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.

**John:** But I want to make sure for people who are listening, we are not arguing for happy endings.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Is it one that tracks with the characters along the way? So it doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

**Craig:** Yeah. And maybe just a little bit of hope.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I mean, I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. I mean, this man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person when inside in fact he was awful. And in a moment of explosion at the end truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he never, you know, he just died alone.

And yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling, and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down — I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he always, he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. You know?

[Episode 152]

**John:** So, we’ve set a very high bar. But let’s get started. Let’s get started with those rocky shoals. So, talk to us about what you mean by this topic.

**Aline:** Well, this is something that I’ve always found to be true and in talking to other writers I have found it also true for them. Which is the first act tends to be the funnest and easiest to write. You often overwrite the first act. You often write the 38 pages when it needs to be 29, but it’s usually because it’s the thing that you spent the most time on which is the setup and the idea and you have the most information about it.

And what I’ve found is that after the first part of act two, where you’re sort of setting up the pins to knock them down — analogy — in the second part what you’re really doing is sort of building that on ramp to the third act. And I know Craig has talked many times about how you need to know that third act to write the movie, and it’s best if you know the third act, and I agree with that. And I find third acts not, I would say, on a par with first acts in terms of difficulty to write.
But if I’m going to have an existential crisis, if there is going to be a moment where I drive home from work and say to my husband, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I’ve ever written one of these before, I don’t understand how these work,” it will always be around 71 where I start to feel like, you know, it should start to spit out material, and it’s probably the stuff you have the least of in the outline. But it should start to spit out steps to this thing that you know you’re going to.

So, often I know exactly what the third act is and I can see it. And it’s just over the crest, but I need those steps, and 70 to 90 are those steps. And if something is wrong, if you’ve conceived a character incorrectly, if the action in the third act is in fact wrong, if your thematic are wrong, that’s where it’s all going to fall down. It almost never falls apart in act one. For me it almost never falls apart in act three. It’s always 70 to 90 is the moment where I think, oh boy.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** In act one you’re setting things up. And that’s the part of the movie where you had the best idea of what it really was. That was probably what got you to start writing the movie. You had this idea, and that was probably act one.

Act three, you’re closing stuff down. You’re cutting off those threads, you’re tying stuff up. Final confrontations. But there is not a defined thing that’s sort of supposed to happen in that stretch that you’re talking about. There’s probably been some big thing that happened in the middle of your second act, but now you’re kind of waiting for this third act thing to happen. You’re waiting for either the worst of the worst, or this big twist, this big reveal, and you don’t want to do anything before its time. But, yeah, it’s a tough moment.

**Craig:** Well, it is. Although I kind of feel like that’s the point. You know, your character is going through this process and that’s the part of the movie where they’re lost, right? Your plot is building in a certain way and that’s the part of the movie where the plot and the simplicity of what’s supposed to happen doesn’t work anymore. It’s natural for us to get to that place and start to feel overwhelmed. Oddly, we give ourselves a break from page 30 — well, the ending is far away, I’m relaxed.

When you get to page 70 you think, well the ending is supposed to be coming up soon but it also still feels far away. It feels further away now that I’m at 71 then it did when I was at 30. But I feel like that’s the purpose of that section. In a weird way pages 71 and 90 in every movie is a horror movie, in every genre. That’s where the horror is. It’s where everything is supposed to basically fall apart, otherwise your ending is kind of a “who cares?”

So, if you start to embrace the fact that you’re supposed to feel that way, particularly if you’re connected to your main character and the movie is supposed to fall apart. You have to break it to fix it. Then maybe, you’ll still be scared, but at least you’ll understand why.

**Aline:** You know how Ted Elliott talks about that stuff where you make those first couple decisions about a movie and then you’re sort of — you have the consequences of those you can’t ever get back. I feel like to use one of my tortured analogies that to get — you’re going to have a lot of stuff and you’re winnowing. The process of a movie really is winnowing down thematically and plot wise.

And I always feel like it’s like you’re at the edge of a river. You’re Tarzan. You’re trying to get to this place across and there’s ten vines. And you can only pick a couple to swing across on. And I just have had a couple times where I’ve gotten there and thought which one is taking me, is the right path to act three. And I think that’s probably the section that I rewrite the most because often I have an act three I really like, but it might not land if the onramp is not — if I have not picked the right thing to swing across on.

