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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi. This is Craig. If you’re in the car with your children or at home with your children, you may not want to play this episode too close to their delicate little ears. We’re going to be using some bad language, some R-rated language. John asked me to do this warning this time because he was concerned that usually when he does it, people think at first that I might have died, but I didn’t. I’m alive. Now get your kids out of the room.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 225 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we have Tess Morris, the writer of Man Up, and she’s here to talk with us about romantic comedies. And we’re so excited because we just saw her movie and it’s really great. And so everyone can see her movie but we can also talk about the thing that her movie is which is a romantic comedy and it’s not a shame to be a romantic comedy.

Craig, you just watched it so I know you have so many things you want to say to Tess.

**Craig:** Fresh in my mind, the tears have just dried on my freshly bearded cheeks.

**John:** Yeah, people might have a chance to see that beard on December 9th. We’re doing our live show in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Hi, I’m Segue Man. Natasha Leggero, Riki Lindhome, and Malcolm Spellman will be our guests for that show along with some other folks who are not quite confirmed yet, but who I think are going to be fantastic.

People have been writing in with questions, questions like is there a Three Page Challenge at this live Scriptnotes? No, there’s not. Do I need to reserve a specific seat? And my belief is that no, it is general admission. But the most important question is, where can I get a ticket? And the tickets are available at the Writers Guild Foundation website, wgfoundation.org. They are $20. The proceeds benefit the great programs of the Writers Guild Foundation.

So you should come see us because as we’re recording this, we’re more than halfway sold out. So we might be sold out by the time you listen to this. You should probably pause the podcast right now and get yourself a ticket to the live show.

**Craig:** Fools, fools for waiting.

**John:** They are fools.

**Craig:** I mean do they not know that we’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting?

**John:** Yeah. I mean the younger people might not even know what that reference is but, you know, they might think that is important.

**Craig:** Hey, kids. We’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting. If that doesn’t motivate you, you’re right, we’re old.

**John:** Yeah, Wikipedia that. In the mail bag this week, a couple of questions came in about Amazon Storywriter. Do you know what Amazon Storywriter is?

**Craig:** Not only do I know what it is. I went and actually fiddled with it even though you suggested on Twitter that I never would, I already had, by that point.

**John:** Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So what did you think of Amazon Storywriter? Or do you want to describe what it is for people?

**Craig:** Well, as far as I could tell, I mean I didn’t go in-depth, but it appears that Amazon has created their own screenwriting software. So it’s basically a word processor that formats automatically in our screenwriting format. All the standard stuff. It’s Courier. It’s got all of your basic elements. And it works pretty much like they all do, combination of tab and return.

And it’s free and it’s Cloud based so everything saves on their servers and then you can then very easily pipe it through to their Amazon Studio thing for submissions. Also, it does export to FDX which is the Final Draft format. This whole thing by the way, side note, Final Draft I believe, I believe that company is going to die. The format will survive and I hope that we eventually kill that format too because it’s nasty, but the format will survive.

Anyway, back to this. It actually worked quite nicely. I mean, it’s not fully featured in terms of revisions and production work and all the rest of it but it was quite elegant. It worked very nice. It was smooth, looked nice.

**John:** Yeah. So you say it uses tab and return but really it’s more like — it’s based on Fountain, which is the format that I co-created the syntax, so you’re just typing in plain text and it’s interpreting what you’re doing and figuring out what the different pieces and parts are. And that part actually worked reasonably well.

**Craig:** Wait, Amazon stole your shit?

**John:** Didn’t steal it. Actually, it’s a public format that we created called Fountain.

**Craig:** They don’t have to even acknowledge that they took it?

**John:** No, no. That’s what open source is. It’s like it’s out there in the world for the world to use. And so their implementation of it is actually pretty good except they left out some kind of important things like bolds or italics or centering.

**Craig:** Yeah, I noticed that I couldn’t bold slug lines, and also I couldn’t, like there’s no way to automatically set it. So for instance, I like to have two line breaks before a new scene header, and it didn’t seem like that was automatable.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not automatable yet. So it does some of the stuff that Highland does where you can throw a PDF at it and it will melt it down and bring it out as plain text so you can edit. So that’s kind of nice. It’s just trying to do a lot of things that Highland is trying to do or that Slugline is trying to do or really any of the other screenwriting apps are trying to do and it does an okay job with it. It’s all online. It’s free-ish.

I don’t really think that many people are going to use it in any meaningful capacity. Though I think you’re going to have a lot of people who write like two scenes in it and then never touch it again. That’s my hunch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out. I mean listen, you know, my whole thing is, I’m basically rooting for whoever Final Draft is playing against so if it doesn’t hurt anybody, I’m all for it. I mean I still think that there are better options. I get very squirmy about the Cloud based option. Just the idea that it’s only Cloud based, I know that you can export it and save it locally but I don’t like it so much.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Next bit of follow up in the mail bag is from Pam. And Pam writes, I have this one-woman crusade. It’s futile, but I persevere nonetheless. I would love if people would stop using the word dick derogatorily. My dad’s name is Dick. He’s an amazing, wonderful, caring man. One of the most important people in my life. Whenever I hear people using the word dick pejoratively, it hurts me on his behalf. You guys use it a lot especially this [laughs] — that’s the voice of Tess Morris breaking through, not even —

**Craig:** [Laughs] Tess, you’re not even on the show yet. You have to wait for your spot.

**Tess Morris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I’m glad you’re here.

**Tess:** Sorry.

**John:** It feels like it’s been increasing exponentially in film lately actually. Craig, what is your opinion of the word dick?

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite words. It’s weird but this whole thing is basically delusional except for this one moment of awesome clarity where she says, “I realize it’s futile.” Yes, Pam, it’s futile. The word dick exists simultaneously as both a pejorative for penis or a person who’s a penis-like person.

**Tess:** Thanks for clearing that up, Craig.

**Craig:** Right. Or it is short for Richard. Your dad’s name is Dick. I know a lot of guys named Dick and they’re cool guys. And I mean Dick Cook was a beloved executive at Disney. Everybody loves him still. And the thing is, if your dad, trust me when I tell you, whatever pain you’re feeling on his behalf, he’s heard it way worse, way worse. If he’s made it all the way to this stage of his life, I’m assuming that he’s at least middle age, if not older, and he’s still going by Dick, this is a hardened man. He’s going to be fine. He knows the world isn’t going to stop using the word dick. That’s crazy.

**Tess:** My dad’s called Richard.

**John:** Oh, yeah. And is he okay?

**Tess:** He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine. But also, I think one of my favorite quotes ever from a film is 37 Dicks from Clarks, you know. “Was it 36 dicks?” When he finds out how many dicks that his girlfriend —

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Has and he just can’t get it out of his head, can he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And it always makes me laugh.

**Craig:** I think that dick is a great counterbalance to some of the pejorative words that we toss on people that are related to female genitalia. Dick is our kind of cool balanced way of saying, no, no, no, if you’re called either male or female genitalia, we’re saying we don’t like you.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to Pam’s dad. I feel like —

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** The challenge is how we —

**Craig:** You mean Dick?

**Tess:** You mean Dick.

**John:** Yes.

**Tess:** We don’t know Dick.

**John:** We don’t know him at all. And so Pam —

**Craig:** Some of us know him more than others.

**John:** Pam’s objection to us using the word dick pejoratively, well, it’s been used his entire life anatomically. And the anatomic thing is probably actually worse or sort of more annoying than pejoratively because I think when we’re saying dick, we’re saying like don’t be a dick.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** It’s quite a British word I must say. I don’t hear it that much.

**John:** Oh, yeah? We use dick all the time.

**Tess:** Yeah, I hear it much more at home.

**John:** Craig and I are both Anglophiles. So we try to be British.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Where did it come from? I mean what is the dick?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Tess:** What is it? We should find out.

**Craig:** You know what I love is, in England, I love spotted dick. I mean I don’t love the actual food. I just love that it’s called spotted dick.

**Tess:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Sounds like a venereal disease. I love that.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a pudding or dessert as you call it.

**Craig:** It’s a pudding or dessert. Exactly. Like would you like some spotted dick? Absolutely not.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** Nobody, by the way nobody, I don’t care how much you love dick, if it’s got spots on it, you don’t, you just don’t. By the way, Pam’s realizing now this is backfired terribly. Look, Pam —

**Tess:** Pam’s regretting it.

**Craig:** It’s just funny. What are you going to do? Funny is funny. I’m sorry that you’re hurt. You need to get over this. You need to accept that this is the world and nobody is going after your dad. And I think if you talk to your dad about it, he would probably say, “Pam, I love you. You’re awesome. Thank you for caring about me but it will be okay. We’re good. We’re good.”

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** I like that this is how we started though.

**John:** Yeah, this is very important, your introduction to the podcast was discussion over dick.

**Tess:** Thank you. My laugh about dicks.

**John:** Last week’s episode, we talked about Whiplash. And so we had a bunch of listeners writing in with different things. One of the questions was good and maybe you will have an opinion on this as well, Tess. We talked on the podcast about there was a scene that was around a big dining room table and how scenes around tables are actually much more difficult to film than you would think they would be because you have to match so many eye lines and angles that it actually just takes forever to do.

And so listeners wrote in to ask, what are other scenes that you think would be really easy to shoot but end up being like really difficult to shoot?

**Tess:** Ooh, that’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, do you have any thoughts about scenes that are deceptively difficult to shoot?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you listed a couple of great ones. I mean the ones that are I think most deceptive are montages of any kind.

**Tess:** I was just about to say a montage, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, because a montage is like shooting 20 minutes. It’s basically the work equivalent of shooting 20 minutes of finished scenes for 30 or 40 seconds. And of course the stupidest, meaning the most work inefficient montage of all time, I still maintain was Allen’s flashback in Hangover 2 where he remembered all those events, but as they were all children so we had to film a montage twice but with children.

**Tess:** I think the easiest montage is probably the Rocky montages, though. I imagine that they were not stressful to film.

**John:** No. But I think looking back at your movie, Man Up , there’s one —

**Tess:** Two montages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Montage, montage.

**John:** Yeah, montages.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** Montage.

**John:** Deux montage.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** So I was thinking there’s a montage in which they’re bowling and that’s actually a fairly — and you’re shooting a scene, so it’s a bunch of different little setups.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** But you’re all in one place. The really killer montages are things that look like it’s just two-eighths of a page on your script but you’re going to a whole bunch of different locations.

**Tess:** Yeah, we did that for the second one. The first one was the bowling one that we shot that the first week of filming as well and we just played loads of loud rock music and got Simon and Lake to, you know, get on down. But the one when she does the triathlon through the streets of SoHo, that was quite tricky.

**Craig:** And that one looks so, it’s just like, okay, she’s running down a street, she turns down an alley, swims through some bachelorette party girls, then asks a guy for his bike then bikes on over. It’s like, yeah, it goes by —

**Tess:** No.

**John:** That was probably two nights of filming.

**Tess:** That was, I think it was two nights, we had to obviously shoot — Lake had a stunt, well, also a funny story. The bit where Simon like legs her in the taxi with her, she’s our taxi driver, a stunt taxi driver actually crashed into the car in front of him during filming.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Tess:** So that delayed things slightly.

**John:** It does. So montages are a time suck. He goes to over the window is my example. So like you’re in a scene and then like characters just move around in a room. You’re like, oh, the characters are moving around the room, but you don’t realize until you actually need to film one of those things is that like once a character has moved over from this place to that place, all the other angles in the room have changed and, you know, you may be crossing a line. There’s complicated things that may have happened because those characters have shifted their position.

And it may be the right choice to have those characters move around, but it’s taking up extra time. That’s why you sort of, you know, instinctively love to have characters just like find a place and park.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it saves you time and geography problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll sometimes and this is something that DPs will, it’s fun watching DPs and first ADs fight because of course the first AD is like shoot it as fast as you can and the DP is like, “I want it to look great.” A lot of times for things like this, you know, you have a scene of people in a room, and that’s your master and then you start covering it, but if somebody moves and changes position, well you need to — now you need a new master, and new coverage. So what they’ll do is they’ll lay down some track and as the person moves, they’ll move the camera along the track and so they’re repositioning their master as they go and then they try and do on the opposite side the same thing so they can reposition their coverage as they go.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and then yeah, you’ve screwed yourself especially if somebody goes to the window and looks out the window.

**Tess:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh my God, now you got to be outside looking up at them looking out and you got to see their POV, you got to be pointing it down. Ugh.

**Tess:** Talking of tracking in two shots. What nearly didn’t, well we did — our DP, he’s called Andrew Dunn. He’s incredible. If you look him up on IMDb, he’s just got the most brilliant, eclectic CV. And him and our director, Ben Palmer, knew that they wanted to shoot everything with two shot, absolutely everything so we got all those little comedy reactions that you really need obviously in a romantic comedy, but we nearly didn’t get Waterloo Station because it was so tricky to film there. And then our DP went down there with the director and just was like, “Okay, we can do this, but we’re going to do it at 3AM in the morning with 50 extras and we’ll have a tracking thing and we’ll just move with them the whole way through right up until she’s under the clock.” So otherwise it would have been like with — I think us and Bourne are the only two films to have shot in Waterloo Station.

**Craig:** I know, it’s actually amazing because when — it’s such a different scene.

**Tess:** What are you talking about? Bourne is very similar.

**Craig:** I mean, I just love the total — I mean — but it’s the same setting, and it actually looks different because it’s a different scene. I don’t know. It’s just a funny thing.

**Tess:** Well, he goes up all into the scene.

Well, he’s all angles. Like everything in that scene is all sniper angles. Like either it’s you’re looking up where the sniper is going to go or you’re looking down at the sniper and this thing is all eyes and misconnections and straight aheads and so.

**Tess:** We didn’t need a sniper. Yeah but I like that that might go down in sort of Wikipedia facts.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The two movies shot there. The last thing that comes to mind for me that seems really simple but is actually really complicated or at least requires complicated decisions is anything with driving. So usually with driving, you have two choices. You can have a real car, or you can green screen it. And so green screening it saves you a lot of time because you can park it on a sound stage, and just shoot whatever angles you want to shoot and then just like put the windows in in post. And a lot of things do that these days and they do it so well that you don’t really notice.

**Tess:** Yeah, I mean nowadays you don’t know the difference, yeah.

**John:** It looks so much better.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s often a good choice and sometimes it just means like not moving around. So the other choice is to put the car either on a trailer or really drive an actual car and mount the cameras to the car and that can look more realistic but it also limits your ability to move around in the car. The thing you also realize once you actually have to start putting cameras on actors in a cars is that there’s a limited number of ways that you can get both actors into a shot or to sort of cut back and forth between reactions. So that’s a reason why don’t you see movies that have a lot of time in the car.

Or you see rare exceptions of movies like that Tom Hardy movie which was entirely in the car.

**Tess:** In the car, yeah. I always think about Thelma and Louise, and I think about those driving shots because I always wanted to know how they did that. I’m sure there is a behind the scenes document.

**John:** But there’s a really good reason why they were driving a convertible.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** They could get shots —

**Tess:** Keeps it open, yeah. But it’s also very cool as well.

**John:** It’s very cool, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Most of your road trip movies at some point or another, I mean, nowadays, you will do a lot of it with green screen. It saves you a ton money and time and effort. You can go so much faster. It’s brutal shooting processed cars where either they’re on a flat bed or you’re driving ahead of them and the actor is actually driving just because you got to do an entire take. You need a run of road. You have to have the cops shut it off. There’s noise. But, there’s nothing like it for the reality of getting in and driving and getting out, you know. So you build an enormous amount of time for those things and enormous expense beyond it. Driving, to me, is number one. The thing that seems the simplest and is the most annoying.

**Tess:** It’s almost like a movie is quite hard to make isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, you think so. I think writers never quite appreciate.

**Craig:** Well, here’s another question that we got in from Brian from Syracuse. And he writes, “After following along with this week’s script to screen exercises involving Whiplash, and hearing you guys quickly discuss how both scenes really underline the dramatic arguments posed both in the micro sense of the individual scenes and in the macro sense of the entire film, I was wondering if it might be possible for you to elaborate a little more on the subject and maybe provide a couple of examples how these types of scenes pertain to your own films. Do you usually have the dramatic argument of the entire film and then look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses or accentuates this argument/conflict?” Brian —

**Tess:** It’s a long question.

**Craig:** Yeah. But you know, like he put a lot of thought into that question. I appreciate it.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a good question.

**John:** I would say that in my experience, I won’t necessarily know what the dramatic question or argument of the film is as I’m starting to write it, but it’s there already. Like, it’s the reason why I’m writing the movie and it’s sort of central to the DNA of the movie. And so that if I’ve picked the right movie and I’m approaching it from the right way, that central question — that central theme kind of permeates every scene regardless. And so, if a scene isn’t about that central question, it’s just not going to last in the script, it won’t last in the movie.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would say, it usually takes me the first draft to find my axiom — my central axiom.

**Craig:** Good word.

**Tess:** Thank you. I know especially because I write mainly romantic comedies, you are sort of always wanting to look for the bigger question for your leads or your leading lady or leading man. So I think — yeah, at the moment, I’m writing something, I remember I got my axiom about two drafts in which was when is the right time to meet someone, is there a right time to meet someone, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think mine comes about as I get into the — probably the same as you, really. I have to get into it a bit.

**Craig:** I think I’m a little different than you guys.

**Tess:** Of course, you are, Craig. You got to be different.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I mostly just ask what you two do and then I think, “Do the opposite.” I do try and start before I begin crafting scenes, I do need to know. It doesn’t have to stay this one. It can change and evolve. But I need to at least begin with some central question because I need to know that my character believes the opposite of that central question. And I need to start designing scenes — and he said, like, do you look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses? Yeah. I try and design scenes to test the character and lead them towards the truth or punish them for —

And by the way, your movie does this beautifully. Like, every time — like, I always talk about two steps forward one step back. Your character moves towards something, the possibility of an entirely opposite way of living, and for a moment it’s working and then you punish them. This is exactly how I approach these things. So I do need to kind of know. And over time, the question might change and thus the scenes might change. It’s just hard for me to start unless I have something there to build off of.

**Tess:** I mean I have — I think with Man Up, because I wrote that on spec. And I really did know, probably from the very beginning, I knew what I wanted to say about life. But then I need to — what I have to do — Philip Seymour Hoffman had a really good quote which was that writers need to fill up and then they can kind of write. And I think I sort of — I have to take a few more years to fill up again, to write again, if that makes sense. Because I sort of put everything into one script. It’s not very financially a good thing to be.

**John:** That’s not a viable strategy.

**Tess:** Yes. It’s not a viable strategy.

**John:** I was watching a friend’s cut of his movie. And it was a very early cut and so it was a place where a lot of stuff was still fungible and could change. And this idea of stating your central dramatic question, that’s I think my underlying note for him was that I had never heard any of the characters articulate what the movie was about.

**Tess:** Yeah, But you sometimes think as well, I mean I’m so into that. But I do sometimes think as well that you have to — when you’re just starting your first draft, I think there’s also opportunities to not be so sort of like regimented with yourself as well. Because I think newer writers sometimes say to me, you know, “I know exactly what’s it about.” And I’m like, “Oh, you know exactly what it’s about and you haven’t even started to write it yet.” You know, like, I think sometimes, especially if you’re writing in a comedic sense as well, like it can suddenly jump up at you what you actually were trying to say within a scene and then you go, “Oh, great. Now, it is thematic. Hooray.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say, “I know exactly what it’s about for now.”

**Tess:** Yes, that’s totally fair. Yeah. But then allow yourself the freedom to you know —

**Craig:** Always. Always.

**John:** I think what I’m trying to articulate is that it’s good that you know what it’s about. But if you’re not letting any of your characters speak to the theme —

**Tess:** Oh, yes.

**John:** Or speak to what it’s about or actually ask the question, or take actions that invite the question, then maybe you’re missing an opportunity.

**Tess:** Yeah. Sometimes I put the actual question in. But then you realize that you’ve put it maybe in the wrong scene or at the wrong time. And then you’ll get to the point where you go, oh actually now I can have them say that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked in the last episode about how sometimes you will overwrite a little bit knowing that you can always pull it back.

**Tess:** I overwrite so much.

**John:** But it’s very hard to sort of put stuff back in the movie if you didn’t actually shoot it. And so having a character state the central thematic question may be a really good idea. And if it becomes too obvious, you can always find a way to snip out but it’s going to be very hard to stick back it in.

