Search Results for: hero main character protagonist

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/mushroom-powder).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Yes, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 414 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s How Would This Be a Movie with four terrific stories in the news that maybe, just maybe, could become feature films. Plus we’ll be answering some listener questions about narrators, personal crises, and song titles.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** And Craig I thought we would do the questions up front because I always feel like we push the questions to the end and we may rush a bit. So we’re going to lead with the questions with the questions this week.

**Craig:** Yeah. We can really milk the answers. I love it.

**John:** That’s what we’ll do. But, I have news and a favor to ask of all our listenership. So, I’ll post a link here in the show notes, but I am trying to direct a feature film. I think I said this on the podcast before. Part of the reason why I’m not running for the WGA board again is I’m hoping to direct a feature film in these next two years. That film is called The Shadows. The central character in it is Abby. She is 15 years old. She’s smart, resourceful, anxious, and blind. That means I need to find a blind actress who is 15 years old-ish to play this role.

That’s not going to be easy. There’s not just a list of teenage blind actors who are ready to make feature films. So, if you follow through the link you’ll see I have a casting notice up that describes what I’m looking for. It has audition scenes. My hope is that we’re going to find someone who has probably never had the opportunity to act in a feature film before or television who will self-tape and present herself as the possible actress for this role.

But if I cannot find this actress I cannot make a movie. So, if you know an Abby or you think you might know an Abby the place to check out the information is johnaugust.com/casting. That’s where you go to see all the information and the audition scenes and stuff about self-taping of yourself to possibly be cast in this movie.

**Craig:** Good URL. Appropriate. So traditionally the way this would work is casting directors would be sent out into the world and they would cast a wide net and show up in malls and things, trying to just pluck out some diamond from the rough. But now we have these things. We have podcasts and Twitter and social media. So this is a great way to get the word out that you’re looking for somebody like this and I have to presume that there are tons of kids across the United States who are acting, or acting in school productions, or community theater who are blind who will hear this and say, yeah, what about me, John August.

**John:** Yeah, what about you?

**Craig:** What about me?

**John:** So classically the casting director would send out this notice and you might do searches in malls and such, but that’s not going to work for this very specific part. So ultimately there will be a casting director to help do all the other things, but if I cannot find this person it is sort of pointless to do anything more about trying to make this movie. So, this is not the first step. The first step was writing the script. But the second step is trying to find this actress, so that’s what I’m trying to do right now.

Ryan Knighton who was on the show once or twice, a fantastic writer, actually the reason why I met him was because I was writing this script. So that’s how long I’ve been working on this. This predates the Arlo Finch books. But now is the time where I can actually make this movie. So, if you can help me find this actress I’d be much obliged.

**Craig:** Now, here’s a question for you. Let’s say you don’t. Do you scrap the movie?

**John:** We scrap the movie.

**Craig:** You scrap the movie.

**John:** I don’t think you can make the movie kind of any other way. I’ll say that as I started writing this movie it was a real concern. Like is this an idea worth pursuing knowing how hard it will be to find the right person for this part. And I decided to go for it because it’s something I’d never seen before on screen and that’s really interesting to me. I want to make the movie I want to see most, and this is kind of the movie I want to see.

So, that’s why I wrote it and that’s why I’m hoping to be able to direct it.

**Craig:** Well, I think you will find someone. I can’t imagine that you won’t. That doesn’t seem possible. Sight is not required for acting talent. It’s just not. You know, I think of all the things that we do in our business and acting is so interestingly internal. In many ways I would imagine that there’s probably a lot of acting exercises where if you are sighted you close your eyes anyway and try and relate to somebody without the extra cues. So, I would be shocked if you don’t find not just one person but a lot of people. I think you will.

**John:** I hope so, too. And I do think it will be a process of working with this person to figure out a language for how we’re going to do the things we need to do and how to sort of best make this movie happen. If this were a supporting character we might not have the time and resources to make this all possible, but this is the central character and so it’s all going to be about figuring out the best way to make this movie. So, it’s going to be a very collaborative process.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, I’m just thinking ahead to the day you’re there and you’re shooting. I mean, other than figuring out how to assist the actor with hitting a mark. By the way, people probably don’t even know – a lot of people don’t know why this whole thing of the actor has to hit their mark even exists. It’s because film cameras and even the video cameras that we use now like the Alexa and so on and so forth, they don’t have automatic focus the way your iPhone does or an old school video camera because those auto focuses are actually very slow. I mean, you’ve probably noticed that when you’re shooting things that sometimes they’re blurry and then they get – well you’re not allowed to have any blurry ever when you’re making a movie.

So there is a focus puller whose job is to constantly adjust focus depending on how far away from the lens the actor who is being filmed is. So they measure where they are and if there’s a scene where they’re moving then during rehearsal we’ll watch them and then there is an assistant camera person, the camera assistant, who watches them and where they stop that person comes over and puts a little piece of tape down or a little bean bag. And the actor now has to reliably stop there each time because that’s a distance that the focus puller is relying on.

So I could see where if somebody was not sighted you would need to have a little extra assistance there to make sure that they didn’t fall short or go too far depending on their motion. But beyond that I think it’s probably the same as everything else, right?

**John:** Yes. So focus is one small issue. I’m sure they’ll be other things that come up. But I’m mostly just excited to meet this actor and see what she can bring to the part.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Now, Craig, you actually had an unexpected bonus episode of the Chernobyl podcast that just came out today as we’re recording this. Tell us about this episode. And I especially liked your little prologue to it.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you. Surprise episode. So this is my Lemonade. It’s a surprise. Well, we were talking and so the podcast was surprisingly popular. We didn’t necessarily imagine that Chernobyl itself was going to be quite as viewed as it was. And I really didn’t think that the podcast would be quite as listened to as it was. But it was. And that’s very gratifying. And Jared and I were talking and he suggested kind of a little bit of a bonus, OK now that the show has come and aired and has been viewed and occupied a space could we/should we discuss it.

And so we got Peter Sagal back and Jared joined us. And I think maybe a day after or two days after we recorded it all of a sudden there was this news story and, huh, a nuclear explosion in Russia that they weren’t telling us about. Well that’s familiar. So I did a quickie solo prologue and, yes, that is available this morning. So if you subscribed to the Chernobyl podcast you got a little ding on your phone this morning. But if you don’t it’s available on all podcast platforms in the known universe, including YouTube and Stitcher and all the other ones that John knows I don’t know.

**John:** And we’ll also put a link to it in the show notes so people can follow through there. Because sometimes people are meticulous and they delete subscriptions just so they don’t have old things sitting around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can follow through there. One final bit of news. There’s been an issue with the app, the Scriptnotes app for the premium listeners. Folks both on the Android side and on the iOS side have written in with some problems. So, if you are having problems with the app the general advice I can give you is make sure you’re using the most recent version of it. If you’re still having a problem write into the ask@johnaugust.com account and Megana can help steer you towards some resources or at least get reported to the actual folks who manufacture those apps to make sure that we get those bugs fixed. Sorry for anybody who is having problems.

**Craig:** Was the bug that somehow some of the money was going to me?

**John:** No. It was not a money flow issue. It was simply an authorization token.

**Craig:** So that bug remains is what you’re saying? The bug of money not going to me.

**John:** That bug – that is a feature not a bug.

**Craig:** [laughs] I am a feature not a bug.

**John:** You are a feature not a bug. Some follow up. Why writes in, “As a longtime fan of the show I believe you guys have made me a better writer. But that sadly cannot be empirically proven. My body weight however is easy to accurately measure. A few months ago I listened back to Episode 50, How to not be Fat. And John’s diet, slow carb, sounded really simple and easy. Having never attempted a diet before I went in with no expectations but the change was instantaneous. Now some four months later I’ve already lost over 30 pounds. So this is a thank you for helping me to not be fat at the very least.”

Craig, can you even remember back to Episode 50?

**Craig:** No, I thought we started at Episode 51. I don’t know if we even did this. What are these first episodes? They might be other guys.

**John:** I think this was like a random advice episode. I think this was maybe not a traditional craft and character arcs. But we did talk about it. I remember discussing it and back at that time I was doing this slow carb diet which is like the Atkins diet. It’s like all these things where essentially you eat fats and proteins and not a lot of carbohydrates. And it works. And at that point I was eating a lot of black beans and eggs. And you will lose weight if you do that.

I’m not doing that right now, but I’m sort of mindful of those things and I try not to eat a lot of carbs that I don’t need to eat. So, if you want to go back and do that, great. But we’re not really a good diet and health advice podcast.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. There are four billion of those. Listen to one of those waste of times. Because we would like to waste your time in different ways.

**John:** Yeah. But Why I’m happy for you that you‘ve lost this weight. I would encourage you to find other ways other than just a diet to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Because just eating alone is not enough.

**Craig:** Yes. Meth is not recommended. You will lose a lot of weight. A lot of weight with meth.

**John:** A tremendous amount. Because teeth – teeth are heavy, too.

**Craig:** Just the teeth alone.

**John:** Those last ounces, just pop them out one by one.

**Craig:** Yeah, man.

**John:** Tic-Tacs.

**Craig:** Meth. I mean, who doesn’t know not to do meth still?

**John:** My hunch is that some people who do meth – this is me talking with absolutely no expertise.

**Craig:** I like this. Go for it.

**John:** My hunch is that people who find themselves doing meth often don’t know they’re doing meth when they start doing meth or they’re coming from some other drug and when that drug is no longer available that’s how they’re ending up at meth. That’s just a guess. I’ve done no research or Googling before saying that.

**Craig:** Your theory is that no one is really sitting down and going, right, so I don’t have drug problems and I’m aware that this is meth. Let’s go. You’re saying that’s probably not happening.

**John:** I think that’s probably not the default pathway into meth abuse.

**Craig:** Well, meth. How about some questions. Should I start with Alison from Atlanta?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Alison from Atlanta asks, “I’m in the planning phases of my screenplay and I’ve come to fork in the road about whether or not to use a narrator. I’ve heard the argument that it’s lazy writing as you’re telling instead of showing, which I understand, but some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully. I feel like it could be especially useful when there is significant dissonance with how a character feels inside versus how they are behaving. Do you have any advice for when the narration is useful or when it detracts from the story?”

John, what’s your advice for Alison?

**John:** The only project I’ve had that I think has a narrator – I take that back. Two projects I’ve used narrators for. The first is Big Fish. The second is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In both cases they were really, really helpful. But let’s take a look at why. In Big Fish that narrator is sort of the voice of Edward Bloom, the storyteller who is bridging between the real world and the fantasy world. It starts kind of in the real world and drifts into the fantasy world. Helpful for that. Could you do the movie without the narrator? Yes. But it is useful.

Second movie is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is very much a fairy tale, a storybook telling of this boy’s quest and Willy Wonka. In those cases, useful.

Those are situations where I think the narrator is helpful. Unfortunately we encounter so many movies and scripts where voiceover or narration has been applied in post. It was not part of the initial conception of the storytelling. And, wow, you can tell.

**Craig:** Yeah. Narration sometimes is a Band-Aid. But I want to say, Alison, when you say some of my favorite movies or TV shows use narration really successfully, that’s the answer to your question. Anybody who makes the argument that narration is inherently lazy writing, as you “telling instead of showing” is wrong. And you should tell them to their faces that they’re wrong. And that probably everything else that they say after that should be considered invalid. Because it’s the most ridiculous thing to say. Narration is a perfectly good tool if it’s used properly.

Like you, John, I have not written a lot of things that have narration in them, but I remember the first thing I wrote with narration was a movie based on a Philip Dick short story. This is many, many years ago. And it’s one of my favorite things that I’ve written, so of course it didn’t get made. But the hero was an immigrant who did not speak English. He was an Italian immigrant. He didn’t speak English. And the story itself had a kind of romantic fairy tale quality to it so a narrator felt appropriate. He was able to kind of fill in some things when the character was alone and wouldn’t necessarily be speaking in his own language. And if he did why would we subtitle. There’s a lot of weirdness in there. But it was mostly the fairy tale-ness of it that seemed to call for a narrator.

Similarly when you talk about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it is kind of a modern fairy tale. It is clearly taking place in a world that is a pushed version of our own. So the storybook aspect of it feels worth honoring and acknowledging. So, go for it Alison. If it feels right then do it. And if you’re doing it because it’s just convenient, or solving some problems, maybe not.

**John:** I would encourage people to think about the movie Clueless without Cher’s narration. It would be unwatchable. You would not like Cher in that movie if you did not have the ability to see inside of her head. And that’s really what it is. It’s honestly kind of like giving that protagonist a song in a musical. It’s allowing you to expose what they’re not saying to everybody else in the scene. So that may be another situation where you need to use it.

**Craig:** Correct. And if you think about Fleabag which is spectacular, all of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s little discourse to camera to us, that’s narration. That’s what that is. The fact that she’s filmed doing it but talking to us doesn’t change the fact that it’s narration. And we don’t mind it, we love it. Because it fits. It makes sense.

Goodfellas needs narration. Narration – probably the same exercise worth doing. Watch Goodfellas and every time the narration starts hit mute. It just won’t work. Or it won’t work as well.

**John:** All right. Nicole asks, “I live in one of the cities that was recently devastated by a mass shooting. As I’m sure you can imagine you the depth and breadth of emotion in the aftermath is sometimes overwhelming. I have an appointment with my therapist and we’ll work through it with her, but in the meantime I’ve got a draft due to a producer I’ve never worked with before. Normally I’m super responsible about hitting deadlines, but it’s really hard to get my head into writing comedy right now so I’m struggling to get pages out and I am falling behind. How do you overcome your personal life crises when you have to get your work done? Should I let the producer know that the draft might be delayed or wait and see if I can get back on track soon? The draft is due in about two weeks.”

Craig, what advice would you have for Nicole?

**Craig:** Well, first of all fantastic question. And I’ve been there. Happily I haven’t been there a lot. But when it happens it happens. And I think Nicole your sense that this is not mentally doable for you needs to be listened to and respected. Yeah, you could soldier through it but would it be good? And is it good for you?

When this has happened to me, when there have been incidents in my own life – I just went through one myself again with my family – where either someone is ill or there is a crisis or trauma that befalls you or around you or you just on your own without any cause slip into a clinical depression or an unmanageable state of anxiety it is absolutely fair to call people up and say I need two weeks, because I need two weeks. This is where I am. This the page I’m on. This is why I need the two weeks, without getting into super-duper detail. I will be back after those two weeks and then I will finish.

There are not many things that will work as well as a break. And what you don’t want to do is turn your work, your writing, the thing that you love and that you rely on into a burden or more fuel for dysfunction and misery. John, what do you think?

**John:** Your advice is absolutely correct. And what I would caution Nicole to do is not to wait until the actual due date to lob in that email or that phone call, because then it just looks like, oh, you just ran out of time and now you’re telling us.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this is the time to reach out to that producer, even if it is a person you’ve not worked with before, and explain the situation. In this case you have – I don’t want to say the advantage – but because it’s a public event that everyone can see it’s pretty clear that there’s a basis behind this. That you’re not just making an excuse.

It can be tougher when it’s just your own thing. When it’s something in your own family that you don’t want to discuss. When it’s clinical depression coming up. When you’re having problems that can’t be sort of externally verified I know it’s scarier to reach out and make that call, but you got to reach out and make that call. And you need to do it before the time is up.

If you have an agent, manager, lawyer, someone else who is also on your side, a different producer if it’s about the studio, it’s worth clueing them in to just so that they have a sense of what you’re going through so that they can back you up a bit.

**Craig:** And you are working in a business that’s full of people that have all sorts of emotional issues and mental health issues. And after all you’re also working in a business that pedals emotion. That is our product. So the fact that you are a feeling person, that you have a sensitivity – that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature right?

You don’t have that thing that actors have where they can use their crisis to pump out tears on film or if they’re having a terrible, tragic day it theoretically could be turned to their advantage. Writing requires a lot of mental energy. It requires focus and attention. It’s spinning 12 plates at once. There’s a lot of logic going on. And then also all of that emotion. I think in general you will be met well by people. They will not say to you, “No, I want you to finish it anyway. You can’t take two weeks off.” Because at that point they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot. What are they going to do, complain to you then when they get the script and don’t like it? You told them. You warned them.

Also, there’s really nothing they can do about it. You can just get sick for two weeks. If you feel, by the way, this is for anyone, that you’re working for people who truly will not get it, then lie. If somebody is so miserable as to not understand the validity of an emotional crisis then just tell them or having your agent or representative or manager tell them that you have a physical illness that is going to last two weeks. Because they can’t argue with that.

It’s a shame that sometimes you have to do that. But if somebody is going to be a total jerk about it then they forfeit their right for you to be completely honest and forthcoming.

**John:** I think that’s all true. The last thing I want to say is that just making that phone call or that email and telling them that this thing could come in late in my own experience has relieved so much anxiety on my side about the fact that I’m worried that I’m going to be late that it made the writing a lot easier. So some of what you’re actually feeling is the panic over a what if I can’t actually deliver this on time. And so by tipping them off that you may not be able to deliver this on time you’ve lowered the stress on yourself and you may actually be able to do the work that you need to do and be happy about the draft you’re turning in.

**Craig:** No question. Sometimes you say I need two weeks and they say sure. And then two days later you’re like I’m good. What you really needed was two days. And that’s the thing. You’re right. The worst feeling for writers is feeling that they have to write and yet they can’t do their best work. That’s a terrible feeling.

So, whatever you need to do to not have that feeling, do it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** OK. So we’ve got one more question. This is from Seth who asks, “My question is about using a song as the basis for a movie. For example, if I decide to write a quirky rom-com about a grungy mechanic from the Lower East Side who meets a beautiful society girl from Central Park West and I call it Uptown Girl, do I owe Billy Joel a credit or money? I know that if the song is licensed that will cost. But what about the concept?” Well that’s an interesting question. Hmm, John, any thoughts on that one? We’ll be pretend lawyers for the moment.

**John:** We’ll be pretend lawyers. I think you’re in real jeopardy if you call that movie Uptown Girl. Uptown Girl is a title that everybody knows. It’s very clear that it’s inspired by that song. No, Seth, no. Don’t do it.

So, if a song inspires you, so if you wanted to do a movie about a mechanic and a society girl, you could do that probably pretty safely because it’s going to be generic enough that like there’s nothing in the song that you’re actually taking from that. But you call that movie Uptown Girl and you just put a giant crosshair on your back.

Honestly, if your movie has nothing to do with the song but you call it Uptown Girl you’re probably going to be getting some heated emails from some people who are not too happy about that. I don’t think that’s a safe choice. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure where the legal line is per se, but you actually don’t want to find out. They’re going to make a problem for you. The point is that usually speaking the stories of songs in and of themselves aren’t really copyright – I mean, they’re copyrightable. Of course, lyrics are copyrighted. But the story inherent to those can be duplicated without fear of infringement.

For instance, I’m thinking of a good old story song like the Pina Colada song. Escape (The Pina Colada Song). So most people know the story of that ridiculous song. A guy gets tired of his marriage to his wife, so he is looking for singles ads, or I guess he writes a singles ad. Yeah, that’s what he does. He puts an ad looking for somebody who likes the following things, including Pina Coladas in the rain, and then somebody responds back and says, “I love all those things. Let’s meet.” And so he goes to a bar to meet up with this new woman that he’s going to cheat on his wife with and lo and behold it’s his wife. And then they laugh weirdly, which would not actually happen. In real life it would be a rocket ship to divorce.

But regardless, because it’s just bizarre, but the story of somebody looking to cheat on his wife and swiping right and ending up with his wife, anybody could do that. That idea is not intellectual property. If you call it The Pina Colada movie and he’s talking about Pina Coladas in the rain then oh yeah you’ve got a problem.

So I agree with you. I don’t see the point. I don’t really think the title Uptown Girl is so important to that concept anyway. If it’s the only attractive thing about that idea, well then you kind of are leaning on the Billy Joel-ness of it all and I would think he’d have a reasonable argument to make.

**John:** So titles we talked about before are – the whole process of getting titles cleared is complicated and there’s a whole division that sort of approves which movies can have which title. But it is complicated by songs. And I’ve been through several situations on movies and other projects where a title we would have wanted is a famous song. It becomes arguable like are we using it in reference to that song or not. It becomes complicated. Don’t call your movie Uptown Girl unless you’re making a Billy Joel related movie I would say.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. All right. Let’s talk about movies we do want to make. This is a segment we do every once in a while called How Would This Be a Movie where people send us stories that are in the news and we talk about them the only way we know how to talk about them is how do we turn these into narrative feature films or perhaps TV series. This time we have four of them because there were four really good ones and I just couldn’t winnow it down.

Different people sent in different things. I’m not going to credit who sent stuff through because in some cases it was multiple people. But they’re all compelling in different ways.

So let’s start with a podcast I listened to this past week. It is by Willa Paskin for Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast. She is a terrific writer and these are really well-produced episodes. I really loved listening to the whole podcast series. The one this week was about the soft serve wars. So the Mr. Frosty trucks both in Midtown, Manhattan but also in China and sort of the war of turf, of different companies competing, and break off groups, and the history of soft serve ice cream. I thought there was a lot of compelling stuff here. Craig, how did you feel about this as story material?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting world. And it occurred to me you probably didn’t have this, right? I mean, where you were growing up in Colorado?

**John:** No, we didn’t have soft serve trucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. We had them everywhere. So on Staten Island, and this extends throughout New York in every part of New York, you would have these trucks. And there were two trucks that would come by. One was the Good Humor man. So he had the Good Humor brand of ice cream.

**John:** And Good Humor was hard ice cream?

**Craig:** It was. It was incredibly hard. It was the hardest of ice creams. It was so hard. And then there was the Mister Softee truck who would come by, and that was the soft serve. And frankly I did prefer the Mister Softee. It just didn’t come by as often. And they would play their songs. They had their little jingles. And we would get very excited and run after the truck.

So, right off the bat I think one of the issues with this is that it’s not necessarily a universal experience. The notion of this kind of turf war over this particular kind of product. It does feel a little niche to me. Obviously when people are trying to do it China studios get very excited when something may appeal to a Chinese audience, because they’re greedy. But I’m a little concerned about that.

The story though that this brought to mind, when you were a kid, John, did you ever read a book called The Push Cart War?

**John:** Called The Push Cart War. Yes!

**Craig:** Do you remember that one?

**John:** We said it at the same time. I do absolutely. And they had little pea shooters and they were shooting out the truck tires I believe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I do remember The Push Cart War. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It reminded me a lot of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, The Push Cart War is basically a classic story of the little guy versus the big guy. And the little vendors versus the big trucks. And in this case I could certainly see a kind of comedy – I think it would have to be a comedy – of competing ice cream vendors who are at each other’s throats scrapping over the last nickel and dime. And then they have to face a common enemy which is, I don’t know, suddenly a Starbucks or some massive corporation is taking over by sending their new things in which is better and bigger supposedly. So it becomes mom and pop, little guy versus the big guy, and maybe there’s a little bit of an allegory of the way that capitalism gets people on the lower rungs to beat each other up and leave a space for the big guy to just waltz in.

But I’m not sure – I’m a little worried about the whole ice cream aspect of it because I just don’t know if people in like you say Boulder or Denver are going to say, oh yeah, ice cream trucks. I think they might go, “Ice cream trucks?” That’s a problem.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that universality. Because even in the intro here I said Mr. Frosty rather than Mister Softee because I didn’t know that as a thing.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That’s how little I knew about that. But I don’t know that this lack of universality really is necessarily a problem because I think, you know, I could imagine the start of this story very quickly setting up important it is for this community and really establishing the worlds. Because so many movies we see, like I don’t know anything about sort of how baseball mathematics works, but the movie is going to teach me how to care about that.

You know, there’s so many movies involve characters who are experts in things I don’t know anything about and that’s part of the experience of watching the movie. So I’m not so worried about the lack of universality in the sense of like places that don’t have ice cream trucks as long as I can establish why it’s important for these people who are selling ice cream and these people who are buying ice cream.

There were three kind of main threads and I think you’d have to pick one of them to make a movie. There’s the guys who are trying to start a Mister Softee business in China. And so that’s – you can picture that one. You’re trying to build something within a bureaucracy which is really complicated and you’re trying to explain to people what it is that you’re doing.

It was fascinating in the podcast talking about how McDonalds and I think KFC were the only places that were serving soft serve at that point and they had separate walk up drive-thru windows for just soft serve ice cream because it was so new and unusual there at the time they were launching. So China is one possibility and the rise and fall of that company.

Then the tension between the Mister Softee trucks and the competing brands within Midtown Manhattan. It’s probably a comedy. It’s probably like Adam Sandler is the godfather. Sort of a turf war kind of thing and it seems silly but these people are taking it really seriously. That section of the movie, I don’t know about you, but I got sort of PTSD trying to think about the logistics of shooting in Midtown Manhattan and how you’re getting all these trucks in Midtown Manhattan. The filming of it freaked me out.