**John:** One of the things I think you’re describing may be part of the problem. If you’re describing it as an onramp then you’re not describing what the actual — what’s the joy of that part of the movie? If it’s only doing work, then there’s not a joy to that part of the movie.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** One of the scripts that I was working with at Sundance this last year, as I was talking with the writer we were trying to figure out how to move some scenes around, or sort of what could go where. And I had him really rethink the whole thing in terms of sequences. And so basically like imagine this is the sequence that goes from here to here, the sequence that goes from here to here. And within that sequence, those are the edges of your sequence — what is the movie? Like imagine that little sequence as its own movie.

And maybe that’s the key to what the 70 to 90 is, is think about, well, given where we’re at what is the movie of 70 to 90 and how can we make the most interesting movie in that place?
**Craig:** That movie also is… — One thing, it’s funny, I actually have a weirdly opposite point of view that it is true, as we make choices, the breadth of choices that are available to us begin to narrow. But that section to me is actually the one place where you get to not worry about that because, for instance, that’s the point in movies a lot of times when somebody gets really drunk, or gets high, or has a vision, or a dream. That part of the movie you’re allowed to almost become non-linear. And then arrive at something kind of —

**Aline:** But you need propulsion. It’s too late in the movie to not be propulsive. And I often find I’m in that section cutting stuff because it feels early act two-y.

**Craig:** Maybe so. I mean, to me if you’ve gotten your character to a place where they are disconnected from the life they had, but they are no longer at the life they need to live, then you’re allowed to get arty horror, I guess. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re allowed to break the rules of your movie and actually plunge them into a moment where out of it they can have an epiphany or something.

I was just telling John before the show began that I’m plotting out the story of the script that I’m about to write and I got to this point. And I understood that my character needed to have an epiphany, but well how do you have — it’s hard to create an epiphany. If you can create it that simply then it’s probably not that satisfying.

So, part of what I did was just relax. I don’t know how else to put it. Like you can start to beat yourself up when you get to that section because you feel like, oh my god, ugh. And then it has to make this half propulse and make the ending happen and all the rest. I just weirdly just relaxed.

**Aline:** But I do think it’s the point where the audience starts to get shifty. It’s just the part in the movie after the first hour and it’s the thing that I always refer to in meetings as you really don’t want people to be sitting there going, “Did I park on P2 or P3? Honey, was it P2 or P3?” And they’re thinking that. And that’s where if it’s going to go south it’s going to be there.

I mean, you have such tremendous goodwill in act one. You really do. And I always find, I have a friend who watches movies going, “I’m at an A. I’m at an A+. I’m at a B. I’m at a B-. I’m at a C.” Like that’s how he experiences a movie. And so often you watch a movie and you’re like, I’m at an A. I don’t know why people didn’t like this. I’m at an A. I’m at an A. But getting back to you’re like at a B. And then it’s always an hour in where you’re like, oh, we just wandered into D- here. Like we’ve lost our way.
That’s always the — that really is. That’s why I say, “Rocky shoals, men from the boys, you know?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you can get into a treading water syndrome where you kind of think, oh, I’m not allowed to have my ending yet. I need to do some work. You actually don’t. Like for instance one solution to your 71 to 90 problem is that it’s really 71 to 80.

**John:** Yeah, you’re cutting it short.

**Aline:** And you know what I will say? I worked with Alex Kurtzman and he said something to me that I really think about all the time. He’s like, “You always need less stuff than you think you need.”

**Craig:** It’s so true.

**Aline:** It is so true. You pack up for your screenplay and you’ve got like giant suitcases and a duffle and a carryon slung across you. And you always get through and go, “Why did I bring all this stuff? I didn’t need all this stuff.”

**Craig:** But you don’t know what you need until you get to the resort.

**Aline:** You don’t know what you need until you get there!

**Craig:** Yeah, but you should just be willing to not wear everything at once. Right.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about like that heading into that last section. If we talk about a movie as being a character’s transformation and hopefully you’re going to have this arc of transformation. They start at one place and they end up in a different place. And that transition to act three is really the lowest of the lowest, that moment of great transformation. Everything seems lost. All hope is gone.
There may be an opportunity in that 70 to 90 phase for the character to try a new thing, to try a new persona, to try a new approach that may not end up succeeding, but you can see it’s a step on their way to this next thing. So, they wouldn’t get to the character they’re going to be at the end if they hadn’t tried this new thing. And that could lead you into the new thing.