**Tess:** We thought long and hard about whether he should actually — anyone should actually say the phrase, “Man up,” in Man Up. And then I went for it but I went with the man saying it to the woman rather than the way around. But it was a real sort of thing about do we actually say the title of the film?

**John:** So everyone clapped when —

**Tess:** Yeah, everyone cheered, like, “Yay — ”

**John:** “He said the title.”

**Craig:** They did it. They know they’re in this movie.

**Tess:** They know they’re in the film acting.

**Craig:** Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?

**Tess:** I haven’t seen it, you know. And I need to see it. I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t seen it.

**John:** I’m probably the only person in the world who has not seen Hamilton.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to see Hamilton.

**Tess:** I’m obsessed with that.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the greatest.

**John:** Man up.

**Tess:** But you haven’t seen it yet?

**Craig:** Man up is the —

**Tess:** Man Up the musical which I would like to do, obviously, next year because I think it could work really well as a musical.

**Craig:** You want to do Man Up as a musical?

**Tess:** I’d love to do it as a musical. Do you want to do it with me, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I like it as a movie. I don’t think —

**Tess:** Yeah. Give it five years.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see — I don’t think it needs music.

**Tess:** No, that’s true. But I just like the idea of doing it. Come on, humor me.

**Craig:** Let’s just make a new musical.

**Tess:** That’s true. Okay.

**John:** There’s a dance fight in Man Up and that would work very well on the stage.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And you know, it’s quite a chamber piece of a film, two-hander.

**John:** It’s a heightened chamber piece, and that’s a musical.

**Tess:** It is. Thank you.

**John:** Aaron writes, “I really appreciated your most recent episode discussing Whiplash. I totally agree about your take that Fletcher obviously offers Andrew the performance slot in order to embarrass and ruin him. But would Fletcher really put his reputation further on the line to ruin Andrew? Especially since Andrew was nowhere on the scene anymore, not at the conservatory, not playing clubs, nobody knew who Andrew was, and certainly nobody in the music community.

“He would be ruining a non-entity who already seemed to have given up. And yet Fletcher decides to get his revenge on this guy in a public performance at New York’s largest jazz festival in an ensemble he’s conducting. Sure Andrew would look terrible, but Fletcher is the person standing at the forefront of the crowd. He’s already lost his job, his reputation remains intact enough that he was asked to lead this ensemble performance, and now he’s out to give a crap performance. I just had trouble seeing him as that selfless in his vengeance. To sacrifice himself and his reputation in order to embarrass someone nobody knows.”

I thought that was a really interesting point. I never really thought about Fletcher’s choice to set up Andrew at the end. We’re spoiling the movie Whiplash for you.

**Tess:** Spoiler alert.

**John:** It is really an interesting idea that like Fletcher is going into this knowing he’s going to publicly embarrass himself, but he’s going to get a lot of blowback from that himself. If things go as disastrously as it seems like they’re going to go.

Tess; Yeah. I mean I don’t remember feeling — I remember just feeling so like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards in a good way after I saw that film. You know what I mean, I don’t know what you guys said about it last week because I unfortunately haven’t listened yet, but I will listen obviously.

**John:** Leave the room immediately.

**Tess:** Leave the room immediately. No. But I mean, it’s so visceral the whole film. There are things that you can pick apart. I understand why he’s questioning that. But in my heart of hearts, it’s such a film about being bullying and this whole journey that actually because he is such a bully, I kind of do believe that that’s sort of part of his awful journey. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way — let me offer our listening audience some certainty. There is absolutely no way that the intention there was that the character of Fletcher rigged the whole thing to bring some great performance out of Andrew. He absolutely did that.

**Tess:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** He did that to humiliate Andrew and punish him because he truly believed Andrew had cost him his job and he was a revengeful bad person. And you can tell because Simmons’ performance shows joy, true sadistic joy at ruining him.

**Tess:** Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

**Craig:** And then also shows absolute shock when Andrew comes back and starts doing what he’s doing. And then epiphany when Andrew becomes something. And that is not the performance of somebody who goes, “Good. This is what I wanted to happen.”

**Tess:** It’s so incredible that performance because you still like him. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. So I loved Aaron’s phrase of selfless vengeance. I just think that’s a great, you know — it honestly was circling back to the question of the central dramatic argument. Is there such a thing as selfless vengeance? Because Fletcher is not acting in his own best interest at the moment. Like vengeance is actually kind of never in your own best interest. A rational person would never probably seek vengeance.

**Tess:** Rare. Well, Craig is —

**John:** I mean, is vengeance only emotional or can vengeance be intellectual as well?

**Tess:** I think it can be intellectual. I think you can play the long game in terms of vengeance.

**Craig:** You see, what’s going on here, John, is that you have a full Jew and a half of a Jew.

**Tess:** Oh, God. Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Both of us are like, no, no, long term vengeance is part of our culture.

**Tess:** It’s part of our life.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s what our parents did to us. I think that vengeance is always selfish. It can be self-destructive, but it’s selfish.

**Tess:** I think in the creative sense it can be very liberating. You know, write who you know, not what you know. So you know, I think there are times when it can be incredibly helpful. But it shouldn’t be to your own detriment or anyone else’s detriment. You know, you should just be secretly vengeful.

**Craig:** Well, we all know as writers that it’s fun to write characters who are looking for vengeance. And we also know that characters who are obsessed with revenge either die in the fire of their own self-destruction or finally let it go. We all know that’s kind of that’s the deal.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s the journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the journey. And I’m amazed all the time at how many times I will meet writers who behave in ways that they would never allow their characters to behave. It’s like they haven’t learned those lessons at all.

**Tess:** It’s bizarre behavior, but we are all weirdos, that’s the other problem isn’t it? Most writers are —

**Craig:** You have no idea.

**Tess:** We have issues. So we write about them and then we pretend that we’re okay afterwards.

**Craig:** We’re not.

**John:** So Tess Morris, tell us about your issues. Maybe that’s a good segue into —

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Talking about romantic comedies. So our special guest who’s not said a word yet in this whole episode —

**Craig:** Yeah, who’s just rolled over tradition, steam-rolled.

**John:** Is Tess Morris, she’s the writer of —

**Tess:** Hi, I’ve been here for a while, yeah.

**John:** She’s the writer of Man Up, a new romantic comedy which you can see on demand now everywhere.

**Tess:** Yes. In theaters this weekend, wider, this is my pro language that I’m using.

**John:** Yeah, nice.

**Tess:** Thank you. In about ten or 12 cities, I think, LA, Grand Rapids, which really excited me.

**John:** Grand Rapids, Michigan. Come on.

**Tess:** Houston, Dallas. Yeah, but on demand as well on your special iTunes box.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Tess:** To purchase.

**John:** This is a romantic comedy starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. And it is just delightful. So I saw it at the Austin Film Festival.

**Tess:** I was so excited that you sat behind me but I was also obviously really nervous. I was like, “Oh, shit. John August.”

**John:** It was really quite funny. And Craig just saw it through the magic of Internet connection.

**Craig:** But I knew that it was going to be good because my wife, Missy, went with you, John.

**Tess:** She did.

**Craig:** To see the movie and she loved it, loved it, loved it, and cried a lot.

**Tess:** She’s a big laugher. I loved her a lot.

**Craig:** Yes. She’s a big laugher, she’s a big crier. That’s why I married her, for the emotional extremes.

**John:** And the critics seemed to have laughed and cried in appropriate numbers. And it’s certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so congratulations on that.

**Tess:** We are certified Fresh.

**Craig:** I don’t care about that. You know that I actually hate that.

**John:** Do you have questions for Tess about what it’s like to get reviews like that?

**Craig:** No. I have no interest. I don’t care. I hope that you choke on those reviews. No.

**Tess:** Oh, you know what, we only remember the bad ones as well.

**Craig:** Well, of course the only review that I care about is my review.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** My review.

**Tess:** It’s the only one I care about for you, Craig, about Man Up, as well.

**Craig:** It’s the only one of my reviews that you care about is my review.

**Tess:** Yes, your own review.

**Craig:** Well, I loved it.

**John:** So Tess, as you were introducing this movie at the festival up on stage, you talked about how this was a romantic comedy and people shouldn’t talk shit about romantic comedies.

**Tess:** Yes, I did.

**John:** So tell us about romantic comedies and what do you even mean by romantic comedies?

**Tess:** Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because ever since I wrote this film and it got made, I’ve become like the spokesperson for defending the whole entire genre. My big thing with it is that people sort of dismiss it so quickly. Like no other genre in the history of film. It’s quite a strange phenomenon that people are all, “I don’t like romantic comedies.” Or “Rom-coms are dead.” Or “Rom-coms are alive.” And et cetera, et cetera.

And I find that incredibly frustrating because there have been some brilliant ones in the last sort of 10 years or so. And I think also what happens is when they win awards, they’re suddenly not romantic comedies. So Silver Linings Playbook and As Good As It Gets and those kinds of, you know, brilliant movies.

I mean when you talk about romantic comedy, you’re just — you’re talking about something that has probably I’d say 72 percent — 68 percent comedy ,and the rest is romance. If you take your central love story out of the film and it falls apart, then you don’t have a romantic comedy, you know well you do have a romantic comedy on your hands rather. And I just adore them as a genre and I always have and I like all the ones, the hybrids. Like I love Romancing the Stone, the ones that are like the action rom-coms.

So I wonder if Long Kiss Goodnight is technically a rom-com? No, it’s not — her and Samuel L. Jackson, it’s not, that was a stretch. But yeah and I mean I love Sideways which is a rom-com between two men and I love Bridesmaids which is a rom-com between two women and Muriel’s Wedding. And I think like people sometimes forget that they’re watching one, and the art of a good one is that you don’t realize sometimes that you are as well. So yeah I’ve become sort of like this strange irritating person that constantly is like “I like rom-coms” and get annoyed when people you know say that they don’t.

**Craig:** I think you’re making a terrific point because I don’t — I personally love rom-coms, I mean and I really agree with your point that what we think of as romantic comedy is across almost every comedy genre. Identity Thief is a rom — it’s like an asexual rom-com, it’s like a platonic rom-com.

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I happen to love the genre and I miss it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly but and maybe we can figure out why —

**Tess:** I think I can tell you, yeah. I can tell you what went wrong actually.

**Craig:** Okay, what went wrong?

**Tess:** Well and it’s — and this is not me talking, this is me using the voice of Billy Mernit who’s a good, brilliant friend of mine and also wrote this book called “Writing the Romantic Comedy” which I’m addicted to and obsessed by because it’s the one book on screenwriting that I’ve read that just really inspired me and unlocked lots of structural points for me and thematic things. But I had a big chat with him about this. And he works for Universal actually, is a story editor, and he was saying that essentially what happened in the sort of late 90s, early ’00s, is that they had these huge hits with you know, the kind of Katherine Heigl set of vehicles and made loads of money, the studios made a ton of money.

But then they essentially killed the golden goose because they then started to make identical versions of those films, just probably like they do with most genres but for a longer time period with romantic comedies, which caused everyone to say the romantic comedy is dead which only really people started saying in the late ’90s early ’00s, before then, you know you didn’t really talk about it like that because they have such a rich history of movies that are romantic comedies. So I think there was just this you know, lazy time period where everyone started to say that and now people just resort back to that whenever there’s a new one they go, “Oh the rom-com is alive,” or something bombed at the box office, “It’s dead.” It’s like, give it a break.

**John:** Christopher Orr had an article called Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad, and the sub-head is, the long decline from Katharine Hepburn to Katherine Heigl, which I thought was —

**Tess:** It’s a great — it’s click bait — it’s a great title, great headline, but it’s not true.

**Craig:** Good anger. Anger.

**John:** Anger. We like that.

**Tess:** Can you feel it?

**Craig:** Umbrage. Umbrage.

**John:** We’ve got dual umbrage in this episode.

**Tess:** Vengeance.

**Craig:** Vengeance will be ours.

**John:** But he actually raised some interesting points in terms of what has changed. And one of the points he brought up was that actors will sometimes do one romantic comedy and they’ll just stop —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as doing that, so you look at Will Smith in Hitch, who was fantastic in Hitch.

**Tess:** He’s great in it. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great romantic comedy and he will not do anymore of them. You look at Julia Roberts and she made her start in romantic comedy but didn’t want to keep doing that so they want to do serious roles and —

**Tess:** Although I read an interview with her recently that said if she read a good one for a woman who was whoever old Julia, lovely Julia is now, I’d happily write you one, because I love her. Yeah, I mean I don’t know whether that’s because they feel like they don’t have as much integrity. I mean comedy as a whole thing and you all know this, both of you from writing yourself, that it doesn’t ever get the kudos that any other line of craft does.

**Craig:** No. It’s crazy.

**Tess:** And I would argue that to write comedy is far harder that to write drama overall.

**Craig:** Because you’re right.

**John:** So, a theory I want to posit is that part of the reason why it’s looked down upon is because almost definitionally a romantic comedy is going to have one woman in it, and like one prominent actress who has a major role in the movie. And we sort of don’t want to write for women anymore — or we don’t want to make the movies for women anymore.

**Tess:** Yeah, but I mean It’s so weird because I’ve done so many interviews about Man Up and someone ask me the other day, “Oh is your character a hot mess?” And I was like, “Oh piss off, she’s not a hot mess. She is a messy person.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Who’s just going through some stuff and I think —

**John:** And she’s literally a very messy person —

**Tess:** Yeah literally a messy person. And I think also like you could switch the roles in Man Up and very easily either/or could play you know man or female roles. I do worry when people sort of think that there aren’t still stories about sort of romance to tell, because especially in the modern world.

**Craig:** I actually feel like were telling romance in every genre now. Part of what’s happened is everything — it doesn’t matter what it is.

**Tess:** And actually it’s too much, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, like no matter what the genre is, even if it’s like a wrestling movie, there has to be some sort of love story.

**Tess:** Or a Marvel movie.

**Craig:** Yeah by the way exactly, superhero movies like Ironman has to have Gwyneth Paltrow in a romance story. And we put romance into everything.

**Tess:** You know what, someone said to me recently that Superman wasn’t about his love for Lois Lane, and I got so angry.

**Craig:** Right well from the start —

**Tess:** That’s all that the film is about.

**Craig:** By the way that’s all Superman is about like —

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I’m going to get some more angry letters, I don’t like Superman. I like that relationship. And I think It’s a really good relationship story and I don’t care about his powers but —

**Tess:** But it’s not a rom-com to be fair.

**Craig:** No, It’s not a rom-com, but I do think that we actually are more interested now, it seems to me in writing comedies for women that we have been in a long, long time. There are really prominent female comediennes that are stars now, whether it’s Tina Fey or Melissa McCarthy —

**Tess:** Kristen Wiig, yeah.

**Craig:** We’re getting a lot of them and — but were not doing the traditional romantic comedies in the sense maybe there’s a vague feeling that they’re old fashioned but I disagree. I don’t think they — I think that they are old-fashioned only in the sense that movies used to be awesome and like I thought what Man Up reminded of is a good — a movie like the kind they used to make and that’s not to say stodgy or old but —

**Tess:** No, no I take that as a huge compliment because that’s what I — the screwball kind of element and the kind of classic structure and whenever I read the bad reviews which I obviously I always do. Whenever I read the ones that say “Oh God It’s just like so obvious,” I’m like, no, you’ve totally missed the point like we’re embracing all the tropes because that’s what any good genre film does, embraces them but then turns them into — gives them your own sort of angle on it. So —

**John:** Let’s talk about the tropes because I think that’s actually one of the things that people sort of single out romantic comedies for, it’s like “Oh these tropes,” and we sort of slam on these tropes. So let’s talk about tropes. The meet-cute, is that —

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah I mean like — I mean there’s technically you know, seven —

**John:** Oh my gosh, there’s seven tropes —

**Tess:** Well they’re not really tropes, actually that’s wrong they’re more like the beats of a rom-com.

**Craig:** Can I try? I don’t know them I just want to take a stab at it.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m going to start with a woman who is single and vaguely unhappy with her life.

**Tess:** Can be a man as well. Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Correct, I’m just going with the — I’m going to do the female version.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** She has given up on — she’s tried to — she’s gone through bad relationships and is about to give up.

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** There’s a meet-cute — so far so good — there’s a meet-cute where she or he runs into a person and they have sparks but they aren’t — the circumstances are such that they can’t just say fall in love. There are circumstantial things that are keeping them apart, obstacles.

**Tess:** All together. Yeah.

**Craig:** Good exactly. But they then start to — they go through a honeymoon phase where things are kind of exciting and they both think is it possible that this person, nah, we’re just friends, it couldn’t be, so they’re like kind of moving towards and away from each other out of fear because there’s a problem — the problem that they had in the beginning of the movie isn’t resolved. There’s a lie that one of them tells —

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** They get caught in the lie, they break up, and in the breaking up they return back to the world they started in, but no longer find that world satisfying and then one of them goes running.

**Tess:** I would give you a B-minus.

**Craig:** Okay, the B — by the way B-minus is not a bad grade because I never — I mean, you know — what did I — tell me where I went wrong and tell me what I left out.

**Tess:** No you didn’t, It’s all there really, I mean essentially what you’re talking about in terms of the girl who’s single — I’ll talk about Billy Mernit’s beats because that’s how I write. And he talks about the chemical equation which is the thing that in all writing you’re looking for your leading characters, what they’re missing in their life, what they are not doing. So in Man Up she is not getting out there, she is not putting herself in a position to meet someone. She is closed down, shut down. Yeah, then you got your cute-meet. I mean, in the history of time cute-meets are the hardest things to find original ways for your two leads to meet each other.

And I always love it, I always try and think about how do — like say you said to me how did you meet your partner, and I said, well I stole his date from under the clock at Waterloo Station. If that’s going to make me laugh, then that’s a good cute-meet. And then what you’re talking about in terms of your — Billy calls it the sexy complication turning point.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**Tess:** Which is your end of act one, which is when — really in a romantic comedy you’ve got to find emotional obstacles to keep your two leads together. And really at the end of act one, in lots off these films, they’re not the great examples of it, they could just walk away and the film could end. Sorry, I don’t fancy you anymore, bye.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** So you have to find either a plot driven thing but obviously what’s much better is an emotional obstacle or thing —

**John:** So either literal handcuffs or emotional handcuffs.

**Tess:** Exactly. Very good analogy, John August. And then you keep them together all through to your midpoint which is in terms of romantic comedy, you want to, in the smack bang of your middle of act two, you want to send them in a different direction to where they thought they were going, emotionally speaking.

And then they kind of start liking each other, but then you’ve got to get into the end of act two, your swivel second act turning point where someone makes the wrong decision. Someone always makes the wrong decision in a romantic comedy. It can be both of them and actually in Man Up, both of them don’t Man Up at the end of act two. And then all is lost from there onwards and you just have no idea how you’re going to get these two people back together and then in — you know When Harry Met Sally kind of did the brilliant run.

Weirdly now when I think about it, probably if you wrote that montage into a script now, someone would go “Nah,” wouldn’t they?

**Craig:** Of course, they say nah to everything.

**Tess:** And then he has a flashback so all of the moments in the film. And then he realizes that he loves her and then he runs.

**Craig:** Right, someone’s always running. I got that right.

**Tess:** Yeah, but you know what, they can be running metaphorically, they can be actually running. In Man Up, he does do an actual run, but I tried to sort off find a unique way without spoiling it for him to do that run.

**Craig:** Yeah and you did.

**Tess:** So it wasn’t just traditional —

**John:** Well you were calling out the trope.

**Craig:** Right exactly, you’re acknowledging, oh this is where they run, so we’ll give you a little something like a present.

**Tess:** Yeah. I mean you know, were quite on the button with the beats in Man Up, but hopefully, and I was saying to John actually when I first got here, when I wasn’t actually here, when I was pretending not to be here. I really — I sort of like love the fact that we are unashamedly saying, here they all are, you know, that I have no sort of fear in admitting. And I also think when you watch it again and this is not a plug to watch it twice, but the second time around, it’s a very fast movie the first time you watch it. When you watch it again, you can relax a bit more and understand some of the — you know catch some more of the jokes and more of the humor. So I think the first time you watch it, you can be like “Oh my god what is happening?” It’s like one night of kind of you know craziness.