**Craig:** By shooting in Toronto, of course. [laughs]

**John:** That’s naturally how you would do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But they’ll get the New York City tax credit. And finally the single character who is probably the most compelling and interesting is a woman they interview. She’s the ice cream woman who took over her dad’s route. He was a Good Humor man who then had a soft serve truck. And so she’s the – actually she doesn’t have a soft serve truck. She’s still selling traditional ice cream in Brooklyn.

She had a fantastic voice. She just felt like a really compelling character. For a single protagonist this woman trying to defend her father’s route feels like a through line. But I don’t know if any of these are compelling enough movies that I’m rushing out on a Friday night to see them.

**Craig:** No. I think it would require – I think you probably got closest with the idea of Sandler. Of a comedic star taking something that’s small like the Water Boy and making it into something epic. I mean, Tim Herlihy is a genius at doing stuff like that and I could easily see Tim writing a really funny movie that’s centered around Mister Softee versus Good Humor, which is just already I’m kind of giggling at it. It sounds like a funny idea.

So that’s probably the closest I would think to actually getting it made. I mean, this other last little component of this is that there is – for those of us who grew up in New York – there’s a lot of nostalgia to it. There’s a strange kind of connection to the past with those trucks when I see them walking around, even as an adult, and I would see the Mister Softee. The logo is like a cone that’s got soft serve but he’s got a face like in the cone. And just his face warms my heart. It just does. His dumb, stupid cone face makes me happy.

**John:** Yeah. I also got thinking about sort of what’s the color scheme, what’s the world, like what’s happening in the day. It got me thinking back to Do the Right Thing which is an incredibly hot day and sort of what it feels like to have an ice cream truck on that hot day and sort of like passing through these neighborhoods. What would it feel like and what does it feel like to be the guy on the truck? And it’s a cash business and so you’re always vulnerable that way. The staking out of corners. Even if it’s not done as heavy drama, it felt like there were dramatic moments in there. There were reversals. That felt interesting and I think doing it – probably knocking it back a few years and setting it period is helpful for that way, just because you get the benefit of nostalgia and a simpler time when we didn’t have Uber and Postmates and all the other things that got you your ice cream. You might be waiting for that truck to come.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve decided. This is going to be set in the ‘70s or ‘80s. Tim Herlihy is writing it. Sandler is in it. It feels like it’s going to Netflix. Sandler has got that huge deal at Netflix. I’m in. I’m watching that movie. What do we get for – do we get money for this? Do you we get money when they? Yeah, you know what? They’ll have to send us money. Yeah. Money.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve made a lot off this.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** All right. So our next story is about Zimbabwe’s female rangers. It’s a story in the National Geographic by Lindsay M. Smith, photos by Brent Stirton. So this talks about an all-female wildlife ranger team, the Akashinga. And so they are the defenders of the animals within this region. It’s a non-profit international anti-poaching foundation. The Phundundu Wildlife Area is 115-square-mile former trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley ecosystem.

We’ll summarize some stuff in here, but it’s worth clicking through for the photos because I thought the photos were actually one of the most fascinating parts of this. Craig, what did you take from the female ranger’s article?

**Craig:** Well, I thought that this was a chance to do something more than what it was. I actually – the value here to me is that it can be allegorical. And I do like these stories where it seems like, OK, this is pretty straight up. It’s about women who are fighting off poachers to protect animals. That’s a very nice thing. Who cannot like that? That’s very sweet. But in and of itself there’s the problem. It feels a little just saccharine. Right? Like, ah, cool, women are doing that. And they’re beating poachers. And everyone hates poachers. And they’re saving animals. Hooray.

But I think there’s probably an interesting story to be told underneath where these characters who are doing this are in their own way reclaiming something about their lives that was taken from them. This is not easy. Living in Zimbabwe isn’t always easy. That country has been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe, a dictator and a thug, for decades. And that part of Africa is a tough area to live. And being a woman in any part of Africa seems like it’s an additional challenge.

And so there is a chance to tell the story where it’s not just well-minded women go, you know what, we’re defending these elephants, but rather it’s women who have lost a certain kind of power or have been traumatized or who have been marginalized finding a way to reclaim some power and defend something of great value. And ideally – ideally – have a really positive portrayal of Africa, because we don’t get it a lot. We get a lot of Blood Diamonds. We get a lot of Ghosts in the Darkness or whatever that movie was with the lions. We don’t get a lot of this. And I think that’s really – that’s what you’d hope for.

And they do hint at this in the article. They point out that a number of these women have suffered trauma. They either were orphaned by parents who died of AIDS. Or they were victims of sexual assault or domestic abuse or abandonment. And so I think that’s where I would kind of come at it. And I do think actually this could be pretty cool. I could see this being a movie.

**John:** I could see this being a movie, too. And I agree with you that focusing on the women is clearly the way to tell this story. You want to see why they are doing this and why they are better suited for this task than men would be. And so the article does talk some about that in the sense of when they’re trained to do this they just do a better job, because they’re better able to work with the community. They have these automatic weapons but they don’t turn to those automatic weapons as sort of the first way to get a problem solved. And they work well together as a community, so that is crucial. I think that’s really the center of the storytelling.

In this short story we meet Sgt. Vimbai Kumire. So she’s one of the main women we follow in this story. But Enterprise World also meet Damien Mander. So he’s described as a “tattoo-covered Australian and former special forces soldier who has trained game rangers in Zimbabwe for more than a decade.” And he’s one of those characters who seems kind of interesting and compelling at the start, and yet I kind of don’t want him in the movie. My concern is that no matter what you try to do with this character he’s going to feel like the white savior guy. And that’s the thing I want to see least in this movie is the outsider who tells people how to do something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So in focusing on this I’d want to find a way to tell the story honesty but that focuses on the women themselves and feels like it’s them solving this issue and not some outsider telling them how to solve this issue.

**Craig:** An alternative way to approach that is to accept the truth of it and then use that to address the white savior-ness of it. Meaning in reality this guy I assume was very useful and he helped trained them. But he’s not the one out there doing it. He’s not the one putting himself on the line. He’s not the one who is going to stay. This isn’t his country. And pointing that out I think is reasonable.

There is a limitation to the value of those people. But there is also real value to them. And that’s interesting. I think even a relationship – and I wouldn’t have it be a romantic relationship in any way, shape, or form – but a relationship between one of the leaders or a leading character of the women and him which is a relationship of mistrust and concern specifically for that reason. Because remember Zimbabwe was not always Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe was Rhodesia not so long ago. And the idea of addressing certain aspects of colonialism and asking how do we move forward and how do we live or work together with this behind us is an interesting one.

So there’s an alternative point of view to embrace it and face it head on. But I agree the one thing you can’t do is this old school thing of white guy shows up, teaches black people how to be better Africans, and then leaves. That’s – we don’t do that no more.

**John:** That’s not going to work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I think what we’re both saying is neither of us want this guy to be protagonist or antagonist in the story. He can be a character in the story. He can serve a function, but he should not serve one of those primary functions because that is something we’ve seen a lot and it becomes – I just get the bad kind of goosebumps when I see that.

**Craig:** Bad bumps. Nobody wants bad bumps.

**John:** Nobody wants bad bumps.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Where does this movie go? Where do we see this kind of movie happening?

**Craig:** Well, this is a movie that if done at a certain level and a certain way could earn a theatrical release because it theoretically could be quite prestigious. I could see it being an award-y kind of movie depending on how it’s done. It could also just be a very down the middle obvious treatment of this material. With all of these movies it’s always more likely that they’re going to be done on a streaming platform because that’s the world we live in. There’s no superheroes in it. Nothing blows up.

But, there is still a space for independent film and even for major studios releasing independently made films that address issues like this, have really interesting casts. I think you can cast this really well. Now more than ever there are some awesome actors of African descent, both American and Caribbean and British. And, of course, African. So there’s a lot of really cool opportunities. I think it could actually be a theatrical movie, but it would need independent love I would think.

**John:** I think you’re right. I could see a Participant or sort of an outside financier being a key player in this to make it happen at a budget level where you can sort of get the production values you really want to see there.

I would say of all the movies we’ve done on a How Would This Be a Movie before it reminded me somewhat of the California firefighter story we read.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** About the female inmates who were California firefighters. In which you a have a setting and a world but you need to pick very specific characters within that story to follow. And we don’t have them quite yet. We have sort of a sense of placeholders for people who could be there, but we don’t have actual characters with journeys. And so any writer who is approaching this is going say like, OK, here is the backdrop, here’s the world. I need to create an entire story. I need to import a story into this or do the firsthand research to figure out what are the stories I can tell that actually have beginnings, middles, and ends and characters who go through transformations. Because we’re not seeing that in this story so far.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this may just be a matter of personal preference but I think I would rather see this movie than the firefighter movie, just because I find the subject matter more interesting and I get to see somewhere I don’t know and learn things I don’t know and be with people that I don’t know. And it’s not that I know those women, but I know California, I know brush fires, I know firefighters. A lot of this we have experience with it. It’s not foreign to us. And I’m attracted by things that are foreign because you learn more. I just do. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to do Chernobyl. It was not American. It seemed like an opportunity.

**John:** Here’s what’s also great about this story is that as you’re watching this you are aware that the danger to these women could come from any direction. So it could come from other humans in the world. It could come from animals. It could come from gunshots. It could come from poachers. There’s a lot of things that could happen and stand in the way or endanger any of the characters we care about in the story.

In the firefighter movie we’re afraid of the fire mostly.

**Craig:** Fire. Yeah.

**John:** And so we can see that coming. Where we can’t always see bullets coming. Or we can’t see that dangerous panther or tiger or anything else that’s potentially out there. So that’s an interesting difference with this movie. Our last How Would This Be a Movie comes from an advice column in The Cut as well. It’s the Ask Polly advice column written by Heather Havrilesky. This one is about a woman with severe mushroom allergies who becomes convinced that her in-laws are maybe trying to kill her. So it’s not just that they are insensitive to her food sensitivity. They seem to be finding ways to introduce mushrooms into things that have no business having mushrooms in them.

I loved the letter writer’s description, but I especially loved Heather’s response to how nuts this situation was. And she actually says that this feels like the pitch for a dark comedy on premium cable. And, yeah, it kind of does. It’s that idea of like are my in-laws trying to kill me. Maybe they are.

**Craig:** Yeah. Heather went ham, which I love. And she was right to do so. And the letter writer was so weirdly sweet about it and kind of underplayed the insanity of what’s going on here.

Now, look, we live in a world where people will say, “Look, I have this allergy to this thing,” and maybe there’s a little pushback kind of in the air, like a little silent pushback which is, ugh, everyone is allergic to something now. You can see people kind of groaning and rolling their eyes sometimes. Or if someone says, oh yeah, if you’re in a restaurant, “I want the surf and turf but instead of the lobster can I have this because lobster makes me slightly itchy.” You know, I understand there’s a certain kind of, I don’t know, self-indulgent griping you could do about people with allergies.

But the truth is that when somebody has a legitimately troublesome allergy it is life-threatening. It is terrible. As a parent it’s got to be absolutely nightmarish to be policing your own child and just every day wondering is this the day that somebody slips freaking mushrooms in. And the crazy part, the craziest thing, is when after it’s been made clear to her in-laws that she has been hospitalized over this and convulsed in an ambulance because of mushrooms they added mushroom powder to mashed potatoes at a holiday dinner.

What is mushroom powder? I’ve never even heard of mushroom powder. That’s literally poisoning. You are poisoning – you’re trying to poison her. And everybody knows it. And they say things like, you know, “Well, everyone except your wife likes mushrooms and we’re not changing what we eat for one person.” Oh my god. It’s not that she doesn’t like them. It’s that they’ll kill her. So, I think the deal is they want to kill this lady. They’re literally trying to kill her.

**John:** The fact that it seems like they want to kill her is what makes this so compelling. And I think it’s easy to feel sympathy for this woman and I find the husband character really fascinating. Like how much of a doormat is he that he’s not willing to stand up to his family for trying to kill his wife? That isn’t good. But it’s easy to imagine who that family is and how messed up that family must be and how tight that family must be to want to do this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, this woman is an outsider marrying into a thing. It feels kind of great.

Now, this allergy by itself is not a movie. So, I think it’s suggesting a jumping off point for a movie, but there would have to be a lot of other things and this mushroom allergy is just like one sign, like a really clear sign of not just the undermining but the dangerous dislike that they seem to have for her. And that, you know, I think what’s relatable is we all kind of imagine that our in-laws don’t really like us, but to have it taken to the extremes is I think what makes it a movie.

**Craig:** Mushroom powder. So, one thing that I always try and remind myself when I read these things is we’re getting one person’s version. Now, it may be that this woman who is writing this letter and who is describing how her in-laws are trying to kill her with mushrooms, she could be awful. She could be an awful person. I’m not saying she is. But there’s a world in which she’s just a racist, nasty, abusive human being. And everyone reasonably loathes her.

Even then you can’t put mushroom powder in the mashed potatoes. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t mushroom somebody. You’re not allowed to mushroom people. There’s other ways to deal with them. You can’t mushroom them to death. That’s just wrong.

Is this a movie? No. It’s not at all a movie to me. I don’t think of it as a movie. I don’t think of it as a series. I think it could be an episode of something that’s kind of interesting. It could be a B-plot that you find out that somebody you hate is allergic to something and somehow mushrooms get – I don’t know.

**John:** I don’t think it’s a movie by itself. But I think the notion of are my in-laws trying to kill me – I think that is enough of a comedy idea that you could build something around it. I think there’s a tremendous amount more story you need to do there, but I think the mushroom aspect of it as am I crazy could work.

And a movie like Game Night comes to mind, where it’s just like it is funny but there is a real darkness underneath it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could do a movie where a woman marries a man and it’s one of those interesting paranoid things. And Game Night has a similar aspect to it even though it’s a comedy. There’s a certain paranoia to it. Where she discovers that her husband actually has been married three times before that she didn’t know about and all three of those women died. And so now she’s thinking – and we’re all thinking – oh, he’s a serial wife killer. But he’s not. He insists that he’s innocent and she keeps finding clues. And eventually the big twist is it’s not him. It’s his mom. She keeps killing his wives. That could be cool.

I mean, I’ve just given away the ending.

**John:** To me the pitch is more like right from the start you’re worried about the mother-in-law, but of course she’s talked down, well everyone sort of feels that way about their future mother-in-law. And there’s ups and downs, but when it becomes clear like, wait, something really nuts is happening then there has to be a further step there. There has to be something more than just like, you know, oh, she’s trying to kill me. There has to really go to sort of why they’re trying to kill her, or what it is about that.

So, figuring out what that is – figuring out what’s really behind the family – that’s probably the key to what makes this a movie versus an advice column.

**Craig:** I want you to know there is mushroom seasoning. And there’s some mushroom powder. It’s really rare. I mean it’s just not – it’s not really a thing. You’ve got to go way out of your way – way out of your way – to find like dried porcini mushroom powder or something. They’re trying to kill her.

**John:** They are trying to kill her.

**Craig:** Sorry, based on what I read. I am not accusing anyone of anything. But based on what I read it would seem–

**John:** We don’t know the real family’s name, so they can’t libel us.

**Craig:** Correct. It would SEEM that they are trying to kill her with mushrooms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, of these four things we’ve talked through which do you think will become a movie and which are you most excited to see if it’s not the same answer?

**Craig:** The Zimbabwe female rangers.

**John:** I would agree with you. I would say that’s probably the most compelling story area. I can imagine some version of the comedy soft serve wars thing happening. That feels like the nostalgic space for that. But I’m probably most excited to see the Zimbabwe anti-poaching rangers.

**Craig:** If Tim Herlihy does agree to come onboard and do the soft serve thing, then that one. But only if.

**John:** Herlihy or bust.

**Craig:** Herlihy or bust. That’s my motto.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Game to Grow. So it’s this Seattle-based company and they use specially designed D&D experiences, modules and rulebooks, to help kids with anxiety and/or spectrum disorders relate to each other better and work through skills that they can use in real life. It seems great. So I have not met these people, the Adams, but I’ll put links in the show notes to an article about them, what they do. Also a Kickstarter for a thing called Critical Core which are sort of the slimmed down rulebooks that they use to talk through what they’re doing. But you look through this Craig and you’ll obviously recognize so many D&D things you love, but you’ll also recognize some things that are developmentally useful.

So there’s this one to nine scale of developmental capacities which is so true and accurate to sort of how kids process things which is basically how to think critically, how to cooperate going through stuff, how to plan ahead. All the things that you and I do all the time when we play D&D, which I think I probably got a lot out of playing D&D as a teenager, which is so useful and transfers so well to real life decision-making.

So it just seems like a great program, so I’ll tip people towards this and it’s something I’d love to see replicated in other places.

**Craig:** This is brilliant. And I love that the age range is so wide. So they’re looking at kids from ages eight to 20. So, this would certainly be relevant for one of my kids. And, yeah, I’m going to look a little deeper into this. For sure. This looks great.

My One Cool Thing this week is the National Puzzler’s League, otherwise known as MPL. The National Puzzler’s League is, like one hand there’s a magazine, The Enigma, that comes out with lots of puzzles in it. And they also have a national convention. This is not for your casual puzzler. I’m just going to tell you.

So I have friend Dave Shucan who is a brilliant puzzler and puzzle constructor and solver and he goes to the convention and he’s kind enough to say, hey, take a look at this puzzle that I did there. And they are awesome. They are really layered. When I say really layered I mean I tried explaining one to Melissa last night and she stopped me after about 12 words and said, “Please no more. I don’t want to hear anymore.” [laughs]

It’s layers and layers and layers. They’re beautifully done. They’re beautifully constructed. So I’m going to be joining the National Puzzler’s League and the membership for a year is a big whopping $23. I think I can do that. Online-only membership is just $15. So, yeah, I’m totally into that.

So National Puzzler’s League. If you want you can check it out at puzzlers.org and we’ll have a link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Med Dyer. 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 like the ones we answered today.

Short questions on Twitter are great. So I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the casting notice. So, again, if you think you might know an Abby, a blind actress who is around 15 years old, I’m looking for her. So you can go to johnaugust.com/casting to find out more information about that.

You can find transcripts there as well on the site.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you for helping me figure out whether these things would be movies.

**Craig:** My pleasure, John. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](https://johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [Bonus Episode, Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bonus-episode-with-jared-harris/id1459712981?i=1000446954276)
* [Scriptnotes Ep 50, How to Not Be Fat](https://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-not-be-fat)
* [Decoder Ring: Ice-Cream Truck Wars](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2019/08/decoder-ring-explores-the-world-of-ice-cream-trucks) by Willa Paskin
* [Akashinga Women Rangers Fight Poaching in Zimbabwe Phundundu Wildlife Area](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/akashinga-women-rangers-fight-poaching-in-zimbabwe-phundundu-wildlife-area/) by Lindsay M. Smith
* [My In-Laws Are Careless About My Deadly Food Allergy](https://www.thecut.com/amp/2019/08/ask-polly-my-in-laws-are-careless-about-my-food-allergy.html) by Heather Havrilesky
* [Game to Grow](https://www.cnet.com/news/game-to-grow-the-dungeons-dragons-game-rescuing-kids-from-their-social-anxieties/?__twitter_impression=true), support on [Kickstarter here](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gametogrow/critical-core/description)!
* [National Puzzler’s League](http://www.puzzlers.org/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Med Dyer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_414_mushroom_powder.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/writing-about-mental-health-and-addiction).

**John August:** Hey this is John. Today’s episode comes from a panel recorded last week in cooperation with Hollywood Health and Society. If you want to see video from the panel there’s a link in the show notes. But realistically if you’re already listening to this audio you are fine. You don’t need to see the video. There’s no slides or anything you’re going to miss.

Now, Craig was planning to cohost this panel with me, but he has had a family medical situation, so I did this one solo. But I think Craig is really going to enjoy this episode, if he listens, which I hope he listens to it because he really will like this episode. We have a remarkable showrunner, Gemma Baker, we also have a medical doctor who can talk about the science of addiction. We have a therapist who can talk about young people and mental health. And we have a journalist who writes extensively on drug policy. It’s a really great group.

We talk about writing protagonists dealing with mental health and addiction issues, their impact on other characters, the responsibility of writers addressing those topics, and what writers need to keep in mind about their own mental health.

This episode pairs really well with Episode 99 if you want to go back and listen to that one.

Today’s episode was produced by Megana Rao, with music and editing by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Marty Kaplan, Kate Folb, and everyone at Hollywood Health and Society for putting together the event. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. I host a weekly podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes and we talk a lot about writing and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And as we talk about screenwriting we’re always trying to focus on specifics, like what is the specificity of this moment, what is the reality behind this thing? Why are characters doing what they’re doing? We will talk about the words on the page, but we’ll also talk about the experience of watching the stories that we’re trying to tell. And we’ll bring on guests sometimes to talk about very specific things that they wish we as writers could do a better job at.

We had Rachel Bloom on recently to talk about how we portray sex on screen and how we can portray sex more realistically on screen.

So when I found out this panel was happening I virtually threw myself in front of Kate to say like, hey, do you need a host, because I really wanted to talk with these very smart people about addiction and mental health.

Another thing we talk about on Scriptnotes a lot is structure, so let me talk a little bit about the structure of tonight’s evening. I want to start by talking about the experience of a character facing addiction or mental health challenges. Then talk about the characters around them, sort of how that character is impacting the world around them. We’ll then step outside a little bit and talk about how the stories we tell are perceived by the world out there and what is our responsibility, what are our opportunities as we’re telling these stories. And finally as we’re talking about addiction and mental health, how do we as creators have to be mindful of our own mental health? And things we can be looking out for for ourselves.

So that’s sort of the structure for the evening. There will be questions and Q&A at the end, so if a question comes up along the way remember it because we’ll get to that at the end. But I want to start by talking about how our characters come into our stories and I want to start with you, Gemma. So, Gemma Baker is a writer and producer and the co-creator of the hit CBS comedy series, Mom, a show lauded for its portrayal of addiction. She previously wrote on Two and a Half Men. She graduated from Tisch with a degree in theater.

**Gemma Baker:** Hello.

**John:** My question for you, so the two lead characters on Mom both have addiction issues. How early in the process of coming up with Mom did you know that this was a thing that you were going to want to explore?

**Gemma:** In the very, very beginning. So when it was first being talked about the idea was for the character to be a mom who has addiction, active addiction and drug problem. They knew they wanted – it was Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky – and they wanted to do a show about a mom and they thought we’re going to bring in a mom. And they asked me if I thought that could be funny. And I just thought, well, if people don’t think that the kids are safe they’re not going to feel OK laughing. And so what if the character was in recovery? And you could root for her, because you knew she was trying to change. And so that was our starting point.

**John:** What was the starting point for your research into this? How did you find out about what recovery would look like and sort of where the opportunities were and where the challenges were for these characters? What was that research process like for you?

**Gemma:** I think one of the things that was really important for us was that a lot of times when recovery is portrayed, not necessarily now, but then it felt like it was dreary and that there was no joy and light and there wasn’t a lot of hope in the portrayal of it. And I think that that is what we felt was missing, you know. And that anyone who knows and loves someone in recovery knows that that’s such a huge part of it. And also so often recovery is the end of the story. You know, you watch a whole movie about addiction and it’s so awful and painful and heart-wrenching and then at the very end it’s like and then they got sober, the end, roll credits.

**John:** Sometimes they’ll give you nice little title cards.

**Gemma:** And then they got sober and it worked out.

**John:** Yep.

**Gemma:** And I think that recovery is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the story. It is having a chance. It is where it’s the beginning. And so we wanted to tell a story that started there. That was really important to us.

**John:** That’s great. Well let’s talk more about recovery. So our next guest, Dr. Corey Waller, is a nationally-recognized addiction expert and currently practicing specialist in addiction, pain, and emergency medicine. Through his work with the Health Management Associates and the National Center for Complex Health and Social Needs he has developed addiction treatment methods, provider training, and educational outreach delivered by that center. Dr. Corey Waller, thank you for being here.

**Dr. Corey Waller:** Thanks.

**John:** We’re going to be talking about addiction and mental health. And because you’re the actual doctor here can you help us get our terms straight. When we say someone is dealing with addiction what does addiction mean in a medical sense? Or what’s helpful for us to be thinking about when you use the term addiction?

**Corey:** That’s a great question and I think a lot of people misinterpret what addiction is. Addiction is not the presence or absence of a drug in somebody’s system. It’s the way in which they behave in obtaining and using the drug. And we actually define addiction based on nine very specific behaviors. That means they’re predictable. I mean, in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual we’ve identified nine specific behaviors associated with both drugs and/or a behavior like gambling that ultimately tell us whether or not someone has addiction. And we can use those behaviors and the presence or absence of those to determine how severe it is.