It may also be a moment for — I’m a big believer in burning down the house. Like literally I will burn down the house as much as I possibly can. And sometimes you’re burning down the house at the start and that’s instigating the whole story. But sometimes you’re burning down the house at the act two moment, that’s like that was the worst of the worst and their house got burned down. But it can be a fascinating time to literally burn down their house or destroy everything they have at that moment before the real end of act two. And so this is a section where they’re forced to sort of be on their own. They’re force to sort not be able to go back.

**Aline:** I’ll give you a somewhat, it’s not super specific, but in the script I’m writing midway through this character has had a relationship with — a woman has had a relationship with a man. And halfway through she realizes he’s not who she thought she was. And the third act is her realizing, oh, he’s a good guy. I’m going to go help him and save him.

But in between, oh, he’s not the person I thought he was, in that 70 to 90, she’s trying to decide or figure out is he the good guy or bad guy of this story. That’s really what’s she’s doing is she’s going back and forth between trying to figure out was I right to be drawn to this person or not. And at the end she’s, yes, and she goes — so, she is in a treading water kind of a thing where she’s investigating and it is a little bit like a horror movie because she’s sort of going down halls and trying doors.

And my challenge has been to pick the things that allow her to be in a little bit of a suspended state, which you often are in that section, right?

**Craig:** Without feeling like —

**Aline:** Without feel like —

**Craig:** The movie is just flat-lining across. I know what you mean.

**Aline:** Yes. Exactly.

**Craig:** Well, sometimes also the way to approach those sections is to think of them as false endings. So, okay, in her mind this movie needs to end on page 90. So, perhaps then she just decides I’m going to make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right decision or not, but I’m making a decision and I’m going to confront this person and I’m going to blow this thing up. And that’s going to be the end of this movie. And she does it. But then it’s not, you know?

**Aline:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** Or sometimes if it is a heist movie, this is where we’re going to do the thing, oh my god, it just —

**Aline:** Well that’s exactly, really smart, because that’s the part in the heist movie where everybody is moving in and getting the thing and the acrobat is in the box and all that stuff is happening. And I think one of the reasons really truly that I find it challenging is not often because I don’t know what to do, but because the execution of that, if it’s elegant and wonderful like it is in Ocean’s, if it’s an elegant, wonderful, surprising thing, it elevates the movie and if it’s the kind of thing where the audience goes, yeah, yeah, okay, so that’s the part where blah, blah — I think the onus on the level of execution in that particular thing is quite high. I just think they’re not in a — an audience is not in as forgiving a mood.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, you have to write it well.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** [laughs]

**Aline:** The solution to all your writing problems is write things well.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to do that part good.

**Aline:** But I do find, I always think of it as like going down a
rapids thing and then you get there and you’re like, oh, you know, here it is. Rocky shoals.

**John:** Part of the challenge may be with your project, but all projects in that 70 to 90 phase is that you want to sort of keep your hero active. So, right now in your case like she’s opening doors and she’s investigating, but that character doesn’t necessarily know where the end is. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

**Aline:** Exactly. That’s right.

**John:** And I think part of the reason why movies often feel aimless in this part is you’re not communicating to the reader and to the audience what the character is trying to do and where the character thinks they’re headed. And so sometimes you just literally need to put a place or you need to put — explicitly state a goal, like I need proof that he is this person. I need proof that he really did this thing, so we know what they’re really trying to do.

**Aline:** I’ve noticed this a lot in action movies where they wrap their movie up on page 85 and they start a new movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yup. Absolutely.

**Aline:** Every action, I mean, I actually really admired in X-Men it did not feel that way, the latest X-Men. I felt like it was a true continuation. But a bunch of the super hero movies I’ve seen and the action movies I’ve seen recently, it seems like you all just stop at the end of act two and then there’s new creatures, and new stakes. And then they go to a… — And that’s a note. In the third act you often go to a new setting, a new environment.

**Craig:** I actually don’t love that syndrome. And I think that’s part of the new creature of movie as theme ride theme room.