But yeah and I mean I love — I just get so bored and tired of people sort off saying — the amount of times I get emails going would you like to talk about defending the rom-com for this, this, this? And I’m like yes.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like —

**Tess:** I will talk about it.

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like the movie is a great defense. And what you’re describing when you say —

**Tess:** That’s my exhibit A.

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you. If you said look, I have a collection of tropes, and the job is not to throw them out, the job is to execute them in fresh new ways —

**Tess:** Yeah and hide them.

**Craig:** Well that’s what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.

**Tess:** I know

**Craig:** All of us.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the point. So to me, I loved how traditional it was, and proved that a traditional romantic comedy still works because in the end — you know Lindsay Doran has this great remark, she says that movies are about what we care about at the end of movies, is relationships. And if you watch a movie, no matter what that movie is, the last scene is almost always about the relationship even if the movie is about robots blowing each other up, the last scene is the boy and the girl, or the boy and his car, or something, and it’s about the relationship. And you know the last scene — she always points out the last scene of Dirty Dancing. Everybody thinks Dirty Dancing ends with —

**Tess:** Oh, let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** She — you know, everyone says, “Oh, how does Dirty Dancing end? With her leaping?” No it doesn’t. It ends with Jennifer Grey talking to her dad.

**Tess:** No. To her dad exactly.

**Craig:** The relationship.

**Tess:** When I’m wrong I say I’m wrong.

**Craig:** Right. And so what Lindsay says is, what’s interesting is, they make these movies for boys and men about robots exploding, but then they put in this little relationship thing at the end to sort of say, okay, but also, you like movies about relationships. She said, when we make movies so called for women, that are about relationships, we’ve kind of said you’re smart enough to know that what you’re here for is the relationship. That’s the part everyone cares about anyway. The exploding robots, meh.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So romantic comedies are the purest form of that, I love that.

**Tess:** They are because like my favorite thing in the world, I love people, like even if I meet someone that I don’t like, and I’ll be able to use them at some point in my writings, so I’m like I’ll talk to you, even if you are dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. But like I sort of feel like — especially like when people sort of say, oh, you know Lake’s character in the film, because she is very, you know, it is very autobiographical. I’m not going to lie. But like — but she’s a person, not a woman, if that makes sense you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And I think that’s the key to sort of — I mean, I know lots of men that have seen Man Up, and I get random messages on Twitter all the time sort of going “God, I really love that film,” like you know, I really like this and I love Simon’s character in it, and Simon Pegg is so brilliant in it and actually very underrated actor, I think genuinely in terms of like his actual dramatic chops. I mean obviously he’s not underrated comedically, but he’s very vulnerable in the film, and he’s very, you know, effed up, and all those sort of things. I’ve already sworn. I don’t know why I did an “effed up” then. I could have just said it, couldn’t I?

**Craig:** Say it.

**Tess:** Yeah they’re two people and no one really wants to be on their own, do they, in life, whether you want to be in a relationship or just be with your friends or be with your family, you know, that’s what life is about for me, being with people.

**John:** So one thing that occurs to me though about the nature of a romantic comedy is that, the — you can have a central dramatic question that is about sort of like, can men and women be friends, you know what is the duty to think — you can have central dramatic questions that aren’t necessarily specifically about that relationship, but the fundamental plot question that the audience is going to expect to have answered is like, will this couple end up together?

And the answer in romantic-comedy generally is yes. And so the challenge of the screenwriter is like how do you believably keep them apart?

**Tess:** Yes. You know your ending already, so in life, in writing, you’ve got to be so full of questions, I mean, that is just a part of the job, do you know what I mean? So it always really fascinates me when people, with romantic-comedies, they don’t think they need that, they think they just need two people who are they/aren’t they — it’s like, no, you’ve got to have these huge, big emotional things that kind of are running through it.

**Craig:** That’s, I mean to me, all the differences that keep people apart that are circumstantial, I think of as MacGuffins, they are the glowing stuff in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. I kind of don’t care about those things. I always care about the things that are internal to them, and their fears that are keeping them alone, or keeping them apart from this person, that if they only could take a risk with, things would go well. Why I think, to me, the joy of a romantic-comedy is not in wondering, will they/won’t they, because the answer is, they will.

**Tess:** It’s how they. It’s how they.

**Craig:** It’s really, it’s being reminded, this is why men should always go to romantic-comedies with their significant others, is because it’s reminding everybody of the joy of falling in love, and the value of falling in love, because over time, I mean, you know, John and I have both been in monogamous relationships for years and years and years and years.

**Tess:** All right, don’t rub it in.

**Craig:** Sorry, you can’t maintain a heightened level — and you talk about this in the movie, a heightened level of passion for all that time. If you did, your brain would explode, and you would be mentally ill. It’s just not possible.

Going to romantic-comedies, revives it, it makes you look at the person you’re with, and makes you remember the risks you took with them, and it also reminds you of the value of what you built together because in the end, when you watch a movie about somebody stopping the world from exploding, that’s never my job, but at the end of a romantic-comedy, when I see a man and woman come together and make an agreement to mush their lives together and build a thing, and I always love in romantic-comedies when they’re old couples too, like in yours, it reminds me that I did something really good.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s worth it, you know. I think that’s the value of the —

**Tess:** That’s the job, isn’t is? I mean actually, it’s funny because someone was asking me the other day whether they think that Nancy and Jack, the two leads in Man Up, stay together. And I actually said, “No.”

**Craig:** You’re terrible.

**Tess:** Well no, I said no because I feel like the film is actually about putting yourself out there and taking chances. That’s part of her mantras within the film, and it’s something that I struggle with myself, you know, I’ve been single on and off now for bloody years, and I go into a very closed in kind of environment and I don’t want to kind of like take any chances.

And I think the film for me, is trying to say to people like if you do something, enjoy it, and see where it goes, but don’t try and maybe over-analyze it and worry about, okay, is this the man I’m going to marry and is this my life I’m going to have? So I love that they get together in the end, obviously. I would always get them together at the end.

But strangely, with Annie Hall, when they are not together at the end of that, I actually love that film, but that’s the only thing I find slightly dissatisfying, although you know, arguably, from the beginning of the film, you know that they’re not very well suited.

**Craig:** Well, I mean that movie, you know, the original title of Annie Hall was Anhedonia.

**Tess:** Yes, good fact. Nice fact.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Tess:** Fear of what?

**Craig:** Fear of pleasure.

**Tess:** Fear of pleasure. Exactly.

**Craig:** And so it really was a meditation on — definitely more Woody Allen in the —

**Tess:** Exactly and then it became her story, I mean you know.

**Craig:** That’s an existentialist movie, it’s in a weird way, people talk about it as a romantic-comedy. I don’t think it’s a romance at all. I think it’s actually an existential drama crisis movie.

**Tess:** Well, I think it is a romantic-comedy, but I think it’s fascinating that once the title changed to Annie Hall, you don’t really think about him as much in that film as you do about Diane Keaton. And I think that’s what turned it around, you know, he then probably hopefully realized, ah okay, this is actually much more about the breakdown of a relationship between two people that are a bit mismatched.

**Craig:** I do think that your characters, they get married, and they grow old together —

**Tess:** That’d be nice.

**Craig:** And then when one of them dies like at 92 —

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** The other one just sits down in a chair and dies like 10 minutes later.

**Tess:** Like six months later? Oh, 10 minutes? I was going to give them a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Yes, because that was just the way it was going to be. I believe that. I believe it in my bones.

**Tess:** Well, I have to believe to write it. Otherwise —

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think by the way, that you’re going to have this.

**Tess:** Thanks, Craig. You know what though, I’m fine though, like I think that like being single, I keep an edge.

**John:** Yes, absolutely, you get more writing done when you’re single.

**Tess:** It keeps me writing, yes.

**John:** Here’s a question for both of you. Do we think that romantic-comedies are by their nature dual protagonist stories, or can you have a romantic-comedy that has a protagonist and just an antagonist who does not change? Do both characters have to change?

**Tess:** Well Trainwreck kind of did that recently.

**John:** Yes, so Bill Hader’s character just barely changes.

**Tess:** He clearly doesn’t change. I would argue, actually I would — I liked it as a film, but I would have quite liked him to have a little bit more of a sort of journey, to use that word.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that the best of them, I always feel like there’s one protagonist. The dual protagonist thing to borrow a Tess Morris thing, I always feel it’s like 68, you know, 32. In this movie, it’s Nancy who is the protagonist.

**Tess:** Yes, she’s — I mean it was originally much more her, actually, and then I turned it more into a two-hander and brought Jack’s character in a bit sooner.

**Craig:** So I’m going to argue against sort of that because if you look at what Nancy is actually doing, especially in the bar scene where she’s like getting him to actually stand up to his ex-wife and that like, he is a character that has the most growth. He does the most things over the course of a lot of the movie to change.

**Tess:** He does, yes.

**Craig:** So ultimately, she is the person who has to do something at the end. He is the guy who does the big romantic run at the end, so he fulfills that Harry function.

**Tess:** Well, it depends where they meet as well. With When Harry Met Sally, they meet in the first scene, you know. And they’re together, they’re in every pretty much every single scene together about bar five or six or whatever, and I think with Man Up, it’s Nancy’s story for the first 12, 13 minutes, and then it’s entirely both their sort of journeys, but obviously she has more, I think it begins with her. She is the catalyst for the things that happen in the film.

**Craig:** I also think that, I mean you’re right, there’s the quantity of change that happens for Simon’s character, for Jack, but the profundity of the change, and the resistance, he’s already somebody who feels he’s defined as passionate, somewhat plastic in that nature, he’s emotional, he’s honest, he’s free with his feelings, he just needs to get over something. She’s bottled up to me that it’s like it’s the — he can make 12 changes over the course of the movie, but for her to uncork is like the hardest thing because it’s so — see, my problem with the single protagonist, and this is another thing I actually think hurt romantic-comedies is that for a long time the model was one person meets another person, the main character is flawed and can’t see that this other person’s perfect for them.

And they continue to fail in front of that person until finally, they succeed, and that person is essentially fixed in place as a moral ideal that you’re just waiting for them to grow up enough to earn. And that’s not quite satisfying for me as a moviegoer.

**Tess:** All my favorite rom-coms I would say are dual protagonist, you know, As Good As It Gets, and Silver Linings, actually, which is a great example of like something that begins with Bradley Cooper’s character, and then she just comes along and changes his whole life. And there’s a great sort of sub — I read a thing recently about how in the first scene when he meets her, when he says to her, you know, I find you — you look nice, I’m just saying that, I’m trying to get back with my wife, it’s not that I’m trying to come on to you, and actually, that’s the moment he falls in love with her, the first time he sees her.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And then she just bowls in and they have that brilliant kind of Hepburn/Tracy-esque kind of sort of dialogue between each other. And then it becomes their film, like once they meet, it should become a dual thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** To wrap this up, so romantic-comedies, we’re saying they are not dead. We are saying that the things that people identify as being formulaic about them, are the tropes that are common to the genre, but you could say the same things about the tropes in any genre. And so we don’t slam on superhero movies for having those tropes and genres, I guess because they’re wildly successful.

**Tess:** Can you imagine if everyone got upset about set pieces in superhero movies.

**Craig:** How about like, how about the part where they discover their powers and don’t have control over them at first? How about the part where they make their suit for the first time. God.

**Tess:** I love it when they make their suit. I’m like, how are they going to make their suit?

**Craig:** Who cares? So boring, I’m so done.

**Tess:** Yes, sorry, John.

**John:** So we’re also saying that romantic-comedies are comedies which we are expecting to see one or two characters grow and change, but you can say that of course with any movie.

**Tess:** Any movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And I think sometimes when people really hate a genre, I’m suspicious of them as a person.

**Craig:** Me too.

**Tess:** I’m like, “You hate romantic-comedies? Have you got no joy in your life that you — ” I mean I get a bit like —

**John:** That’s why I think you actually need to question them on what they’re defining as romantic-comedy because I think what they really mean to say, like I hate Katherine Heigl movies. It’s like, well, that’s fair, it’s fair to hate Katherine Heigl movies.

**Tess:** That’s fine, yes. I mean, I had an argument with someone recently about How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They hated it like with a passion. I was like, you know what, dude, it’s fine. I quite enjoy that film when I’m a certain kind of mood, but this kind of like association that it’s a chick flick, that I’m going to sit there in my track suit bottoms, well, I don’t know what you call them. Do you call them track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Sweat pants.

**Tess:** And eat a massive bag of Maltesers. Do you have Maltesers?

**John:** I have no idea what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Here it would be sweat pants and a pint of ice cream

**Tess:** Yes. Like don’t get me wrong, I love Bridget Jones, she’s a fantastic creation and always has been, but like we’re not all just doing that. I might do that when I watch Con Air, and that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s what is making you feel a certain thing, and I don’t know.

**Craig:** Also, why are we apologizing for things that are true? Like there are moments in movies when men are depressed and they do male depressed things.

**Tess:** Yes, and they’re allowed to do that.

**Craig:** They’re allowed to do it. Nobody goes, “Oh my god — ”

**Tess:** Exactly. In Sideways, no one went, “Oh,” which is one of my all-time favorite films, no one said, you know, “Oh god, he was so unlikeable.” The whole point is that he’s brilliantly unlikeable, you know?

**Craig:** We just did a whole episode on how angry that gets me —

**Tess:** Did you?

**Craig:** Unlikeable. The worst note. I believe it’s the last episode that you didn’t listen to.

**Tess:** I would say it’s the worst note particularly when you’re talking about female stuff when they go, “She’s just not likeable enough as a woman.”

**Craig:** For all genders, even if we’re dealing with genderless aliens or androids, it’s the worst note.

**Tess:** Do you think they got that note in Marley and Me.

**John:** The dog’s not likeable enough?

**Tess:** The dog’s not likeable enough.

**John:** Can we see the dog smile a little bit more?

**Craig:** Yes, people are going to want it to die.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. CG that smile in.

**Craig:** You know what that dog is?

**Tess:** What?

**Craig:** That dog’s a dick.

**Tess:** He’s a dick. [laughs]

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Tess, we should have warned you about One Cool Things.

**Tess:** Oh shit.

**John:** So you could be the third to go. You could say something that’s cool about your time in Los Angeles, because you’ve been here for a couple of weeks. My One Cool Thing is a profile of Nick Bostrom who is a scientist and a philosopher. He writes a lot about AI and sort of doomsday scenarios. And so the profile I’m going to link to is in The New Yorker.

And the things he was talking about are really interesting, but I thought it actually more interesting as a character profile, so just sort of digging into sort of what it’s like to be that sort of scientist guy who’s warning you about doomsday. It’s the character who in movies would be played by — I’m trying to think who is —

**Tess:** Kevin Spacey?

**John:** Kevin Spacey, yes, somebody like that who would be like, you know, I told you this is going to happen, this is going to happen. But the actual character that they outlined here is actually really fascinating and I think worth looking at.

**Tess:** Liam Neeson may be more —

**John:** Liam Neeson might be — Jeff Goldblum would be —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Goldblum is sort of the classic —

**Tess:** You didn’t stop to think whether you should.

**John:** Exactly, indeed, so be it Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park, he’s the guy who’s going to warn you about that. You’re playing god.

**Tess:** I’m with him. I’m with him.

**John:** What is so fascinating about this profile though is it goes into sort of this early decision to sort of like, you know, I am going to change my life completely. And sometimes we’ll see this in movies, but it’s so rare that you see this actually happening in real life where like you sort of have an epiphany and sort of like wrote like this is how my whole life is going to change and sort of did that.

And so a really interesting character profile, and also some good science in there as well.

**Tess:** Some good science.

**John:** Some good science. And if you like what they talk about in the fermi paradox stuff part of this, I’m also going to put a link in the show notes to this really great Wait But Why article on alien civilizations and what the fermi paradox is

**Tess:** Can you see my face? I’m just like what is he talking about?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like you’re talking about crisps. I have no idea. And track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Crisps. Crisps. I want Crisps. Look, you know what I think about all this. We’re living in a computer simulation.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re not real either.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** End of discussion.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Did you say, “Thank you?”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like I had put you at ease with that horrible proposition.

**Tess:** I felt suddenly like really relaxed.

**Craig:** That’s the opposite of what I wanted. You were supposed to start gazing up —

**Tess:** No, because I’m worst case scenario person. It’s the way I live my whole life in a state of panic, so when someone just says like, well, it’s over, it’s going to end, I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well fine. Good.”

**Craig:** Great, yeah. I get take a nap now.

**Tess:** Yes, that’s good, excellent.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I would have done it last week, but I did the whole blood brain barrier business last week, so this week, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be Fallout 4?

**John:** You’re enjoying it, Craig?

**Craig:** A little too much.

**Tess:** Is this a game?

**Craig:** It is a game, well done, Tess Morris.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Fallout 4 — everyone else knows what it is, so I will just say this, the crazy thing about Fallout 4 is that it is exactly the same as Fallout 3. I mean, with like one tiny change that’s actually kind of semi-fun, it’s the same damn game, and I don’t care, I love it.

**Tess:** Is it shooting?

**Craig:** It is shooting, but it’s mostly, it’s quest-based, so people — yes, so you have missions and you go on and you find things, and sometimes you have to kill people, sometimes you have to talk to people.

**Tess:** Like the Fall Guy, then?

**Craig:** Like the what?

**Tess:** The Fall Guy, the show that was on in the ’80s?

**Craig:** Not at all like the Fall Guy. Literally not anything like the — so think of the Fall Guy —

**Tess:** There’s no Jacuzzi that you jump in at the end with some ladies?

**Craig:** No. It takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston.

**Tess:** It’s nothing like the Fall Guy.

**Craig:** It’s more like Mad Max than The Fall Guy.

**Craig:** Thank you. It’s more like Mad Max. But I don’t know, whatever it does to me and my brain, because I love following storylines, I can literally feel the dopamine squirting out of my brain while I’m playing it. When I’m done, I can feel the lack of — I know I’m taking drugs, I know it. I know I’m smoking crack when I play this game. And it’s disrupted my sleep this week, but it’s been great.

**Tess:** It’s been great. Like MacGyver?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Goddamn it.

**Tess:** Good storylines, though. My One Cool Thing, now I’ve had two minutes to think about it.

**Craig:** Is it either The Fall Guy or MacGyver?

**Tess:** It’s the A-Team.

**Craig:** It’s A-Team? I love that you watched all those.

**Tess:** Oh my god, of course. So my One Cool Thing, since I’ve been living here, I’m coming back because I love it so much, but I’ve had my little six weeks here, and I’ve been living in Los Feliz — you say Los Feliz?

**Craig:** You can say both, actually.

**Tess:** What would you say?

**John:** I say Los Feliz.

**Tess:** Los Feliz. Los Feliz.

**Craig:** You did it right.

**Tess:** Los Feliz!

**Craig:** Never that.

**Tess:** Never that? So I’ve been living there which I love because I can walk everywhere, because I’m British, I love to walk, so I’m like, brilliant. And I discovered the Vista Cinema since I’ve been here which I think is the coolest cinema I have ever been in. And it’s just at the bottom of Hillhurst and Sunset and I just — it’s like my dream cinema, I mean not only was True Romance, I think the opening sort of scene is filmed there, but it just has everything I need.

You do cinemas so well here when you have that kind of old-fashioned sort of like art deco-y kind of sort of thing. And I got quite drunk with a friend when we went to see Spectre, and we arrived so late, so we couldn’t sit together and we were like, oh, god, what’s going on?

And then they brought out some folding chairs for us.

**Craig:** Oh, how nice.

**Tess:** So we sat drunk at the back, and then realized it was two-and-a-half hours long. Let’s not even —

**Craig:** But you know you can walk out at the last half hour, and —

**Tess:** At one point, I did turn to my friend, I was like, should we go? And he said, I think we need to see it through, we just need to see it through. And I had sobered up by then, so it was fun, but anyway, I just love how there’s just one film on there, once a week, and it’s just got a beautiful atmosphere to it, and I just — if I could be in there every night, but the only thing is that they have only one film a week, that’s the only thing. So I can’t go every night, but I just love it.

**Craig:** You could go every Saturday night.

**Tess:** I was like a pig in shit when I was in there.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** What a great guest.

**John:** Tess Morris, thank you for joining us on the podcast this week.

**Tess:** Thank you. It’s on my bucket list now, I’ve done it. I’ve been on Scriptnotes.

**John:** So is it no longer on your bucket list?

**Tess:** I’ll just keep coming back. I’ll just keep annoying you.

**John:** The buckets confuse me.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** John can’t handle it.

**Tess:** His whole face just went, what, uh?

**John:** I’m so confused. My programming won’t allow for this.

**Tess:** I won’t allow for this.

**Craig:** Literally, you divided by zero, just froze. You can find us at johnaugust.com, for show notes, where we talk about a lot of things we have discussed on the show today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Tess, are you on Twitter?