And so with that, that’s how we create our interventions and have done all of our testing to identify how to appropriately treat people at the beginning because they have predictable behaviors that we identify as addiction. And unfortunately those behaviors many times are misinterpreted as frustration or anger when in actuality they’re just symptoms of a disease. And so I think that’s the big piece around addiction is that it’s definable, it’s identifiable, and it’s not because somebody is mean or it’s not because somebody got drunk at a party. And it’s not because somebody used cocaine on a Friday. It’s what does that look like in their life in general and do they have control over that drug. Do they have control over their behavior when obtaining that drug? Do they try to obtain that drug over their safety or over the safety of their kids? Or do they lose their job because of the drug? These are the ways we define it.

And so many times that term is slung around in a pretty messy way. But medically we have very specific criteria for what addiction is. And we actually know more about the neurobiology of addiction than any other chronic brain disease.

**John:** So as we’re talking about terms, addictions can have a pejorative context. Like someone has – and we need to get past that. That’s the stigma thing we’re trying to get past tonight. But a word like addict – is addict a useful word or not a useful word? What’s helpful for us to be saying when we’re talking with somebody who is dealing with these issues?

**Corey:** Well person. If we just start with that. But in general people aren’t defined by their disease. We’ve gone really far to make sure that people with diabetes and cancer and other medical illnesses aren’t defined as their disease, because they’re a person with that disease. And the disease is a part of who they are, but it’s not how we define them.

So we don’t in a perfect world call them addicts. We call them a person with addiction. And then we can get very specific in healthcare terms. They have an opioid use disorder, or a substance use disorder. Terms like clean and dirty, those are terms that are utilized that have no medical connection whatsoever. Even like a urine drug test. They dropped “dirty.” I have doctors say that. There is no clinical terminology. What does that mean? It get mud in it? I don’t really know.

What we have to start doing is not taking on how the patient’s very self-stigmatizing language is utilized. And it’s used a little bit to combat the shame and the fear of this disease and not take that language and somehow weaponize it toward them. Because as people in healthcare and even just society in general, using a term like a person with addiction is just – it is what it is. And that’s where I think we should start.

**John:** And thinking about this as writers, as we’re coming up with character descriptions, we’re trying to describe what a character is like, if we use a word like addict that just stops us dead it’s very hard to see anything else around that character. We’re not seeing what they’re doing and we’re not seeing the choices they’re making. It’s taken all the agency away from that character. And so finding the right words to use feels really important.

The other part of our panel tonight, our discussion, is about mental health. Where are the overlaps between people with problems with addiction and mental health things? Is there a big crossover between the two?

**Corey:** Yeah. And so the crossover seems to really be identified in those with what we call adverse childhood events. So early life trauma. I ran a clinic dedicated to pregnant and parenting females. So we saw hundreds of females who had addiction while they were pregnant and all but two of those hundreds had a significant early life trauma, most of that sexual trauma. And so the early life experiences that occur to someone increase the chances of them having not only addiction but a co-occurring mental health disorder.

And that mental health disorder if not treated while you’re treating addiction will make the addiction unstable. And if you’re treating the mental health disorder on one side but not addressing the addiction you’re never going to get the addiction stable. So it’s a matter of most people who have addiction also have a co-occurring identifiable mental health disorder.

It’s unclear early in treatment if that’s going to be there after we stabilize them in treatment. And so you have to go through a pretty significant process. But quite honestly as you’ll hear, one side doesn’t necessarily talk to the other. You hear, “I treat addiction,” or “I treat only psychiatric ailments.” But rarely do those ships meet in the night. I mean, honestly, it’s crazy because that one book has all of the descriptions and a third of it is about addiction but then there are psychiatrists who are like, “Eh, I just kind of ignored that part,” and moved on. And then addiction medicine providers who don’t read the other stuff. So it’s very disconnected where it really shouldn’t be.

**John:** All right. Let’s keep looking for that crossover. Our next guest is Dr. Holly Daniels. She is the managing director of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, supporting 32,000 clinicians. She has worked as a clinician, teacher, therapeutic consultant for over 15 years, specializing in addictions, eating disorders, and other mental health issues using her extensive knowledge with treatment programs on university and college campuses to help young adults thrive. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Sophia University. So you’re working with younger populations, what are some things that we as sort of non – older than college students – might not be aware of that are happening on campuses, college campuses and high school campuses? What do you see that we may not be aware of? What are the things that young people are facing?

**Dr. Holly Daniels:** Well there’s a really interesting dynamic right now in that our society as a whole has embraced talking more about mental illness in general and substance use disorder. And that’s really prevalent in the younger generation. So kids are actually talking more on campus about – even about their mental health issues, about having anxiety, about being depressed, and there’s more of a discourse. And I would say thank you to television and film, actually, for opening up a lot of that discourse. Kids feel more free to talk about it. But, you know, there is kind of that backlash of the more they’re talking about it and there isn’t really the science-based support to help them through it, right, there’s still a lot of issues with drug and alcohol abuse, you know, from age 10 up. And there really isn’t unfortunately enough support in our school systems or in our education system. And the education that they’re getting about mental health issues and substance use issues is coming from the media, right.

I mean, that is their discourse. The film and television and what they’re watching. And so sometimes it’s a really helpful education. And I don’t know if anybody has seen Eighth Grade, but I loved Eighth Grade by Bo Burnham which talked a lot about anxiety. We have shows like Euphoria which I’ll let us – maybe I’ll talk about that later. I have different ideas, I have thoughts, too.

But overall I would say the big positive is that, just like Corey was talking about, we really need to chance as a society and stop penalizing mental health issues and criminalizing substance use. And the great thing is when we can see those stories in television and film and we can see people having compassion and leaning in to support the people who are struggling that gives our young kids, our adolescents and our young adults, that model to be like, oh, if somebody is struggling I reach in and help. I don’t call them a bad person or say that they have a moral failing. I want to help.

And that’s actually really a hopeful thing that’s happening on campuses is that kids want to help each other. They want to be there for each other and that’s a beautiful thing.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely noticed that kids, teenagers, want to help each other but sometimes don’t have the actual skills to be helping each other.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** And to what degree do we need to be aware of contagion or the sense of like a person with a challenge spreads to other – like how as a person who is dealing with young populations what are some things that we have to be aware of with teenagers? Are there are different things that happen with them?

**Holly:** Such a good question. And this is why the work that Hollywood Health and Society does is so important and being able to as film and TV writers reach out to experts to understand where that fine line is when you’re portraying heroin use, or when you’re talking about kids committing suicide. What are the things that you can do so that the visuals, right, are not more triggering than they need to be? It’s a fine line of we want to be able to talk about this, and we want to be able to portray it because that’s important. But we also don’t want to cause children out there to hurt themselves, right, or create an atmosphere in which they feel like it’s glamorized or it’s cool to self-harm.

**John:** So finding that balance between realism and glamorization is a challenging thing. We’ll keep talking about more of that tonight. But I want to introduce Zachary Siegel. He is a journalist who covers public health, mental health, and criminal justice. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, Wired, and Politico Magazine. He’s currently a journalism fellow at Northeastern University, the university’s Health and Justice Action Lab where he has spearheaded the “Change the Narrative” project. He cohosts Narcotica, a podcast about drugs that’s informed by science, policy, and the lives of real drug users.

I have a rival podcaster on the panel. I’m not sure I—

**Zachary Siegel:** That’s OK.

**Kate Folb:** That’s why we put them as far away as possible.

**Zachary:** We’re hoping to steal this audio, too, for our own podcast so we’ll talk later.

**John:** All right. It all crosses over. Zach, could we talk about sort of your experiences with addiction and sort of the degree to which Hollywood and the things you saw in movies and television influenced the start of that, the progress of that, the recovery from that. What did you see as you were encountering it for the first time?

**Zachary:** Yeah, so I’ll try to keep this brief because it’s a long story. So, full disclosure, when I was about 17 had opioid use disorder as we call it now. And it really started with friends and I exchanging pharmaceuticals and really what happened was as a young, anxious, sort of nervous Jewish teenager trying to figure out what the world was like I took an opioid and finally felt normal. Like I finally felt OK. And it’s a cliché at this point, but it is really true. When most people take opioids they get kind itchy and constipated and they don’t really like them. When I take an opioid it was like, OK, the clouds have parted and I feel very, very comfortable, which can be a very dangerous feeling for a teenager.

And so that progressed and progressed and progressed, like all the way up to heroin use, but to not like [unintelligible] with that story because really I was just like watching movies like pretty zonked out five hours a day. It was not a productive time of my life. But I did watch a lot of media. So I can talk about, for example, like how maybe the first time I ever saw injection heroin use on screen was Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio. And I think that had a huge impact on me and I wanted to be a writer and be in like sort of the beat scene in New York and that whole thing was very attractive. But, you know, the sort of delusion that has to be confronted is like people on drugs typically, you know, life is really hard and you can’t necessarily be productive.

Like I was not a successful writer when I was using heroin because I had to think basically in six-hour timetables where, OK, here’s one fix and where’s money for the next one. And to live in this sort of collapsed time where you’re very much encased by the next one and the next one. It was incredibly difficult. And so I can talk more about media, but yeah I do think the way that I consumed media and the things that I saw were very impactful.

It may sound random, but there’s a documentary called Methadonia produced on HBO. I don’t know if anyone saw this, but it was a horrific portrayal of a drug called Methadone. And just the quick facts, Methadone saves lives. It reduces someone’s risk of fatally overdosing by 50% or more. And this documentary however portrayed it so negatively and I think I was a teenager watching that before I’d ever really like thought that one day I might need this drug. But as the recovery process sort of unfolded for me and I didn’t wind up in a Methadone program I had to confront my own stigma about people who take Methadone because of that documentary.

So these things have – it’s just a huge responsibility to portray this.

**John:** So I thought we would start by talking about the experience of a central character in our story, so either a movie or a television show, who is dealing with an issue and sort of talk about the timeframe, the things, the challenges, what are the realities there so we can then think about how we are going to portray them and sort of what are the opportunities. And so my hypothetical character I want to introduce is a character named Jane. She’s 28. Boyfriend, not married. An alcoholic. And we can talk about where her alcoholism is. I use the term alcoholic. I probably should use a person dealing with alcoholism. But this is where the character is that we’re meeting. But we could meet her at many places along the spectrum.

So Gemma, you decided for your show to show somebody who is already in recovery. Corey, can you talk me through someone who is dealing with alcoholism where are some points along the way we might meet that character? What are the stages where we might meet a character who is grappling with it?

**Corey:** Well, I mean, a bar. Common location. So a couple of things—

**John:** The timespan. The stages of—

**Corey:** I know. So as we look at this, alcohol use disorder is the most prevalent addiction period. You add all the other ones together, it’s still not as many people that have alcohol use disorder in the country. So it is still the most prevalent, but it’s also the one that is more normalized. And so people can go to a bar and get barely able to stand or walk and we’ll call them an Uber and send them home, but we don’t think about that in the context of alcohol use disorder a lot. So somebody tied one on, or you’re hungover this morning, or that kind of piece.

But generally speaking the first time that we interact with them in a healthcare setting is going to be when they accidentally fall and break an ankle. Or they get picked up by police and are incoherent and show up – you know, I’m an emergency medicine doctor, I still practice – and so I’ll see people in the emergency department and that’s how I first encounter them many times is intoxicated. And just being intoxicated doesn’t mean you have an alcohol use disorder, but it starts to really add up a lot of those points that we talked about when you are intoxicated, and you fell, and you hurt yourself, and you ended up in the emergency department because of the intoxication.

So it’s not always just the homeless intoxicated person who shows up to the emergency department. The early part of the disease means that there are times in which things are stable. They’re still able to generally go to work. They’re still able to have an interaction. They’re still able to have friends and connections. And over time those things start to wane. So that first time that we get them is the best time to intervene because we generally have milder disease than if we wait this out.

And so this concept of they’ll come and get help when they’re ready, or this concept of rock bottom, basically means we’re going to see if they wash out through dying before we treat them. And so the times that we’re going to interact are going to be the times that they drunk dial mom at three o’clock in the morning. The times that their boyfriend confronts them because they’re frustrated about how they embarrassed them at these places. Or the boyfriend or significant other also has an alcohol use disorder and maybe they’re perpetuating this.

Those are the times that we’re more likely to make the biggest difference in someone are those early signs of addiction which is they’re missing work. And so I have a staff of 30 people and I was the chief of pain medicine for a health system, so if a doctor started having odd behavior I would pull them aside and have to be like, “What’s going on?” We are scared to do that in society. We’re scared to call people out because we don’t know how to do it many times. But an empathetic ear and somebody just saying I care about you, if you want to chat about this, really opens up the door for that early interaction to occur.

By the time I get them, I mean, the train has crashed at that point. This is a point where they’re either mandated by court or intervened by family or their life is in complete shambles and they have nowhere else to go. And that’s just too late. And so I think recognizing that 60% of people who at some point meet for an alcohol use disorder self-resolve.

So, I always use the anecdote of when I was in college I tried really hard to be an alcoholic. It just didn’t work. And that’s good for me, but that’s a lot of people. If you think about back in school and that the number of people who drank to the point of failing a class or missing class or failing out of college but then kind of bounced back, early in life – in adolescence and in early adulthood we have kind of resolution of an acute version of addiction. Now that is an increased risk for later that something may recur, but if you can catch them at that phase and really kind of work with them we don’t necessarily have to even label them long term.

I mean, I have a roommate who drank just as much as I did. He has a label of an alcohol use disorder. But I don’t. And we have the same trajectory in the end. So it’s just a matter of when you catch them. So I think early and it’s those little pieces where we find them the most. And that’s where they start to struggle with isolation which we find is the early form of kind of the fear and stigma they put on themselves. And from a character perspective, being able to portray that shame and isolation that occurs very early in this disease that is the path to the more severe version of the disease that leads to bad outcomes that I would see.

And so that guilt and shame keeps them – they hide. They start to drink alone. They start to separate from people. Go to different bars where they’re not going to be noticed. And it’s not a control issue. It’s a part of the brain. You know, we know exactly what part of the brain it is. It’s the default behavior for an input called cue associated relapse. And it’s not a decision like we think about. It’s not a pros and cons sheet. It’s a reflex once they’ve started using.

**John:** Gemma, he’s talking about self-stopping and sort of control. And we always as we write our characters we want our characters to – we’re sort of cruel gods aren’t we as writers? We’re always creating these challenges and obstacles for our characters to face. As you look at the characters you’re dealing with in your show how are you as a writer and as a writers’ room talking about characters’ awareness of the behaviors that they’re doing? Awareness of the problems that they are encountering for themselves? Because it sounds like any one of the characters we set off in our stories could end up in a very dark place. And yet you are mostly responsible for getting them back to a good place by the end of 30 minutes. So how are you talking about that in a writers’ room? How are you figuring out sort of how to get a character through these situations?

**Gemma:** Well, I think, you know, one of the things that sitcom characters are not known for is growth and change. So, but we have this amazing opportunity, and I think responsibility, to say that these characters, now we’re going into season seven, they have grown. They have changed because they’re sober and because they’re facing life in a new way and because they’re doing it together and because they’re using certain principles to change and grow.

And so I think that’s been really fun. When we feel like they’re starting to get stuck we’re like, oh, you know, that season two Bonnie, that’s not season seven Bonnie. Season seven Bonnie is going to handle that better. So we keep ourselves sort of accountable to that. We sometimes have the actual meeting portrayed. We have this device of people sharing. Also on a sitcom you don’t necessarily see someone just tell you where they’re at for two minutes, but we have that ability to do that because our characters literally are sharing where they’re at. And so that helps us to – they might begin their share thinking one thing and then hear something and get to another place quickly.

**John:** So the idea of a group meeting, a 12-step meeting, or some other place where people come in and describe what they’re going through, Holly could you speak to sort of what the role of group meetings is in Jane’s life. Let’s say that Jane is making progress. What would that meeting really be like and what are the things you don’t see that we might be showing better?

**Holly:** Well, there’s really huge power in group share. And that’s why the Alcoholics Anonymous movement has been so successful actually in helping a lot of people get sober and get better. And it’s a place where you can feel like somebody sees you and somebody gives you space to be who you are and be going through what you’re going through. And that is huge and that actually is what television and film does for us, too, right. When there’s a representation in a television show or a film of what we’re going through and how we can identify that’s just so very powerful and empowering.

And so when we’re working with people who are dealing with mental health issues or substance use issues definitely we want to employ groups and as an individual therapist I would definitely and do definitely encourage my clients to find a group and to utilize the group and the support of the group. But that is kind of on the recovery side.

And I did want to mention, and maybe you’re going to get to this John, but what I would like to see more in film and television is the group that the person is with while they are in their addiction, while they’re really struggling, because we are systems people. Right? We’re in a system. And there are always people who are enabling or ignoring what we’re going through, or you might meet Jane at a bar but then fairly soon you’re going to meet Jane in her room drinking by herself and she’s waking up and shaking and her boyfriend is going and buying her some alcohol because he wants to help stop the shaking. But he doesn’t realize that he’s actually perpetuating her illness.

And there are some really complex dynamics that go into the system that is supporting the person who is struggling to continue to struggle unfortunately. And that’s something that I haven’t seen really deeply portrayed in all of its complexity which would be really neat to see.

**John:** Zach, as you watch film and television and you watch individual therapists or you watch group settings what are we getting right and what do you think we’re missing? And what is the ideal role of the expert, the therapist, the person who is there to help the person. Again, I think we idealize them so much in Hollywood, but what is the real function of that person that you see?

**Zach:** Well, I think to, yeah, be scientifically and medically accurate and grounded as any expert in this field treating addiction should be. And that means oftentimes not sending people to Malibu for 30 days and pet horses on a ranch. Like that is not how we treat any other addiction or any other medical condition.

**Holly:** I used to work at one of those places so I take offense.

**Zach:** Sorry. And especially in terms of opioids which it’s on my mind a lot, there’s an overdose crisis, and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to communicate health messaging with media by having a therapist say, “You know what? Actually you’re a perfect candidate for Buprenorphine. And let’s get you to the right doctor who can prescribe this drug and, you know what, maybe when you go to a recovery meeting or group share on Buprenorphine you might be stigmatized because within this community frankly they don’t often have most science-based approach to things like medication.”

So I think to see that play out in a narrative would be very powerful.

**John:** Well, I should say writers, we love conflict. So if there is a conflict that can be introduced that could be a useful thing. And do you–

**Zach:** This one has been going on forever.

**John:** Yeah. But I would say that most people don’t realize it exists.

**Corey:** Well, I think two pieces that I would pull out is, one, for our 28-year-old female character she’s prey in these settings sometimes. If you get into the wrong meeting and you’re very unstable in your disease people that are also unstable in their disease can be a predator in that setting. And so it can be very unsettling for that person to show up to that meeting to someone to seems to get them unlike their boyfriend or maybe unlike their parents. And they use that angle to actually connect themselves in a pretty pathological way. And I’ve seen that happen a number of times for females in recovery going to some meeting. So they need to find the right one, right? It can’t just be any random place.

And I think the other portion is to understand that everybody has their path to recovery. But at this point for opioid use disorder 12-step abstinence-based treatment is only 8 to 12% effective. Now, for alcohol use disorder it has a higher rate of effectiveness. But the research was done on generally speaking doctors, pilots, and lawyers of white origin, so when we start to think about what modalities we’re looking at and what the data looks like that data looks very clearly good for doctors, pilots, and lawyers, especially those that are Caucasian. It’s about 85 to 90% effective for alcohol use disorder.

But for the population that I see when I was in Camden or when I was in Detroit or Philly, wherever that is, that’s not effective treatment for them. But it’s also about timing and dosing. So thinking about somebody who is really unstable, that’s probably not the best time for that. We do find, however, when they need to reconnect that may be the perfect time to add something like that. So just recognizing that it’s not the default treatment for everybody. Most people get treatment outpatient. Most people don’t go to residential treatment. Most people get their treatment in an outpatient setting just like they would for congestive heart failure.

So sometimes creating less conflict with it, because there’s plenty of conflict in their life otherwise, so the treatment of their addiction doesn’t have to be the conflict point. There are so many other pathways because this disease is such a socially connected disease. It creates conflict in families. Conflict at work. Conflict in just going to the store and walking past beer. I mean, those are conflicts that are there.

So creating the conflict in the treatment sometimes stigmatizes the treatment. So I think that it’s a little lazy, to be honest, because it’s not the place where drama has to be. We know how to treat it. We have effective treatments. It’s pretty matter of fact. And we know how to know where they go. I mean, so that part of it and understanding where meetings are and what role they do play, it’s not the treatment. It’s just a part of a larger normal approach to treatment that we would take.

**Holly:** And if I may add to that, Corey, I agree. Not only is it a place where people could be preyed upon or, you know, but it also is a place that you actually don’t want to go into a group setting – to piggyback off what Corey said – until you really are stabilized internally. Because it might be very difficult and re-traumatizing for somebody to hear everybody else’s stories about their trauma. And when we’re talking about trauma I’m not talking about getting shot with a gun or run over by a car, I’m talking about complex emotional relational trauma we call that which goes back to the adverse childhood experiences which so many of the people struggling with substance use have.

And so you have to maybe work one-on-one with medication, get yourself stabilized, before you go into a group where you’re going to hear a bunch of stories about a bunch of other people’s really difficult times because that can be very triggering and re-traumatizing.

**Corey:** By the way, you guys portray – it’s the only show I can actually watch with addiction, to be honest.

**Holly:** Love your show, Gemma.

**Corey:** The rest of them are triggering to me, honestly, as a practitioner, frustrates me and gets me angry so I can’t watch it. But so this one is one that does it in a way that people in recovery they do well in those situations.

**Gemma:** Thank you.

**John:** And I think it’s because you’re offering hope. There’s characters who are dealing with a thing and it’s never going to be completely resolved. It’s not like the monster is ever fully killed. But they are able to have productive lives. And that’s obviously an early decision you’ve made that you’ve been able to keep up for eight seasons.

**Gemma:** Yeah. To be able to watch someone’s life get bigger. To have our main character. If I could go back in time in the pilot we said that she wanted to be a psychologist and then we quickly changed her into a lawyer. If I had a time machine and I would go back and just correct that one line in the pilot to say she wanted to be a lawyer. But I can’t, so we just ignore it. And pretend that her dream was always to be a lawyer.

And it was important for us to do that. It takes a while to become a lawyer and it’s hard to write becoming a lawyer stuff. But we’re doing it – and make it funny – but we’re doing it in real time because we hope that we are going to be on long enough to see that happen and to watch that whole process. And for her the ups and downs and the doubts and just showing up for all of it sober.

**John:** Cool. Let’s try and experiment with a different character. Carlos, 35, depression. And so this is a character who is dealing with depression. What things will we see outwardly as we’re looking at the character of Carlos that might tell us that he’s dealing with depression and help me figure out both his inner state, so what he’s going through, but what externally we would see for Carlos. What would be the things that we would be noticing? Holly, do you have a sense of what we’d see first?

**Holly:** Yeah. I think that, you know, it’s not totally unlike symptoms of substance use disorder in that you’ll see changes in behavior that suddenly Carlos isn’t around very much, or he made plans and he didn’t keep them, right, that his circle will notice. That he’s just not feeling up to doing the regular activities that he might want to do. And when it really progresses he might lose his job because he can’t get into work and he can’t get out of bed and doesn’t want to return phone calls. And maybe then when is confronted is able to like buck up enough to be like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, everybody don’t worry. I just need some time alone. Don’t worry.” And it really takes a supportive person in Carlos’s circle to say, “You’re not fine. Can we help you get some support?”

Because depression is one of those things. It can be a little bit under wraps. You know, people can be really struggling with depression for a really long time and still show up to life just enough that they’re not going to get into a car accident or break their ankle or do something that’s so big because of being high or drunk that it can really go under the wire for a long time.

And that’s what is so scary about it, too. And especially if Carlos starts to become suicidal. And most people who die from suicide don’t leave a note or give any signs beforehand. And so it really takes a community, right, to be around Carlos to say, “Hey, you know, this is the fourth time you haven’t come out and you usually came out with us and ate dinner every Friday night and now you’re not doing that anymore. What’s going on? And can we help?” Because Carlos can hide it for a good deal of time.

**John:** Quite a few people I follow on Twitter self-identify as dealing with depression and they’ll talk about medications they’re on. They’ll talk about the struggles that they’re going through. I admire them for doing it. Is that useful for them? Is it useful for everybody else? I always wonder the degree to which self-identifying as this can become an identity of being a depressed person. What is the current science and best thinking in terms of when a person who has depression is in treatment and is improving talking about it? What is the best way to interact with that character?

Let’s say Carlos has started getting some help. What do we do with Carlos? And what changes do we see with Carlos?

**Holly:** That’s a really good question. It’s a personal question, right? So sometimes the diagnosis can be really empowering and it’s something that you can share and you can say, “Omg this is what’s going on with me. I have this chemical imbalance and it is a disease and it’s an illness.” And so it’s a little bit freeing. For some people having a diagnosis is very shaming and it’s very difficult for them to carry that with them. So that’s part of our job as mental health workers to kind of be there with each individual and decide is this somebody who is going to feel empowered with the diagnosis? Is this somebody who is going to feel shame with the diagnosis and to be able to talk through all of that with them?