**Aline:** That’s exactly how it feels. It’s like that thing where you’re in that strap in a ride and you get around the corner and you see that last thing.

**Craig:** Right, you’re like, oh, I thought I was done, but there’s one more thing. You know, and that’s fine. But for an integrated story that you’re telling, I think, John’s got the exact right advice. There’s a — even if the character doesn’t have clarity, that’s good. But the audience needs clarity.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And you need clarity to know what the hell you need to do.

**Aline:** She doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but you don’t want the audience to be like, “What is she doing?”

**Craig:** Right. Even if she sets an artificial thing up, okay, I’m giving myself 48 hours. I’m like a jury now. I’m going to collect evidence over 48 hours and then I’m going to render a verdict. Verdict: you’re not good; I’m dumping you.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** Another possibility would be to shift POV. So, if your
story has really locked POV to one character —

**Aline:** That’s when you can switch.

**John:** That might be the right moment to switch and actually see things from the other point of view.

**Aline:** Listen, you guys are very expensive, so if we do a lot more of this on the air I’m going to be owing you guys a lot of dough.

**Craig:** Uh, you already do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Aline:** That’s a great idea because you know what’s funny —

**Craig:** As John Gatins says, “The meter is running.”

**Aline:** It’s funny when you have a single perspective movie, it does get exhausting. And that’s a great kind of technical tip just to try, even if you don’t end up keeping it, which is go to the other lead, go to the other main relationship and write what they’re doing for awhile and see if that is — because that creates a nice intriguing mystery for the audience, which is you want to get back to your lead. That’s an excellent tip.

**John:** One of the other exercises I do with people when I’m sitting down and talking about their scripts is I’ll ask them like, okay, you have written a thriller here, but let’s imagine this as a crazy comedy. Let’s imagine this as a western. This imagine this in a completely different genre.

**Aline:** Yes

**John:** And sometimes you’ll figure out what the beats would be in that other kind of genre and that you won’t necessarily be able to apply those directly, but it will get you thinking in different ways.

So, in your case, if your movie is predominately not a thriller, but these are thriller moments, like let’s talk about the real thriller of this, and then you can sometimes bend those elements back into your —

**Aline:** Well, I don’t think it’s funny because this is sort of what Lindsay Doran’s thing is, but every movie I’ve written in any genre, you always start going — someone always says, or you say to yourself, “This is really a love story about these two people.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** All movies are.

**Aline:** Always. All movies are.

**Craig:** If they’re done right.

**Aline:** They’re always a love story between two people.

**John:** 21 Jump Street is a love story.

**Aline:** Sometimes you have the wrong people. I mean, name any movie we love, ET, even movies that are — every Hitchcock movie. I mean, they’re love stories.

**John:** Cast Away.

**Craig:** All movies have a central relationship. All of them. And knowing your central relationship and playing that through. And she has this great thing. She talks about how some movies it’s do a thing, and then you get the relationship. And some movies the relationship is the thing.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Which I love. I love both kinds.

**Aline:** That’s great.

**Craig:** But I think it’s not — the Rocky Shoals aren’t so rocky. You know, we know this because we get through them. Once you’re done with it, and you’ve fixed it, and you know what you’re doing and you’ve solved that problem, when you look back you go, “There’s no rocks. There’s no shoals.”

**Aline:** Yeah, well, of course. Any writing problem once you fix it it’s like why was that a problem, yeah.

**Craig:** So, I guess my point is that over time, we’ve been doing this long enough to know, when you get to that place, see if you can’t subtract the fear of it from the equation. The answer may come, I don’t know if it will be a better answer, but it will probably come quicker. I do believe that. I believe that relaxing and not tensing up will probably make it go faster. I love speed.

**John:** Yeah, speed is good.

**Craig:** Speed.

[Episode 392]

**John:** Cool. Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. And this came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel she flew off into space and they changed it so she flew off into space with some other characters. And it was an important change and sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.
And it got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written that last moment, that last beat, has changed from the pitch to the screenplay to the movie. And I sort of want to focus on why that moment is so important and also why it tends to change so much.

**Craig:** Interesting. And it’s funny because for me because I’m obsessed with that moment it actually rarely doesn’t change – it doesn’t change much for me.