**Tess:** I am @thetessmorris.

**John:** She’s @thetessmorris on the Twitter. If you have questions like some of the ones we answered on the show today, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. If you would like to listen to back episodes of this whole program that we’ve made, you can find us at scriptnotes.net, you can also find us through the app. There’s a Scriptnotes app on the applicable app stores.

While you’re in iTunes, you should subscribe to Scriptnotes because why not? It’s free. And you should leave us a comment which actually helps us a lot and helps other people find the show. So thank you for doing that.

You should come and join us on December 9th for our live show with our special guests. And if there’s still tickets, hooray. Well, or, I don’t know, but you should come to the live show on December 9th.

Last but not least, we have a few of the USB drives left of all the 200 back episodes of the show, so you can find those at the store at johnaugust.com, and we will send you one with all 200 of the first episodes of Scriptnotes.

Our outro this week is by John Spurney, and it is a really good one. So John Spurney, thank you very much. We’re not even going to talk over it because it’s so good. And Craig and Tess, thank you so much.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome, Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) and [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Jon Bon Jovi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bon_Jovi) on Wikipedia
* [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/) and [Fountain](http://fountain.io/)
* Scriptnotes, 224: [Whiplash, on paper and on screen](http://johnaugust.com/2015/whiplash-on-paper-and-on-screen)
* Tess Morris on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTessMorris), and [Man Up](http://www.manupfilm.co.uk/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Up_(film)) and [Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_up_2015/)
* [Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/why-are-romantic-comedies-so-bad/309236/) by Christopher Orr
* CinemaBlend’s [30 Best Romantic Comedies Of All-Time](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/30-Best-Romantic-Comedies-All-Time-43134.html)
* The New Yorker on [Nick Bostrom](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom)
* Wait But Why on [The Fermi Paradox](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)
* [Fallout 4](https://www.fallout4.com/age-gate), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016E70408/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Vista Theatre](http://www.vintagecinemas.com/vista/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/whiplash-on-paper-and-on-screen).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I am Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 224, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

On last week’s episode I misidentified it as episode 232, and so some listeners thought I travelled through time and they’d missed episodes. And they’ve not missed anything. We are now back on track, we’re on the 224 train.

**Craig:** I feel like we lost a lot of work there. I mean, that’s 10 episodes that just disappeared.

**John:** Yeah, it’s like one of those things where — Heroes used to do this a lot, where they would jump back and forth in time and like sort of like whole timelines didn’t exist. And those were some really great episodes. I thought that the Shonda Rhimes episode we did was phenomenal. But I guess that’s just not in our timeline anymore.

**Craig:** It’s gone. You know, Melissa was a big fan of Lost. She watched all of Lost, every episode, all the way to the end. She loved the end, by the way. She’s one of those people that just cried and cried. She thought it was great. And you know, me, I don’t watch TV. So you know, every now and then, I’d walk by, I’m like, “What’s going on with Lost?” You know, I’d watch like five or six minutes of it. And I’d say, “What’s happening?” And she’d say, “It’s too complicated, you wouldn’t understand. They’re in a flash sideways.” And I was like, “That’s it. I’m going to go — I’m going to go play a video game. I’m out.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I loved Lost. I loved just sort of all the weird twists and turns they took. And I think they got unfairly slammed for like, people said like, “Oh, they broke the rule, that they were not supposed to be in limbo and like this wasn’t limbo.” But the no limbo rule is really sort of for the initial, what the island was, not that any season couldn’t talk place at limbo and so the reveal that part of it was limbo, was not fair.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s all whirring and clicking noises to me. [laughs] That’s how I feel what’s going on. But you know what we should do?

**John:** What should we do?

**Craig:** We should get Damon Lindelof to come on our show.

**John:** We should absolutely do that. So that will be a goal for 2016.

**Craig:** I don’t even think — it’s not that much of a goal, I mean. We’ll just go —

**John:** Damon is actually a friend.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

**Craig:** Damon, get on the show. I’m just going to tell him, “Get on.”

**John:** Damon Lindelof listens to the show so I bet he would even be happy to be on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s go. Actually, I love — I mean, he’s — talk about a great insight into what we do. He’s written a bunch of things about final episodes. When the last episode of Breaking Bad came out, he wrote this really interesting essay where he kind of put to bed his own weird relationship with the final episode of Lost and how it made people feel, and all the rest of that stuff. It would be really interesting to talk to him about that because he is a really smart guy, and he’s got such an interesting and familiar-to-me relationship with feedback and criticism and, you know, all that stuff. So we’re just going to order Damon to be on the show.

**John:** He will absolutely be on the show. I was talking with him about Season 2 of the Leftovers which I’ve really been enjoying. And he was warning me before it happened, like “Oh, and there’s this one thing that’s going to happen. It’s going to be like a big social media flashpoint,” and you know, the difference is I now can anticipate and see that coming and sort of try to be not even ahead of the story but sort of responsive to where I know the conversation is going to go and he was absolutely correct. And so when it happened and the next morning as people started having their think pieces about what happened on the previous night’s episode, he could be part of that conversation and not say dumb things.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, he really loves to be part of that conversation and —

**John:** But he’s not on Twitter anymore. He’s very deliberately — he steps in when he needs to and steps out when he doesn’t want to.

**Craig:** I see. I see. Well, I mean, he’s a very interesting guy that way. He really is — I think he is interested in being an active participant in the discussion about his own work which I think is really interesting. It’s not — it’s like another job on top of your job and — now, I know that there are a lot of people that, well, they follow, you know, my new role which is just go somewhere for two weeks and come back and it’ll be fine. But he’s in there, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that he thinks about these things. He’s very — it’s an interesting thing. So, okay, we’re forcing Damon to do the show.

**John:** It has been decided. Today on the episode, we will be talking about two scenes from Whiplash, both how they function on the page and how they function on the screen, and why they are so wonderful. So this is sort of a follow-up to the episode we did with two scenes from Scott Frank. Actually, that’s I guess one scene we looked at from Scott Frank.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And people loved that episode where we really dug into what Scott was doing on the page and how it worked and why it worked. And so we’re going to be doing that with two scenes from Whiplash.

**Craig:** Great. And Damien Chazelle, by the way, also a super nice guy. And I believe I’m going to force him to be on the show as well.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I got to interview Damien Chazelle for a film independent thing —

**Craig:** I remember that.

**John:** A year ago. And he was just the best. And in that conversation we talked about how those scenes shifted from what he wrote to shooting it to editing it. And we’re going to see some of the results of that in today’s episode.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting is that, of the four of us, you, me, Damon, and Damien, three of us have something in common. One of us is not like the others.

**John:** Did you all go to Princeton?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** All right. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Damien, Damon and I are all from New Jersey.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** What a great state.

**John:** It is a great state, the undersung state.

**Craig:** Undersung. Although I’m sure some people will be like, “Yeah, well, I liked Whiplash.”

**John:** Yeah? No one else has done anything good out of New Jersey.

**Craig:** The other guys did Hangover 2 and Tomorrowland.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** F them.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** F Jersey.

**John:** This is also a great moment for us to bring up the issue of Fs because this will be an episode where we are talking about scenes from Whiplash and there are some F words in it. So in the later half of this show, you may not want your kids in the car to be listening to the episode because they will hear J.K. Simmons say the F-word.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you’re in a car and it’s moving, unfortunately, you are going to have to push them out.

**John:** Yeah, that’s fine. I mean, that’s pretty much parenting. It’s knowing when to push your kids out of the car.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** We have actual news, so if you missed us at Austin because you were not in Austin for the Austin Film Festival and you were saying, “Oh no, why do we not get to see John and Craig live?” Well, if you live in Los Angeles, you will get to see us live. We are doing another Scriptnotes holiday show. It’s long-rumored, but it’s actually going to happen on December 9th. It will be in Hollywood, California across from the ArcLight.

Our guests for the show include Malcolm Spellman, Natasha Leggero, and Riki Lindhome from Another Period. They’re the co-creators of Another Period and they are phenomenal and funny. Malcolm Spellman was a previous guest. He is a producer on Empire and writer and an all-around funny person.

We may have some other guests too that we’ll be announcing soon. But it’s important that we announce this now because tickets go on sale on Tuesday, the day this episode comes out. So they are $20. As always, all proceeds benefit the Writers Guild Foundation and you can go to the Writers Guild Foundation website in order to purchase your tickets for this show. It has always sold out, so maybe don’t delay too long.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And talk to your friends and come to see us live and in person.

**Craig:** I think these will move pretty quickly. Malcolm is one of our more popular guests. Perhaps our most popular guest and — because he is one of the key writers on Empire, which is a big, big show, I think people are going to want to hear from him about that. And then, although I don’t know Riki Lindhome’s work, I do know Natasha Leggero as a stand-up comedian. She is incredibly funny. I mean, you may be familiar with her from some of the Comedy Central roasts, but that — I always feel like that doesn’t give people a true sense of who a comedian is. And her work is really, really good. She is just smart. She’s smart. I think she’s one of the funniest people out there. So I’m really excited to meet Natasha and Riki and talk about their show.

**John:** And you’ll probably even watch one episode of their show before this begins. That’s not a promise, but it’s a thing that other hosts might do.

**Craig:** I mean, if there’s like a summary somewhere? [laughs] No. No.

**John:** Because you’ll really get a good sense of the tone or what’s unique about it by reading a summary of the show.

**Craig:** [laughs] Isn’t it great when people ask questions and it’s so obvious they just read a summary. No, I will absolutely familiarize myself with the material. And frankly, it’s going to be — I’m looking forward to familiarizing myself with it, because I know at the very least that Natasha is super, super funny. And if she’s working with Riki, I can only imagine Riki is really, really talented, too. So I’m excited about that. I’m going to watch that. But yeah, you guys should pick up your tickets quickly. And you know, usually, we have some sort of extra pizazzle in there at some point.

**John:** Yeah. There’s some pizazzle coming, we just don’t want to quite announce it to the world yet.

**Craig:** Barack Obama.

**John:** Come one, you spoil everything.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** We have follow up from our live show in Austin. In the live show we talked about Zola and whether the Zola movie could happen, how much of that Zola story was real. So if you don’t remember, that was the story of the Hooters waitress who goes on a wild trip to Tampa, I believe, and craziness ensues. And so we talked about sort of what was possibly real, what was not real, how much her Twitter account was just really good writing versus actual reality.

Well, Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post did a long story on it and did some fact checking and found out that so many of the facts actually check out. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. But basically, a lot of that happened. Nobody got shot in the face, no one died, but a lot of the other stuff happened. And, there’s some disagreements about sort of who did what, when, and where, and how. But most of those people are actually real people. And they — that was their life over a course of some chaotic weeks. And Caitlin also does more follow-up in sort of the parts that happened after Zola’s Twitter story about how Z and Jess and all that stuff resolved

**Craig:** If you recall from the Austin show, my instinct was, if you’re going to make a movie about this that it should be about the strange confluence of a viral news story with — in conjunction with what’s actually really happening. As I read this, I feel it even more because, you know — yeah. So apparently, she made up the part about somebody getting shot in the face. And that’s good because you don’t want murders. That’s difficult. But here’s what I look at, I see that Jessica is 20 years old. I see that she has a daughter, a baby. And I see —

**John:** And she’s lost custody of the baby already.

**Craig:** No surprise there, considering that she is engaging in prostitution. And a greater concern is that she appears to be getting trafficked. And then you read about this guy who’s just a bad, bad man. I mean, when you read these stories on the internet, it’s like “Oh, haha, Z. You crazy nut.” No. Z is also Rudy, also Akporode Uwedjojevwe. That’s right, Akporode Uwedjojevwe.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is an awful human being. He is a bad, bad man who deserves to go to prison, as far as I’m concerned, forever, because he is a human trafficker. And it’s not funny. None of this is — I mean the thing is, Zola’s story attracted everyone’s attention because it was so — it was written in such a breezy, funny, catty, confident style. This is not good. I hate that all of this happened. I hate that is happens at all. That’s where I’m fascinated by people’s casual like, “OMG, Zola’s so crazy.” And in fact, what’s going on, which is a series of terrible crimes. And somewhere down the line is a baby. I hate it. I just hate it. I hate that these things happen. And so I’m fascinated by how social media grabbed on to this and looked at it and decided to have fun with it, almost.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not fun for me.

**John:** So someone on Twitter asked what we meant when I said “taking agency,” like we have a character who takes agency. What does that term even mean? And I answered back that the ability to take agency is the ability to have control over the outcomes of things, the ability to take actions which can propel you forward. And so often in stories you see characters who either don’t take agency or basically have no agency at all. They could not affect the outcome whatsoever, and it’s very frustrating to be in their stories.

I think one of the differences between the Twitter account of Zola and sort of how she told the story is that character that she described for herself seemed like she had a lot of agency, she could actually affect the outcomes. And so she’s the one who’s like creating the profiles and she’s doing all that stuff and when the decision to like — like let’s start trapping, she could do that. And so she would cast herself as a character in her story who could make some of these decisions. And some of these decisions were just to run away, but those were decisions she was able to make.

When you look at this actual real-life account, you see that both the Jessica character and Zola had probably less agency in that situation than would be believed. And that’s the difference between a protagonist that you want to watch in a movie and somebody you kind of shy away from because you see how desperate their real plight is.

**Craig:** Yeah. The term “agency” comes up all the time. And it’s something that is most salient when people are looking at stories and saying, “Well, wait a second, this character may be making decisions, they may be doing things, they’re not passive, but are they being creative? Are they being inventive? Are they the person that is kind of master-minding what’s going on? Are they — are they solving in their minds?” This is what we think of as agency. And you’re right, I think that Zola, a.k.a. Aziah Wells, definitely paints herself with more agency than she has. But, you see, this is what we’ve talked about before, it’s this curse of narrative.

When we read these things and we read her account, we’re like, oh, my god, this is an underdog woman who’s a stripper. But she doesn’t care, she’s proud of who she is. And so she’s going to go along and do something that’s perfectly legal and fine. And then things go bad and she keeps her head, she keeps her wits, and she comes out alive. That’s somebody I root for. There’s agency and narrative. And then there’s villains. And the villain is just like a villain, you know. and he’s a bad guy, and he ends up in jail. And there’s this woman who’s weak and doesn’t have any agency. And so we lose respect for her and we — and we gain respect for Zola because she’s not like that.

But in reality, crimes are being committed and there’s terrible victimhood here. And I — and it’s so — this is what I talk about when I — the narrative sickness that we have. We can’t seem to get past our narrative biases to see how much pain and misery is going on here. And this guy, I mean — ugh, god, you see the mug shot of this guy, you look in his eyes and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, you’re a bad guy. I can see it in your eyes. You got — you got bad guy eyes.”

**John:** He does very much. All right. So what we’re going to talk about in this week’s episode is Whiplash. And specifically, two scenes from Whiplash involve characters with — taking a lot agency but also conflict. And the backbone of any one of these stories that we want to tell is characters in conflict. And Whiplash is a very specific example because it’s just these two kind of sociopaths who have this really complicated relationship over the course of the movie. And the characters are — that you’ll be hearing repeatedly in the show — Miles Teller is the actor who plays Andrew and J.K. Simmons is Fletcher.

So the two scenes that I’m going to be playing for you guys, none of them involve actual drumming or sort of the meat of what this story is which is these intense sessions with a band. So the two scenes I want to focus on first is a family dinner, which is one of the few times where we see Andrew’s character outside of this elite music education school that he’s at. And the second one is a conversation that happens at a jazz club very late in the story, in sort of a third act.

So if you haven’t seen Whiplash at all, some of this won’t make a tremendous amount of sense, but you’ll probably be able to follow along with what’s going on because we’re really focusing on what is the writing on the page and how does that manifest on the screen.

**Craig:** So should we watch it now?

**John:** Yeah, let’s do it. So let’s take a look at the first scene from Whiplash. This is a family dinner scene. So this is Andrew coming home with his father played by Paul Reiser. And it is first starting off at a kitchen and then we’re moving to a dinner table scene where we have a big family around a dinner table. So we’re going to play the audio for it. You’ll get a sense of what’s happening here and then we’re going talk about both the scene at it’s written on the page and what it was actually shot like. So let’s take a listen to that first.

[Audio Playing]

**Man:** Yikes, what did you do to your hand? Is that from drumming?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**Father:** So how’s it going with the studio band?

**Andrew:** Good. Yeah, I think he likes me more now.

**Father:** And his opinion means a lot to you, doesn’t it?

**Andrew:** Yeah.

**Man:** Want to grab the shakers?

**Man:** Jimbo, overcooked. I can barely chew this.

**Man:** He just left.

**Woman:** So how is the drumming going, Andy?

**Andrew:** Yeah. It’s going really well. I’m the new core drummer.

**Group:** Hey, yeah. Yay!

**Man:** Tom Brady!

**Woman:** Did you hear yet?

**Father:** No. What happened?

**Man:** Travis got named this year’s MVP

**Father:** That’s fantastic, Travis.

**Woman:** And Dustin] is heading up Model UN, soon to be Rhodes Scholar and who knows what all else. And Jim, teacher of the year. I mean, come on, the talent at this table, that is stunning. And Andy, with your drumming.

**Man:** It’s going okay, Andy?

**Andrew:** Yeah, I mean it’s going really, really well. Actually, I’m part of Shaffer’s top jazz orchestra which means it’s the best in the country. And I’m a core member so I’ll start playing in competitions and actually I just found out I’m the youngest person in the entire band.

**Man:** How do you know who wins in a music competition, isn’t it subjective?

**Andrew:** No.

**Man:** Does the studio get you a job?

**Andrew:** No. It’s not an actual studio. It’s just the name of the ensemble. But yeah, it’s a big step forward in my career.

**Man:** Well, I’m so glad you figured it out. It’s a nasty business I am sure. Oh, hey, are you going to tell them about your game last week? Living up to your title?

**Man:** I scored a 93-yard touchdown.

**Man:** School record, school record, school record.

**Father:** That’s great. That’s fantastic.

**Andrew:** It’s Division III. It’s Carlton Football, it’s not even Division II. It’s Division III.

**Man:** You got any friends, Andy?

**Andrew:** No.

**Man:** Oh, why is that?

**Andrew:** I don’t know. I just never really saw the use.

**Man:** Oh, who are you going to play with otherwise? Lennon and McCartney, they were school buddies, am I right?

**Andrew:** Charlie Parker didn’t know anybody until Joe Jones threw a cymbal at his head.

**Man:** So that’s your idea of success, son?

**Andrew:** I think being the greatest musician of the 20th Century is anybody’s idea of success.

**Father:** Dying, broke, and drunk, and full of heroine at the age of 34 is not exactly my idea of success.

**Andrew:** I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34, and have people at a dinner table talk about me than live to be rich and sober at 90 and nobody remember who I was.

**Man:** Ah, but your friends will remember you. That’s the point.

**Andrew:** None of us were friends with Charlie Parker. That’s the point.

**Man:** Travis and Dustin, they have plenty of friends and plenty of purpose.

**Andrew:** I’m sure they’ll make great school board presidents someday.

**Man:** Oh, that’s what this is all about. You think you’re better than us?

**Andrew:** You catch on quick. Are you in Model UN?

**Man:** I got a reply for you, Andrew. You think Carlton football is a joke? Come play with us.

**Andrew:** Four words you will never hear from the NFL.

**Woman:** Who wants dessert?

**Father:** And from Lincoln Center?

**John:** All right. So Craig, had you seen that scene since you saw the movie?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. So first impressions?

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting. I love this movie. I remember not liking this particular scene that much. I loved certain parts of it. I remember thinking that there were some transitional bumps. So you know, what we have obviously is we have an insecure guy who is getting beaten up by one father at school. And now, he’s coming home and attempting to crow and build himself back up .And he’s struggling a little bit with his own father. And then with his uncle who is a dick. And so he becomes hostile.

But the — you know, there were some spots where — little transitional spots where I thought, “I’m not quite sure — I’m not sure why this conversation is flowing the way it did.” There are sections that were great and then there were a couple spots that I want to call out and sort of say, “Hmmm.” And I want to look at the pages because I’m wondering if that’s — if it’s different on the page.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a look at it. So if you want to read along with us, I will have these links in the show notes. Basically, there’s two PDFs. So this is the Whiplash dinner that we’re looking at. And so the scene starts on page 48, it’s actually scene 49. So INT. NEW JERSEY — JIM’S HOUSE — KITCHEN. EVENING. Jim grabs a platter from the stove, Andrew by his side. Jim asks, “How is it going in studio band?” Andrew says, “Good. I think he likes me more now.” Jim says, “His opinion means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” Jim looks at Andrew, almost accusatory. A moment. “Yeah? Grab the shakers please.”