But for the most part I think it is, for the people I’ve worked with, it’s empowering. And it’s a way to build community because mental health illness and substance use disorder they are isolating. That is one of the things that happens is people become more and more isolated. So if you can say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this thing” and find other people in the community that say, “Hey, me too.” And you can have that back and forth and connection. It can be really a powerful help. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s point our discussion and talk about the community around Jane and Carlos and sort of how they’re interacting with family, with friends, with the medical establishment, with the police. What do those interactions look like? So we talked about earlier that Jane would come into a medical situation because she’d broken her ankle or law enforcement if she was drunk driving. There’s natural ways to do that. How would Carlos come into a medical community? How would he come into a law enforcement community? What are the interactions that we see with these characters as they’re doing their thing and the impacts they’re having around other people. Zach, what do you see as Jane’s – the circle that she was drinking with? The social circle that was helping her stay there. How do we portray them responsibly and accurately?

I mean, the people who are in some ways helping her stay the way she is.

**Zach:** I mean, I think it’s super contextual. And I think there’s one very recent example of a portrayal of depression is Euphoria. And in a recent episode of Euphoria, so Rue is the main character and she is so depressed that she has watched 22 hours of Love Island straight. And there’s this sort of ongoing, very painful experience of being too depressed to walk up to go to the restroom. And so her bladder begins to hurt and so I think one thing that was really interesting and somewhat playful there was that depression hurts. It’s not just an emotional/psychological pain. It is physical. Like if you really miss someone, like it hurts when they’re not around. And I think that having different ways of portraying psychological pain manifesting as physical pain could be an interesting thing to show onscreen.

**Corey:** I would say that the science backs that up 100% because the two chemicals responsible for depression are norepinephrine and serotonin, these two chemicals. Dopamine can play a place in one type. But those are also really important chemicals in pain. So, in theory if you have a low serotonin level and a low norepinephrine level you’re going to have depression. We find this really commonly. Interestingly, if I decrease those in the spinal cord that also makes your pain sensor higher. Everything hurts worse, literally.

So, when somebody has depression almost always they have physical pain. And it may manifest—

**Holly:** Which is why they want to use drugs.

**Corey:** Right. No, exactly. And here’s an opioid and I’ve just wrecked your life. So the pieces, there’s really hard science to back up physical ailments that go with anxiety or depression. The place in the body with the most serotonin is not your brain, it’s your gut. So this why we see nausea and stuff in people with low serotonin states because it’s not working properly. They don’t digest food properly. It’s one of the most common complaints I would get for patients with depression. They wouldn’t complain about being sad or crying. They would complain about their belly. And then when you dig into it a little more it’s major depressive disorder.

**Holly:** Especially for young kids, right?

**Corey:** Absolutely.

**Holly:** When a young child is dealing with a mental health issue they’re almost always going to tell you their stomach hurts. It’s a big thing to know.

**John:** Great. So let’s talk about a young child. Let’s talk about a young child dealing with depression or anxiety or these issues. What are the idealized perfect Hollywood parents and what are realistic parents that we’re maybe not seeing as much onscreen? Holly, what’s your take on those parents?

**Holly:** The perfect parent would say to their young child, “How are you feeling? Can you talk to me about what you’re feeling? If you can’t use words can you give it a color? Can you describe it in some way? All feelings are welcome here. We want to talk about all feelings. They’re important. Your feelings are important. And if you’re having some painful feelings, or if your stomach keeps hurting well guess what? We know where we can go and find some help and find somebody who can support you and help you feel better because as your parents we’re here for you, but we don’t have all the answers either. And sometimes we hurt, too. And so let’s go to the experts and find somebody who can help us out.”

**John:** That’s the perfect. That’s the dream. But let’s talk about more realistic things, because in real life parents don’t know what they’re doing. They’re busy doing lots of other things. They have jobs. They have other stresses. They are going through their other issues. On your show Allison Janney’s character is dealing with addiction herself and has a daughter dealing with it. So, and yet you’re trying to be a comedy. So, how do you find the balance of talking about these things and still finding the funny in there? And dealing with the fact that she’s not a perfect mother?

**Gemma:** We don’t have perfect parents on our show. No. I think that’s why people like it. I think it’s a relief. I think I don’t want to after I’ve made a mistake as a parent tune in and watch a perfect parent. Like that just makes me feel worse. Really just, oh, I could have done that and I didn’t.

I like characters that are flawed. That are trying but who fall down and make mistakes. And I think that that is where we find humor is in the trying. And, you know, we deal with a lot of difficult subjects. And those are the scripts that I want to write. Those are the ones that are so much fun, because there’s something to hold onto. And those are the ones where you can go into some really deep, painful places. I’ve always loved like a lot of sadness in my comedy, which did not make me a successful standup. But I found a place where it’s working.

But I think that’s – I don’t know, I think that’s the fun stuff to write. The pain.

**John:** And there’s also a lot of fear. I know as a parent there’s also a tremendous amount of fear. So it’s not that you’re just ignorant to what’s going on, but you’re also afraid of what’s going on. You’re afraid is this a small thing or is this a giant thing? Where does this all lead?

And one of the other fears is the cost of things. And so if we have a character with a child who might be having these issues what is the reality of going to get help? And so would they first go to their pediatrician? Would they then go to a specialist? How much of that could be covered by whatever insurance? What are the realities of someone seeking treatment for addiction or for mental health? Where does that money come from?

And Zach you may have some sense of this, too. You’ve done reporting on the realities of this. What does it look like right now in 2019 at least in the US for someone dealing with these things?

**Zach:** Well so there are too many uninsured people in this country. Too many people who are underinsured in this country. And I think getting into healthcare policy and portraying that rightly in an entertainment narrative would be quite difficult. But I do think that having conversations about insurance do work and is done. In 6 Balloons, did anyone see 6 Balloons? It’s like a day in the life of a heroin user played by Dave Franco and Abbi Jacobson from Broad City is his sister and they take him to detox which is kind of the wrong thing to do. Detox for opioids is not really a thing. But they take him to detox and there’s this whole rigmarole because insurance isn’t paying for it and they don’t have the right coverage. And then someone says, “Well, go down to this clinic. They might have the right coverage.”

And so I think that’s actually a very realistic run-in with the bureaucracy of American healthcare. And I think that’s actually very realistic because I think people do have a lot of trouble what’s in their provider, what’s out of their provider. I think health insurance adds a very complex layer to this. We can also get into parity insurance. It’s forced to, but sometimes doesn’t cover mental health as it should like they do with physical health. These things are separate and I think it’s very critical that we don’t separate these things. That they’re all part of hospital treatment and primary care and that these are all treated by doctors like this guy.

**Holly:** And when they aren’t treated by doctors, I mean I think there’s a very common experience that I’ve even had working with young adults, even in Los Angeles which is not the poor rural area where I grew up in that people, like adolescents and young adults, want therapy but their parents can’t afford therapy. And it’s like this lament, the young adult lament of like I want therapy or you’re 26 and you’re no longer on your parents’ insurance and you want therapy and you can’t find it. And it’s really sad. But this is actually – and I don’t want to get too tangential, but this is where the social media platforms actually can be a positive.

Because I’m not saying anybody should go get therapy on a Facebook group. The kids don’t use Facebook anymore. I don’t know what I’m what I’m talking about. But there are Reddit, I don’t know, listservs somewhere. Kids are able to find support groups. And I, through some of my clients, and I also have two teenagers, have been able to look into some of these online support groups and they’re not terrible. You know, the kids are like offering each other some support and some good advice. And it’s really interesting how the support that our community is offering is changing in this way because of social media. Social media is not all bad. There’s actually some really positive things that can come from it.

**Zach:** So I don’t go to AA or NA meetings, but Twitter is my support group.

**Holly:** There you go.

**Zach:** No joke. A bunch of my good friends on Twitter are in this room and we are always on it. And we’re working together. We’re part of something bigger. It’s really important to me.

**Corey:** For young kids, I had three in my clinic that were pretty recalcitrant and very difficult to treat. And I started playing video games with them on Xbox and we would play Halo and have a closed chat. And actually they told me everything there, but when I was in front of them as an old guy in front of them they didn’t want to say a word. They were clammed up. But when I game them my gamer tag and they came on and we literally sat down and played Halo, you know, in the evening sometimes I got everything from them. And then they would come in and tell me more there.

So it’s about building a connection, which means you have to break down these preconceived barriers with kids. And I think we don’t really build – we haven’t built a system for that. We’ve built a security for adults that we somehow adapted to kids and it doesn’t really work. I mean, I use this now even with my kids. When I’m on the road we play Apex and just can chat. And they’ll tell me more things.

So I think there are some things with gaming and social media and a new path that have real potential to make big change. And just kind of throwing those out there as nuggets for what connects to kids and allowing kids to inform that because the minute that they break down those walls they’re ready to talk about stuff. They don’t like where they are. They’re frustrated. They’re scared. They’re sad. They want to be successful. They want their peers to see them in a certain way and they hate that they’re being seen as this person. But the minute they’re that person they will fully embody it because they have this need to own it. Which many times can rapidly create severe illness. And so just figuring out these other ways that we can come at it would be really important.

**John:** Classically we talk about our protagonist, generally our hero who is – the character is going on a journey. The character who is changing over the course of the story. And there’s an antagonist. And sometimes we think of that antagonist as being a villain, like the bad guy of the story. But it sounds like what you’re describing really is a therapist as antagonist. The person who is helping the protagonist change, is causing the change. And so there can be friction there at the start, but ultimately you’re trying to get to a relationship there so that you can help this person get to the next place. That sounds like the nature of that relationship there. Great.

We are mostly talking about characters, but we are also writers who have minds ourselves. And sometimes deal with these issues ourselves. So before we get to questions I want to ask you guys – if someone is watching this from the Facebook stream or they’re here in the audience and they’re saying like, oh, you know what, I think this has made me realize that I may have a substance use problem, that I may actually have some mental health thing that I should be doing something about. What is the thing they should do tonight? Like what is the first step that somebody who is watching this or listening to this should be doing if they have that moment of awareness?

**Corey:** Don’t go to Google. I mean, honestly, this is the problem because at this point in time mainstream medicine is still really crappy at this. I mean, the vast majority of people aren’t really trained. It’s not mandated in medical schools for a doctor to be trained. I mean, I’m board certified and I’ve done it for over a decade. I feel comfortable in the neuroscience of it. That’s kind of not the average person who sees a patient when they walk into a hospital and there’s still this stigma that we have to break down.

And so what I would say for a person in here, first is get my LinkedIn and call me. I’ll hook you up. I mean, I know everybody who does this work. I mean, honestly it comes down to a provider being available to help a person in need, but more importantly a friend being willing to walk with them through this. And I think that’s one of the biggest pieces, and you talked about not only the character but the people around them. The thing I’ve never seen portrayed truly effectively is a non-family member friend having a truly empathetic connection with a person with addiction to help them take that next step. What we call the trans-theoretical model of change.

And moving them from this pre-contemplative state to actually going and get help. And it’s very simple. You look at them and you say I care about you and I have your back. Because they feel so isolated that they don’t do it. And as a physician when I say that in the emergency department it’s amazing the switch that flips in people when I’m treating them in a time of crisis to actually want to get help and kind of empty themselves a little bit at that point.

And so I think the biggest thing that I would say is I could give you the one-liner of go to the SAMHSA website, Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, and type in your zip code and it will give you providers. Or I could say go to the – if you feel unsafe. But find the person you trust the most and connect with them. And ask for them to walk with you through this. And they really will. That’s the first step. And then together you can start to find the pathway for treatment because it’s not predictable yet. We’re just now building these systems appropriately and that’s why these billions of dollars from federal government are coming in because the systems don’t exist.

It’s been kind of an on-your-own pathway. And so don’t let it be on your own. The first thing is to make that strong connection with the person you trust the most. And then start the journey together. And that can be a family member. It can be a friend. Whoever doesn’t trigger you and enable you, identify them. Not the person who just says yes to whatever you want to do. But somebody who cares about you. And I think that’s the first step that I would say for anybody in here who is struggling with this.

And you know what? 10% of you are. And so this is just a reality. And so that would be it. And honestly find me, call me, I’m happy to answer those questions with you. I still have my homeless population in Camden that I see that still calls my cell phone sometimes randomly.

**Holly:** And as the therapist I’m going to say if somebody feels like they might be struggling and they don’t know, if they are and they’re wondering if they should take that step to reach out to take a really deep breath, to love yourself, to understand that we are all experiencing pain and we’re all going through something and that it’s OK to be struggling. And that you deserve a good life and happiness and allow yourself to reach out for help. Because sometimes that’s the very first step that has to happen because the self-loathing is so great that people feel like they don’t even deserve to be able to ask for help. And that’s sometimes the biggest hurdle. Love yourself. Allow it to be – we’re all human. We’re all in this together. None of us really knows why we’re here, right? And we’re doing the best we can and it’s OK to be struggling and it’s OK to need help.

**John:** Zach as a writer you’re often dealing with the struggle of getting stuff down on the page. Is there any special thing you want to say about sort of the writing process and how it ties into these two things and the desire to recognize when you need help? Is there anything that’s different about that?

**Zach:** So I work from home and I joke that I’m a stay at home dad with no kids. And so it’s really nice that I have a partner, Logan. She gets home at around five. So I try to simulate as best I can a 9 to 5 job. Because if you’re writing it’s not 9 to 5 and it’s whenever you get an email or it’s whenever someone shares the doc and you’re in it.

So, I think because things are unstable and not exactly steady I would try my best – and this is just what helps me is get structure. I think – any writer I think is very obsessive. Reading the same sentence a hundred times and it doesn’t look any different and I keep reading the same sentence. I think there’s just part of the process that for someone like me who has had addiction that I have found a way to channel some of the obsessiveness that is part of addiction into something that I think is helpful and something that I think is useful.

Like I don’t really have a big writing process because journalistically things are just moving too fast sometimes to have a cup of tea and put on the right music. It’s like, no, it’s just like–

**John:** The deadline.

**Zach:** I’ve just got to go.

**John:** Gemma, now you get to work – you don’t have to work all by yourself because you get to work with a staff.

**Gemma:** Oh thank god.

**John:** But there must be some aspect of the caretaking that you guys are doing of each other and sort of watching out for each other. And there’s the whole production of the crew that makes your show. As a person who is managing these people how do you look out for these folks? And how does a writer on your staff, how could she feel comfortable speaking up if she’s struggling, if she’s having an issue? What guidance could you give to somebody who is on a writing staff, not yours necessarily? But in general what should they do if they’re struggling?

**Gemma:** Well first of all I mean in our room we get taken care of so well. Like we are fed and watered and coffee’d. Like over our hiatus I almost starved to death because I didn’t know how to get lunch. Sort of a joke but not totally.

**John:** I know it.

**Gemma:** So I think self-care in general is so important. And I think – I don’t know necessarily about other people, but I know for myself there’s a lot of gymnastics that I have to go through to get to the point that I can, I don’t know, find the funny, you know. And I’ve had to face a lot of stuff and deal with a lot of stuff on my time and get through that. Because if I don’t get through that I’m going to bring that – I’m just going to come into work and weep. And I need to find another way.

You know, so I do things every day. I try to meditate before work. I try to get some exercise in. I try to do that book, The Artist’s Way.

**John:** Five minutes–

**Gemma:** The three pages. I’m on week one, year eight. I’ve never gotten past week one. But week one is great because she talks about the morning pages. And I do that which is like the three – and if take a moment, and a lot of moments, 30 moments in the morning to do that. To just write down the voices in my head that are like you don’t deserve anything. You know, if I can just write that down so that I don’t bring that into the room I do so much better.

And my husband and I have a deal if I meet an untimely death that he will never read my morning pages notebook because he will so worry about what I was going through. But it’s just that yammering to get that out.

And then certainly if anyone in our room is going through something I think that we give them the feeling that they can come to us and that, you know, there’s a lot of trust that has to happen in a writers’ room. And you’re sharing your personal stories and experiences and some of them are funny and a lot of them are not. And you need to be able to trust that that is sort of a sacred space where that stuff isn’t going to get shared elsewhere. And the people in my room know me really well. You know, they know a lot. And there’s something wonderful about that. It’s also difficult sometimes because they know me really well. But I don’t know, it’s a very cool relationship.

**John:** Now usually on the podcast we would do a One Cool Thing, but for tonight I wanted to do a new segment called Please Stop. And so I asked everyone to prepare a Please Stop for something that they see in films and television that they wish they would not see ever again, or that people would cut way back on.

So, here’s my Please Stop. Can we please stop with the actual quantity of alcohol we see characters drinking in movies and TV shows? Because it’s physically impossible. You see these characters, I mean, this is really an appeal to writers and directors, but also like the prop people. Because people will drink these massive quantities. And we all know that it’s like tea or something in there, so they’re not actually drinking bourbon. But characters drink so much that they would be dead in some of these things.

So if we could keep an extra eye out for the actual volume of alcohol we’re having our characters drink that would be my appeal and ask to Please Stop overdoing the alcohol.

Gemma, do you have a Please Stop?

**Gemma:** Yes. Can we Please Stop when people are, you know, identifying in a 12-step meeting and they say, “Hi. My name is Bob.” And then everyone says, “Hi Bob.” That, I just, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It’s so depressing and it’s so – I don’t know.

**John:** It’s cliché. Corey, what do you have?

**Corey:** I’d say the biggest one is Please Stop portraying someone who is in recovery from addiction as having a weakness inherently. And on the opposite side of that just to add to it, don’t portray people who decide not to use drugs or drink as lame. Because what it does is it portrays, one, that those who did drink and it happened to be the thing that made them feel normal for the first time and they develop addiction, but then they went through all the work and frustration and pain in that to get well. Treat them like they’ve overcome cancer because this disease has the same mortality rate.

So, as we start to look at it they have fought to get there. And they should actually be as someone who has really been through a battle and won. And it should be portrayed positively as like this is a person I want on my team because I’ve seen them fight a fight and win. But on the other side don’t make the dude who’s like, “Yeah, I’m cool, I don’t want a drink,” as like the lame-o that night. Or “I don’t smoke weed” is like boo, he can’t go to White Castle. Like I still go to White Castle, I don’t smoke weed. So it’s OK.

And so I just think those two pieces go together.

**John:** Both in our media but also in real life. I mean, a thing I often say is if someone says they don’t drink you don’t have to ask a follow up question. They’ve said, great, so they can have something else and let’s move on and have a great night. Holly?

**Holly:** Please Stop portraying mental illness and substance use disorder as anomalies. Almost 25% of people have a diagnosable mental health issue. I would say millions more have maybe a sub-clinical anxiety or depression issue. So, it’s a lot of us and it shouldn’t be like that character has a mental health issue, or that character has an addiction. It’s much more ubiquitous than that and would love to see a more realistic portrayal of that.

**John:** Zach, what’s your Please Stop?

**Zach:** OK. I would say to stop glorifying DEA agents and criminalizing the US/Mexico border.

**Holly:** Here here!

**Zach:** So just one thing, obviously DEA agents, like we make them look tough. And their job is futile and they’re abysmal at doing it. So, let’s just not make them cool people.

**John:** Thank you, Zach. All right. Sicario [as a comedy]. Now we have time for some questions. So if you have a question – a reminder that a question is a question. It’s not a story with a question mark at the end – raise your hand and I’m happy to call on you. Right here?

**Male Audience Member:** Well I guess this is for all of you. I’m just curious, I read Michael Pollan’s new book How to Change Your Mind, which I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that, but they start talking about drug addiction and the use of psychedelics and other drugs. I haven’t gotten all the way through the book yet. But I’m just curious if you’ve researched any of that or could talk about that for a second.

**Corey:** So the psychedelic research is kind of resurgent. There was a time in the ‘60s in which it was actually done quite a bit and looked pretty promising even then. I think that the research that’s now coming out looks equally as promising. So I think it’s about dosing and timing and you have to do science. And science is you have to identify whether or not if I give somebody this versus somebody who got a placebo, like a sugar pill, does it work in that scenario? Because we develop an idea of should I use this based on if nobody knows what’s happening do they do better. And if that’s the case then game on. I mean, there’s nobody really against this in medicine. Medicine is pretty straightforward. I mean, we just like to see a randomized control trial in a population we can believe by a scientist we can trust. And we’re like, OK, cool, this is great.

So, yeah, I think it definitely has a future. And in the mental health there’s a lot of research there where I think for depression and stuff looks great.

**Holly:** Absolutely. Depression, trauma, PTSD. It’s very effective, ketamine treatment and LSD micro-dosing. Very effective. And it’s hopefully going to just be allowed to be used more. Unfortunately it’s over-regulated right now.

**Zach:** One more DEA thing. It’s because of the DEA that we cannot research these drugs.

**Holly:** Yes. That’s true.

**Zach:** So let’s de-schedule these so we can actually research and see what kind of potentials they have.

**Holly:** Right.

**John:** Another question, right here.

**Female Audience Member:** I’ve been researching neuro feedback that people do. I did it as a kid and I didn’t realize I was doing it. I was just brought by my mom. But I just listened to a podcast about it and they claim that there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance. And I’m confused by that because I currently take medication and it works great. And the neuro feedback I do not remember working at all for ADHD.

**Corey:** I’m a neuro molecular biologist at grad school, so this stuff is really interesting to me. So sometimes we oversimplify things to the point of being wrong. And it’s not necessarily an imbalance, because neuro feedback has very little to do with the actual neuro transmitter, the chemical, and more to do with actually building certain signal pathways. Because if you do neuro feedback you’re creating a default reaction to a cue. I mean, we know the lateral habenula. We know exactly what part of the brain we’re working on because it’s the default reaction to a cue that we’re trying to change. And so neuro feedback is I’m feeling anxious but let’s focus on your heart and see if we can decrease your heart rate during that moment.

And so that cue would be to switch from being anxious to thinking about this, which would then lay down new tracks. It would then lower your heart rate and decrease your anxiety. It’s not a chemical imbalance to be depressed because I may – it’s a chemical imbalance in the sense that for your brain the chemicals are a little bit out of whack. And whether that’s structure, or chemicals, we never know. Because some people have – like schizophrenia is a structural problem, not a chemical problem. It’s what we call arborization which is where over time your brain connects a bunch of nerves. And then it trims a bunch of nerves, too, so that you don’t have too many, so that your brain can communicate. So you can have internal thoughts while you’re having external thoughts.

If you don’t trim those branches then you can have internal thoughts way too loudly while you’re having external thoughts and you get a different voice. So it’s these changes in structure. So mental illness is not a chemical imbalance, unless it is, which in that case it’s a lower or higher serotonin. It could be structural or this. So it’s an oversimplification.

The heterogeneity of mental illness has a lot to do with trauma. Has to do with is it group trauma, meaning a whole group of people experience this versus an individual. It changes the whole dynamic of the brain is wired. So, oversimplification, but they’re also wrong because they became black and white. So if anybody is black and white in this space they’re wrong. It’s all grey. Because the science we know a lot, but we don’t know everything.

So if they’re not speaking in – if they’re speaking in absolutes turn it off, because it’s just wrong.

**Zach:** And pharmaceutical companies wrote the copy for chemical imbalance. Like it’s not a thing.

**John:** All right. A hand right there. Yes?

**Female Audience Member:** Thank you. The thing I’ve personally experienced a lot is somebody whose friends and family think they have an addiction or mental health issue but that person either doesn’t think they do or doesn’t want treatment. What does the ideal friend or family member do in that situation and how does that fit in the timeline of issues that we’ve been talking about?

**Holly:** Should bug them every day. Tell them they have to go to treatment. The people around them should spend all their time worrying about whether the person is in treatment yet.

**John:** Just badger, badger, badger.

**Holly:** Yes, badger, badger, badger. That’s what works. I’m good.

No, yeah, you know, grownups make their own decisions. And if somebody is not ready to get treatment they’re not ready to get treatment. And we have to respect that and live our own lives and take care of our own selves. But you can still be there in a way to say, “Look, I’m here when you are ready to get help. I’m here if ever you want to get help.” And you might want to say that every couple of weeks, but probably not every day, right? So that they know when they are ready to get help that you’re there. You can’t force anybody to be ready to go to treatment, right? Or to get any kind of help.

What you’re talking to, and I don’t want to get too complicated, is actually though one of the systemic problems of something that might keep somebody sick. Because there might be what we call enablers, and I hate that word, but it’s a good word, who are spending their entire lives worrying about that other person. Wanting to make sure that they’re OK. Resentful that they’re spending all their time worrying about the other person being OK. And in that system the sick person almost might want to stay sick unconsciously because they’re getting all that attention around them and there are these weird payoffs. So actually the healthiest thing to do is to step back, be your own person, you know, say when my loved one is ready to get treatment he or she will. And until then I’ll live my own life. I’ll be a model of setting good boundaries and living my best life. And as long as they know I’m here that’s all I can do.