**John:** OK.

**Craig:** But that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

**John:** I start with it, too. And so as I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end beat. And so when I pitched it to Disney and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry that last line, the last image of that last moment. It’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed in ways that things change.

But I would say even the movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, you know, we shot the script, those last moments and sometimes the last image really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s deliberated to.
So let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

**Craig:** Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. You know, I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms. Somebody rides off into the sunset. So the last shot really is about sunsets. But of course it’s not.
For me the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment. We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships. And she would cite how sometimes she would ask people well what was the last image of some movie, The Karate Kid, and a lot of people don’t remember it is Mr. Miyagi’s face. Proud. It’s Daniel and then Mr. Miyagi looking at each other and there’s pride.

So, figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be. And you can’t get there unless you kind of know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey. A character leaving home and getting to some place. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. And that destination is generally that last beat, that last moment, that last image. And so of course you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process of where do you want to end up. And way back in Episode 100 there was a listener question and someone asked us I have a couple different ideas for movies and I’m not sure which one I should start writing. And my answer was you should pick the one with the best ending because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to you’re very likely to either stop writing it or get really off track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. So, having a clear sense of this is where I think the movie lands is crucial. It’s like the plane is going to land on this runway tells you, OK, I can do a bunch of different stuff but ultimately I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place. You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

**Craig:** John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment and the teacher said you need to draw a circle, and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?
**John:** I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson is how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think about what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

**Craig:** No. Absolutely horrendous. If you ask me to draw a circle you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. And the reason I bring this up is because to me the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning. The beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle.

If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either. That you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where, I think, people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script because they realize that the story has developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.
One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I think it’s Pink Floyd The Wall. And Pink Floyd The Wall, they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did, and one of the games they play in Pink Floyd The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song and then someone says, “We came in.” And then at the very end, the very end, they’re playing the song and it finishes and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” And that’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s life, but it also was satisfying. You felt things were connected and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant.

It’s the way frankly Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come around with that last final look.

**John:** Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle where there’s a circle and there’s these little lines across it that characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about story that way.
That’s not quite what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’re talking about how in general a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed. And so just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way.

So it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. So that’s what we’re talking about, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

**Craig:** No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, oh, here’s the variable. Where we begin is the control. Our character is the variable. Start at the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. And sometimes it’s very profound.
You know, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed and that’s your character.

**John:** So, I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, OK, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended and there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy. And it’s like, OK, this is the journey that we went on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. And yes he’s physically in the same space but he’s a completely different character in that same space and has a different appreciation for what’s happened.
And so being able to go back to previous locations where things have happened you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last beat and how the last beat has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character over the course of the journey.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you would not – reading Arlo Finch you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer, but he does.

**John:** [laughs] It’s really shocking for middle grade fiction.

**Craig:** Well it is. But then when you look back you go, oh yeah, you know what, he was laying the groundwork for that all along. It actually makes sense. He’s a nightmare. Then there’s the
Dark Finch trilogy that comes next. Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not a bad idea.

**John:** Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

**Craig:** You should do it.

**John:** I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books about his assassin.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Silver Bear.

**John:** Silver Bear.

**Craig:** Silver Bear. Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric. I love it.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I love it. So, you know, when I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this. But what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is I think my favorite feature script, and so of course it hasn’t been made. They make the other ones, not those. The last shot to me was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. You know, it’s a coming of age story and the last shot when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who is no longer with you.
And I go, OK, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion. And I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it that can change.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** And often changes frequently. But this is an area where I think movies sometimes fail because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome, so a writer will have an intention like I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention. And here is how I would execute it.

Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny.” And the intention is gone. And then you get to the movie and you show it and people go, “Well, the ending.” And you’re like, yeah, the ending, and that writer never really nailed the ending.

**John:** Ha.

**Craig:** You see how it goes? It’s just freaking brutal.

**John:** Yeah. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. So, in the pitch version of it, you know, obviously we talked about in pitches that I would describe it as you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So you’re really talking a lot about the characters and how it starts. And you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff. But you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last beat, because you’re really talking about what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who has watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.

So, in a pitch you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. So that last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the readers to take away from reading the script.