So let’s look at what this little snippet of scene does because it feels like the kind of thing, like, “Oh, you could just take that out.”

**Craig:** No, you can’t.

**John:** No, you can’t. Because what this is setting up is that even though you have left the school, you have not left the school. And that this movie is about Andrew and Fletcher. And so the very first thing the father asks is, “How’s it going?” And Andrew answers, “Oh, other daddy likes me now.” And —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s crucially what this movie is about, is this really fucked up relationship between these two characters. And you have to remind the audience that even though we’re not in that physical space anymore, it’s still about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. The character of Andrew’s father, Jim, will become exposed as something of a weakling. And so you have a situation where a boy-man, Andrew, is looking at his own father and thinking, “You’re not special. You’re not strong. You’re not interesting. And in school, I have this other father who is strong and special and interesting but abusive.” And watching him ping pong between these two is remarkable. And so here, Jim is kind of — it’s interesting, he’s saying — when he says, “His opinion means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” And there’s that pause and then Andrew looks at him and says, “Yeah.” There’s — in the text, you see it says, “Jim looks at Andrew almost accusatory,” got it, “a moment. Then Andrew says, ‘Yeah.'”

But what could have gone in parenthesis in front of the “Yeah” is defiant, right? I’m glad, you don’t need it. You know, Damien is directing his own movie, he knows what’s going on here. But there is a defiance there which is “Yeah, not just his opinion means a lot to me. His opinion means more to me than yours.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And you get it. It’s all there, which is, this is what we’re going for. And you know, when you’re writing, you may ask yourself, “How much am I supposed to say?” Remember that sometimes what we have to say is “Yeah.” Real simple. Love it.

**John:** Yeah. So there are moments in this scene that’s to come where — which are very written. Where you definitely sense like, okay, you can sort of feel the writer’s hand there a bit. But so much of Whiplash is just responding to what it actually feels like to be in that moment. And “Yeah” was exactly the right thing to say there.

So let’s move into the dining room. So INT. JIM’S HOUSE — DINING ROOM. NIGHT. Seven people seated at the table. Jim and Andrew, Andrew’s Uncle Frank, Aunt Emma, and 18-year-old cousin Dustin. To Jim, “Jimbo, overcooked. I can barely chew this thing.” Jim laughs along. Andrew watches. There’s an undercurrent to the joking. The power dynamic between the brothers is clear. He just laughs.

So this is all we’re going to ever see of this family again. They’re never going to be around us again. And so I remember when I talked to Damien Chazelle about this scene at this Director’s Forum, I was like, “There must have been a lot of pressure to cut this scene.” He said, “Absolutely.” Because like it’s a lot of actors to suddenly bring in. It’s a whole new location. You’re shooting around a table which seems like “Oh, that should be really simple.” It’s actually really complicated to shoot around a table. It takes so long because you’re matching eye lines.

But he thought it was really important to see Andrew outside of the school and sort of have Andrew try to define and defend himself. And we’re about to move into that section.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, first of all, you bring up this fascinating thing that people don’t know. And that is, what’s hard to shoot and what’s not? Shooting around a table is brutal. It’s absolutely brutal. And it is entirely about eye lines. So the eye lines are also angles. Every time somebody moves their head to look at somebody, that’s a new angle.

So you have Andrew in this point looking at his father, looking at his uncle, looking at his cousins. Those are all angles. You have his father looking at everybody, looking at his brother, looking at Andrew. Everyone is looking at everybody, it’s endless. Anyway, the point was very well directed, very well done. And it was all about the choices of who looks where and when. I love the way that Damien does this.

We need to learn something about Uncle Frank’s relationship with Jim. And all he gives us is, “This is overcooked.” But he’s like being jovial about it, “It’s overcooked. I can barely chew this.” And then his brother Jim, Andrew’s father, just sort of like sheepishly laughs. And then Uncle Frank says, “He just laughs.” And Jim keeps laughing. It’s the most — it’s the most wonderful alpha dog/beta dog moment and you get everything. And you know, and you can see in the scene, that Andrew is watching and he hates it. He hates it because his father is a beta dog and he doesn’t want to be one. He wants to be the ultimate alpha. This entire scene is about masculinity. Bad masculinity. It’s really fun.

**John:** I want to circle back to what you said about shooting around a table because we’ll put up links to these clips as well. We’ll put them on YouTube or some place so people can see them. And what you’ll notice now that we’ve said it is that when Travis comes into the scene, he doesn’t take a seat at the end of the table which would probably be the natural place for him to sit. Instead, he sits right beside his brother. It’s basically so you don’t have to establish a new eye line for everyone around that table to look at each other.

So Travis gets to share a two-shot with his brother and doesn’t have to have his own separate eye line for everything, for everyone to look at him down at the end of the table. That saved them probably eight hours of filming to have him sit in that chair rather that at the end of the table.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what else it saved them, production design. Because if he’s sitting at the end of the table, I got to see the other part of that room. And then I got to dress it and what does that look like? Ugh. No, smart.

**John:** Because who is important in this scene? Well, Andrew is important in the scene. Like Andrew is the heart of everything in the scene. And so the only people who need really careful coverage are people who are going to spar with him directly. So his father is the second most important character in that scene because his father is this character we’re going to follow out through the rest of this movie.

The other guys, they’re not so important. All they’re there to do is to set up stuff for Andrew to hit back. And that is why we’re not getting into huge amounts of depth about who these other people are. The aunt is just a woman who says some lines and that’s how it should be. Because if the aunt talked about what she did in knitting today or sort of what this other thing that happened in the world is, it wouldn’t help us tell the story of Andrew.

**Craig:** Right. And just as we did with Scott Frank’s pages, let’s just keep note in our minds of how much has gone by here. We’re only about a half-a-page in and I know — I know how Andrew thinks about his father. I know that Andrew and his father are locked in a battle of wills that Andrew is winning. I know that Uncle Frank is the alpha dog to Jim. And I know that Andrew knows this and hates it.

**John:** And so let’s — first line from Aunt Emma, “And how’s your drumming going, Andy?” So first off, she’s saying Andy rather than Andrew. So she’s diminishing him. “Your drumming,” it’s like, oh, it feels like something a little kid does. So she’s not taking him seriously. So she’s trying to engage with him but she’s just, you know — you can very definitely see his reaction to what that is.

And actually, in the scene description he says, “Andrew put on the spot hesitates. But then excited, ‘Well, actually it’s going really well. I’m now the core drum,’ the door opens.” So he started to be able to define himself and then Travis walks in.

**Craig:** Right. Now, here is the little area where I got a little nervous. And even in the scene, I remember even watching the movie I felt this, which is like I’m feeling a little bit of a disconnect. I know what’s happening here. I know that they’re going to be basically diminishing what he does, “Oh, your little drumming thing.” You know?

But what I was nervous about was a disconnect from their attitude and what I think would be real. At least one of them would have some moderated opinion here. He’s going to the equivalent of the Berklee School for Music. That’s kind of what’s implied in the movie, it’s — or Juilliard. I mean, it’s the top of the top. He’s already achieved something fairly remarkable by going there. It seemed not to match up for me in terms of reality that every — I mean, even Aunt Emma would be like this. I would have much preferred Aunt Emma to pipe in and say, “Well, no, it’s a very good school.” And then Uncle Frank mows her down. But I got a little worried there.

**John:** So let’s — this will be a situation where we’ll look at the difference between what’s on the page and what is actually in the film or what made it through the cut. There was a little bit more, I think, along what you’re asking for there in the written pages. So — but also it was distinguished between like, if you are a violin prodigy at Juilliard, people are going to perceive you one way. Whereas, if you play drums, they’re going to perceive you a different way. And so I think, singling out the drumming is a useful way of thinking about it because we don’t think of drummers being musicians in the same way.

**Craig:** I guess, but he is — it’s jazz. Like, if he were trying to drum in a band, I totally get it. But jazz, everyone, I think, views jazz as the academic version of music. It’s the fanciest for drummers, I think, even more so than classical music, so I don’t know. It’s just felt a little — it just felt a little broad. Yeah, I thought it was a little broad.

**John:** So let’s take a look at Aunt Emma’s next block here. “And Dustin heading up the Model UN, soon to be Rhodes Scholar, who knows what? And Jim, teacher of the year. I mean, look at the talent at the table, it’s stunning. And Andrew, with his drumming.” And so she’s trying to include Andrew in the conversation about how remarkable everyone is and singled out Andrew as well but it’s not working. And you can definitely see Andrew’s reaction. And that’s Uncle Frank’s next line, “Yeah, you said that was going okay, Andy.” That sense of like, you know, “Oh, we didn’t forget about you. We are going to circle back to you.”

**Craig:** Right. And so here, we’re getting it. I mean this is — we now know what’s going on, which is Uncle Frank, alpha dog, is going to boast about his boys. Emma is going to boast about her boys. The boasting has been over the top, for me at least. [laughs] And it’s interesting, because — I don’t want to seem like I’m down on the scene because I love the other scene. I love this movie. But there was something a little pushed about the bragging. Where it goes, though, once we get past the push about the bragging, I got very, very happy.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the section that got cut out. And so I want to focus on this. So I’m looking at the bottom of page 50, top of page 51. Uncle Frank asks, “So does the studio help you get a job?” Andrew says, “It’s not that — the studio, it’s just the name of the ensemble. And yes, it’s a big step forward in my career.” So he does say that in the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Uncle Frank says, “I’m just curious how you make your money as a drummer after graduating.” That’s a reasonable question, I think, for that uncle to ask. Andrew glances at his dad wondering if maybe he’ll chime in, in his defense. But no, dad stays meek and quiet. Aunt Emma, trying to be helpful, “I saw a TV commercial for credit reports where a young man was playing the drums. You could do that.”

**Craig:** I’m glad they cut that one out.

**John:** Yeah. “Yes. Or the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, but the credit reports gig is a wonderful backup.” And so this is the first time where he’s actually just being a dick in the scene. And that’s an important thing to remember is that you have to think about who your character is in that scene. And Andrew is a dick. And we’ve not had a chance to sort of see how much of a dick he is because he has always been out-dicked by Fletcher. And this is a chance to see him actually being the asshole that he kind of deeply is in his heart. And we have to have some new characters to show that with.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s also internalizing what Fletcher has done to him. He is copying. He is copying his teacher’s voice. He is copying the cruelty in his teacher’s voice. Now, at this point it’s warranted. We’re actually rooting along with Andrew. And what’s interesting about this scene, my favorite part of the scene, is what’s going to come next which is when Andrew stops being rootable for. So at first I get it. Now, I understood why they cut the TV commercial line up because it made Aunt Emma too dumb. And it was too much in the direction of what I already thought was a little bit too much in the direction of.

But Andrew says in the script, “Yes, it’s a big step forward in my career.” They skipped a couple of lines. And Uncle Franks just goes, “Well, I’m glad you have it figured out. It’s a nasty business, I’m sure.” Then he says to Travis, “Okay. You got to tell them about your game last week.” It was really pushing pretty hard. I would have — I would have loved for one of the kids to sort of pipe in on their own, because again we got back to “I love bragging.” [laughs] “Kids, talk more about you.” It just felt a little — it felt a little broad again.

**John:** Yeah. Yet we need to be able to get to moments where we can reveal Andrew just like how much of a dick Andrew can be. And so we need to find a way to get to a place where Andrew feels pushed enough that at least to his way of thinking it’s reasonable to go after these doofuses and sort of point them out. So he’s saying, “He plays for Carlton. It’s Division III. It’s not even Division II.” So basically like — he’s essentially saying like, “How dare you compare what he’s doing to what I’m doing?” Or not even really compare what we’re doing together because like he’s playing at like the amateurs and I’m playing in the pros and the difference then.

Ultimately, where this is all going to is allowing Andrew to state the question which we’re going to see again in the follow-up scene is what is he actually doing this for? What is the goal of being in the school? And the Charlie Parker story is what he’s going to get to here.

**Craig:** Yeah. When he announces it’s Division III, that’s the moment where — and aim for these moments, folks, when you’re writing these conflicts via discussion conversation — that’s the drop your fork. So everything has been survivable barbs. When he says it’s Division III, that’s a flat out insult. He’s literally saying you play for a lame team. It’s not real football. Stop bragging. You suck. I’m good.

Now, interestingly, there’s a line that’s in the script that’s not in the movie. And I want it to be in the movie. So in the script, Andrew explains, “He plays for Carlton. It’s Division III. It’s not even Division II.” Then you see silence. Shock around table. Then Andrew says, “The tilapia is delicious by the way.” And Uncle Frank, in parenthesis, (I’ll get you back for that), “You got a lot of friends, Andy?” Now, this moment, the tilapia line is cut out, so —

**John:** I’m happy the tilapia line is cut out. You want the tilapia line back in?

**Craig:** I do. And here’s why. Because I need a moment for Uncle Frank — I need to see Uncle Frank get angry. I don’t see him get angry in the scene. I see him get angry here because Andrew is being a real snot. He’s trying to like say, “There, I just dropped a bomb. But now moving on, tilapia, everyone. I’m in control of this discussion.” And I want — and I want Uncle Frank to go, “No you’re not. No, I’m in control.”

**John:** The tilapia felt sitcom to me. It felt too punch line. There’s something about how specific the word tilapia is that it just — it made it too clear to me that Andrew knew he was being a dick. And that he was peacocking in front of everybody else where it wasn’t — I didn’t think he was quite ready to be at that place yet.

**Craig:** Well, I would say to you that the language there is not what I’m in love with. Let’s change — I mean, let’s rewrite, Damien. We can change that to whatever. What I’m in love with is the fact that he thinks he just got away with it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that Uncle Frank, I need — the moment that I like the least in the scene is where Uncle Frank says, “You got a lot of friends, Andy?” It comes off as a non-sequitur. It doesn’t come off as mean. It doesn’t come off as revenge. It doesn’t come off as a challenge. It almost comes off as vaguely conversational and kind of odd. So I needed that moment where I saw Uncle Frank make a decision to go, “Okay. Let’s go.” And that is a specific response to what you just did.

**John:** Yeah. So from this moment on, this scene plays as if it’s a fight between Andrew and his uncle. Of course, it’s really about his father and of course the other, you know, cousins there as well will chime in. But it’s really about this sort of, like, Andrew when he sort of feels like he’s backed into a corner will come out stabbing and slashing. And that’s just the basic nature of him. And it’s important, I think, for us to see it at this point in the movie that he actually is this kind of character. And that, you know, the hard worker we saw earlier on has become a bit of a sociopath. And I think it’s an important sort of change to see

So when he talks about, you know, people know who Charlie Parker is because of all these things that happened. And that he’s not worried about dying broke, drunk, and full of heroine at 34. Like, that’s sort of his fantasy. And that’s an important thing for us as an audience to see. And it’s the kind of thing that in less capable hands, the character would just say it to somebody or would just say to the girlfriend or to somewhere else. But Damien has created a scene that gets him to say this. And I think that’s the important part of the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love that this is a thesis statement about who I am and who I want to be that is presented in the guise of “I don’t want to be you. See, you, you people are all Division III. And I am going to be great. You’re all concentrating on Model UN and Division III. That’s fake and fake. I’m going to be real.” And it’s so much more interesting hearing someone articulate what their vision is for themself if it’s done in opposition to somebody else as opposed to just sharing a thought. I completely agree. I love that this is phrased in conflict.

And then a wonderful relationship thing happens here where Jim, his dad, chimes in in support of Uncle Frank and makes a point that frankly is important and valuable. This is where Damien, I think, does something brilliant because Andrew is sparing with Uncle Frank and making pretty good points. Points that, frankly, I agree with. Until Jim points out that Charlie Parker, Andrew’s hero, died broke, drunk, and full heroine at 34. And that’s true. And this is what we talk about a lot, that the argument of your movie has to be something that can actually be argued.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And here’s the good argument right there.

**John:** Absolutely. You know, to be able to put those words in people’s mouths to really state what your thesis is is so crucial. Now, later on, on page 52, there’s stuff that got cut out here. And you could totally see why it got cut out here. So Andrew does say in the movie, “No. None of us were Charlie Parker’s friends. That’s the whole point.” And here’s what got cut out. “Well, there’s such a thing as feeling loved and included. I prefer to feel hated and cast out. It gives me purpose.” Jim says, “That’s ridiculous. You don’t mean that.”

But the movie does jump back in to say, “Travis and Dustin have plenty of friends. I’d say they have plenty of purpose.” So we cut out those three lines and I’m so happy that those lines got out because Andrew saying, “I prefer to feel hated and cast out. It gives me purpose.” I don’t believe that the character actually understands that yet or is able to articulate it in that way.

**Craig:** I agree. It is too revealing. It involves too much self-awareness. And in a strange way, if you’re aware enough to say that then you’re aware enough to change. Because actually, the truth is when Jim replies, “That’s ridiculous. You don’t mean that.” I agree with Jim. That is ridiculous and you don’t mean that. So I’m glad that that isn’t there. But I love this when Andrew says, “I’d rather die broke and drunk at 34 and have people at a dinner table somewhere talk about it than die rich and sober at 90 and have no one remember me.” That’s the movie. Right? He’s literally just told you, this is the argument of the movie.

And what’s wonderful about this movie and why I think it had an extended life beyond what you would expect from a small independent film is that that question is worth discussing. It’s the kind of thing people walk out of the movie theater, go somewhere, have a cup of coffee or drink, and debate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s actually worth debating. It’s really interesting. But it’s also where you start to see that Andrew, because he is saying it to his father and literally saying, “I’d rather be what I want to be than what you’re going to be.” It’s where Andrew starts to turn from “I’m making a point that you can all agree with” to “I’m becoming a bad person in front of you. I’m becoming cruel now.” And this is where it escalates.

**John:** Yup. Also very notable that the scene ends as filmed with Jim’s line, “And from Lincoln Center.” But the scene as written goes on quite a bit longer. So there’s an extra sixth-eighths of a page. It says, a moment of silence, Andrew looks at his dad, his dad just looks right back. A simmering anger in his eyes, Andrew turns to the others and slowly says, “In 1967, a scientist named Laszlo Polgar decides to prove talent isn’t about what you’re born with but about conditioning. He has three kids Susan, Sophia, and Judith and he gets them practicing chess for hours and hours before they could even talk. Fifteen years later, Susan and Sophia are the two top female players in the world. And Judith is on her way to entering the history books as the greatest female chess master of all time.” And so Andrew says this thing and — okay. But that wasn’t the scene we were just in. And I’m really glad that got cut out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is the kind of thing that you probably don’t know until you know, you know. So we have the benefit of seeing the scene. And I think we all do this. There are times when we think, I know what to do here. I know how to drive this home. Because you put yourselves schizophrenically into each character as you write each line. And so I ping pong around as I’m moving through and I get back to Andrew and I can feel how frustrated he is at what his father just said. And I want him to deliver the killing blow.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And what I think is wonderful that Damien found is that, in fact, the killing blow that should be delivered, the one that’s more dramatic is the one from Andrew’s father. That is, in fact, the moment where Andrew gets up and walks out. And we understand his relationship with that man is now essentially severed. That he’s — because what Jim had said to him is, “You can’t do it.” And what’s fascinating is that’s exactly what he’s hearing from Fletcher, “You can’t do it.” They’re both — they have both now found an agreement for different reasons. And so brilliant choice to end, “And from Lincoln Center?” because what leads into it is Andrew saying something very, very mean to Travis. Because Travis is actually being —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I mean look, that was insulting and unnecessary. It wasn’t like Travis was tooting his own horn, his dad was doing it for him. And he says, “You think Carlton football is a joke? Come play with us.” And Andrew says, “Four words you will never hear from the NFL.”

**John:** And that’s a closer line. Like, the scene really can’t continue after that line. It does feel like that is the button on the end of the scene.

**Craig:** Well, it’s almost the button because you’re like, “Oh, yeah. He just dropped the mic.” And then his father walks over and drops a bigger mic. “And from Lincoln Center?” Like who is it that you think you are all of a sudden? You can say that you want to be great but you’re not. You’re just you right now.

**John:** Yeah. I did not actually connect the “And from Lincoln Center?” to the NFL as well as you did. And so it always felt like a bit of weird floater for me that the Lincoln Center line there. Particularly because there are cuts early on the scene to talk more about Lincoln Center.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s not the ideal out for the scene as it was finally staged. I could imagine an out which is something that Jim says. I agree it should be Jim’s last line there to cement what the conflict is, it’s going to keep going forward in the movie after this dinner table scene. But I just loved this scene.