**Corey:** And from a provider’s standpoint we use a technique called motivational interviewing which is basically a science-based interaction technique. It’s like The Force. It’s awesome. I mean, literally these are not the droids you’re looking for. I mean, you can get someone through just appropriate empathetic questioning, but it has rigid structure in the way in which you approach it. So, if you want to know the right way to say things that might help someone move through those stages of change and get ready faster rarely can a family member do this because there’s too much emotional connection and discourse.

**Holly:** Can be shaming, sorry Corey. It can be a little shaming.

**Corey:** Yeah. It can be, if overdone. But at the same time motivational interviewing is the basis for getting someone to start to slowly move through these stages of change. And it’s the language that should be mimicked if you’re going to try to portray someone who is kind of doing the right thing. Not overdoing it. But the basics of it.

**Zach:** A last thing I’ll add is if someone is actively using and they are not ready to stop it’s a good time for them to learn about harm reduction. It’s a good time for them to find out where the local syringe exchange program is, where they distribute in a naloxone, where someone around them can naloxone which reverses the effects overdoses which someone who knows how to do the proper breathing in case this person isn’t breathing. So there’s ways to keep this person safe and know that they’re cared for even though treatment isn’t on the table right now.

**Holly:** That’s a huge important point. If you have somebody in your life who has an opioid addiction or might have an opioid addiction get some Narcan. And will you explain more what that is? And you can get it at your pharmacy. You can ask your pharmacy for Narcan to be there. If there is an overdose you can help them stay alive.

**Corey:** Yeah. So an overdose is when the opioid or other substance, or a combination of substances, in fact most overdoses are not just opioids. They’re an opioid plus like a benzodiazepine like Xanax or Valium or alcohol on top of it. And it suppresses the breathing in the brain stem. And so when that occurs if that’s not reversed then the patient will die because you’re not breathing.

Narcan, or naloxone, which is a nose stray or an injection. In fact, what’s out in the public right now is just a nasal spray.

**Holly:** It’s easy.

**Corey:** It gets to the brain. It blocks the receptor that the opioid goes to and reverses that. So, what it does is it wakes them up and puts them into [floored] withdrawal, but it keeps them from dying. And that’s the important part. Because I can never get somebody who is dead well. So, we need to make sure that any chance that we have this. My seven-year-old knows how to deliver this. My nine-year-old knows how to deliver. They carry it in their backpacks. And I live in Ann Arbor, which is not really a place where you’re most likely going to find as much of this in density. But it should just be that ubiquitously.

So if I asked the question how many of you have Narcan on you, it honestly should be kind of everybody, because it is the one thing that literally is a life-saving drug that anybody can give that nobody is going to steal. It has no street value other than keeping somebody alive. And if I’m walking back to my hotel tonight, you know, you need to be able to give that.

**Holly:** Go to your pharmacy and say I’d like some Narcan or some naloxone and your pharmacist will help you figure that out.

**John:** There are going to be so many scenes with Narcan in these people’s scripts and it’s going to be great.

**Zach:** That’s good. That’s very good. More naloxone.

**John:** Question right here.

**Female Audience Member:** So, as you know what happens to people of color who have mental health or addiction is very different from what happens to white people in this country. And I’m wondering what you would like to see be different in the program that we have around race and mental health and addiction.

**John:** Let’s talk about both sort of portrayals right now and also reality, so we make sure that we are addressing both things.

**Corey:** The data is very clear that medicine is racist. I mean, very racist. Not a little bit. This is not unconscious bias. It’s racism. And so racism is shown to be systemic in even doctors of color. And so it’s not just everybody. It’s the field of medicine that is racist. And this has been well studied and it basically shows that if you are an African American female you are going to receive the least effective care that we can deliver as compared to anybody else. And the spectrum changes. So poverty and the appearance of poverty and color also put you even below that.

So the minute you come in and you code as impoverished or you code as African American from that culture, or you code as American Indian or Latino, you’re going to get worse care. And so that’s a reality and I think quite honestly is worth beating up in TV shows. Meaning this needs to be called out.

I have this conversation with my patients, because obviously they’re going to look at me and be like well what do you know about this. I’m a white male doctor. I can walk into a room and have immediate power without having done anything, right? That’s just a reality of America.

And so I think what I would love to see is how to actually have that conversation from someone like me and someone like that to cross that bridge because it’s crossable. It really is. But you have to call out the fact that the entire system is actually built against that population. And that’s a systemic historical problematic issue that we’re going to have to deal with. And until we really beat it up in anecdote and emotion and story it’s not going to change in the bigger picture. That’s a great question.

**Holly:** It is a great question. And something that I wish – we all wish – was more addressed in television and film, too. Because it’s just so empowering to make sure that there is representation in our media. Mental health wise, too. It’s really unfortunate that there is a bias within the system and there are also cultural biases, some groups are more prevalent to ask for help or reach out for help. And I wish that story was told more, too, because it’s really, really important.

**John:** Yeah. This panel is set up to talk about stigma and I think it’s also important as we do our research on these things make sure we’re looking at cultural groups and what are the stigmas about these specific things within that group that would cause different outcomes or cause people to make different choices, be it for getting help or other things. It doesn’t stop at sort of doing the research on what is the issue, but like what is that issue within that culture is crucial. And that’s why you have to have representation in your room to figure out what’s going on there.

I think we can take one more question. I didn’t anyone in the back, so I see one hand in the back. I can’t even really see your face, but I see your hand up very, very high.

**Male Audience Member:** Back to screenwriting, within the 12-step programs there’s actually a tradition in not talking about the 12 steps in radio, television, and film. So as screenwriters how do you approach that because you would want to be responsible to that. And like Zach said with the doc he watched that gave him an unconscious bias on wanting to take methadone, so if as screenwriters we do the best that we can, or don’t, like what is our level of responsibility? And is there a higher level to the networks and studios to oversee how we’re portraying these 12-step programs or recovery in general?

**John:** I can start answering the question, but I think we have very smart people up here who can also answer it. I think as screenwriters we’re always looking for that balance of what is realism versus what is the point that we’re trying to make. And what you’re describing is that sometimes the absolutely realistic version of what that 12-step program might be like might be divulging stuff that is not helpful for the community as a whole. So you may want to make some choices that are different.

You’re always going to approach the scene from what are you trying to do for that character. What is the essence of that scene for that character? And there may be ways to use the nature of that scene or sort of what’s the arc of that scene to get at that thing without revealing things that you don’t need to be revealing. Or getting into esoterica that’s not meant to be discussed. But what do you guys think? To what degree is talking about the specifics of recovery, or sometimes the specific of a certain kind of treatment where you can’t walk somebody through the whole thing and you’re going to be doing some short-handing.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show I loved and in this final season Rachel Bloom’s character is going through a program and you can sort of squint and probably figure out what she’s going through, but they weren’t specific about the nature of the program. Is that an appropriate choice to not give it the name? Where do you guys land on this?

**Gemma:** Well I can speak to that. My understanding of that tradition is that it is not to break personal anonymity but not that you can’t discuss the program. So, that is a difference and we’re dealing with fictional characters. And to do it in a responsible way I think is definitely important. But I don’t think it breaks that tradition. And that’s sort of the stigma of recovery that I was sort of talking about earlier is something that is real and it gives people a sense that there isn’t hope and that if you seek recovery that your life is over and that you won’t find joy or happiness again. And I think that that is false.

**Corey:** It’s national security. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to divulge something that’s going to make every person with addiction suddenly worse. I think transparency is really important for all aspects of treatment. Both for addiction and mental health. And in that because the more we normalize these things the more likely it’s less stigmatizing. And I think hiding it and separating it and keeping it under the covers just continues to perpetuate that stigma about people who are in recovery and what these things mean.

And if somebody goes to a cancer support group then we talk all about that. In fact, that’s entire storylines of pathways for people in shows. So I think that with this it’s a step. It’s a pathway in their recovery. And sometimes and for some people it’s not a part at all. Some people it’s a big part. Some people it’s transient. And it just is what it is. So normalizing it as much as you can through the stories that you tell becomes really important for destigmatizing the treatment of addiction and not keeping things under wraps and scary in a sense.

**Zach:** Yeah. I just think anonymity, it’s important for people who want to protect their identity, obviously. But I do think we are in, like that book, The Traditions, I think it was written in the 1930s or the 1940s, and I don’t think these traditions are mapping super neatly onto where we are now as a culture in society, namely that when there was an HIV epidemic a saying was literally Science = Death. That was the slogan. And right now there’s an overdose crisis where 70,000 people are dying every single year. And I think that there’s a responsibility to not be quiet about that. And to speak up. And the more that people like me are in places like this and the more that there’s people who use drugs, people who are using drugs, we need to hear from them. And, yeah, so I don’t think they should be anonymous. But that’s just my take.

**John:** I want to thank our fantastic panelists for a very great night.

Links:

* [Hollywood Health and Society](https://hollywoodhealthandsociety.org/events/addiction-mental-health-breaking-stigma)
* [6 Balloons with Dave Franco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uF4XjvS_Z0)
* [Motivational Interviewing](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/motivational-interviewing)
* [Narcan](https://www.narcan.com/)
* Follow Corey Waller on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rcwallermd).
* Follow Holly Daniels on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/drhollydaniels).
* Follow Zachary Siegel on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/ZachWritesStuff). Follow his project Changing the Narrative on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/hijaction) or using #ChangingtheNarrative.
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_412_mha.mp3)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/setting-it-up-with-katie-silberman).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 411 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now in the past few weeks we’ve been talking a lot about the journey of a single hero. Today on the program we’re going to be focusing on two-handers, movies with two central characters. To do so we’re joined by writer Katie Silberman whose credits include Set it Up, Isn’t It Romantic, Booksmart.

Katie Silberman, welcome to the show.

**Katie Silberman:** You guys, I’m so excited to be here. This is a real thrill for me. This is like the Universal Theme Park of me. [laughs]

**Craig:** So we can get in a tram and experience what you’re experiencing right now?

**Katie:** I’m going to spend at least $250. I’m going to take a lot of photos.

**Craig:** This is so great. I’m always mystified by why people – because it’s just us. I mean–

**John:** It’s just us talking.

**Katie:** I still feel that way about scripts. Like if someone tells me that they liked a script my first instinct is how did you get it? Where did I leave my computer?

**Craig:** Why would you read a script?

**Katie:** Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

**John:** Now, you’ve also just sold a pitch to a new movie, so I want to talk to you about that whole process of selling a pitch in 2019. Because that’s a thing that used to happen a lot.

**Craig:** Daily.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**John:** Daily. And it doesn’t happen so much anymore. So you are the person we can ask about sort of what that’s all like.

**Katie:** It was so much fun. And I feel really lucky. I have experienced pitching when it’s just an idea, you know, to producers when it’s a script you want to write. I’ve been able to pitch with a bigger package. I find them both so fun. When it’s just you in a room trying to sell a story that to me is the greatest challenge of trying to convince someone to like something as much as you like it. It’s fun, too, because you get to present ideally what your job will be in the context of all these other people.

This was particularly fun because it was an idea that Olivia and I came up with on the set of Booksmart. We enjoyed working together so much that we wanted to do something else together. And so it’s been a very collaborative process getting it to the place where we were ready to take it out into the world. And then it was really fun to be able to do that.

**John:** Great. So we’ll get into concrete details about sort of how you figure that out, so that will be our third segment probably of the show. But first we always have some follow up. And so first bit of news, next week we are doing our first live show on the Internet. We are going to be doing this special panel on mental health and addiction organized by Hollywood Health and Society. We are excited to do this. This is next Wednesday at 7:15pm. You can see it streaming on Facebook. Ultimately this will be an episode that we will air in the feed, but if you want to see it happening live–

**Craig:** Live.

**John:** Live.

**Craig:** There’s video.

**John:** There’s video, too. You can see what Craig looks like, and what I look like. Which is always jarring for people.

**Craig:** What you look like or what I look like?

**John:** Just that we actually have faces.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, that we have faces. Well I remember when I was a kid I would listen to Dr. Ruth. That’s how I learned about sex. And I would listen to Imus in the Morning. This was before Howard Stern.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Craig:** And I had ideas of what they looked like. And then I saw pictures and I’m like what? What? That’s not what they look like. But they do. And this is what we look like.

**John:** This is what we look like.

**Craig:** I know. People have these weird feelings. Well, they get to see us doing it.

**Katie:** You could hire someone.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Katie:** To be on the video.

**Craig:** Oh.

**Katie:** Whomever you wanted.

**Craig:** Oh?

**John:** Yeah, I have a voice double, so maybe he could be my voice double.

**Craig:** You have a voice double?

**John:** Yeah. It was a One Cool Thing earlier. Maybe an episode you weren’t around for. But I heard a guy on the radio I was like that’s actually my voice.

**Craig:** And a lot of people said that Charlie Booker sounded like a British me. And I listened to it because I wasn’t there for that one and he does.

**John:** Yes. He sounds like a British you.

**Craig:** Or I sound like an American him.

**John:** People thought that it was just Craig doing a British accent pretending to be Charlie Booker.

**Craig:** Some people legitimately thought it was just a long con of an episode. My British accent, not great.

**John:** We have some more follow up. So, in a previous episode I talked about Midsommar and Rodrigo wrote in. Craig, can you read us what Rodrigo wrote in about?

**Craig:** Yes. Rodrigo writes, “This may sound petty, but in your last episode John referenced Midsommar and may have done damage to an industry we are all trying to keep relevant. I planned on seeing this film but after hearing you say that you ‘liked it but didn’t love it’ I became less enthusiastic to purchase a ticket. We all want audiences to buy tickets to movies showcasing new and original content and so many from this audience listen to your show and are influenced by what you say, myself included. I only ask that you guys keep aware of your power to elevate or dilute a frenzy for audiences to go watch and support films.

“Your point you made about the film was spot on and super productive. But I think the brief one-thumb- up review may have done more harm than good. And for the record I have absolutely no affiliation with Midsommar. I just know how fickle influence can be when getting people motivated to go see movies in the theater.”

John, Rodrigo has got a bone to pick with you.

**John:** He does have a bone to pick with me and I think, he’s actually right. So, even as I said it I remember hearing myself say that I liked it and didn’t love it, and why did I add that ‘didn’t love it’? And I hear myself doing this in real life when I’m not being recorded. I’m going to stop doing it. I want people to call me out when I do it next time because it’s such a weird hedging. I don’t want to fully commit to loving something so I’m going to say I liked it/didn’t love it. I could have just said I liked it. And it’s fine to have reservations about a thing or things not working fully, but that liked it but didn’t love it is such a 2019 sort of like I’m not going to be fully invested in a thing.

Katie, do you find yourself doing that like it but not love it, or hearing it and being frustrated?

**Katie:** Yes, I mean, I’m someone who on average uses about seven exclamation points in every text message, so in general if I say I like it if people know me well enough they’re like she hated it. Because I speak in such hyperbole. I would give a slight counterpoint to Rodrigo who I respect that opinion totally, but I also – this is such a collaborative business. I really like when someone says I didn’t love it. That makes me want to see it more to see if I think they’re right. Or if I can come back at them and say I did love it and here’s why.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. I’m such a Pollyanna about this honestly on Twitter and all that stuff, anything that’s public, on this show. I just never say anything bad about – and not because of what Rodrigo is saying, interestingly. So Rodrigo is making a point like, look – and I think he may be overstating our influence, honestly. But regardless he’s saying you can actually drive people away from a movie. That’s not why – I’m less worried about that. My emotional connection to people who make things and who are suffering is so intense, and it’s so empathetic, that I never want to be an additional cause of problems.

It’s so hard to make things. It’s so hard to make things. And I am often struck how intensely we feel our own pain and then miss that other people are feeling it, too. So, you know, I try and avoid that. I think Rodrigo makes, at least it’s a good idea to avoid that. And I will say John that saying that you love something actually is an act of vulnerability.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Because, yeah, if you say you hate something then you’re cool. And if you say you love something you’re admitting that you were touched, you were impacted or affected. And a critic, I can’t remember who it was, it was a critic writing basically saying it’s so much harder to write a good review than a bad review because you’re vulnerable.

**Katie:** Yeah. Especially in comedy I feel.

**Craig:** Oh man. Can we talk?

**John:** Well, especially, with any comedy it’s your immediate reaction to that time that you saw it, but also hedged by saying like will this hold up five years from now, or is it too timely of its moment. You kind of can’t do any of that. It’s just what is your reaction in the moment? And I think in the case of Midsommar it’s a movie that stuck with me for a long time so whether it’s a 10 out of 10 for me is less relevant to it actually had an impact on me which is kind of rare sometimes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know what? Thank you Rodrigo. You’ve inspired a good self-examination.

**John:** Now, for these next two segments I need your help Katie because we’re going to talk about some WGA stuff and we could go on for an hour. And we should not go on for an hour.

**Craig:** God no.

**John:** So if you can help us out by limiting us to one-minute per topic. And then we will plow through this and not speak of it more in this podcast.

**Katie:** Yes sir. Do you want like a 15-second warning to wrap up?

**Craig:** I think it would be fun to be just surprised.

**Katie:** OK. Mid-word.

**Craig:** Literally mid-word. Just slap the word right out of our mouths.

**Katie:** OK.

**John:** And go. Now on a previous episode we talked about the upcoming WGA West elections and the news that Craig will be running for the board. That is now incorrect. Craig is running for Vice President. And it’s a change. It’s a different.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s different. I wish I weren’t running for Vice President, but I am. And so I guess the big deal is I actually agree with everything that the union is doing in terms of its fight with the agencies. I support that fight. I just don’t love the way they’re going about prosecuting the fight. And I want more of a voice to see if we can get it resolved quicker. That’s basically what I’m going after.

But there’s less daylight between me and those folks than people might think.

**John:** Now, Craig is no longer running for the board, but 21 other people are running for the board, for those eight seats that are available. So we will figure out some way to talk about this on the podcast coming up. But there will be a candidate’s night August 28 at the Writers Guild Theater. So that’s a chance for people to ask questions of all these people running for the board.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s good to see a contest back at the Writers Guild again.

**John:** I agree. Having multiple people running for things is a good thing.

**Katie:** And that’s time.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** We did a good job there.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** Boom. Fist bump.

**Craig:** Fist bump. It turns out actually there’s not that much to say.

**John:** All right, and go. On Monday of last week Kaplan-Stahler Agency became the first midsize lit agency to break ranks with the ATA and sign a new agreement with the WGA. Then on Wednesday three lit agents broke off from Abrams to form a new signatory agency called Ultra Creative. Those are some changes on the smaller side of the WGA.

**Craig:** And that’s where we’re seeing the changes and that’s to be expected. We know that in terms of the big four agencies it’s increasingly unlikely that we’re going to see any sort of spontaneous change like that without some sort of negotiated deal. And we also know that there are thousands of writers represented by those agencies that cannot be absorbed by the smaller ones. So this is nice to see. I encourage it. But it’s in no way indicative of a kind of permanent resolution.

**John:** That’s fair to say. There are going to be member meetings for all the WGA West folks August 7, 8, and 10. So two of those are at the Writers Guild. One of them is in Burbank, I believe. But that will be your next chance to sort of gather with a big group of people to ask questions of negotiating committee, the board, and everybody else about what’s going on.

**Katie:** And that’s time.

**Craig:** Nicely done. I had nothing else to say.

**John:** It’s the equivalent of our podcast ads. Like they have to be a certain length but not longer than a certain length.

**Craig:** I wish we did do podcast ads, but for fake things. Because I think it would be fun to do ads, I just don’t like prostituting myself for Squarespace which by the way did not give us money.

**John:** They have not given us money yet, so we need to follow up with them. We sent them a nice email, but I think some public shaming may be the next step.

**Craig:** Well the fact that I just described ads for Squarespace as prostituting myself may have limited us somewhat. But, yeah, I think it would be fun.

**Katie:** Make up a fake mattress name.

**John:** Ooh yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**Katie:** There’s like 50 of those.

**Craig:** Every week we do an ad for a fake product that doesn’t exist. I think we should start doing it.

**Katie:** Create the fake website.

**Craig:** Yep. Do the whole thing. Maybe start selling some mattresses.

**John:** Katie, let’s get into it. So tell us a little bit about your origin story, because I first knew you through Dana Fox. So you were an assistant to Dana Fox, but I don’t know how you came to Hollywood overall.

**Katie:** I feel so lucky about my origin story. I think it’s incredibly serendipitous and I mostly feel lucky because I just came into all the greatest people and I feel like I benefited from that. After college I – I should say during college I decided I wanted to be a writer. The first script I ever read was Juno.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Katie:** By Diablo Cody. I know. Because my roommate had a connection and she put herself on tape to play Juno’s friend. So I read off-camera with her the screenplay. And it was the first time I’d ever seen anything in script format. And I fell totally in love with it.

**John:** So the first script you ever read was–?

**Craig:** Oscar Award winning Juno.

**John:** A fantastic game-changing script.

**Katie:** Quite literally. And a genre-builder in my opinion in terms of kind of stories about those kinds of young women. And I was so in love with it I came out during my off term from college and interned at 20th Century Fox Television during their pilot season. My job was to digitize their script library. They had an enormous closet full of physical scripts of writing samples of writers they might want to hire for shows. And they were in the process of trying to turn them into PDFs. And so my job was literally–

**Craig:** Scanning.

**Katie:** File it into a PDF maker which was extraordinary. I just read all day. And while I was there I wrote down the names of writers that I loved and scripts that I loved so that when I went back to college I decided I was not quite brave enough to come out to LA and just start trying to find an assistant job. So I ended up going to Columbia Film School to study for a little bit longer. But while I was there I cold emailed almost all the people I had found in that closet and two of the people I emailed were Dana Fox and Lorene Scafaria.

**Craig:** Wow, how about that?

**Katie:** The two nicest, most talented people in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Legitimately.

**Katie:** And they wrote back. And they said that they didn’t need assistants at the time but they offered to be essentially pen pals and answer any questions I had which was so extraordinary.

**Craig:** Those two.

**Katie:** I know. They’re the greatest.

**Craig:** They make me feel bad about myself. I mean, honestly.

**Katie:** And then when I was at Columbia I wrote a script that found its way to Mason Novak and Michelle Newson, two really extraordinary managers who knew them socially because Mason represented Diablo. And when I signed with them that’s kind of when I followed up with Dana and Lorene and I was less a crazy person from the Internet and I felt a little more established.

**John:** But is it weird that – they were all friends. And so separately you’d written out to them and you had no idea that they’re all talking.

**Katie:** It was a crazy coincidence. I mean, I say it’s a coincidence. I was desperate to work with anyone associated with the writers that I loved. So I did kind of send things specifically to–

**Craig:** You sort of independently picked out members of the Fempire.

**Katie:** Yes. One by one.

**Craig:** One by one.

**Katie:** I tried to pick them off one by one.

**Craig:** I like this person, I like this person, I like this person. And then later on realized, oh, they’re part of the Fempire.

**Katie:** Yes. Well I knew that they were part of the Fempire. I mean, I had that New York Times article cut out in my binder. I was kind of excited about it.

**Craig:** Got it. You were very aware of the Fempire.

**Katie:** Yes. But so then I’m emailing with them. I met with them a few times when I came out to LA. And I graduated from Columbia in the fall of 2011. And the day that I landed was the day that Dana’s television show Ben and Kate was picked up by Fox. And so she had my old email asking if she ever needed an assistant to please call me. And she emailed me and said I need an assistant. It was literally the day I landed.

**Craig:** Wow. Oh, come on.

**Katie:** It was crazy. I know. And so I started working for her a few days later. And it was extraordinary, not only because as you guys know more than anyone Dana is the most generous and intelligent and just kind of inspiring person to be around. But also because the year of making that television show was condensed film school. It went from casting, to choosing the director, to shooting the pilot, to filling the writers’ room, to then following Dana as a fly on the wall all day from set, to the writers’ room, to the edit, and then watching them create those 13 hours of television. I mean, it was extraordinary. And I just loved spending time with her. And when you’re making a TV show you’re spending, as you know, 100 hours a day with whoever you’re with.

**Craig:** She’s amazing. I mean, ugh, I hope she listens to this.

**John:** I hope she does. And so people may not know that she is the basis for the Lucy Liu character in Set it Up, the monstrous boss.

**Katie:** It’s just so extraordinary to be able to turn those stories into art and share it with the world. It was funny though because to go – anytime talking to the press about Set it Up I was like I need everyone to write down that Dana is the greatest boss that’s ever lived. Because she’s kind of the only boss I’ve had outside of camp counselors and, you know, summer jobs at Urban Outfitters and stuff like that. I mean, I knew enough people with terrible stories but it’s kind of how they say that only really smart people can play dumb people. I feel like only if you’ve had the greatest boss in the world could you write a story–

**Craig:** Can you know what–

**John:** You recognize the tyranny.

**Craig:** The anti-Dana.

**Katie:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, she is an endless ray of sunshine.

**John:** So Dana Fox works really hard and writes a ton. And so how much of your daily life was involved in writing and sort of getting – on a show like Ben and Kate she is going through and she might be rewriting scripts. She’s doing stuff. How much are you touching the words versus how much are you just getting life to work properly for Dana?