**Craig:** What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is ultimately how do I want them to – I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot, so for instance, let’s say I’m in a room and I’m pitching Star Wars.

What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “And in our last shot our hero receives a medal which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid – I would bring it back to the beginning and say this farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, didn’t know about the Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he can maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last he knows who he is.

See, some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end but not the actual end.

**John:** Well, let’s take your example of Star Wars because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script you actually have to write this scene that gets you to that moment. And so as you’re writing that scene at the last moment you’re looking at what is the medal ceremony like, who is there, what is said, but most importantly what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there. Actually painting out the world so we can see like, OK, this is why it’s going to feel this way. This is clearly the intention behind this scene but also I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end.

And so in the script stage what was sort of a nebulous description of like this is what it’s going to feel like has to actually deliver on that promise.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always wondered – I hate being the guy who’s like would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this – but the last shot of Star Wars is the medal ceremony, right. And then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. But I always wondered what would happen if the last-last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man and kind of starting a new beginning, a new hope. You know, that vibe of returning. I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.
**John:** I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that though it would just feel like one more beat. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal and you had this swell. Whether the journey was this is a kid who is all on his own who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory.

**Craig:** Dead family.

**John:** Dead family. So I think you want to see his joy and excitement rather than sort of the – I would just imagine the music would be very different if he had gone back to Tatooine at the end. It wouldn’t feel like a triumph.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, you’re right. And I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke and Han and Luke. That it’s we’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.

**John:** So let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and 100 days of production there’s finally a cut and you see that last moment in the film and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written on the page doesn’t work. In my experience it’s generally because the movie sort of got – the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page just naturally. And as people are embodying those characters things just feel different. Obviously some scenes get cut, things get moved around. And where you kind of thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up. And so you have to make some sort of change there.

In some cases it’s reshoots. In some cases you’re really shooting a new last scene. You realize this was not the moment that we thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases it is just a matter of this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on? You talk about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried it a bunch of different ways and it would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately Mr. Miyagi was the right choice.

They’re thinking about what does the music feel at this moment. How are we emotionally landing, the payload here. And the music is going to be a big factor. So, there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie. And you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

**Craig:** No question. And this is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan. But if we know the intention and we have married the beginning to the end then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end. You require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. And if we can’t, OK, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances you do get to a place where you realize, oh my god, having gone through this movie it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. OK. So, now we have to think of the beginning, let’s recontextualize what our beginning means and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.
But the ending can never be just – do you know what? “It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

**John:** The danger is a lot of times in test screenings they’ll see like, OK, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little beat, or like an extra thing. And generally people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more, they just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion. And that’s the challenge.

**Craig:** Right. How do you leave them feeling is the biggest.
**John:** So sometimes though the opposite holds true. Just this last week I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film. And he has this really remarkable last shot and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it I was like oh that’s a really great last shot/last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw. But when I looked at the movie I had seen before that I was like, oh yeah, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense. So it was really talking about this is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place. And so therefore you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations and change what we’re following over the course of the movie because doing that you could land at that place and it would feel really meaningful.

**Craig:** Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning. Right? If something is not working in that where your circle is supposed to connect up and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong.

**John:** Ha.

**Craig:** But it’s usually one or the other. And it is I think tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid and this this thing sits atop the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” And, John, you’re absolutely right. Sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

**John:** Yeah. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it and you can get them there.

**Craig:** Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

**John:** All right. That is our discussion of that final moment.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. I’m here with Megana Rao our producer. Megana, why did you pick these segments for today’s episode?

**Megana Rao:** I guess because I’m approaching the rocky shoals in my own project and rewriting it. And so I obviously turn to Scriptnotes for advice.

**John:** All right. So you don’t get enough of me and Craig just talking normally.

**Megana:** Exactly.

**John:** You listen to old back episodes. Now we’re talking about endings so much in this, and I feel like we’re always talking about beginnings in this podcast, like sort of how you get started, how you break the seal and get started writing, but we don’t talk enough about finishing stuff up in terms of your work and your craft. With you and a script how do you – if you’re finished with the day’s work what does it look like and are you just walking away from your laptop? Like when you’re done what do you do?