**Craig:** Well, this is — by the way, this is what critics never understand. So let’s talk about the ticky tacky argument that must have gone on in the editing room. That last line I think is terrific because I think it’s really important for the character and I think it’s important for the relationship for Jim to point out “You aren’t great yet. And so maybe be a little less arrogant.” But the area that sets it up is buried in some stuff that isn’t working. So that stuff has to go. So you sometimes make a trade. And what was working so — what was working at 100 percent is now only working at 80 percent because you’re trying to get rid of something that was only working at 10 percent.

Well, down the line, someone watches this movie, and I say this all the time, they watch it with the belief that everything is intentional and it’s not. And they may go, “I don’t know. That scene just ended with, it could have been better. It just could have been better a line.” Well, ugh, you don’t understand. There are compromises, there must be compromises because not everything is going to work, and even the things that do work sometimes get a little reduced. I still love that line.

**John:** Yes, I do think though if Damien had known in shooting it that like he was going to be cutting out the other stuff, he would have found a way to make Jim’s last line work better because he would have also known it was the last line of the scene, so it was just feels like a bit of a weird floater to me. Or just some other moment of eye contact between them that could have just done the same job.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. Still a great scene. So let’s take a look at another one that involves our two main characters, our protagonist and antagonist, Andrew and Fletcher. And this is a quite late in the story. So Fletcher has been dismissed from the school. Andrew sees him at a jazz club. And so the video clip which we’ll link to will show sort of the whole sequence which is basically Andrew spotting Fletcher as Fletcher is finishing up a piano solo. It’s the first time, I think, we’ve seen Fletcher actually perform, as just not conduct, but actually perform, and they ultimately will get together and sit at a table and have a conversation.

So you will remember this conversation we see in the movie because it’s where Andrew asks the question, “Where is the line?” Basically asking the question going back to the Charlie Parker story, if someone hadn’t thrown that cymbal at his head, would he have become Charlie Parker? And that’s the thesis that — not just trying to state, it’s like without that cymbal being thrown at his head, he would never have pushed himself to become Charlie Parker that we know. Andrew asks the question, “Well, where is that line?” Where do you push too far that Charlie Parker just walks away?

And so let’s start listening at the end of the sort of a long monologue from Fletcher where he’s talking about this idea of Charlie Parker and his frustration with society.

**Fletcher:** There are no two words in the English language more harmful than “good job.”

**Andrew:** But is there a line? You know, maybe you go too far and you discouraged the next Charlie Parker from ever becoming Charlie Parker?

**Fletcher:** No, man, no because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged. The truth is, Andrew, I never really had a Charlie Parker. But I tried. I actually fucking tried, and that’s more than most people ever do. And I will never apologize for how I tried.

**Andrew:** See you later.

**Fletcher:** Hey, Andrew, listen, I have no idea how you’re going to take this, but the band I’m leading for JVC, the drummer is not cutting it. Do you understand what I’m saying?

**Andrew:** No.

**Fletcher:** I’m using the studio band play list. You know, Caravan, Whiplash. I need somebody who really knows those charts.

**Andrew:** What about Ryan Connolly?

**Fletcher:** All Connolly ever was to me was incentive for you.

**Andrew:** Tanner?

**Fletcher:** Tanner switched to pre-med. I guess he got discouraged. Hey, take the weekend to think about it.

**John:** Obviously the clip will show the whole sequence as we go through it, and there’s really great stuff in the head of this scene, but I really want to focus on the end of the scene and the discussion, the decision between the two characters, and the choices they’re having to make as they go through the end of the scene. So let’s take a look at, if you’re looking at the pages, at the top of page 88 is where we’re starting with Andrew’s question of, “But do you think there’s a line, you know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?” This is, again, stating the thesis of the film. Fletcher says, “No, because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.”

Andrew takes this in a moment, and here’s stuff that got cut. And again, I think it’s so useful to see what was on the page versus what was actually shot. Andrew used to ask, “And you, are you back to playing now?” Fletcher used to say, “Not really, here and there. The playing never interested me. I never wanted to be Charlie Parker. I wanted to be the man who made Charlie Parker. The kid who discovers some scrawny kid, pushed and prodded him, shaped him into something great, and then said to the world, check this out, the best mother fucking solo you ever heard.”

Andrew asks, “Where is Charlie Parker then? Sean Casey?” The name hits Fletcher. Fletcher looks at Andrew, who immediately regrets bringing the name up. Why? Because even after everything, the sight of Fletcher hurting affects him. There’s more stuff here. So basically we go through the whole Sean Casey of it all who’s the kid who committed suicide. We skip all that stuff out, and instead we just leave it with Fletcher reflecting on, “I never had my Charlie Parker,” like he doesn’t even say that he was trying to create it, not trying to be it, he makes it clear that he was trying to have a student who would be a Charlie Parker, and he never did.

And instead Damien just let’s — sort of the eye contact and the look between them tell more of that scene.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s really a very smart excision. First, of note is that in the dinner scene, we talked about this question, is it better to be great, or is it better to die you know, 90, and sober, and rich?

And that is a great argument worth having, and people had it. And then the gift of this movie is that it gives you another one. And it’s this one, which is must you forge greatness and fire, or is there a way to create greatness with love and support? And can in fact love and support backfire, can in fact forging someone in fire backfire? And great topic, and well worth debating. And the movie doesn’t answer the question for you which I think is terrific. In fact, Damien, I met Damien at a discussion that was moderated by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and I think the topic was essentially ambiguity. What do we do about this, and how intentional is all the rest? It was a really interesting discussion.

So you have that, that’s a challenge there. And then the thing is, Fletcher has certainty. There is no debate in Fletcher’s mind. In his mind, it’s almost tautological, we would call this, begging the question in philosophy structuring your argument in support of an answer by assuming that the answer is part of the argument. But that’s the way he is. No. The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.

Now the rest of what happens here is understandable. We are always trying to guess how much the audience needs to get the point. And in this case, I think Damien wrote a lot of really interesting things to make us get this point that Fletcher was never about being supportive and teaching a group of kids to play some songs. He was always about finding that person who needed the cymbal thrown at his head, throwing the cymbal at his head, and creating the next great thing.

But the truth is, as good as the acting is in this moment, and as good as the dialogue is later on, all you needed was for Fletcher to go from the top of 88, “No, because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged,” all the way down to the bottom of 88. “The truth is, I don’t know if I ever had a Charlie Parker,” regret, “but I tried,” and that’s it. We get it. Perfect. Perfect cut.

**John:** Yeah, “I tried,” and “I will never apologize,” I think that’s the crucial thing, too, is that we should sort of back up and talk about sort of what information the characters have going into this. So Andrew testified against Fletcher basically, did agree that Fletcher had done bad things. There was an investigation and Andrew had cooperated with that investigation. Andrew knew that Fletcher had been let go from the school.

What Andrew doesn’t know is whether Fletcher knows that he was part of the process because he should have been kept out of it. So he has a lot of questions about Fletcher. Does Fletcher know what I did? And so the top half of that scene you’ll see there’s a little bit more of that sort of like probing. And what didn’t make it into the final cut was really more of those questions about sort of like what actually happened and sort of how much does this guy actually know about what my role in this was.

Most of that got dropped out of the actual cut, so that what it seems like this scene is doing is for these two characters, it’s like these two warriors who meet off the battlefield, and actually can have a conversation about like, “Oh, hey, remember that war?” to some degree, and that’s what the scene seems to be about.

What I think is so smart about it is that this is actually a misdirection yet again, because it seems like Fletcher is being totally honest about what he’s trying to do, and sort of like he’s sort of coming clean about sort of how he’s built and how he’s wired. But as we go into the next beat here, you see he wants something from Fletcher. And what it seems like he wants is, kid, you’re really good, please play in my band. So as written on the page, as we go outside, Andrew and Fletcher exit, they stand for a second, look at one another in awkward silence. Andrew says, “Nice seeing you.” Fletcher nods. Beat. Andrew turns, about to head off when, “Look, I don’t know how you’ll take this. The band I’m leading for JVC, our drummer isn’t cutting it. Do you understand?” “No.” “I’m using the studio band playlist, Whiplash, Caravan. I need a replacement who already knows those charts inside-out.” Andrew looks at him. You can’t be serious.

So it’s turning the tables where it seems like Fletcher is extending an olive branch, he’s saying, like, hey, you really are that good. He’s trying to put the past behind them, and more importantly, he’s validating Andrew who’s not had any validation as a musician for a long time here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fletcher is a master of the mind game. And in this case, what Damien is doing is he’s having Fletcher mind game us in the audience as well. Because what Damien understands is we are connected to basic narrative understanding, and we believe we’re watching Rocky, and we believe Rocky needs to win at the end, even though of course, Rocky loses, but we need Rocky to at least make a good showing, right?

So Andrew has quit, he is done. I think his father is happy about this. And Fletcher gives him this speech that’s really just, well, it’s a discussion about his philosophy. They’re no longer teacher and student. There’s no power and balance. In fact, in a weird way, Andrew has the power because he’s come to watch this guy play. Assumingly he’s getting paid. And Fletcher says, “All I ever wanted was to find Charlie Parker.”

So now, they walk outside, and now Fletcher goes, hey, my drummer isn’t cutting it. Now, you and I both know as creative people that when someone comes to us and says, “Hey, my writer, they’re not cutting it,” there is a little dopamine blast that goes on in our brain, which goes, oh, so this is about me. Maybe I’m the one you want. And it’s very, very attractive.

So even though Andrew doesn’t quite understand it at first, when he gets it, you can see the dopamine, you can see that release. And then Damien’s really smart because Andrew says, “What about Ryan Connolly?” who was the drummer ahead of him — the seat ahead of him. And Fletcher says, “What about him? All he was was your incentive.” Like, I think, don’t you get it, idiot? You’re going to be my Charlie Parker. I think you could be my Charlie Parker. And it’s this juicy, juicy bait on the end of a hook. And Andrew just bites.

**John:** Yes, he does bite. So the relationship between these two characters is described as sort of like a really fucked up love story. And I think this is one of the scenes that’s sort of most fucked up about it where this is like, well, what about those other girls you were sleeping with? Like, oh, they didn’t mean anything to me. I was only thinking about you this whole time.

And that’s essentially what Fletcher is saying to Andrew is that these were just bait to sort of to get you to work harder. And that’s why they were never anything to you, they never meant anything to me. You are the only person who could possibly do this thing. And that’s incredibly attractive to this kid who really wants to be Charlie Parker. He really wants someone to tell him he is Charlie Parker, and that he’s not just good but he’s like once in a lifetime great. And so this is exactly what he needs to hear, exactly when he needs to hear it, and Fletcher knows it.

And so it’s interesting that Fletcher does say, “We’re rehearsing next Thursday, why don’t you take the weekend to think about it?” And in the script, on the page, Andrew thinks about it and says, “I don’t need to.” But this is a line that was scripted. I’m sure they shot it, but it’s good you shoot it because then you cannot use it. In this case, they did not use it. It lets the cut be the answer where you see, you know, you end the scene on a question mark, and then the far side of the cut is the answer which is basically like I’m so excited, I’m going to do this thing.

**Craig:** Yes. So on the other side of the cut we see Andrew opening his closet and pulling out his old drums. So we get his answer, we know his answer. What’s fascinating about Fletcher’s appeal here is that he doesn’t mean any of it. He’s lying. He is lying in order to set Andrew up, to punish Andrew, because he believes Andrew is the reason he got fired. He’s being vindictive, there is nothing about what he’s doing here that is true to any notion that Andrew could be the next great one. He doesn’t believe that at all, which sets up this remarkable ending, where Andrew becomes that, in spite of, and yet, also because of.

And that’s why the ending of the movie is so fascinating because it’s not like Fletcher’s plan really was to do that. It happened because Fletcher was awful, and this kid came out of that cruelty as great. And then, of course, the great question of the end of the movie is, what now?” Are they friends now? I don’t think so.

**John:** Oh, I don’t think so at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that Andrew moves far beyond Fletcher, who returns to a life of obscurity, and that’s the greatest tragedy of all. But also, the question is, Andrew, who ends up in his moment of glory, playing all of his blood and sweat all over the place, what will happen to him? His father is shut out completely in a shot that is almost a direct lift of Diane Keaton having the door closed on her at the end of The Godfather. So his father is gone. He’s cut strings there. He’s gone far beyond Fletcher. He doesn’t need him anymore. Now what happens to this guy? Does he end up dead at 32? It’s a fascinating movie. And this scene is another great example like the Scott Frank scene of people fighting without fighting.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** It’s terrific.

**John:** So we only focused on the end of the scene, but we’ll have the pages up for the whole scene, and the video for it. And I would strongly encourage people to look at both the scene as shot and the page, and really compare them in real time because what you’ll notice is that I think because Damien is the writer/director, he felt file with actors making huge changes to how they were saying those lines of dialogue as long as they were getting the effect across. And one of the most notable things I noticed was, tense changes, and so a lot of things that were written in the present tense in the script are spoken in the past tense in the movie, and it totally makes sense. It all tracks.

What you have to be really mindful of if you’re in production is if you have two characters who are speaking to each other, and you’re cutting those as singles, lines of dialogue might not make sense anymore because people are speaking in different tenses. So are they talking about a theoretical future, or are they talking about a thing that happened in the past? In many cases, especially J. K. Simmons has changed a lot of what those tenses are, and it totally works in the course of the movie, but you have to know your text really, really well as the writer and the director to feel comfortable with an actor making all those changes.

**Craig:** No question. And I think that he did that thing that some writers fail to do, which is transition successfully from the guy who wrote the script, to now I’m the guy directing the script. He treated the script the way he should, which I think was very respectfully, but also with flexibility. And he did a terrific job. I really enjoyed that movie.

**John:** Yes. So that was two sequences from Whiplash. Thank you, Damien Chazelle, for writing your great movie. We’ll have links in the show notes for the script pages, and also links out to the video clips so you can see what the scenes actually look like when they were shot. Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Well, today, my One Cool Thing is in my frequent category of neurological advances, but this one is amazing. This one actually could change a lot. So one of the problems with treating brain illness, whether it’s cancer or other kinds of disease, is that there’s something called the blood brain barrier, and the blood brain barrier is a mechanism that protects the brain from being affected by whatever the hell you throw into your body at any given moment.

Obviously, we know that some molecules go through the blood brain barrier, that’s why they work on us like you know, heroin, but a lot don’t. And this becomes very frustrating because a lot of pharmaceuticals are really big molecules, and they just don’t go through that barrier at all. So what ends up happening, when you’ve got something, for instance, a cancer in the brain, and you want to treat it with chemotherapy, you can’t because the chemo won’t get through the blood brain barrier.

So what these folks have done in Canada, led by a guy with the best name ever, Dr. Todd Mainprize.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, if this works, Todd will get the main prize. So Todd Mainprize and his team in Toronto have come up with this remarkable concept where they introduce a particular chemical into the blood, and then they use ultrasound to expand that chemical as it’s moving through the blood brain barrier, and open up tiny little tears in the blood brain barrier that they can then get medicine through. And it’s really targeted, and it’s just kind of amazing.

And if it works, well, you’re going to see major reduction, I think, in terminal brain cancers. I think this could be truly amazing. And of course, when they try and take a cancer out of somebody’s brain, it’s invasive, you know. Sometimes the surgery itself is permanently debilitating. So I don’t know. I mean this is a crazy one, but it could work, it could really work and it would change the game. So very excited, congratulations Dr. Todd Mainprize. You have the main prize of today. You are my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very cool. My One Cool Thing is called what3words, and it is a system for mapping the entire surface of the earth and providing coordinates that are actually described by three words. And so what they’ve done is essentially they’ve taken the entire surface of the earth and broke it into 57 trillion squares that are about three-meters by three-meters, and so that’s really quite small. But 57 trillion seems like a huge number, but it’s actually a number that could be described with a combination of any three words. And so the computer system is actually assigned a word to each of those squares on the surface of the earth, so you are able to then say like I am at alpha dog hypotenuse, and that is where I am. And it is really a fascinating system, and it makes sort of similar to like providing a URL or sort of a short code for any place in the real physical world, and it seems like a really ingenious system for doing that. So I’m going to link out to what3words.com which will show you how they’re doing it, and provide interactive maps so you can actually figure out where you are, and what the words are for the place that you are currently at. So it really is quite clever and I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before now, but it seems very smart.

So our live show on December 9th will take place at Tides Vivid Snail. And literally you can download the app and put in Tides Vivid Snail and it will give you directions to that specific venue.

**Craig:** That’s so much better than like an address. So much better.

**John:** Yeah, and why this hasn’t happened before? I don’t know, but it seems like a really, really smart idea. So a friend of ours who works in mapping sent this through and it seems just like a very clever way to do things.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** What’s interesting is that three-meters by three-meters square is small enough that like our house has a bunch of different squares, and so like if I’m out in the office, that’s a different square than the kitchen is. And so it’s a really very specific thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, three-meters by three-meters, that’s basically 10 square feet. That’s amazing.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s fascinating that you could actually think about mapping all the surface of the earth to that, but of course you could. So we have the technology now to do that. So I’m excited by this as a possibility.

**Craig:** We got to figure out how to use this for D&D because we’re basically D&Ding the world now because it’s becoming a grid —

**John:** Absolutely. Everything is on a square grid. Our grid that we’ll play at on Sunday, it will be five-foot squares, but this is similar to that.

**Craig:** Similar. All right, very good, very cool.

**John:** All right. That is our show this week. Our outro this week is by Kim Atle. If you have an outro you would like us to use, please send us an email at ask@johnaugust.com with a link to your outro. ask@johnaugust.com is also the place to send question to us. We love to answer questions, and we’ll do so in a future episode. If you have short questions for me, or for Craig, I am on Twitter, @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. You can find our show on iTunes. We are just Scriptnotes. Search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the Scriptnotes app which lets you get to all the back episodes of Scriptnotes.

To register for the back episodes of Scriptnotes and to get special episodes like the Drew Goddard episode, just go to scriptnotes.net.

A reminder that we have USB drives with all the back episodes as well, so you can get all 200 episodes of the show before now on USB drives shipped to your house, which is handy. Lots of people have been using those. A reminder that our live show is January 9th and you should get tickets. They will be at the Writers Guild Foundation website, wgfoundation.org, and we look forward to seeing so many of you there.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Great. Thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome, Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) and [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [The true story behind ‘Zola,’ the epic Twitter story too crazy to be real](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11/02/the-true-story-behind-zola-the-epic-twitter-story-too-crazy-to-be-real/)
* [Whiplash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiplash_(2014_film)) on Wikipedia
* [Whiplash, family dinner scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSDmo-gJ8XY&feature=youtu.be), and [the PDF](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/WhiplashDinner.pdf)
* [Whiplash, jazz club scene, Script vs Screen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kunUvYIJtHM&feature=youtu.be), and [the PDF](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/WhiplashClub.pdf)
* [Sunnybrook doctor first to perform blood-brain barrier procedure using focused ultrasound waves](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/sunnybrook-doctor-first-to-perform-blood-brain-barrier-procedure-using-focused-ultrasound-waves/article27171384/)
* [what3words](http://what3words.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Kim Atle ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Our thanks to the Austin Film Festival for having us there. It was tremendously fun. And we look forward to seeing you next year.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. This is a real church crowd. Yeah. All right.

John: My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and —

Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Really well done. So a few of you may have listened to the podcast before. Can I see a show of hands of who’s actually heard of the Scriptnotes podcast? Oh, that’s a lot of you.

Craig: That’s a softball to use. You’re just —

John: Yeah.

Craig: Looking for praise now.

John: Yeah, we are. Basically, we’re looking for t-shirts out there in the crowd. Some of you might not know what the podcast is like. So Craig, what do we do on a weekly basis?

Craig: John carefully prepares a bunch of topics. He talks to his staff about how to produce the show. He lets me know what time the show will happen. I am five minutes late. I don’t know what we’re doing.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I talk too much.

John: Oh, no. You talk just the right amount, Craig. So what are we doing today? I’m going to put you on the spot.

Craig: Today, I know what we’re doing.

John: All right. Tell us what we’re going to do today.

Craig: Because it’s special.

John: All right.

Craig: Well, we have two great guests today. We have Nicole Perlman who wrote Guardians of the Galaxy. Little movie. And we also have Steve Zissis, star of HBO’s Togetherness and writer and creator thereof. And those of you who are looking in the book, the guest list has changed a bit because of flights and whatever. I think, frankly, it has improved.

John: Tornadoes, yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Floods.