**Katie:** I felt very lucky because it felt very equal. It felt about 50/50. In any assistant job your job is to make sure that they are living their happiest and most productive life. And so a lot of that is the day to day jobs that they don’t have time to do, they can’t do, and making sure that life is running smoothly for them. But from the get Dana was so generous with allowing me into that process and the words process and sitting with her and talking things out and beating out episodes occasionally, scenes occasionally. The time that I was most grateful for was – because we would have a very long day. We would get to set at six and we would be there until about three and then we’d go to the writers’ room and then we would go to the edit when everyone else went home.

But sitting in the edit with her was probably the most I’ve learned in a condensed period of time. Because she’s not only a great writer, she’s an extraordinary producer. She’s now a wonderful director. And she has such a sense of story and such a sense of what the audience will be feeling. And not only watching her translate the episode, you know, the script to the episode, but seeing how you need to be able to give up what was on the page into what you’re creating, what you’re actually giving to the world. That was really, really invaluable for me.

**Craig:** That’s the real stuff, right? I mean, I think a lot of writers, Ted Elliott always used to say that screenwriting is one of the only jobs in the world where you can get paid for years and only do half the job.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because a lot of people, particularly in features, they write and they write and they write but they don’t go through the process of production which is when you learn so much kind of retroactively. And in comedy, which you write, you know that editing is kind of – that’s the music. That’s the final playing of the tune. And it all comes down to that. I’ve learned more about comedy in an editing room I think than anywhere else.

**Katie:** Absolutely. I mean, it’s like designing the most beautiful blueprint and you can frame that somewhere but you still have to build a house. And Dana actually taught me this, that when you finish a script, when you’re happy with a script, you take a beat and you celebrate it. Because the script is great. And now it’s the script. But then you’re going to make a movie. And you have to have celebrated what the script was and now be ready to turn it into something that’s a totally different medium.

**John:** You’re working really hard for Dana Fox, but how are you finding time to write for yourself and what is the process of getting your own scripts written while you’re working with Dana?

**Katie:** Yes. Well, I was lucky because Dana really did bring me into a lot of things that she was working on. Not just Ben and Kate, not in an official capacity, but it felt like stretching that muscle over and over in terms of talking out scenes and pitching dialogue and what not. And then when that show was over, you know, at the same time every night I was going home and noodling on my own ideas and sketching things on a legal pad.

But when Ben and Kate ended she had other jobs she needed to work on, to complete. Other feature jobs. And so she and I actually started writing those together as a writing team. And so then it felt like just a wonderful halfway house towards really doing it on my own in terms of splitting up the work in real ways and working together in a tangible way where I felt like I was really contributing as a partner as opposed to someone who is there who got to contribute every once and a while.

So, that led to more time to be able to work on my own stuff as well at home, so that was kind of the transition period where I would wake up early in the morning and write before I went in to work with her.

**Craig:** Ah, youth.

**Katie:** I know. [laughs]

**Craig:** Youth. Do you have children by the way?

**Katie:** No.

**Craig:** OK. John and I have talked many times on the show about how children basically suck the life out of you. I think it’s one of our common themes.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** And, yeah–

**John:** It makes it impossible to do that sort of stuff that’s outside of work hours.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I do remember that there was that time where I could do that. And good for you to kind of capitalize on it.

**Katie:** It’s crazy. I feel really lucky. Even now I’m married and I have a dog, and I know it’s incomparable in terms of the time they suck–

**Craig:** Depends on the dog.

**Katie:** But to think that there was a time where writing was the priority, kind of before you have a partner, before you have anything to take care. It’s such a luxury. And I’m glad that – I think Dana helped me be aware of that at the time because she had other responsibilities.

**Craig:** She has 200 children.

**Katie:** Yeah. She has 789 kids. And 40 dogs.

**Craig:** [laughs] She does. I’ve seen them all.

**Katie:** Yes. But so that was another thing, I mean, among everything else that she taught me was to really take advantage of when you’re able to give it your full self because that’s when you’re kind of creating the muscle and the framework to then be able to hopefully continue it when you have the time.

**Craig:** I wish she had been my boss. First of all, I want Dana to be my mom.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then if I can’t have her to be my mom, then I would definitely have her be my boss. Because I mean talk about somebody that just coasts on positivity and gets it done.

**Katie:** Truly. It’s like someone asked Mike Nichols what the secret to a long marriage is and he said marry Diane Sawyer. And people say what’s the secret to working in Hollywood, I say work for Dana Fox.

**Craig:** Work for Dana Fox.

**John:** Dana Fox was my assistant before she went off–

**Katie:** Yes. So it all comes from this.

**John:** It does all come from me.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But I will say that Dana was my assistant, and Rawson Thurber was my assistant, Megan McDonnell who just left the show is now writing. I never did that thing where I invited them so directly into the process. And so that kind of apprenticeship that you’re talking about is a thing that happens in TV all the time. Whether it’s the newest staff writer on a show or the writer’s assistant, they’re always there for part of that process and it’s really hard to get that experience in features. And so you had a unique opportunity with Dana to be able to do that stuff.

**Katie:** It really does feel very singular. Because you’re right, in a television show, even just by osmosis people are sitting in a room and watching how it happens so often. I mean, that’s why – not to kind of butter you guys up, but the website and the podcast is so invaluable. I remember how ravenous I was for any information as to how the process went. Whether it was pitching, or writing, or finding an agent, and wanting as many details as possible. And I’m so excited for young writers coming up now that there is such a wealth of information and places to access that information in terms of just trying to understand what it looks like before you show up.

**Craig:** You know what? I remember when I first came to Los Angeles I was an intern also at Fox Network. It was through the Television Academy. So this is 1991. And when I got there I realized I really didn’t understand anything. I had grown up and watched networks. I knew there were networks. But now people are talking about Fox Television, but there’s also Fox Broadcasting. And I realized I actually didn’t understand anything.

Well, what do you do at that point? There is no Internet. There’s no Wikipedia. There’s no podcast. Nothing. So, I went to a bookstore and I bought – Ken Auletta wrote a book called Three Blind Mice which was kind of a history of the three networks. And I read that mostly just to learn like, oh, OK, they weren’t allowed back then to produce their own stuff so that’s a production company. They deficit finance. I learned what syndication was. I literally didn’t know that there was a difference. I didn’t know why one channel had reruns and the other one–

**Katie:** Why does a channel get to air four and this channel only airs one?

**Craig:** Right. And I learned it all from a book because that was the only way you could learn in 1840.

**Katie:** I mean, I’ve never admitted this, but when I came out here for that internship I heard from someone that the writers from the Office, because this was 2007, right in the height of their popularity, although I guess it lasted for a decade, but that they used to hang out at Molly Malone’s on Fairfax. I don’t even know if that’s true. I just heard it. And I used to go there almost every night.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Katie:** Hoping to see them.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**Katie:** I guess assuming maybe they’d be writing at 9pm at a bar. Like maybe I’d see them in the middle of their process. But I was like just to be in the same city where all these people who are doing the thing that I wanted to do were actively at it was so exciting to me.

**Craig:** There’s a wonderful romance of the writer. Then you become one, you meet them all, and you’re like, ah.

**John:** Maybe not so much.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Let’s talk about the movies you actually got made though. So the first thing I saw that had just your credit on it was Set it Up on Netflix which was delightful. So congratulations on that. So it was a big hit for Netflix. We have no idea what that actually means in terms of numbers, because they will never tell us that.

**Craig:** Between one and everyone watched it.

**John:** Yeah. But everyone was talking about it and that’s when you define a hit on Netflix is it’s a watercooler conversation moment. It was just a delightfully well-done romantic comedy. And talk us through that script. And had you written that script trying to do it in another way and Netflix ended up being the buyer? What was the process of getting Set it Up set up?

**Katie:** First of all, that’s a really lovely thing to say. Thank you so much. Set it Up was so much fun from beginning to end. A very good friend of mine named Juliette Berman who is also a really wonderful producer, she and I met as assistants and at that time we’re working for two women and met on a film set. And then a few years later she was a lower level executive at a company. And I had just started writing with Dana. And she reached out to me and said she wanted to make a movie about assistants setting up their bosses. She had that log line.

And I said I love that idea. I think that’s great. So I went off and spent a few weeks breaking the story and went back to her and said this is how I would like to do it. I would like to make a real throwback kind of screwball romantic comedy. And to her immense credit didn’t say no one is buying those anymore so don’t do that. And she said, OK, that’s the movie I’d want to watch, too, so write that one and then we’ll take it out.

So, I just wrote the movie that I wanted to see and didn’t really worry about where it would end up. I was–

**Craig:** Let’s pause for a moment so that people can really hear what you just said. Because I think a lot of times they don’t quite get it. Because they think that they’re supposed to write what supposedly the marketplace is demanding or their agent or their manager or their lawyers or their friends are telling them nobody wants that, write this.

Don’t do that. Do what Katie did. Write the movie you want to see.

**Katie:** And also that’s fun. Because then you’re writing what you would want to be watching. And then your day is fun and you know you can lean into that strike zone. And if it’s a genre you love – I love the genre. I love the classics. And so it was a wonderful excuse to investigate why I loved it and the things that worked and the things that would have to change in a modern setting. And it was just a really fun experiment in addition to a fun job to take on.

I had wonderful support in Juliette and Justin Nappi who runs that production company, Treehouse. And when the script went out it was exciting because a lot of places said that they wanted to make movies like this again. A lot of places also said we love these movies but we can’t make them because no one will see them. But it was exciting at the time that it felt like studios wanted to try and take that risk. And we were set up at MGM and briefly Fox 2000 for a little while. And it was a great college try from both of those places in terms of trying to figure out a way to make the movie in a way that would make sense to them. And then everyone kind of amicably realized that was not going to happen.

And that is when Netflix stepped in. And they said the same thing that we said. Matt Brodlie who at the time was running that program said this is a movie I want to watch and so I want the opportunity to make it. And they were so supportive and so extraordinary. I mean, we described it a little bit like the inmates running the asylum in that we had so much creative control. We almost weren’t ready for it.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious for older writers I think they still look at the theatrical release as this magical thing as opposed to being released over a streaming service like Netflix. But my daughter I don’t think really cares. I don’t think she notices much of a difference except that for one you have to drive a little bit and park.

Did you feel any difference yourself or were you like, yeah, no, it actually doesn’t matter?

**Katie:** I certainly didn’t feel any difference in the making of the movie. They feel the same wherever it’s going to end up I would say. And you know we tested Set it Up in theaters. We took it to the traditional kind of testing process. So I had seen it in theaters a few times before it was going. So even that process felt very similar. It was interesting, in the mix it’s different, in the sound mix, because you’re never worrying about the theatrical Dolby experience. That was the first time I realized, oh, this will only ever be watched—

And it was interesting too because at one point Matt reminded us, he was like, you know, you’re not in a comedy – you’re not spacing out for the laughs. This is usually going to be someone alone in their room or in a living room with two other people and you don’t have to wait for the person behind you to stop laughing to hear the next joke.

Little things like that were interesting. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have experienced both versions, kind of back to back in a way where it really is comparable. And there are huge benefits to both, and things you miss from both I think. I also feel lucky, I think romantic comedies are a genre that are really aligned with that kind of experience, which is where everyone wants to watch them anyway.

There is a thrill to seeing it in the theater with a lot of people. I mean, we premiered Booksmart at South by Southwest and that theatrical experience will probably be the highlight of my life. It was extraordinary. But there’s also a thrill in being able to tell people you’ve already paid for it. It’s at home this Friday.

**Craig:** It’s at home. No pressure.

**Katie:** Yeah, no pressure at all. And to watch it grow in ways like that as well. And, you know, internationally it’s fun I think for Glen and Zoey especially to feel like it has the equivalent of an international release that essentially only Mission: Impossible gets, but that they can travel globally.

**John:** Day and date worldwide, yeah.

**Katie:** Absolutely. And so the reach of it is really extraordinary. So, I feel lucky. There were things that while experiencing both I was like, oh, it’s maybe a little better over on the other side of the fence. But I think there are movies and there are experiences for both kind of at all times.

**John:** Set it Up is a romantic comedy and every romantic comedy is going to have those sort of two co-equal leads, or those two characters are going to be so central to everything. But I want to segue into Booksmart which also has two characters who are driving the story, who are at the centerpiece of the whole thing rather than a single protagonist.

And for folks who haven’t seen the movie, what is your short version of what the movie is about? How do you describe it to people?

**Katie:** I would describe it as it’s a high school comedy about two unapologetically brilliant best friends, girls who have been best friends for ten years in high school, who have prioritized school work, have prioritized their future, taken themselves seriously, and the last day of school realize that all the kids that they thought prioritized fun and didn’t take anything seriously were just as smart as them and got into schools just as great as they did.

And so they’re rocked by this knowledge that they were the only ones who chose, and everybody else got to do everything. And so they only have one night to prove that they also can do everything. And the night before graduation they try and fit in as much fun as possible to kind of prove to everybody that they’re just as multi-dimensional as they are.

**John:** Now, this was a script that was loved for a long time.

**Katie:** Yes, for a decade.

**John:** This was a Black List script. Emily Halpern, Sarah, Haskins, Susanna Fogel had been on this. And when you came on board what was it that made you want to do this movie?

**Katie:** Well, I think as you said the original draft that Emily and Sarah wrote was about two smart girls and a buddy comedy of two smart girls. And that was a dynamic that I was so excited about. Even when it came out. I remember when, because I used to be obsessed with the Black List, I still am, and when it came out in 2009 in college you had to pay to print every page. It was like ten cents to print a page at these public printers. And I printed out the script of Booksmart I was so excited about it, because I wanted to read it.

**John:** Holy cow. So this is 2009,

**Katie:** Yeah. So I was like tossing money towards the Dartmouth paper collection or whatever it was.

**Craig:** I hope it wasn’t very long.

**Katie:** It’s a comedy, so it’s OK.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s 95 pages.

**Katie:** Like 115.

**Craig:** Well, 115.

**Katie:** The librarian was like what is this?

**Craig:** That’s $11.50.

**Katie:** I know. I was committed.

**Craig:** That’s real.

**Katie:** And so I was incredibly excited about that. And Susanna Fogel, who is so talented, had done a big update a few years later and it was the same core idea but kind of a different context. But I was excited to both I think try and tell a story about smart girls that I hadn’t seen before, because I do think that in most movies if there’s a smart girl that’s 90% of her personality is that she’s intelligent. And I feel really lucky in that the women in my life are all really smart and no one would list that the first thing about them.

And I was excited about the potential to explore that. I was also excited to try – the high school movie is such an established structure and framework. And I felt like there was a really unique opportunity to take the archetypes that we’re used to and reveal all of them to be something more than that. Because I knew that, much like high school, when you start watching that movie you’re able to label everybody as a certain thing. And in so many great ways in high school movies they play either a comedic relief or a tertiary role that way, but I was excited to try and flip all the preexisting notions you have about these movies on their heads and reveal all that.

And mostly honestly I was excited to work with Olivia because she was attached at the time and had made this extraordinary deck and had such an undeniable and clear vision and tone for what she wanted the movie to be. She said she wanted it to be Training Day for high school girls.

**John:** Ha.

**Craig:** Ha.

**Katie:** And I was like that, I would work the craft table for. I’ll do anything for that movie. So I was really excited to be able to tackle that. And we talked a lot, too. We started developing this script right at the time of the Parkland students becoming so political and outward and so many young women, teenage girls of this age showing up in huge public ways so courageously and so bravely, both on the political spectrum, kind of throughout every spectrum. And we were really excited to try and tell a story to honor how brave and cool and tough girls of this age – what it’s like to be a young woman in 2019 which in the last three years had changed so astronomically.

And what it’s like to kind of be burying the burden of society as of now at that age and what it means. And so we wanted to celebrate how inspired we were by the women of that generation.

**Craig:** Here’s a writer-y question for you based on what you just said, because I think a lot of times when you are writing movies that are two-handers and you have two people you do start with this question of who are they/what do they represent/how are they connected with society of large/what’s their relevance? All the things you were just saying.

But at some point while you’re writing you realize, OK, but to each other they’re none of those things.

**Katie:** Exactly.

**Craig:** To each other they’re just people, so how do you – as you dig into the relationship do you start to feel like you’re shedding a little bit of the kind of concern over what they represent to an audience and start delving into what they mean for each other?

**Katie:** Completely. I mean, that’s the nail on the head in terms of how we wanted to structure it which is we talked a lot about how intense high school girl best friends are. And it’s an incredibly codependent borderline unhealthy relationship. It’s your first soulmate in a real way. But we were talking about how they’re the only person who sees all your dimensions. So that friendship gave us an opportunity to quite early on and kind of throughout the movie and the story show what the rest of the world saw these girls as. And most of the time it’s how they’re presenting themselves. You know, a character like Molly who is played by Beanie Feldstein so beautifully, she projects this intensity and this seriousness and this kind of no nonsense. And when she’s with her best friend she’s warm and goofy and funny and that’s the only person who sees that side of her. And so depicting a friendship like that in a buddy comedy you’ve got to show the interior and the exterior almost at the same time.

And that was such a fun opportunity to also right away establish this is who they present to the world and this is who they are when they’re gooey at home.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And you start to see them as people-people.

**Katie:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Which is fun.

**John:** Well let’s talk about the Amy character then. So Molly’s character is the prototypical if Amy didn’t exist you could still make a movie that was essentially the Molly movie.

**Craig:** This force of nature.

**John:** This ocean liner that’s going to be ploughing through here. And if this were Election then she would be Reese Witherspoon’s character. She’s the one who is just in charge of everything and clearly has stuff together. But to see the Amy character who is as smart and has very specific other things, came out as a lesbian in the 10th grade, and has no experience, in your writing process and figuring out how you were going to structure the story what were you thinking about the beats between the two characters and sort of the journey of their relationship? Sort of like what was that stake for the two of them over the course of that night? And decisions about how far to carry that out?

Because you describe it as codependence and it really is. It’s uncomfortable to watch at moments, sort of how deeply into each other’s lives they are. And you recognize that they have to find some space between each other, and yet you don’t want them to break out. So, as you’re plotting this out how are you trying to tie this into the actual events of the evening?

**Katie:** Yeah, well from the beginning Olivia and I decided we wanted to structure it almost like a romantic comedy knowing that it was a breakup movie. That as you’re saying what they really needed from each other was some freedom to figure out who they were. And so we went through and structured the story as if it were a romance but as you’re saying essentially at the beginning of the movie Amy knows that they need to be independent and Molly does not.

And so the structure throughout is Amy trying to make that happen in a way that doesn’t feel like an explosion, until Molly forces her to blow it up basically. You know, I’ll give maybe a slight spoiler alert because we’ll start to talk of some of the real plot.

**Craig:** Spoiler!

**Katie:** Spoiler alert! But over the course of the story Amy is trying to live her own life, even in small ways, saying I’m not going to go out, you go do it by yourself. I’ve gone out to one party. You keep going out to the other parties. It’s not until Molly really makes herself vulnerable at one point in the midpoint and admits that there’s something she hadn’t been sharing with Amy that Amy puts herself in the driver’s seat and decides that for Molly she’s going to continue this night out.

But I think what’s been fun is to listen to people talk about their own friendships in terms of the person who pushes and the person who maybe needs to be pushed. Because I think they both have a valid argument. I think Molly would say without me Amy wouldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t try things. She wouldn’t be brave. She wouldn’t experience things. And Amy would say you force me do everything and I would get there on my own if you gave me the time to do it.

So, that back and forth and making sure that structurally the arcs are lined up with each other in that one person realizes something before the other because the second can’t catch up in time, it’s going to come to blows almost.

**Craig:** Conflict.

**John:** Conflict.

**Craig:** Right? We talk about this. Conflict.

**John:** You need two characters who want different things. So let’s try to step back and generalize for movies with two central characters and the questions you need to ask yourself if you’re trying to write one of these stories. So you have two characters who need something from the other person. And they may already be getting that at the start of the movie, or they may meet over the course of the story and discover they’re getting this thing from each other, but they each have their own journey they need to be on and you need to find ways to structure your story so that each of them is challenged to grow into the next person they need to be and that it’s not just about the two of them going through a bunch of stuff.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is a great two-hander.

**Katie:** Yes.

**John:** Where those two characters, they needed to be together and they provide specific things to each other, but by going on this trip together they’ve both grown and changed. And in some ways it is just a single hero’s story with two heroes. You really have to think through each of them are kind of driving their own story and making sure that it really is meaningful. That you’re getting all the way through with this character’s – what they need at the start of the story and where they got to by the end of this, especially in a movie setting where it should be a one-time transformational event.

And that’s why being structured around this last night before graduation makes so much sense. That this is the only chance they’re going to get to do this thing while they’re still in high school.

**Katie:** Yeah. And I would even say, too, because I love Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I love Tommy Boy, I think is structurally like an–

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**Katie:** –an ideal buddy comedy. Sometimes it’s that one person needs something from the other and the other needs to realize they don’t need something from the other. That’s kind of the Amy – Amy needs Molly to give her some space, and Molly needs to realize that she can’t have Amy around all the time in that same way. So I think as you’re saying break it so that each individual arc would live on its own. And ideally it’s a character that’s interesting enough that you would watch a whole movie about them without the other. But the secondary buddy is forcing them to become the best version of themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think of it, when I was working on Identity Thief and I had to balance out Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, it seemed to me that, well like from a classic point of view clearly they’re each missing a piece that the other one can provide. And they can each illuminate each other’s condition and all that.

But underneath all that, even when you’re saying, OK, well it’s a two-hander, it seems to me that of the two people one will be fundamentally different by the end of the movie and the other one will have learned something but generally is going to be the same again. Like if there is a sequel, you know that one of them will be quite different and one of them has learned but is still – like Melissa McCarthy’s character is never going to be like normal. You know, whereas Jason’s character learns something.

**Katie:** Yeah. And that’s, I mean, it’s so fun to look at – it’s the same way. Tommy is never not going to be Tommy. But he’ll have learned something and David Spade’s character will have been transformed by–

**Craig:** Spade’s character is transformed. Like he gets it. You know what, just because the outer thing looks idiotic and stupid there is some magic in there.

**Katie:** And that there’s usually someone whose worldview has been so dependent on thinking they understand that and then realizing that it’s going to shift their entire worldview.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Here’s a difference between a two-hander versus a classic protagonist/antagonist setup is that in a two-hander generally we have POV from both characters’ point of view. We can watch scenes from either character’s point of view and it makes sense. And a good example of this in Booksmart is literally their big fight which is staged as a single tracking shot that just angles on one and angles on the other as one long take. And it’s an example of why we are seeing this from both character’s point of views.

If this were a classic protagonist/antagonist situation we’d be focused on our protagonist learning this lesson or taking this in or winning this fight. Instead we’re focused on these two as sort of co-equals trying to find their space in this place.

**Katie:** Yeah. And fight scenes are in my opinion so fun to write because you get to – it’s like a debate. You get to fully embody both arguments. And I think Molly and Amy have equally understandable arguments. I think they both – even when they make up at the end know that they’re right and that’s the most fun fight to write in my opinion.

**Craig:** I love a good fight between characters. If we care about both characters then what’s interesting is they can both cut each other to the bone and we will not hate them for it. We will feel bad for each of them. Because they get hurt. And then we also see that the person who hurt them feels bad about hurting them. Because, in fact, in reality most arguments are between people that like each other. It’s very rare that you end up in some sort of Burr/Hamilton duel on the street, right?

It’s like you have a friend and then something goes wrong and you guys get into it. And the cost of those things are people that actually are good and care for each other hurting each other.

So, I like that kind of concept of what a two-hander can get you as opposed to when you are dealing with the protagonist/antagonist, the antagonist is hurting the protagonist and we hate them for it.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** We don’t feel bad for them. Nor do we believe that they could be hurt. They don’t have feelings.

**Katie:** You’re right, though. I think the best fights are the ones where the thing that’s most devastating is the fact that they said it. Not that you hear it, but that they said it.

**Craig:** Right. That you put it in the air. And my ears heard it. And you can’t take it back. And you can see somebody wants to take it back. I love those moments. They always work.

**John:** So let’s talk about this new project you just set up. We won’t get into details of what the actual story of it is.

**Katie:** I will say it is a buddy comedy, which is why, I mean, we’ve been talking about What About Bob and Tommy Boy and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and even stuff like Elf. They’re the most fun movies – we talked about Identity Thief a lot.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. [laughs]

**Katie:** We did. Dana and I watched – I was there when she emailed you about it because we watched it together at their old house in the Hollywood Hills. And it might have been the hardest we’ve ever laughed in our lives. We had so much fun. So it’s a buddy comedy.