**Megana:** I feel like if it’s a good day’s work I’m usually pretty hungry. I’m usually pretty hungry or you know sometimes you have that feeling where my mind is still buzzing but there’s nothing in there. I still have a lot of energy in my body so I’ll go for a walk or I’ll workout then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Megana:** But basically just not writing and not looking at my computer.

**John:** Yeah. I think it is important to sort of make a clean break from your writing time to your non-writing time, because you will still have stuff swirling there and you should take some notes. I tend to if I’m sort of writing more or less in sequence or I know what the next thing is I would be writing I’ll take some really quick little notes about what happens next just so I can plan for it, so that my next – I’m trying to do a favor to my future self.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** And put some stuff down there so that Tomorrow John will be able to get some stuff actually written there. In Highland that’s where I would use the synopsis format where there’s little equal signs there. It’s not meant to be real material, but it’s just bullet points for what happens next.

**Megana:** And then the next day are you going back and rereading your work?

**John:** I’m not rereading from the start, but I’ll try to at least reread what I just wrote the day before so I can get a sense of what the flow was. And I will make some small changes in that to get back up to speed and obviously you recognize some things that you didn’t notice the first time. And so you can polish that a little bit. But I will try not to go back too far because otherwise you’re just constantly revising stuff you’ve already worked on and you’re not actually moving the cursor forward.

**Megana:** Totally. And when you finish a writing session do you go back and read those pages?

**John:** Not immediately. Sometimes I will print, like I’ll print them for you so that they’re down there. It’s sort of that closure on that idea. But I will save the file and sort of walk away from the laptop. I’m trying not to focus on it too much.

Now, how about at the end of the day? Are you doing anything at the end of your work day or the end of getting ready for bed that is creative?

**Megana:** I don’t think so. I feel like I’m a night owl and so my best writing time is either 9pm to midnight or 7am to 10am. But we live in a morning-biased world. So most of my nighttime is trying to get my body to sleep when it’s so tough because as soon as the sun goes down I’m just awake.

**John:** Yeah. Classically I was oriented the same way where I was very much a night owl. And I loved to write from like 8pm until 2 in the morning. And sort of once you have kids that stops becoming an option. And also just like you’re trying to have a life and do other things and see friends. It does get in the way of a lot of things. And so I’ve had to much more shift to like, you know, my work life is 9 to 6 as much as possible as I can do.

But, the creative brain is still functioning really well at night and sometimes that stuff is coming up, so I do have as you’ve seen a stack of note cards beside the bed and I will just write down the stuff that’s in my head so I can get it out of my head. And capture it. And that helps me sleep, too, because I’m not trying to keep a loop going in my head of I have to remember this beat or this moment or this line of dialogue. I write it down, get it out of my head, and I have a constant system where I put it on the door, on the floor, by the door so I will see it as I’m headed downstairs in the morning. So I know that I’ve captured it and I won’t forget it and then I don’t have to worry about it.

**Megana:** Yeah, sometimes I’ll journal and write goals or things that I want to write in the morning before I go to bed and that helps me turn that part off.

**John:** Now is that journaling at all like The Artists’ Way, that classic technique of getting stuff out of your brain?

**Megana:** Yeah. I think that that’s where it started, the sort of morning pages of doing the – I’m not doing a full three pages, but as you know I’m such a deep sleeper and my dreams are really intense, so I need to write in the morning to remind myself that I am awake and starting my day. That journaling in the morning helps me make that transition.

**John:** Let’s circle back to where you are at in the script you’re at right now because you said you were in the rocky shoals situation. And is that because you feel like you’re having to shift gears from the first engine of your story to the end game of your story? Or do you feel that you haven’t adequately planned for the section? What kind of stuff are you feeling about the section of the script you’re in right now?

**Megana:** The supporting characters, I feel like I have gotten to know them too much. That my original ending doesn’t feel satisfying anymore.

**John:** That makes a lot of sense. You’re going to discover a lot about your characters over the course of writing, and especially if you’re writing in sequence you spend 70 pages with them and you might have had one plan for them but they’ve told you who they are in ways that’s different as you’ve gotten to this point. Listening back to the segments that you picked for this show, are there any insights from that that you think you can actually use?

**Megana:** In your discussion of the final moment where you talk about getting to this final moment and then having to rewrite your beginning because of that, like I have come to the realization that that is what I’m going to end up having to do.