Craig: We’re also going to be —

John: Acts of God in a church.

Craig: Acts of — we should be safe here.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Well, not me.

John: Listeners at home — and I realize that we’re actually in a historic sanctuary at St. David’s Episcopal Church. And so we are looking over a crowd that’s like maybe, I don’t know, 2,000 people.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And they’re all in pews.

Craig: It’s a mega church.

John: We have this little, you know, satellite room, too.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a mega church.

John: Thank you for being here in this church with us.

Craig: Yeah. And we’re also, today, going to be doing this little feature that we started kind of recently where we take three different stories from the news — current stories from the news and ask, and we’ll have our guests who are in, how would we make a movie out of this. So we’ll be doing that with you guys today.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Hooray.

John: So this will be really fun. So this is probably my seventh Austin Film Festival. You’ve been here a bunch of times, Craig.

Craig: I think this is my fourth or fifth.

John: Yeah. So we love the Austin Film Festival. And yesterday as I arrived, I had maybe not the best start. So I wanted to talk through sort of what happened going from the plane — actually, going from the escalator to the baggage claim. I managed to make a series of faux pas that I feel if I would share them it will make me seem human and relatable.

Craig: Let me just point out, he’s not human.

John: No.

Craig: But he will seem human and relatable.

John: Yeah. So I want you to sympathize with my plight here. So I get down off the escalator and there’s a guy there waiting — maybe you’re out here in the crowd right now — with a big blank sheet of paper and said, “Mr. August, would you draw us a sketch from like, from one of your movies?” I’m like, “I didn’t illustrate any of these movies.” And so like, you know, “Sketch us something from like Frankenweenie or something from Corpse Bride.”

I’m eager to please people. I’m a teacher pleaser. And so I was like, “You know what, I’ll try something. I’ll give it a shot. Like, I’ve never drawn anything from these movies, but sure.” Tim Burton won’t mind if I draw one of his creations.

Craig: And did that guy’s face just go, “Uhh?”

John: No, no. He was really pushing me. And so I was trying to decide whether I was being punked or like to see like how badly I could draw Sparky from Frankenweenie. So I ended up drawing the female dog from Frankenweenie. And like the ball being pushed underneath the fence, and it was like a charming little scene, but completely the wrong thing to draw.

So I’m drawing this thing and I signed it, whatever, and I signed another autograph. And then people started to think like, “Oh, that must be a famous person.” So random people started to like try take photos with me as if I was a famous person. And they have no idea who I am in their photos.

That’s by far the better part of what happened.

Craig: This is what he thought would make him sound human and relatable.

John: No. No, no, no. No, wait. Because the whole thing is about to flip.

Craig: Okay.

John: So as I’m waiting for my bag in baggage claim, there’s a guy who I recognized who was on the flight. I was like, “Is that an actor? I can’t picture him.” But he seems familiar, and he’s wearing sunglasses. And there was a limousine driver who was meeting him there. And so I was like, “He’s somebody famous. Who is that person?”

And then I could see the driver’s little card that he would hold up. And it was flipped over and it said “Raimi.” I’m like, “That’s Sam Raimi.” And so I’m like, “Oh, I should say something to Sam Raimi because we have mutual friends. I mean, like Laura Ziskin and other folks.

And so I finally, like, sort of screw up my courage and say, like, “Hey, Sam. Sam, it’s John. It’s John August.” And he just completely stone faces me. Like does not acknowledge me whatsoever, like I’m just a crazy stalker person. So I became that stalkery person who sort of wanted to, like, get his attention.

So this other nice guy who might be in the audience here today said, “That’s not Sam Raimi.” It wasn’t Sam Raimi. It was Sam Raimi’s brother apparently. And so —

Craig: You met Ted Raimi?

John: Ted Raimi is here.

Craig: Ted Raimi I would have thought would have been like, “No. But let’s talk.”

John: No.

Craig: You know —

John: Ted Raimi shut down.

Craig: Wow.

John: And so this is no slam on Ted Raimi. This is no slam on Sam Raimi who wasn’t even here to defend himself. It’s just this is a situation at trying to get my bag, I managed to humiliate myself kind of twice. So the tornadoes in Austin have been, like, really a highlight after that point.

Craig: I’m really sorry that that happened.

John: Oh, thank you, Craig.

Craig: I care about you.

John: Thanks. That’s nice to hear.

We’re going to try something very new and very different that we’ve never done before. So back on our 100th episode of the show, we did this thing where underneath the people’s seats, there was a golden ticket hidden. And if you have that golden —

Craig: Don’t go looking.

John: Or, maybe go looking but you won’t find anything.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Underneath one seat, there was a golden ticket and that person won a very special prize. So today, we’re going to try doing a raffle of a very special prize. So as you guys came in, each of you should have gotten a little raffle ticket, hopefully most of you. And —

Craig: Did you throw your raffle ticket out? You ate it? What did you do?

John: You ate it? Yeah. It wasn’t edible, no. I guess it technically is edible, just not really good.

Craig: Not tasty.

John: Not tasty.

So this is Annie Hayes, everyone. Annie Hayes is our Austin Stuart. Say hi to Annie Hayes. So Annie Hayes is helping us out.

Craig Mazin, will you pick one ticket from there?

Craig: Yes. Oh, so many. Okay, I got it.

John: All right.

Craig: I have it.

John: So let’s read the number and see if it matches up to anybody here.

Craig: Six. Good. So far so good. Two. One. I think everybody started with 621. Zero. One. Zero.

Amanda Murad: Oh, that’s me.

Craig: Yay.

John: Come on up.

Craig: Let’s see. I’m going to hold on, I’m going to figure out what your name is. It’s Amanda.

Amanda: Amanda.

Craig: Amanda Murad.

Amanda: Murad.

Craig: Murad.

Amanda: Close.

Craig: I thought it was Norad for a second.

John: That would be cool.

Craig: Yup.

John: But Murad’s great too.

Amanda: Okay.

Craig: No, no. It’s not that cool.

John: So are you a screenwriter?

Amanda: I am a screenwriter.

John: And do you live in the Austin area or are you just here for this conference?

Amanda: Just here for the conference. I live in LA.

John: Oh, holy cow.

Craig: Great.

Amanda: Yeah.

John: Is this your first time in the Austin Film Festival?

Amanda: It is.

John: And how is it so far?

Amanda: It is really fun.

Craig: It just got awesome.

Amanda: It just got way more awesome.

John: What are you writing right now?

Amanda: I am working on my second pilot.

Craig: Great.

John: And have you only done TV stuff so far? Have you written a feature? What else have you written?

Amanda: I’ve written one feature. But I have two pilots and a play.

John: Cool. That’s awesome. In these envelopes, they’re marked A, B, and C, there are three different items. And I want you to pick which envelope you would like to open.

Amanda: Whose fate am I deciding in this decision?

John: Your own fate.

Craig: I like her sense of nervousness and caution though, I have to say.

John: Yes. She’s not just blindly rushing in.

Craig: Yeah. She’s not like, “Okay.” No. She’s like, “Okay.” So A, B, or C?

Amanda: Okay. The letter A is usually pretty good to me.

John: All right. Great.

Amanda: A.

John: A. So take this envelope but don’t open it yet.

Amanda: Okay.

John: And we are going to open up one other envelope. So I want a vote from the crowd. Which of these other two envelopes should I open up?

Audience: B.

John: Everybody who wants me to open up envelope C, raise your hand.

Craig: C.

John: Yeah. All right. We’re going to open up envelope C. Open up envelope C, Craig.

Craig: Okay. All right.

John: Let’s see what’s inside.

Craig: See, he gives me stuff to do and everything, keeps me involved. Okay. Oh, this was the good one.

John: Yeah, this was the good one.

Craig: This was the best one.

John: All right. Yeah, it’s a really good one.

Craig: Just let her have it. [laughs]

John: Maybe we should.

Craig: No, because she’s so normal. I mean we had like a chance of getting a total freak. Not that — I mean, there’s at least one of you in here who’s —

John: Yeah. So there’s a thing which I was going to do with all this but apparently, you chose so well or the audience chose for you. Maybe it’s the audience who chose for you.

Craig: You know what? The audience chose this for you.

John: That’s really the audience choice.

Amanda: Thank you, guys, so much.

John: So what this card says is, “John and Craig will read your script.” If you would like to.

Amanda: Yes.

John: Great.

Amanda: Yes.

Craig: And we’ll talk about it on the show. And you can come on the show.

Amanda: Yes. Yes.

Craig: Great. Or you can have a t-shirt.

John: Yeah.

Amanda: I’m going to pick C.

John: All right. Well done.

Craig: C.

Amanda: The letter A has failed me.

John: Yeah. Amanda, at whatever point you feel like you have a script that you want to send in, just send it in to Stuart at ask@johnaugust. I’ll remind him that you were the one who won this competition and the audience won it for you, really.

Amanda: I will be sure to thank you all in my email.

John: And we look forward to receiving it.

Amanda: All right. Thank you, guys.

John: Amanda, thanks so much.

Craig: Envelope B was money, by the way.

John: Yeah, exactly.

So the idea behind that was the Monty Hall problem which is essentially we were going to open up one thing and then she would decide whether she wanted to keep or switch and it involved math and statistics and probability.

Craig: These guys messed it up.

John: No. You guys did a nice thing. You did this all for her.

Craig: They did. Yeah, they did.

John: They did.

Let us get to our very first guest of the podcast.

Craig: Great.

John: Nicole Perlman is the writer of Guardians of the Galaxy. And she’s writing a bunch of other stuff right now and we cannot wait to talk with her. She was a guest way back when, right when that movie came out. And let’s welcome Nicole Perlman up to talk to us again.

Craig: Nicole Perlman.

Nicole Perlman: Thank you.

John: Nicole Perlman, you were on the show before. You had just written Guardians of the Galaxy which was a giant, giant hit. What has changed in your life since we’ve talked to you last, in writing?

Nicole: I’ve descended into heroin use and I’ve lost all my friends and family. [laughs]

Craig: God, I know how that goes.

Nicole: Yeah. Totally. No, it’s been good. It’s been really crazy. It’s been so crazy that I sort of fled to San Francisco. I was like, “Oh, too much stuff. Too much good. Must run north.” So no, it’s been very good. Lots of projects. I’m doing Captain Marvel —

John: Great.

Craig: Awesome.

Nicole: With Meg LeFauve. So that has been cool. We’re really in the early stages but we’re having a lot of fun. And I’m doing a project for Fox, an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s Wool Trilogy, and that has been very cool.

That guy, by the way, really knows how to live. He wrote a best-selling novel and he’s like, “I’m going to go build a boat and sail around the world. See you.” And he like checked out. So that’s what he’s doing which is really cool.

John: I mean you’re checking out to some degree.

Nicole: Totally.

John: Like you’re keeping out of the rat race.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: And so what really prompted the decision? Was it just you had enough stuff on your plate that you actually could leave and —

Nicole: Yes. That was it.

John: That’s the response?

Nicole: And also, people just kept asking me to be on their podcasts and it was just —

John: Yeah, it was such a huge drag.

Nicole: It was a huge drag.

Craig: It’s the worst.

John: Yeah, I mean, Craig, I tell you, you got to back off a little bit.

Craig: I mean, I don’t know what those podcasts are because I don’t listen to podcasts. But I know what it’s like.

Nicole: No, it’s good. It’s probably just for like a year. I’m in LA every week for work but I felt like I could just do it. I spend less time commuting by flying in and out than I did when I was in LA in my car, which is kind of crazy.

John: That’s actually scary, yeah.

Nicole: It’s true though, yeah.

John: So talk to us about — obviously, you can’t give us any character details or really plot details about Captain Marvel.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: But what is it like writing with another writer? Is this the first time you’ve had a writing partner on something?

Nicole: It’s not the first time. I’m working with another writing partner on a spec, my first spec in a long time. So that is another experience. It’s been really good.

Meg and I are really, really just starting out. And she comes from a Pixar background so she’s really used to collaborating. So I think we’re still feeling it out a little bit. The being on the phone part, I’m very meek on the phone when other people are talking. I’m very respectful. I’m just, like, “No, no. You go ahead. No, no. You go ahead.” You know, and —

Craig: You got to lean in, girl.

Nicole: You got to be like, [roars], “Listen to me.” So I think that is — because that goes over really well, too.

John: Yeah, it does.

Craig: I don’t think that’s a good idea, actually. I don’t want you to do that.

John: But you need to get a Groot voice is really what you have to do.

Nicole: A Groot voice for sure. For sure.

John: Simple things.

Nicole: But Meg is wonderful and so she’s really good about character. And I think she comes from a non-genre background and so there’s a little bit of me being like, “Oh, you know, so there’s this history of this type of character, you know, we don’t want to do that because it’s been done that way.” And she’s like, “But we want to have this with character and integrity.” I’m like, “What? Integrity? What? What’s that?” So she’s great. And I think that we balance each other out in a good way. But again, it’s early days yet.

John: So one of the challenges would seem to be that you have to come to a consensus between the two of you about what it is you want to do and how you want this movie to work and how you want the character the work. But also then you have to be able to pitch in a unified sense to Marvel. And Craig sort of loves Kevin Feige or sort of really admires Kevin Feige.

Craig: I do.

John: And so that must be a challenge of like how you want to do your work and also fit into this greater picture. Do you have to be mindful of everything else that’s happening in the Marvel Universe to do your one story?

Nicole: Well, you know, without giving away anything that would get me, you know, excommunicated, basically Kevin and his group of brain trust people go and figure out where we fit in and then have let us know where we fit in. And so Meg and I gave them a list of questions, very long and epic questions and then potential answers to those questions. And they, you know, returned from their mountain top retreat which they [laughs] went to and then returned from and said they —

Craig: Handed you tablets.

Nicole: Pretty much. Pretty much. And so that’s what we’re working with now. And we’re also really in the phase of reading through massive packets of information, you know, which is always fun.

John: Cool.

Craig: I love that you’re writing a spec at the same time you’re doing all this other stuff.

Nicole: Yes.

Craig: In the wake of the success that you’ve had and all of the stuff that they’re now asking you to do, how do you manage to carve these spaces out and keep these things separate? Because you’re working on, you said, Captain Marvel and a spec and —

Nicole: The Hugh Howey Wool.

Craig: The Wool.

Nicole: Yeah. And I just sold a sequel to a movie that was my favorite movie from childhood but I can’t talk about it yet, so that’s going on. And then I’m also doing a virtual reality project with Steven Spielberg.

Craig: That’s five.

Nicole: And then I’m also doing a comic book —

Craig: I’m sorry, with who?

Nicole: Nobody. Nobody. Just a real, you know, up and coming —

Craig: So that’s five things.

Nicole: Yeah. And then a comic book series, too.

Craig: Six things.

Nicole: Yeah.

Craig: So I’ll ask my question again. I mean, how do you keep it all — I mean, do you just push a few things off?

Nicole: Well, honestly, it’s just because — and I’m sure you guys have experienced this — that things go into holding patterns. And especially with Marvel, the movie doesn’t come out for three-and-a-half years, so it’s got a lot of long pauses in between submissions of stuff. So with that and with the other projects, too, there’s a long waiting period.

The people who’ve made me wait the longest are the Marvel publishing people. And that’s like a 20-page thing. You send them and like months go by and then they’re like, “Good work.” “Okay.”

Craig: So in a situation like yours, you’re almost kind of hoping that they’ll take time.

Nicole: Right, exactly. So it’s okay. I think the more projects you have to fill the empty spaces, the less fear, that existential dread of like, “What’s happened to my projects?” You know, they just take a while and so that helps.

Craig: Yeah, because all of your eggs aren’t in that basket. But then there is that sense of being overwhelmed.

Nicole: Yes.

Craig: Do you have that?

Nicole: All the time. All the time.

Craig: Right now?

Nicole: I’m just veering between sheer panic and like different kinds of panic. Like panic of like “I have nothing going on. My career is going to crash.” And “Oh my, god. I’m going to be overwhelmed and die and never get anything done.” So, yes.

Craig: Sounds just like me.

Nicole: I’m really happy all the time.

Craig: Right. Of course. So what do you do to deal with that?

Nicole: I moved to San Francisco.

Craig: Of course, yes. Yes, of course.

John: So I want to get back to the idea of writing a spec. And so what was it? It was an idea that was just burning that demanded to be written? What was the —

Nicole: What it was, was that I’m doing a lot of big, fantastical, world-building projects and I wanted to do something that was contained, low-budget, very character-driven, just a cast of three or four people, and possibly something that would be able to, you know, produce or direct.

My writing partner is a writer/director and so we wanted to do something that was manageable. Which of course my representatives were like, “You realize you’re not going to get paid anything for that.” And I’m like, “Yeah. But get excited about it. Like, you know, get so excited about this guys.” And they’re like, “Yeah. Mm-hmm. That’s great.” So it’s basically what we’re doing in spare time to remind me that I am a writer [laughs] and not a cog in the machine.

John: Yeah, it’s the Joss Whedon do a smaller thing in between the two giant projects.

Nicole: Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

John: Cool. So Scott Neustadter was supposed to be joining us here up on the panel. And Scott Neustadter couldn’t be here because the airport is completely shut down. So like one of many panels who’s not going to be here today. Luckily, Steve Zissis has agreed to fill in. This is Steve Zissis —

Craig: Upgrade.

John: Who is the co-creator of Togetherness. Steve Zissis, come up here.

Steve Zissis: So what’s the processional hymn?

Craig: I’m Jewish. And this is not Greek Orthodox at all. At all. Like the two of us — actually, three of us. And he —

John: I’m good. I’m good. The android faith alone —

Craig: Fucking white privileged man.

John: Yeah. It’s so good.

Craig: I’m good.

John: I’m good.

Steve: What are you?

John: I’m sort of, like, random protestant.

Steve: Oh, random protestant.

Nicole: Random protestant.

Craig: Yes. Yes.

John: Culturally. Steve, thank you so much for filling in.

Steve: Of course.

John: But thank you also for you great TV show, Togetherness.

Steve: Thank you.

John: Tell us how that came to be because this is an HBO show. It was an idea that you sparked with a Duplass brother and is now going into its second season.

Steve: It started, I guess, with Jay Duplass and I fooling around in his backhouse trying to do something creative together. And —

John: It sounds terrible.

Steve: Yeah. We just wanted to do something creative. And at first we started recreating ’80s soap opera scenes from like YouTube clips. And then Jay and I would act them out and we would record them. We didn’t really have a goal in mind.

Craig: How high were you guys? [laughs]

Steve: We just stole someone’s lithium. But then that just started snowballing into something, like, “Okay, we need to do something more structured.” And then we really borrowed upon our own lives and created a relationship show that was very autobiographical.

I was waiting tables at the time. And I would get off of work and stay on the phone with Jay because he was on the graveyard shift with his newborn child. So we would work out the story and the season arc for the first season during the graveyard shift, basically, on the phone.

Craig: Amazing.

Steve: And that’s how it started.

John: So by that point, you were thinking about this as probably a half-hour for cable and it’s going to revolve around these central characters, this family, this guy who’s moving in. You had all those dynamics sort of figured out early on.

Steve: Actually, initially, it was just going to center around the Alex character who was my character. But then when we went to HBO, they were like, “We love it. We really want to work with you. But we’re looking for relationship shows that could be a four-hander.” And we were like, “Yeah. Yeah. We could do that.”

We went back to the drawing board and — I mean, it was tough because we had built something centered around one character. So we were panicked for a little bit. But ultimately, HBO was right.

Craig: Well, I love moments like this because you never — we just did this show last week about William Goldman’s Nobody Knows Anything, which is not nobody knows anything but nobody knows anything. You never know.

So these people hand down these edicts sometimes and our first reaction is, “You know, goddamn. I mean, sure go ahead and turn it into whatever you want. It’s not something that we bled over the graveyard shift while he’s up with his kid and I’m slaving away waiting tables. No, no. Your whim is my command.”

But then sometimes they’re right. And I love that you guys did it. Because the truth is, what was the worst that happened? You tried and it didn’t work, right? But it does work. It’s amazing.

Steve: And HBO in general is really — they’re pretty hands off with notes. I mean, once they sort of, you know, tap you, they want you to do your thing. And they’ve been pretty hands off since then, actually.

John: So when did you actually start writing? So had you written anything before you went in to meet with HBO?

Steve: So we wrote the initial pilot called Alexander the Great which was centered around my character. And then they said, “Let’s go back to the drawing board.” And then it took us about four months to come up with the pilot for Togetherness. We went in and shot that. And then, you know, I was still waiting tables and rubbing rabbits’ feet. And we got the green light for this first season.