**Craig:** All right. You can stay.

**John:** So it’s a buddy comedy. Same director, Olivia Wilde, who directed Booksmart. But you did the thing where you pitched to a whole bunch of buyers and a bunch of studios over the course of a day, a few days?

**Katie:** It was three days.

**Craig:** Three crazy days.

**John:** So you’re going into the room and how long does the pitch take. Clearly you know what you’re going to say. It’s been practiced. What was the process of beating out story and the pitch and then figuring out, OK, you’re now ready to go take this to places? What was the lead up that got you into those three days of pitching?

**Katie:** It was really interesting. I have done this before where it’s just the script. And that’s just you alone pacing around in a room and getting it to the point where – I mean, in general I think you get it to the point where you would write it anyway. Like that’s when I like to pitch. Because then you’re going in with the energy of I’m going to do this either way and if you’d like to be a part of it that’s wonderful. But also if it doesn’t work out you know enough about it and you’re still excited enough about it that you’ll go right in and it’s not wasted time up until then.

So, usually it’s kind of – once I feel like I have the story broken to the point where I would be ready to go write that’s when I will feel good taking it to other places. Which was the case here as well, but because I was pitching with Olivia, with a director attached, and we were both going to be producing it, it was really about pitching the movie we were going to make as opposed to the script I was going to write.

And so that was a different, equally exciting, but a different process in terms of how we were presenting it to the room as opposed to me just getting to like snap my fingers and talk about sequences.

**Craig:** Which feels a little more modern to our time. You know, when John and I were starting out you would go around and pitch an idea. And you could talk about it without anything attached, no directors, no actors, and you’d give your 15-minute or 10-minute description of the movie. And then somebody might buy it or two people might fight over it.

But the idea of going on, well first of all, you’re not just going in with a director. You’re going with a director that is part of a team that worked. So now they know there’s a team that worked. They know what you guys are going to do. It’s a movie. Now the question for them, and this is a question I think they ask all the time, they used to ask, “Well, how much money of our development fund should we spend guessing?” Now the question they have is, “Hmm, when can we put this on our schedule?” That’s kind of the question they ask, right?

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So they’re not really buying a pitch. They’re green-lighting a movie. And that’s the consideration that I guess you make a lot easier when you’re pitching what feels like the beginning of an actual process as opposed to sort of a big guess.

**Katie:** Yes. And that was – and Olivia being able to talk about casting, about locations. She made a gorgeous visual deck that they got to look at while we were pitching the story itself.

**John:** Pause for a second. So was the visual deck something you were showing on a screen, or you had cards that showed?

**Katie:** We did not. We were very analog. Every meeting we went into there was a person waiting to hook up our AV and we were like we don’t need it, we’re so sorry. And instead I just went to Kinko’s every morning at 7am and went to their color printer–

**Craig:** 10 cents a page.

**Katie:** Yeah. It’s much worse than Dartmouth. The color printer at Kinko’s I was like now we really have to sell this. Yes, so we handed them something that they could look at in that concept. But it was so much fun because we, you know, we love each other and we had so much fun breaking the story. And we took it out to pitch as previously when we were ready to do it. We were ready to make the movie. And so the experience was, even though it was a long experience, it was getting to go into rooms and tell them about something that we were just giddy excited about. And we knew we were going to do regardless.

And so then it also felt a little bit like figuring out what vibe felt best for us.

**Craig:** Well, right. So at that point you’re not pitching them, they’re pitching you. And I think they can smell that. I mean, look, there’s a lot of things that they, meaning studio executives, can’t do, like write scripts. But there are also things that they can do really well, like sense in the air what their position is in terms of power and potential. And I think sometimes they just know, right, so they’re coming in, this is what they just pitched. This is who is pitching it. I know they’re pitching it at other places. This is definitely going to be a thing. And now I have to convince them.

And that’s when you know you’ve got them.

**Katie:** That’s, again, very kind to say. But I do think 98% of it, too, is just how much we loved it. Because if everyone had said no thank you, here’s your valet ticket, please don’t take the water bottles, we would have gone home and just done what we’d been doing every day which is beating through scenes and making each other laugh and talking it out that way. So it’s like how you end up playing hard to get best when you actually are too busy to go on a date.

**Craig:** When you’re actually hard to get.

**Katie:** Exactly. Exactly. So it was fun. And, you know, Dana gave me some wonderful advice, too, in terms of pitching. Because the previous times I’d taken scripts around to pitch I had not made any movies. And so it really is a song and dance of you pitch everything. I would throw in lines of dialogue. There was so much tonal stuff I added to try and get them to understand the kind of comedy it would be. And I was ready to do that again this time. And Dana was the one who kind of had to remind me that you’ve established a tone and you don’t need to pitch every line of dialogue in that same way. You can just tell them what the movie is going to be in a more macro sense and they’ll be able to fill in the blanks.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Did you practice pitch to Dana or anybody else?

**Katie:** We practice pitched with each other. I think we both practice pitched to a few people maybe on the side when we had time to kill, like over the phone I practice pitched to my mom, I practice pitched to my husband. But not in any official sense I think because we knew that because we’re such good friends and because we have a conversational manner the more we practiced the more it would feel formal. And we wanted to come in and say like, OK, this is what we’re excited about, here’s the movie.

**Craig:** Totally. Even the act of feeling rehearsed will indicate to them that you’re scared. Because that meant you worked on this really carefully. And you’re right. The best way is to walk in and go, “So, anyway, check this out. Oh, did you not understand it? Did you not like it? Cool we’ve got somewhere else to go. We can go grab a coffee before we go sell this to a competitor.” That’s kind of the attitude.

**Katie:** It’s also I think – someone, I forget, I wish I could remember who said this. But someone said the best way to pitch is to act like you’re trying to convince your friend to see a movie that you saw last night.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Katie:** Maybe you guys said it actually.

**Craig:** I think we might have.

**Katie:** You can cut that out and give me full credit.

**John:** [laughs]

**Katie:** Those geniuses. What geniuses said it? And that’s how we thought about it the whole time. But to do that you have to know the movie well enough.

**Craig:** You have to have seen the movie in your head.

**Katie:** Exactly. So it has to seem casual but it can’t be casual. And I think a lot of my confidence came from knowing that it would be maybe a more broad strokes pitch, but any question that they asked I would have the answer to.

**Craig:** You’d have the answer. Right.

**Katie:** Because I think if I had only had the broad strokes and then had to in the room scramble to figure out what the answers were it would have been like an Albert Brooks flop sweat.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And so the process of going into that room and describing the story is the same for any kind of pitch, but it is a little bit different when it’s your own original thing where there’s multiple places you could go versus coming in to pitch on a piece of property that somebody owns. Because then I’m just like, OK, here’s a thing that you already have and I need to convince you that I’m the right person to adapt that thing that you have.

It is exciting when it’s like and I’ve got another meeting in an hour so I’ve got to go. And I’ve not enjoyed my TV experience all that much, but one of the things I kind of did enjoy was going out and pitching to the three networks in a day because it’s like–

**Craig:** Those days are great. I mean, I remember going around with Lindsay Doran when we were pitching the adaptation of the book Three Bags Full which ended up at Universal. And it was just magic because it was that kind of deal where you knew like, look, we’re doing it anyway and we’ve got this. So jump onboard or don’t jump onboard. But you feel like for once you’re driving.

The thing about coming and pitching on their stuff, it’s actually just auditioning.

**John:** It is. It is.

**Craig:** You know, it’s just a totally different thing. You’re already there wanting. You know, and really when you have something terrific that you’re bringing out you’re kind of saying you’re going to be wanting.

**Katie:** Yeah. And when you’re pitching on property they own they’re the ones with three dates lined up after this.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Katie:** And you’re the girl coming out of the limo trying to impress them on the first night so you don’t go home. And this way you get to–

**Craig:** I feel like that all the time. I do.

**John:** Let’s see if we can answer some listener questions. Frederico wrote in with a question asking, “What are some of your suggestions to make a protagonist who is in a situation he or she can’t control feel more active? It’s not an uncommon note to get. Sometimes a series of unfathomable events drive the narrative forward rather than the realization of a personal arc as in 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

**Katie:** That’s such an interesting question. I would say I feel the most active sometimes when things are out of my control because I’m trying to find a way to respond to it. So, I think a character making decisions responding to something out of their control, how they respond to it, as long as they’re not letting things happening to them and then waiting for the next thing, something out of their control can instigate numerous different responses in terms of, are they fighting against it. Are they trying to find a way out? How many versions of a way out are they trying to find? So I think it’s an exciting opportunity to show what they do in those times of crisis and very rarely are people sitting around waiting for the next thing out of their control.

So I think kind of like a rat in a maze, whatever they do when they get to that end that’s blocked off and how they figure out how to back out of it can be I think as interesting as if someone is in the driver’s seat.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. I’m not really sure what Frederico is hung up on here, because that’s most everything. Most stories, things happen to you. I mean, nobody was controlling whether or not the Titanic was going to hit the iceberg. It’s how you deal with them. Your action is how you respond to changes in the world around you. And it’s almost necessary for some things to be out of your control, otherwise you’re not really in any kind of crisis. You’re determining everything. So–

**John:** I would say there’s going to be some macro events that are way out of the character’s control, but as a writer you’re trying to establish story drives that are within their control as well. So their interpersonal goals. What they’re trying to do on a smaller level, making sure that you’re setting those things up well enough that you can see progress and you can see them making choices that are hopefully fulfilling those smaller things.

Because Titanic, you know, boat hits an iceberg, but the actual movie is about all the characters doing the things that they’re doing and the choices they’re making in that time.

**Craig:** Making plans is always good.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If a character makes a plan you can screw the plan up as the writer, and you probably should screw the plan up, but it’s a sign that they have a goal. And humans are planning creatures. I always just go back to what’s normal. Like Frederico just ask yourself what would you do? When we are in trouble we immediately start planning, so yeah.

**Katie:** I mean, Titanic is a great example because you not only can’t control the iceberg but you can’t control that you’re down on the lower decks and the person you love is up with her fiancé and he’s trying to put her on a boat. All of that is out of your control. What do you do about that scenario?

**Craig:** With that guy with a gun.

**Katie:** Ugh, Billy Zane.

**Craig:** Billy Zane.

**John:** Billy Zane.

**Craig:** I make my own luck.

**John:** Let’s try one more. Craig, do you want to ask Cameron’s question?

**Craig:** Sure. Cameron asks, “I’d like to know how you go about the character prep and research? That is to say knowing who your protagonist is, their background, the people around them, and how that will play out in plot? I’m curious how much you plan and how much you like to discover on the fly?”

**John:** You’re a perfect person to ask this question of. So, let’s go back to Set it Up. And so how much did you know about each of those four central characters right at the very start of this? How much was discovered in the writing process or while you were in scenes?

**Katie:** I really like to over-plan. I like to have more information than necessary times a thousand. So I made pretty long and detailed character biographies for most of the main characters. For Harper and Charlie, the two assistants, for the two bosses. And for most of their friends. I also think tonally it’s helpful sometimes to put even little jokes for yourself in there. When they lost their virginity, what their worst breakup was, their worst vacation. Little things like that so you have in memory for when other things come up.

Then I think once it’s cast you redo all of that. Or you redo as much as you need to and you refine it to the person who is actually playing the character. So some of those background stories will occasionally pop up, whether it’s if you need an alt or dialogue or when you’re talking with the actor for me. And some are just for you.

Occasionally I use things I came up for one character in dialogue in a whole other script if it’s just a story I like or something came up. But I always like to overdo it and let it inform the tone of how they’re talking about everything else later.

**John:** So that’s helpful for you and it’s not busy work. Because I think sometimes I worry about people who do extensive character write-ups. They’re trying to stall and get themselves out of writing. And clearly that isn’t for you. For you it’s part of the process of discovering the character.

**Katie:** Yes. My busy work is like going to Staples and finding a better pen than the one I’m using now and a better notebook and which notecards will best–

**Craig:** Notecards!

**Katie:** Kind of infuse me with – that’s my version of busy work. But, yeah, I mean, I find it helpful in terms of letting it infuse everything going forward. Because I think also if you give yourself a day to say, OK, I’m just going to spend all day working on one character and their background and practice their dialogue, then maybe you will come up with something that makes you laugh unexpectedly that you’ll end up wanting to put in later. So I tend to do it – once I know I think in general what I’d like the arc to be then I go back and figure out, OK, who do I want it to be.

**John:** You just said the phrase “practice their dialogue.” More on that. What do you mean by that?

**Katie:** I love to – once I kind of feel, this sounds very writerly in a way I don’t usually identify myself with, but I feel like once you’ve written maybe five or ten pages of dialogue that’s when you know who someone is. And so before I start writing I’ll practice things, whether it’s them calling Time-Warner and trying to change their service. Them calling their grandmother on their birthday and checking in on that. Them interacting not necessarily with characters I know I want to have in the story but how they would deal with all these – with my friends who I know what they sound like and how this person would talk to my friends.

I’ll do that maybe ten, 15, 20 pages of dialogue. And once I feel like I get a sense of what makes me the happiest or what makes me laugh the most about the way they speak then I’ll feel like I know the core of who they are, the way they’ll react to everything else.

**Craig:** That’s great. You know what? I do this, too. And I think actually, Cameron, there’s two different things you’re asking about. You’re asking about character prep and research. Research is where I think people can start to hide. It depends on what you’re writing. I mean, if you’re writing something that’s historical obviously there’s a lot of research to do. But even then that research is very – it’s about facts and context. It’s term paper stuff, right?

But character prep is different. So, Katie, you write it out. And the movement of fingers on keyboard is really – you’re helping your mind write a person. You’re starting to build a human being. You can do this taking a walk around your neighborhood. You can do it daydreaming in the shower. But the practicing of dialogue, the talking like that person, you begin to become a person and you find their rhythms and what they sound like and what they would and wouldn’t say.

All of that is essential to preparing for the moment you then do it for real.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Otherwise, because I know, when he says how much do you like to discover on the fly? As little as possible.

**Katie:** Totally.

**Craig:** I’m open to it. Always. But I don’t want to rely on the fly revealing anything.

**Katie:** Yeah. It’s a treat if something pops up but you can’t be depending on it.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Katie:** Another trick that is really fun that I do sometimes is if there’s a movie that I love as a comp for what I’m working on or something similar I’ll practice writing by inserting a new character into that scene and the way they would react to that.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Katie:** So like for example something like What About Bob or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, those are very specific tonally and it might not even work if you’re doing a buddy comedy because those are so kind of nailed and in the world that they’ve created, but figuring out how they would interact with other characters you really like just because anyone – that’s why I use my friends, too. I know their voices better than anyone. So I know how they’d always react to something and then it’s a matter of figuring out how someone new would.

But sometimes a character is so well-established that it can be a good litmus test. You know that voice well enough to then see how it would interact with other things.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Los Angeles which just opened this past week. That’s where I saw your movie. It is a great place to see your movie.

**Katie:** I’m so excited.

**John:** And see other movies, too. So for folks who don’t have a Drafthouse near them, they have food in the theaters. They have beers. They have cool things that run before the shows. This one in Downtown Los Angeles also has a video store where you can check stuff out for free. There’s games you can buy. It’s just a really good space.

**Craig:** So hip.

**John:** So hip.

**Craig:** So hip.

**John:** So if you are in the mood to see a movie and you live in Los Angeles it’s worth it to take one trip down there at least see the Alamo Drafthouse. It’s really nice. And if you’re someplace else that has them, like this is old news John. Why are you bragging about this one?

**Craig:** Well, it’s good that we have one because I only knew about the one in Austin. So, great. I’ll check it out. My One Cool Thing this week is a One Cool Person. And I would like to just acknowledge Jennifer Burt. So for people who don’t know Jennifer Burt works at the Writers Guild. She has been working at the Writers Guild for, well, at least since 2004, because I remember meeting her then when I was on the board then.

And Jennifer Burt is in charge with coordinating all of the election stuff. So especially in an election like this one with how many people are running?

**John:** 21 board candidates.

**Craig:** 21 board candidates and whatever seven officer candidates. Everyone’s statements. Everyone’s photos. Everyone’s list of service. All of it has to be in on time. It all has to be prepared and go into the booklet. It is all governed by these rules. And then there’s election laws and labor laws. And she does it all.

And so I just wanted to acknowledge Jennifer Burt because she is like an unsung hero of the guild that keeps the machinery of our democracy spinning smoothly.

**Katie:** I can’t wait for one of the elections in my life to be down to single digit candidates.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be fun?

**John:** It would be so nice. Katie, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Katie:** This is so exciting. My One Cool Thing is technically Two Cool Things, but it’s really One Cool Thing. There’s a restaurant that is relatively in the arts district called Lupetti which is a delicious pizza restaurant. And this place has a secret vinyl listening bar in the back that I have recently discovered. And you knock on a little secret door and you walk in and the entire place is designed for the best olfactory – is that the word I’m looking for?

**Craig:** Olfactory would be smell.

**Katie:** Yeah. Well it smells great, too.

**Craig:** I would go auditory.

**Katie:** Auditory experience. Please don’t cut that. I want everyone to know.

**Craig:** People need to know what happened here.

**Katie:** People need to know both definitions.

**John:** People need to know.

**Craig:** People need to know.

**John:** What is the cost of lies?

[They all laugh]

**Katie:** The vinyl listening bar is called In Sheep’s Clothing and during the day it’s a beautiful bright coffee shop essentially that’s terrific for writing and the entire space is designed for the best listening experience. So the walls, and the ceilings, and everything. They play great records. And it’s a wonderful place to write. And then at night it becomes a cool little bar.

Because the two things that keep going while writing are usually pizza and music.

**Craig:** Pizza music.

**Katie:** And so this is a full combination of both of them.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Love it. Katie Silberman, thank you so much for joining us on this show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Katie:** You guys, this was so much fun. Thank you for having me. It’s going to be like Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. You’re going to come back and I’m going to be living in this studio for the next two weeks.

**Craig:** I’m OK with that because we’re at John’s house. So it’s perfectly fine.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Mackey Landy. 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 like the ones we answered today. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Are you on Twitter? Are you a Twitter person?

**Katie:** I am. I don’t use it very often. But it’s @katiesilberman.

**John:** All right. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

Folks do recaps on Reddit so you can check out the recap there. And back episodes of the show are at Scriptnotes.net or download 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com.

Katie, come back any time.

**Katie:** I’m so excited. Thank you guys for having me. I’m a big fan. So this will be the only one I don’t listen to.

Links:

* We’re hosting a panel on Addiction & Mental Health organized by Hollywood, Health & Society Wed, July 31, 2019, 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM PDT. Watch the [Facebook livestream](https://www.facebook.com/events/801699256892361/) starting at 7:15pm PDT.
* [WGA West Unveils Officer Board Candidates](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/wga-west-unveils-officer-board-candidates-1226520)
* Wednesday, Aug. 28 Candidates Night at the Writers Guild Theater
* [Member meetings](https://my.wga.org) August 7th, 8th and 10th
* [Booksmart Reunion Olivia Wilde Katie Silberman New Project Universal Pictures](https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/booksmart-reunion-olivia-wilde-katie-silberman-new-project-universal-pictures-1202159802/)
* [The Alamo Drafthouse Downtown LA](https://drafthouse.com/los-angeles)
* [Lupetti Pizzeria](https://www.lupettipizzeria.com/) and [In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi Record Bar and Cafew](https://www.insheepsclothinghifi.com/)
* [Katie Silberman](https://twitter.com/katiesilberman) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_411_setting_it_up_with_katie_silberman.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Episode 403 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On today’s show, something we have never done before. It’s just me. No guest. No John. He’s off visiting family I believe in Colorado. So it’s just me today. And we’re going to do something that I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time. I’m going to be talking to you today about structure and character. I’m kind of giving you my whole theory on how to write a movie.

I know it sounds like a lot. And it is a little bit of a lot. It’s a talk that I’ve done at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival a number of times. I haven’t done it in a while. And I feel like their exclusive right to it has ended, so now I’m giving it to you. This is sort of my how-to write a movie.

But before we get into that we do have a little bit of business to go through. And it’s about our live show. Our next live show, we’ve talked about this before. It’s going to be on the evening of Thursday, June 13 here in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel which is a beautiful venue. And it is benefiting Hollywood Heart. We do this every year. It’s a great charity.

We have probably the best guest lineup we’ve ever had. We have Alec Berg, the showrunner of Silicon Valley and Barry. We have Rob McElhenney, showrunner of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We have Kourtney Kang, writer of Fresh Off the Boat. And we have Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. And by the way that’s – Melissa McCarthy and Ben – I’m not talking about other Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcones that you don’t know. I mean the ones you know. Those.

It is just about the most comedy firepower I think we can ever assemble on one stage for this show. You’re not going to want to miss it. Tickets I believe are still available but we’re getting close to running out, so take a look at the link in the show notes and get your tickets.

All right. Let’s get into it. So when we talk about writing a script a lot of times we’re talking about structure. There are, I don’t know, four million books about structure. I went online and I looked for just images based on screenplay structure and what I saw was kind of mind-blowing. There are these long narrow lines with little ticks on them and then there’s a pie chart. And then there’s a swirly thing that kind of looks like a snail shell. There’s a triangle. There’s a diamond. I think there’s a parallelogram. And if there’s not a trapezoid maybe one of you can get on that.

All of this is designed to help you learn how to structure a screenplay. Here’s the problem. All of it is done from the wrong end. All of it. It’s all done from the point of view of analysis. They look at things, they take them apart, and then they say, look, all these pieces fit into this swirly shape, or this diamond. The issue is that’s not going to help you actually write anything because when you write you’re starting from scratch. You’re not breaking something apart. You’re building something out of nothing. And when you’re building something out of nothing you need a different set of instructions.

I can think of a doctor who takes bodies apart. That’s a medical examiner or a coroner. That’s not the doctor you want to go to to make a baby for instance. It’s just a very different thing, right? So we’re going to come at it from the point of view of making babies and your baby is your script. Don’t worry, we’re going to keep this safe for work.

So, structure. Structure, structure, structure. Screenplay is structure. You need to know how to do your structure. Structure I’m here to tell you is a total trap. Yes, screenplay is structure, but structure isn’t what you think it is. Structure doesn’t say this happens on this page, this happens on that page. Here’s a pinch point. Here’s a stretchy point. Here’s a midpoint. Structure doesn’t tell you what to do. If you follow strict structural guidelines in all likelihood you will write a very well structured bad script.

Structure isn’t the dog. It’s the tail. Structure is a symptom. It’s a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Take a moment. Think about that for a second. I’ll repeat it. Structure is a symptom of a character’s relationship with a central dramatic argument. Structure isn’t something you write well. It’s something that happens because you wrote well. Structure is not a tool, it is a symptom.

When we think of rigid structural forms I have to tell you there’s nothing honest about them. There’s nothing true about them. They’re synthetic. There’s never been one single great writer who created one single great screenplay following a structural template. Not one.

What real writers follow are their characters. And what great writers follow are their characters as they evolve around a central dramatic argument that is actually meaningful to other human beings. Let me stop for a second and tell you that we are going to get into real practicals but for a bit now we’re just going to talk a little bit of philosophy. First, let’s consider what we call basic structure. There’s a Syd Field point of view. You have your three acts, your inciting incident, act break escalation, magical midpoint character shift, third act low point, and kick off to climactic action.

We also have the Chris Vogler Hero’s Journey, ordinary world, call to action, refusal of call, acceptance of call, and blah, blah, blah. Save the Cat is a lot of stuff.

There’s a lot of what to do but where’s the why? Who came up with this stuff in the first place? Why is it there? Why are there three acts at all? Why is there a low point? Why do we like it when there’s an inciting incident? Why do we like it when there’s a low point? If we don’t know why those things are there how are we supposed to know how to write them? Because we process the world through our consciousness and our consciousness is sort of a natural storyteller, all of us are actually walking around doing this right all the time. We just don’t know it. We’re narrativizing our own lives better than most who try and do it on purpose on Fade In or WriterDuet, or Highland2. I don’t know any other software.

Right now you’re sitting there, you’re riding along in your car, you’re being passive. You are accepting this structure talk, wondering when I’m going to get to the practicals. And I will. But later if someone asks you about this experience you’re having you will naturally, without thinking, create a story. You won’t have to consult a graph or a chart or a swirly thing. You’ll just tell the story.

Here’s a story. I listened to a podcast. It was on the following topics. Reasonable people could agree or disagree. Anyway, I’m the same. That’s not a very good story, is it?

Here’s another story. I was listening to a podcast and it was OK, it was sort of a little boring, but then the person said this one thing and it reminded me of something else I’d heard once and that tied back to this moment in my life where something really interesting happened. And now I’m wondering maybe if I was wrong about that thing and I should be doing it this way instead. Huh. There you go. And that story has character, meaning you. That story is about you and maybe it’s about me. It’s about a relationship that we’re having right now through this podcast, for better or worse.