**John:** It’s giving yourself permission to do that. Because you might have had absolute, fantastic, perfect opening image, opening moment for the story you did not end up writing.

**Megana:** Exactly. Exactly. It is, yeah, it’s a weird feeling and I’m like, ugh, it feels like I have gotten to know these people and now I can’t shut them up.

**John:** Yeah. You’re also suffering from a bit of the curse of knowledge. Because you know who those characters are at page 70 in ways that the audience wouldn’t. So, again, you have all the blessings of wisdom of living with these characters and really knowing who they are, but you have to remind yourself that a person picking up the script for the first time won’t know these things, so you have to introduce them as strangers too.

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s honestly one of the really tricky things about getting through this pass and sort of – it’s not even really your second pass. It’s that draft 1.5 is remembering, oh that’s right, you have information that the normal reader would not have.

**Megana:** Oh. I have to walk away. If this wasn’t on a mic stand I would have dropped it for you. Wait, but did you want to talk about your nighttime rituals?

**John:** So my nighttime ritual is obviously using the cards is really helpful to get stuff out of my head. And if there’s a thing that’s the main thing I’m writing and I don’t have it all figured out I will as I close my eyes to get to sleep I will try to think about that space and be in that space. And I won’t necessarily dream about it but it just reminds me that it’s the most important thing to be working on.

I’ll also write myself some cards like focus on this first tomorrow. As I get started on the day’s work I’ll know like, oh, those are the things I actually really wanted to write. And so the scenes you just read today those came out of cards last night saying like write this scene between these characters, do the new version of this, and that sort of sets the priority, the agenda for what my writing is going to be like the next day. Because as you know it’s just so easy to be distracted from actually getting started doing the work and so to close up a day’s work with notes about what you want to tackle next feels important.

**Megana:** So you’re not writing at night at all?

**John:** I’m almost never writing at night. Unless there’s something urgent I’m almost never writing at night. There have been times where I’ll have to excuse myself, I really do have a great new idea that I want to tackle. But as a parent and husband you can’t do that too often.

**Megana:** Yeah. That makes sense.

**John:** Now, we’ve talked about the end of your writing day, the end of the day, sort of getting ready for bed. But what about finishing up a script? Because at this point you’ve now finished a couple of scripts. And do you have – what is working for you in terms of feeling closure, completion with the stuff you’re writing?

**Megana:** I will usually send it to a friend and then I will like treat myself to something nice, like maybe a nice blouse.

**John:** The equivalent of me treating myself to Panda Express.

**Megana:** Exactly. Like I’ll buy a piece of clothing that I like, or I will go treat myself to a nice dinner.

**John:** Which is I think a smart way to reward yourself. We’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo right now so, or I guess we’ve just started NaNoWriMo, and when I was doing the Arlo Finch book which started as a NaNoWriMo project I loved the daily routing of like OK I have to hit my 1,500 words or 1,600 words in order to hit this goal. But it did feel weirdly artificial because I didn’t necessarily feel like I was achieving any sort of story purpose. It was a very artificial sort of boundary behind stuff.

One thing I do very much like about screenwriting is that a scene begins or it ends. It’s just done and you can have some closure. And there can be short scenes. And there can be short moments that feel intact and full. But getting to the end of an Arlo Finch book was just so amazing because I could just look at all the words that I had done. There wasn’t even time to reread the whole book because it just takes too long to read a whole book. So those feelings of completion, like I actually had some postpartum joy and depression for a week or two after finishing one of those giant books.

**Megana:** There’s such a fleeting moment between feeling so proud of yourself and then being like, wait, was that shit? Now I have to reread it and edit it and face my own writing judgment.

**John:** Yeah. So as we end this segment on endings any thoughts about the next topic that will be good to do as one of these clip shows? Because we hadn’t done clip shows before you became a producer. So, any other things you want to think about? Do you want listener suggestions?

**Megana:** I would love listener suggestions. And to hear what other people are struggling with.

**John:** Yeah. Megana, thank you so much.

**Megana:** Thanks John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 44: Endings for Beginners](https://johnaugust.com/2012/endings-for-beginners)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 152: The Rocky Shoals](https://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 392: The Final Moment](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-final-moment)
* [Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLkqI2UiZJU)
* [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 Henry Adler ([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

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