And if you were to relay this story, this experience, you might share some parts of this that you thought were interesting or some parts that you thought were stupid, but you will naturally contextualize it as such. This moment in time did or did not help you in your desire to change. We live our lives this way, but when we sit down to write we somehow forget. You know who never forgets? Actors. They have to get it because they are the characters and we are experiencing them as the characters.

So there’s that old cliché line: what’s my motivation? Well it’s not a joke. Believe it or not that is the key to structure. What is the purpose of all this storytelling that we engage in, all this narration? Well, narration helps us move through a changing world. And story is about a change of state. There are three basic ways your story changes. And this applies I think to every possible story.

The first way is internal. This is what is going on inside the character’s mind. This is the things they’re thinking, they’re feeling, their emotions. And this axis goes all over the place. It zigzags up and down. Then there’s interpersonal. That’s the main relationship of your story. It has a start, it has an end. It usually begins in a kind of neutral way. Then depending on how your story unfolds it can dip and then rise and then plummet and then spike. And finally you have the external axis. That’s the narrative, the plot, the things that are going on around you. And that generally is just a straight line. Start to end.

All of this is made up of scenes. And within scenes we’re doing something that follows the Hegelian dialectic. Calm down. You don’t need to look it up. I’ll help you out. The Hegelian Dialectic basically is a way of thinking about how we formulate ideas and thoughts and arguments. You take a thesis. That’s a statement. Something is true. And then you apply to that an antithesis. No, that’s not true and here’s why. Those things collide and in theory what results from that is a new thesis called the synthesis. And that starts the whole process over again. That synthesis becomes a thesis. There’s an antithesis. A new synthesis. That becomes a thesis. Constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.

And who is the person firing these antitheses at these theses? You.

So, as we go through this talk never forget this one simple fact. At any given moment as you begin a scene you have a situation that is involving those three axes and you are going to fire something at at least one of them to make something new. That is all story is. But what is the glue that holds all those changes together? What’s the glue that you the creator can use to come up with your antitheses and get your new syntheses and do it over and over again?

And that brings us to theme. Theme is otherwise known as unity. Unity is a term that was first used by Aristotle in Poetics and this is one you actually should read. I know you’re like, Aristotle? Hegel? Hegelian guy. Calm down. It’s fine. In fact, Aristotle was really a contemporary writer in his own way. Poetics is an easy read. It will take you about 30 minutes. It’s a pretty good bathroom book. And in it you’ll find a lot of things that we hear today, like for instance the worst kind of plot is an episodic plot. Well, that’s pretty much true.

What did he think of unity or theme? Well basically theme is your central dramatic argument. Some of those arguments are interesting. Some of them are a little cliché. And the quality of the argument itself isn’t necessarily related to the quality of the script. For instance, you can have a really good screenplay built around you can’t judge a book by its cover. That’s OK. The theme itself doesn’t have to be mind-altering or, I don’t know, revolutionary. It’s your execution around it that’s going to be interesting.

But the important thing is that the argument has to be an argument. I think sometimes people misunderstand the use of theme in this context and they think a theme for a screenplay could be brotherhood. Well, no. Because there’s nothing to argue about there. There’s no way to answer that question one way or the other. It’s just a vague concept.

But, man and women can’t just be friends, well, that’s an argument. Better to be dead than a slave. Life is beautiful, even in the midst of horrors. If you believe you are great, you will be great. If you love someone set them free. Those are arguments.

Screenplays without arguments feel empty and pointless. You will probably get some version of the following note. What is this about? I mean, I know what it’s about, but what is it about? Why should this movie exist? What is the point of all this?

Now, it’s really important to note you probably don’t want to start with an argument. That’s a weird way to begin a script. Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically. For instance, let’s talk about this idea. A fish has to find another fish who is somewhere in the ocean. Got it. The animators will love it. Water. Fish. Cool.

OK, let’s think of a central dramatic argument. How about if you try hard enough you can do anything, even find a fish? That’s a bit boring, isn’t it? How about sometimes the things we’re searching for are the things that we need to be free from? Well, OK. That’s an interesting argument. I’m not sure how it necessarily is served or is being served by this idea of a fish in the ocean. How about you can’t find happiness out there, you have to find it within yourself? That could work. That’s sort of Wizard of Oz-ish.

But let’s go really ironically. How about this one? No matter how much you want to hold onto the person you love, sometimes you have to set them free. Well, that is pretty cliché but it is a great central dramatic argument to pair with a fish needs to find another fish. Because when you’re looking for somebody out there in the deep, deep ocean you the writer know that what you’re promising is they’re going to find them and then have to let them go anyway. And that is starting to get good.

All right. Let’s get into some practicals, shall we? Because this is thematic structure. This is going to help you write your script. In thematic structure the purpose of the story – and listen carefully now – the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. I shall repeat. The purpose of the story is to take your main character, your protagonist, from a place of ignorance of the truth or the true side of the argument you’re making and take them all the way to the point where they become the very embodiment of that argument and they do it through action.

So, let’s talk about how we introduce. We begin in the beginning with the introduction of a protagonist in an ordinary world. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times. But why? Sometimes movies don’t start ordinarily. You probably saw Mad Max: Fury Road. If you didn’t, do so. Well, there’s no ordinary beginning there. I mean, it’s crazy from the jump. Ordinary doesn’t mean mundane. Although sometimes it can.

What ordinary means here is that the protagonist’s life essentially exemplifies their ignorance of the theme, of the argument that you want them to believe eventually. In fact, they believe the opposite of that argument. That’s how they begin. Typically in the beginning of a story your main character believes in the opposite of the theme and they have also achieved some kind of stasis. There’s a balance in their life. In fact, their ignorance of that theme has probably gotten them to this nice place of stasis and balance. It doesn’t mean they’re happy. What it means is that without the divine nudge of the writer-god their life could go on like this forever. It’s not a perfect life. It’s not the best life they could live but it’s the life they’ve settled for. Their stasis is acceptable imperfection.

If we’re going to circle back around to my favorite fish movie, Marlin can live with a resentful son as long as he knows his son is safe. That’s acceptable imperfection. I get it. Nemo resents me. He’s angry at me. He feels stifled by me. That’s OK. He’s alive. I can keep going this way.

And then along comes you, the writer. Your job is to disrupt that stasis. So you invent some sort of incident. Ah-ha. Now we know the point of the inciting incident. The point of the inciting incident is not to go, “Oh god, a meteor!” The point of the inciting incident is to specifically disrupt a character’s stasis. It makes the continuation of balance and stasis and acceptable imperfection impossible. It destroys it. And it forces a choice on the character.

OK, but why? I’m just going to keep asking that question. But why? But why? But why? Why do you have to do this to this poor character? Because you are the parent and you have a lesson to teach this person, or animal, or fish. Your motivation is part of your relationship to your character. You don’t write an inciting incident. You don’t write push character out of safety. That gives you no real guidance to let something blossom. What you write is an ironic disruption of stasis. Ironic as in a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts that is, and hear me out, genetically engineered to break your character’s soul.

You’re going to destroy them. You are god. And you are designing a moment that will begin a transformation for this specific character so you have to make it intentional. It can be an explosion, or it can be the tiniest little change. But it’s not something that would disrupt everyone’s life the way it’s disrupting this person’s life. You have tailored it perfectly and terribly for them.

So, what’s the first thing your character wants to do when this happens to them? Well, it they’re like you or me they’re going to immediately try and just get back to what they had. They have to leave their stasis behind because you’ve destroyed it, but everything they’re going to do following that is done in service of just trying to get it back. Shrek doesn’t have his swamp, so he has to go on a journey so he can get his swamp back. The point here is that the hero has absolutely no idea that there is a central dramatic argument. They’ve made up their mind about something and their mind has not changed.

Your heroes should be on some level cowards. I don’t mean coward like shaking in your boots. I mean coward like I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the way things are. Please just let me be. And underlining that is fear. And fear, especially in your character, is the heart of empathy. I feel for characters when I fear with them. It is vulnerability. It’s what makes me connect. Every protagonist fears something.

Imagine a man who fears no other man. He doesn’t fear death. He doesn’t fear pain. But, ah-ha, fill in that blank. But the point is it has to be filled in. You can feel it, right? Like he’s going to have to fear something. Because fear is our connection to a character. And a fearful hero should have lived their lives to avoid the thing they’re afraid of.

You, are taking their safety blanket away. So I want you to write your fearful hero honestly. What do they want? They want to return to what they had. They want to go backwards. And believe it or not that is the gift that is going to drive you through the second act. The second act.

Oh, the thing that’s so scary. No. No, you should be excited about it. Let me take a break for a second and say that everything I’m talking about here is mostly to serve the writing of what I would call a traditional Hollywood movie. That doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean cliché. It doesn’t even mean formulaic. It just means it’s a traditional narrative. So, I don’t know, if you’re looking to be a little more Lars von Trier about things, well, I don’t know how interesting or helpful this is going to be. But I’m presuming that most of you just want to write a general kind of movie that conforms to a general kind of movie shape.

So this is how we’re going to help you do it. And the second act is the part that I think freaks people out the most. They get scared. But I think you should be excited about pages 30 to 90 roughly. Please do not quote me on those numbers. But first, are you getting it? Have you stopped thinking about plot? Have you stopped thinking about plot as something to jam characters into? Because when you do that that’s why you run out of road in your second act. You ran out of plot because it wasn’t being generated by anything except you.

Ah-ha. But when you start thinking of your plot as not something that happens to your characters but what you are doing to your characters that’s when you can lead them from anti-theme to theme. How do we do it?

First, we reinforce the anti-theme. That might sound a little counterintuitive but hear me out. You’ve knocked your hero out of their acceptable stasis. They are now on the way to do whatever they need to do to get back to it. The hero is going to experience new things. And I want you to think about making those new things reinforce her belief in an anti-theme. Because this is going to make them want to get back to the beginning even more. Oh, it’s delicious. We’re creating a torture chamber basically. Keep thinking that way.

Imagine your hero is moving backwards against you and you push them forward and they push back. Ah-ha. Good. Design moments to do this. You’re going to keep forcing them forward, but you’re also going to put things in their path that make them want to go backwards. That’s tension. That’s exciting. And more importantly when they do get past those things it will be meaningful. You want to write your world to oppose your character’s desires.

So, you’re going to reinforce their need to get back. Ah-ha. So, let’s see, Marlin wanders out into the ocean. His theory is the ocean is really, really dangerous. What should the first thing be? Maybe let’s have him meet some sharks. And actually, oh, you know what, they’re not scary at all. Oh god, yes they are. The ocean is in fact way worse than he even imagined. That’s what you need to do. He needs to get his son back really, really soon so he can return to stasis. And then when you’ve done that you’re going to introduce an element of doubt.

Something or someone lives in a different way. Someone or something in your story is an example of the life of theme rather than the life of anti-theme. So remember, your hero believes in one side of the central dramatic argument. It’s the wrong side. You want them to believe the other one. OK, but they believe the wrong one. They need to run into someone or something that believes in the right side of it. This element of doubt creates a natural conflict for the protagonist because of course I believe this, you believe that. But it’s also attractive to them on some level because – and again, really important. Your hero is rational. This is a critical component of a good hero. You are dealing with somebody that probably lives irrationally, fine, but they have to have the capacity to see that maybe there is a better way.

You’re living things maybe the wrong way but you need the capacity to see things going the right way. It is fear that separates the irrational hero from their rational potential. And because they’re rational when they get a glimpse of this other way of being they’re going to realize there’s value to it through circumstance or accident or necessity or another character’s actions. These are all things you’re inventing, but here’s why – the hero is going to experience a moment of acting in harmony with the right side of the central dramatic argument.

This could involve their own action or it could be something that they watch someone else do or something they experience passively. But this is why the magical midpoint change occurs. See, now you know why. You’re not just doing it because a book said. These things generally happen in the middle of the movie because our hero’s belief system has been challenged. There is an element of doubt. There is not a willingness to go all the way and believe the other side of the argument yet. They may not even understand the other side of the argument.

There’s only a question that maybe for the first time they have to wonder if their side of the argument that they started with, the anti-theme, maybe it doesn’t explain or solve everything. Have I been living a lie? That’s what’s happening in the middle of a movie.

So, remember in Finding Nemo there’s a moment where because Marlin has to rescue Dory from this field of jellyfish he invents a game. She forces him to do something that he normally wouldn’t do. Play. He’s doing it for the old Marlin reasons of neurosis, but it’s working. She’s following him. And as he’s doing it he gets a glimpse of what it’s like to live without fear. He gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be carefree. To not worry so much. To be, well, a little less conservative with your own life. And he loves it.

And then what happens? She gets stung. Oh, glorious. And that gets us to this reversal of theme. The very moment your hero takes the bait that you put there to think about maybe switching sides – maybe switching sides of the argument – you need to hammer them back the other direction. The story has to make them shrink back to the old way. Dory almost dies in the jellyfish. And why? It happened because Marlin decided in a moment out of necessity to have fun and then forgot himself, forgot his fear. And what’s the price of forgetting fear and not being vigilant? Pain and tragedy. The tragedy of the beginning is reinforced and the hero retreats once again.

Ah. It’s good stuff. And it means you have to be kind of mean. Sadistic really. But it turns out that these are the kinds of things we want out of our narrative. It’s the essence of what we call dramatic reversal.

I’m going to put aside the examples from Pixar for a second and I’m going to talk about somebody real. There’s a guy named Jose Fernandez. This is a true story. Jose Fernandez is born in Cuba and at the age of 15 he escapes Cuba with his mother and his sister and many others, all packed in a very small boat. And during the difficult village he is awakened to the sound of someone yelling. That someone has fallen overboard.

And Jose, 15 years old, doesn’t hesitate. He dives into the choppy water to save whoever it is. And it’s only when he drags this person back onto the boat does he realize he has saved his own mother. Wow.

Jose Fernandez grows up, he’s a hell of an athlete. He goes on to pitch. Major League baseball pitcher. And he’s really good. In fact, he is the National League Rookie of the Year. And he’s an All Star. His future isn’t just bright, it is glorious. Jose Fernandez is living the American dream and I don’t know how much you know about baseball but ace pitchers they get paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

But at the age of 24 Jose Fernandez dies. He doesn’t die from illness. He doesn’t die from violence. He dies in an accident. But not a car accident. He dies in a boating accident. A boating accident. Now, do you feel that? Do you feel more than you would if I had said he died of a blood clot? Well, why? I mean, death is death. Why does this detail of the boating accident make you feel more?

Because it’s terribly ironic. Because this is a guy who saved his own mother from water and then he dies in water. It implies that there’s a strange kind of order to the universe even when that order hurts. And this is where we start to pull irony out of drama. This is essential to your choices when you decide how you’re going to push back against your hero. How you’re going to hammer them back. How you’re going to punish them.

Think about that Pixar Short, Lava. And I talk about Pixar all the time because it’s just pure storytelling and they’re really, really good at it. So he thinks he’s alone. He’s a volcano in the ocean. He thinks he’s alone. And then he discovers he’s not alone. But when he discovers that he also discovers that she’s facing the wrong way and she can’t see him. And he doesn’t know how to sing anymore. So she doesn’t even know he’s there. Oh, that’s terrible. It’s unexpected. It’s contradictory. And it’s ironic. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

So, consider the irony that’s involved with Marlin. Marlin is worried that he has lost his son. Every parent who loses a child, even for an instant in a mall, is scared. But that’s not enough. Let’s talk about what the people at Pixar understood they needed to do to this character from the very start to punish him so that his journey would be that much more impressive. It’s not enough to say, look, you love your kid, your kid is lost, you’ve got to go find your kid. Everybody loves their kid, right?

OK. But they go a step further. They say, you know what, there’s no mom in the picture. Mom died. It’s just you. You’re a single dad. You’re the only parent. You’ve got to find your kid. No, that’s not enough. How about this? How about your wife and all of your other children were eaten in front of you because you couldn’t protect them? And the only kid you had left out of all of that, the only memory you have of your wife and your happy life before is one tiny egg. One kid.

And that is still not enough. And this is why Pixar is so amazing. Because they knew that the further they went the more we would feel at the end. It’s not enough that he only has one kid. When he looks at that little egg he can see that the one kid that’s left is disabled. He has a bad fin. Now it’s enough. Now you have created the perfect circumstance for that individual, you cruel, cruel god of story.

Now I know why he’s so panicked that that kid is somewhere out there in the ocean. When you’re designing your obstacles and your lessons and the glimpses of the other way and the rewards and the punishments and the beating back and the pushing forward, keep thinking ironically. Keep thinking about surprises that twist the knife. Don’t just stab your characters. Twist the knife in them. If someone has to face a fear make it overwhelming to them. Don’t disappoint them. Punish them.

Make your characters lower their defenses by convincing them that everything is going to be OK and then punch them right in the face, metaphorically.

So, sorry to tell you that as a writer you are not the New Testament god who turns water into wine. You are the Old Testament god who tortures Job because, I don’t know, it seems like fun. And when you’re wondering where to go in your story and what to do with your character ask this question: where is my hero on her quest between theme and anti-theme? Or I guess I should say between an anti-theme and theme. And what would be the meanest thing I could do to her right now? What would be the worst way to do the meanest thing right now? Then do it. And do it. And do it again until the hero is left without a belief at all.

So as the demands of the narrative begin to overwhelm the hero, the hero begins to realize that her limitations aren’t physical but thematic. Think about Marlin. I promised that I would never let anything happen to him. But then I suppose nothing ever would happen to him. That’s what Dory says. And Marlin knows she’s right. He knows that if all he does is basically lock his kid up to prevent anything bad from happening to his kid nothing good will happen to his kid. The kid won’t have a real life.

So, now what? Well, the answer is obvious, right? If you love someone let them go. And I’m sure that at that point in the movie if you ask Marlin that he would say, “I suppose that’s the thing that I’m supposed to believe.” But they can’t do it. Not yet. In fact, you’re going to want to have a situation where they have a chance to do it. And they fail at it in some important way because they don’t really accept the central dramatic argument you want for them. They just lost the belief in their original point of view. They’re trapped between rejection of the old and acceptance of the new. They are lost. Their old ways don’t work anymore. The new way seems impossible or insane.

Shrek doesn’t want his swamp back anymore. He wants love, but he is also not willing to do what is required to try and get it. He’s trapped. And this is why they call it the low point. It’s not random. It’s not the low point because the books say page 90 is the low point. It’s the low point because your character is lost and in a whole lot of trouble.

Their goal in the beginning, which was to go backwards to the beginning to achieve stasis, to re-achieve stasis, that goal is in shambles. Their anti-thematic belief, whatever it was that they clung to in the beginning of this story, it’s been exposed as a sham. And the enormity of the real goal that now faces them is impossibly daunting. They can’t yet accept the theme because it’s too scary. When your core values are gone and when you aren’t ready to replace them with new values, well, you might as well be dead. And this is why people go to movies.

So, granted, we love the lasers, we love the explosions, we love the ka-boom, and we love the sex, and we love the tears, but what we need from drama – and when I say drama I mean the drama of comedy and the drama of drama – what we need are these moments where we connect to another person’s sense of being lost. Because we have all been lost.

And that’s why the ending is going to work. Because without this there can be no catharsis. Catharsis comes from the Greek word for vomiting I’m pretty sure. So just think of a lot of your plot as shoving really bad food down the throat of your hero because that’s how you’re going to get to this catharsis.

Now, I want to say that these approaches don’t help you map out a second act. What these approaches do is help you develop your character as they move through a narrative. And that narrative is going to impact their relationship to theme. And when you finish that movement of this character interacting with story so that their relationship to the theme is changing from I don’t believe that to, OK, I don’t believe what I used to believe but I can’t believe that yet, suddenly you’ll be somewhere around the end of the second act.

And here is the big secret. John and I have said this many, many times. There are no acts. So you can’t really be scared of the second act. It doesn’t exist. It’s not some sort of weird wasteland you have to get through. It’s just part of one big piece. There’s one act. It’s called your story. And now we get to the third act, sorry, end of your one act. And this is the defining moment. Your character needs to face a defining moment. And this defining moment is their worst fear. It is their greatest challenge. This is the moment that will not only resolve the story that you’re telling but it will resolve the life of your character. This moment will bring them to a new stasis and balance. Remember synthesis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Here we are again.

But what are you going to do? You have to come up with this thing. This is the difference between what I’m saying to you now and what a lot of books say. Books will say, “Defining moment goes here.” And I’m saying, yeah, but how? What makes it so defining? You’re going to design a moment that is going to test your protagonist’s faith in the theme. They need to go through something where they have to prove that they believe this new theme. They have to prove it. It’s not enough to say, OK, I get it. What I used to think is wrong. There’s a new way that’s right. That’s not enough.

They have to prove it. And they have to prove it in a way where they literally embody the point of that idea with everything they have. But before you do that don’t you want to torture them one more time? Of course you do.

The relapse. A nice ironic relapse. You want to tempt them right before this big decision moment. Right before the defining moment. You want to hold that safety blanket up and say, “Go ahead. Go back to the beginning. You get it. The thing you wanted on page 15, I’m giving it to you. Don’t go forward. Don’t change. Go back.”

And what do they have to do? They have to reject that temptation. You design a machinery where they have to reject that temptation and then do something extraordinary – extraordinary – to embody the truth of the theme. And now you get acceptance through action. The hero acts in accordance with the theme. Specifically by doing so they prevail. They have to act.

So let’s go back to Marlin. It’s not enough for Marlin to say, “I get it now. I’ve heard the wise turtles. I’ve seen the way Dory is. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve got to let you live.” That’s not enough. What Pixar does is create a perfect mechanism to tempt and then force action. Dory is captured. And Nemo says to Marlin, “I’m the only one who can go in there and save her.” And this is a great temptation. This is where Marlin has to reject the old way. We’re saying go ahead, you’ve got your kid, we’re giving him back to you. It’s all you wanted. On page 15 you just wanted your kid. Here he is. Get out.

But he has to act in accordance with the theme. So he rejects that and he says, “No. Go ahead, son. And try and save her.” And that simple decision is how he acts in accordance with theme. And it is terrifying. And now you get one last chance to punish him. Briefly. Go ahead. Let’s see Nemo coming out of that net and let’s think that he’s dead. And let Marlin hold him. And let Marlin remember what he was like when he was in that little egg. And let Marlin kind of be OK with it. Because that’s what it means to live in accordance with theme.

If you say, look, sometimes if you love someone you have to let them go, that’s one thing. Actually having to let them go is another thing. Letting them go and seeing them get hurt is yet another. That is the ultimate acceptance of that idea, isn’t it? And that’s what he sees.

But then, of course, faith in the theme rewards. And Nemo is alive.

So then you get this denouement. What is the denouement? Why is it there? It’s not there because we need to be slowly let down and back out in the movie theater lobby. It’s there because we need to see the new synthesis. You have successfully fired a billion antitheses against a billion theses and come up with one big, grand, lovely new synthesis. Please show it to me. So we now see that the after story life is in harmony with theme.

And here’s the deal with the first scene and the last scene of a movie. If you remove everything from the story except the introduction of your hero and the last scene of your hero there should really be only one fundamental difference. And here it is. The hero in the beginning acts in accordance with the anti-theme and the hero at the end acts in accordance with the theme.

Now, this should all help you create your character. When you’re creating character I want you to think of theme. I want you to imagine a character who embodies the anti-theme. You can be subtle about this. You probably should be. It generally works better if you are. And I want you to think of your story as a journey that guides this character from belief in the anti-theme to belief in theme. Remember you’re god – angry, angry god. You have created this test. That’s what your story is. In order to guide your character to a better way of living, but they have to make the choices.

Oh, if you’ve heard, “The worst character is a passive character,” that’s why. They have to make the choices or you’re making it for them. And then, well, it just doesn’t count, does it?

If you can write the story of your character as they grow from thinking this to the opposite of this, and guess what, you will never ask well what should happen next ever again. You’ll only ask how can I make the thing that I want to happen next better. That’s a whole other talk. Maybe I’ll do that one in like five years or something.

I hope that you found this interesting. It was kind of fun to do. I mean, I’m not going to do it frequently because it’s scary. I mean, John really does run this show. But I’m all here all alone. But I kind of liked a chance to at least talk to you directly about all this stuff and I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, great. And you can let us know.

And here comes the boilerplate. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by, well, I don’t know. But it’s a surprise and we’ll let you know who it was the week following.

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. For shorter questions on Twitter I am @clmazin and John is @johnaugust.

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And with that, I bid you all good luck. Go torture your heroes.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE on June 13th at the Ace Hotel with Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Alec Berg, Rob McElhenney, and Kourtney Kang, buy your tickets here!
• Aristotle’s Poetics
• José Fernández
• Lava, Pixar Short
• Finding Nemo
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• John August on Twitter
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• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

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