John: Great. So you turned in this pilot script. They said yes. They blessed you to go shoot a pilot. But then there’s that long waiting process, you know, whether it’s a show that they’re going to actually want to put on the air.

Steve: Yeah. And we had had the first season sort of arced out. We didn’t write the first season until after we got the green light.

Craig: And then the panic of success set in and you realized, “Oh my, god.” I mean, were you overwhelmed by the thought that you had to do the thing that took you four months again and again and again and again?

Steve: All I remember is calling my mom and crying. And I remember the last day at the restaurant, my last shift, I was so happy. There was such a weight lifted off of me. But I was trying to contain my joy because I didn’t want my fellow friends that I’ve been like slaving with in hell to look at me.

Craig: You’re nice.

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: You’re nice.

Steve: You know, I didn’t want to —

Craig: Right.

Steve: So then I got home and, you know, exploded.

Craig: Oh. It’s such —

Steve: Literally.

Craig: And then — [laughs]

Steve: I exploded.

Craig: I exploded.

Steve: Like the blimp that was released from — .

Craig: Well, we’ll be getting to that.

Nicole: Yes, they will.

Craig: I see you’ve done your homework. You were mostly following the career path of an actor. Is that correct?

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: Prior to Togetherness? Had you done a lot of writing before that? This was kind of the first stab at it.

Steve: The only real writing I had been doing is the countless improvisational —

Craig: He’s an improvisational master, by the way.

Steve: Which I know isn’t really writing.

Craig: Master of improvisation.

Steve: But Jay, Mark, and I had been doing really highly improvised independent films since, like, the early 2000s, even in 1999. And then it just sort of evolved out of that style.

Craig: For your show, I get the sense that it’s not quite like the Curb Your Enthusiasm model where you’re scripting it but you’re almost scripting your own improv. That’s kind of the sense I get from it.

Steve: Well, like Curb and I think, like, the show like The League, they go in with just an outline.

Craig: Right.

Steve: But our show is completely scripted, really tight, really structured. But we just find that, like, the golden nuggets in the scenes and oftentimes the funniest jokes are the ones that are found in the moment. Even the emotional scenes, not just the comedic scenes. Like we talk about it like, sort of like setting up like lightning rods, and then just creating the perfect conditions for lighting to strike.

Craig: Right.

Steve: You don’t always get gold and there’s a lot of trial and error. But if you’re patient, you will.

John: Now, on a show like Togetherness, do you have — obviously you don’t have act breaks, but do you have a template in your head of like over the course of an episode these are the kinds of things that need to happen. We need to be able to take a character from this place to this place. We need to like hit certain milestones. Did you and Jay figure out sort of what the show is like, you know, structurally?

Steve: Yeah. We had a good sense of where the first two seasons were going to be in terms of a story arc and character arc. And then now, we’re preparing to write season three. And for the first time, we’re having to really — we sort of have an open map. We can create our own map at this point. So we’re finding new things now with season three, because the first two seasons were sort of already mapped out in our heads. So now, we’re writing a new map.

Craig: It’s such a great cast, too. I mean, everybody —

Steve: Thank you.

Craig: Everybody is spectacular. You know, the first time I saw the show — I tuned because you know I don’t watch anything. You guys know that. But I watched the show because I’m friends with Amanda Peet and she was in a movie I did and her husband and everything. And so I wanted to see it and there was something about it.

I was one of your first Twitter followers. Because you just — well, there was something, like, you know, I don’t know why I’m attracted to sort of schlumpy side stacks. Yes. Something about you. Something about ethnic, sad men — [laughs]

Like that face right there. It’s like, it’s all I want, like that. Like, look at me moving towards it. [laughs]

No, I mean, honestly, you’re the best. I mean it’s a great show. I’m just so glad that you — I love stories like yours but we don’t hear them a lot. Now, what we do, in a way we celebrate them, I think, sometimes more than we should because a lot of people who are waitering, they’re like, “Fuck it, man. Steve did it. I’m next.” Probably not. Probably not. It’s incredibly rare. So it’s so exciting that it happened, that the incredibly rare thing happened to you.

Steve: And I grew up with Mark and Jay back in New Orleans. We’re all from New Orleans. We all went to the same high school. And we all sort of came across this method of filmmaking sort of by accident. Out of necessity, really, because, you know, we were all broke. [laughs] So, you know, this whole John Cassavetes style, we could say that it was our intention from the beginning but it actually wasn’t. Like Jay and Mark’s first attempt to make a feature film was a complete disaster. It was a failure.

Craig: Because they were trying to make a real —

Steve: They were trying to make something big. They were trying to emulate the Coen Brothers. They failed miserably. They borrowed $100,000 from their father who was like a very successful lawyer in New Orleans. And they squandered — like it was a complete failure. [laughs]

Craig: Was he angry?

Steve: No, not at all. Because he’s —

Craig: Cool dad.

Steve: Yeah. He’s a great guy and so supportive.

Craig: I would be pissed off. My kid blows $100,000, I’m pissed.

Steve: But then after those failures and those failed attempts that they started to find their own voice and style just sort of out of necessity, which is cool.

Craig: And you were part of that from the start.

Steve: Yeah. I did their first experimental films. I did shorts with them. And I loved sort of the improv style of their way.

Craig: Right.

Steve: It just fits with me well.

Craig: Yeah, excellent.

Steve: Thank you.

John: So because we have two of you up here, we want to talk through this feature we usually do called, “How would this be a movie?” And I asked on Twitter for people for suggestions. I’m like, “What should we talk about for how to make into a movie?” And the three best suggestions we got were Zola. People who’ve done their homework, Zola is sort of amazing. So I want to talk through sort of what that is.

We’re going to talk about Zola, we’re going to talk about the rogue blimp, and we’re going to talk about George Bell, The Lonely Death of George Bell. And try to figure out how to make these into a movie or a TV series. Or if someone approaches you with this idea, how do you run with it?

So let’s get some back story on Zola. Actually, I took notes because I’m the preparer. So Zola, if you don’t know is —

Craig: I don’t need notes. I could do this just fine.

John: Just —

Craig: No, no.

John: No, it’s fine. I’ll —

Craig: No, no. I’m done.

John: Just for everybody else, Craig. They might need it.

Craig: Yeah.

Steve: We’ll just ‘prov it.

John: What was the white boyfriend’s name?

Craig: Jarrett.

John: Oh, he’s got it. All right, so for people who —

Craig: I don’t drop mics because it’s not good for the microphone.

John: Yeah. So for people who’ve missed out on the story so far, Zola is a Twitter account. And basically, she had like this epic tweet of like 174 tweets that detailed this wild experience she had in March. And you read this and it is amazing and sort of tweet by tweet sort of going through this long saga of what happened.

Her name is Zola. She meets this girl named Jess at a Hooters. They strike up a friendship. They talk about hoeing. And they exchanged phone numbers. And Zola agrees to go on this trip.

Craig: Just to dance.

John: Just to dance.

Craig: She’s not a hoe.

John: She’s not a hoe. She’s a dancer.

Craig: And she doesn’t know that the other girl is a hoe either.

John: True.

Craig: She knows she’s a dancer. That’s it.

John: Yeah, but —

Craig: She’s not out there trapping —

Nicole: She didn’t seem that surprised though. She’s like, “Oh, yeah.”

Craig: Right.

John: She doesn’t seem that surprised because even early on they were talking about hoeing. So like —

Craig: There was some hoe talk.

John: Yeah. Even not if profession, it’s — they’re sex worker adjacent, if nothing else.

Craig: I ain’t touching that one.

John: All right.

Craig: I’ve gotten in trouble before.

John: So the characters we have are Zola. We have Jess. We have the black pimp whose name is eventually revealed to be Z something.

Craig: Z.

John: Z something. We have Jarrett and Jarrett’s fiancée who shows up every once in a while and is a complete character of mystery. But you guys looked through these tweets and someone approaches you with this, you know, Nicole Perlman, what is a movie you spin out of there? What’s interesting to you as a movie out of the Zola story?

Nicole: Nobody would ever give me [laughs] this project to adapt. I was impressed at her excitement and her enthusiasm about this and she was like, “And then, and then, oh no but wait, oh no, but wait,” you know. And that part was great but I actually kind of lost the thread a little bit, I was just like ah — so I’m going to be lame about it. But I kind of loved the idea of them talking about hoeing like they were farmers, you know. They’re just hoeing and —

John: Yeah. [laughs]

Nicole: That was the twist like —

Craig: I think we’re going to pass on you.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I don’t think that that’s —

Nicole: All right, that wasn’t mine —

Craig: But thanks for coming in.

Nicole: That’s okay, that’s okay.

John: Craig, if someone approached you with that story, do you tell the story as just that? Because it felt like a Magic Mike kind of like road trip sort of, like Magic Mike XXL which is —

Craig: Right.

John: Just following a series of events and perspective.

Craig: Well, it’s so crazy that if you try and tell it, it’s just going to seem like you told it again because the story that she lays out is in bananas. The one way to think about it is, like I was thinking about how sad it was. I mean, the woman that is the actual hoe and she’s getting beaten up and snatched and a man gets shot in the face. This is terrible.

And yet, we’re all reading and everyone’s like, “Oh, my god, you got to read what Zola wrote.” Like that’s an interesting movie to me is that somebody types up something like that and it becomes viral. Meanwhile, the people that are in that have no idea and they’re out there somewhere —

John: Yeah.

Craig: And going through something real. That could be kind of interesting because the nature of these viral things, there’s something really creepy about how it separates us from the real. Someone died. That guy murdered someone.

John: Yes, shot them in the face.

Craig: And they beat that woman up.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Plus the hoeing.

Steve: Is the Twitter account verified?

John: Yeah, the Twitter account is not verified, so let’s talk about that possibility.

Steve: Okay. I’m not sure about the movie, you guys would be better for that. But I think at the end, there should be voice over throughout, we should see the little emoticons on the screen, the tweets, and at the end of the film, there should be a 72-year-old grandmother in Ohio —

Craig: [laughs] Right. Catfishing everyone.

Steve: That has catfished the whole thing.

Craig: Right.

Nicole: That would be amazing. That would be so great.

Craig: That’s pretty great. That’s pretty great. And like her grandson is there in the background playing “Grandma, almost done.”

John: So we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, who was the writer who pretended to be much younger than she was and was Felicity. Was that Riley Weston?

Craig: Riley Weston.

John: Riley Weston. So it would be fascinating if it were a Riley Weston situation where somebody is basically spitting a giant yarn for what all this is. It has such a feeling of truth though. I also had the question about whether all those tweets were written in advance or was she writing them one by one.

Nicole: I think she was writing them all in one stream of consciousness.

Craig: I think so too, yeah.

John: But it’s so hard to, I mean I have such a hard time fitting everything I want to say into one tweet. So to be able to stretch that out over —

Craig: She just got to that character limit, hit return and kept going, you know, I can hear the clacking of her nails on the laptop. And she’s like “Bam, ding ding ding ding.”

John: Yeah. And yet it had a structure to it. She just kind of knew where to start and she knew — she was very good about reminding you, this person you saw before, like I didn’t know his name, but now, I know his name was Z, and it was brilliantly done to me.

Steve: Yes. And just when the energy started to wane, she said, “Only four more tweets till the end.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: I know like she actually knew.

Steve: Yeah.

Craig: You think that there’s — you think grandma —

Steve: It’s a 72-year-old grandmother. That just graduated from the Iowa writing program.

Craig: Nothing good comes out of that.

John: Nothing good possibly can.

Craig: All right, all right. That’s pretty solid.

John: Right. Let’s talk about rogue blimp. So for people who are listening to this, way after the fact, there was a giant blimp, actually particularly an aerostat that was designed for East Coast defense. Basically it wasn’t a camera, but it had a like long range radar for detecting incoming missiles that could hit the East Coast. It broke free of its mooring and all hell sort of broke loose. And so it ended up dragging a cable behind it that did not have power and did other things. This is the sort of a little more in your wheelhouse.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: And a producer comes to you and is like, Nicole —

Craig: [laughs] She’s written a ton of blimp movies.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: Yeah, indeed.

Nicole: A whole sub-genre.

Craig: Like another one. I can do more than blimps. [laughs]

Nicole: Dammit, I’m so pigeon-holed.

John: What kind of movie is the blimp movie to you?

Nicole: It seemed like a wacky sort of like two guys think they’re going to get in the Goodyear blimp but they choose the wrong blimp and then they cut it free. And then because of that they end up almost starting World War III because they keep — I don’t know, but I could see it with the whole cruise missiles with blimps, by the way. I was like that’s how we detect incoming cruise missiles, is with a blimp? You know, that just seems really shoddy. [laughs] I was really disappointed in the Department of Defense. I was like, guys, seriously.

And also the whole Google blimps. Somebody has to get something mixed up with the Google blimp. And I thought it would be fun if they — If they took off on the sort of the like cross country trip in this NSA blimp not realizing it wasn’t the Goodyear blimp and causing a whole bunch of problems with the DOD thinking there was some sort of terrorist attack.

John: Steve, what kind of movie do you make out of the blimp?

Steve: Well when I saw NORAD, it made me think of the 80s movie WarGames.

Nicole: Yes, totally.

Steve: So like tonally I think WarGames would be a [laughs] good match. But I think it should be about the guy that was holding on to the blimp, you know, by the line there. And what happened to him the day before.

John: Yeah, so it’s sort of like Up but bigger.

Steve: Why did he — yeah, like Up. Exactly. Why did his grip — why did he lose his grip?

John: I see the campaign for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and she’s — who’s carrying in the balloons and like it’s sort of like that, but it looks — you need to never let go.

Craig: Never let — that’s the tagline.

John: Never let go. Craig Mazin, what movie would you make out of the blimp?

Craig: You know what, I think you could make a really good Pixar kind of movie about a blimp. Because I love the fact that it seems so anachronistic. And I like the idea that this blimp has been there for so long and he’s just blimping along protecting America and we don’t know. And he just follows orders and he just never doesn’t do his job. And then they come in they’re like, “Oh, you know, we’re replacing blimps, we’re replacing it all, you’re done.” And he’s so depressed. And he basically pulls himself away to just go. And then he kind of goes on this journey that may — helps him find his purpose again and he meets other things that float.

I mean there’s, you know, like dandelions and —

John: There’s a cloud.

Craig: A cloud, you know. But the blimp finds his, you know — it’s basically, he’s committing suicide is what he’s doing but, you know — so it’s — I think he could — I don’t know —

Nicole: It’s really heartwarming.

Steve: I think for sure, at the end credits, there should be a Led Zeppelin song.

Nicole: Ah.

Craig: Nah. No, no. Yay. [laughs]

John: It’s improv. Only good ideas — yes and…

Craig: Yes and.

John: The other —

Craig: Yes and no.

John: Yes and. Another possibility is a — the Michael Bay version is essentially it’s stealth because essentially like the death blimp sort of goes out there and you cannot possibly stop it. And so like if it has a sentience, if it has a thing it’s trying to do. There’s something also kind of like slow motion zombie about it because it’s not fast, it just like — it’s a path of destruction, it’s like the tornadoes this morning. It’s just that it’s going to move through in a straight line.

Craig: So even more blimps start coming and they just keep coming.

John: Yeah. Absolutely.

Nicole: It’s kind of like that — what is it, Rubber with the one about the tire?

John: Oh yeah the tire, yeah.

Nicole: It’s just like this rabid tire that’s running over people. It’s just like that. It’s like the cable very slowly dragging and causing devastation. It would be like, “No,” and it just keeps coming.

Craig: [laughs] It’s a little low stakes. It just — shoot the — just takes the —

Nicole: You just step to the side —

Craig: Just shoot the blimp — yeah.

Nicole: One foot.

Craig: It’s a blimp.

John: Yeah. But the fact that it just keeps coming. And they had to shoot it down. That’s actually the funniest thing. It’s like —

Craig: They do. Use a shotgun.

John: They use a shotgun to shoot a blimp.

Craig: But by the way — I’m sorry but if that’s Pixar and they shoot him at the end and he deflates. You’re going to feel, like that will kill you.

John: It’s Old Yeller. It totally is.

Craig: It’s freaking Old Yeller, but then somebody finds him and inflates him again. You see what I’m saying? It’s like, let’s go make that, guys. Somebody just steal it. I mean, it’s gold.

John: All right. Another option, you have the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of those gets loose and you have to go after that thing and shoot that thing down and that’s pretty good. So Underdog gets loose, and you have to shoot down Underdog.

Craig: Underdog.

John: Yeah. That’s how I would do it. Or Snoopy. One of them would do it.

Let’s get to our third possibility which is, well maybe there’s a comedy but it’s The Lonely Death of George Bell. This is a New York Times story.

Craig: Hehe. Hahahahaha.

John: Hahahaha. Written by N. R. Kleinfield. And it talks through the death of this man, George Bell, who was found in his apartment, he’d been dead for about a week. He was a giant, obese, he was a hoarder, everything was sort of awful and he had no —

Craig: Otherwise, good.

John: All of it was great —

Craig: Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, good.

John: He had no next of kin and so he talks through this, how does the city and the state have to deal with people who have no next of kin and sort of what that whole process was. It was a fascinating look at sort of the different layers of bureaucracy that sort of happen to settle out the estate and deal with the body.

Craig: And a lot of people do die alone and disconnected and they don’t even — like they were having trouble even just identifying him even though he was — everyone was like, “Oh yeah, that’s George Bell.” They had to find some — it took them forever to even match up an x-ray to know that it was really him.

John: Yeah. And it wasn’t a remarkable case —

Craig: No, just a guy.

John: The journalist picked this one situation, but like it’s a very common situation. So what kind of movie? You do sad well. So what kind of movie do you make out of George Bell?

Steve: I was — It was a great article. I was really — I immediately thought of It’s a Wonderful Life when I was reading this, for a bunch of reasons. The main character’s name was George Bell instead of Bailey. And then also, if you’re reading the article where unclaimed bodies go, is a place called Potter’s Field which is where the evil Mr. Potter, you know, his area became — but I was thinking, you know, It’s a Wonderful Life is about George Bailey learning about the lives he touched while he was alive. But in this article, you could study the lives that this man touched by his death, which I find it really interesting like the workers who were sifting through his apartment and his other relatives that were getting like — they weren’t hardly relatives, but they were getting some of his money through his death. It’d be interesting to examine how the death of someone can bring people’s lives together and unify people in a way that is unexpected.

John: Nicole, what kind of a movie do you make out of Bell?

Nicole: I mean it’s going to be a sad movie no matter what I think, but if it’s one of those movies that makes you feel better about your own life [laughs] or rather it gives you a more insightful look into what makes a life worth living. I thought that the heartbreaking thing was the lost relationship, the woman that he loved, and he left in his will, and she still cared for him and how he had withdrawn it. And I think that there’s something really interesting about how objects reflect choices that we make in our lives sometimes. And the whole investigation into who this man was, trying to piece together who he was based on objects left behind. And that was really interesting because it, you know, was definitely a memento mori, but it was also a — it was like a case study of every object represented — I almost saw it more as like a mini-series, almost like a Serial kind of thing. But, you know, each object represented a choice that he made to either connect or disconnect and leading to the final disconnection with the one person who still loved him, you know. And what else do you have to live for, you know.

Craig: I love that part. So in the story, he’s left money to people and they have to find these people. Some of those people are dead, one of them is this woman who we find out he was engaged to. The woman’s mother told her daughter, you have to get a prenup, and the guy said, “I’m not signing any prenup,” and he left. And they never spoke again except for occasional cards. And the woman always felt like that was the path she should have gone. And then by the time they find her, she’s also dead, and she kind of ended up in a bad way. And you know what I was thinking was, just because — my whole thing about these stories is, at some point, obviously we need to find the uplift and the redemption or else it’s kind of brutal.

And I love the characters of these people that go into your apartment and start investigating from your stuff. And I thought what if a man dies alone in an apartment in New York, and a woman dies alone in an apartment in Florida. And you have a guy in New York — or probably a woman in New York looking through the stuff and a guy in that apartment in Florida looking through the stuff. And they find things that are related to each other, and they have to call each other to help, and they fall in love.

John: Oh, Softie Craig.

Craig: Well, I mean because they’re — it’s like The Notebook except with different people, you know, and just like —

They’re both like — well, the point — I mean — because I love — there was one guy they talked to who was like, “Yeah, I’m probably going to end up like George, like his buddy.” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll probably die alone, too.” And here are two people that are like, this could be me, you know, and almost have given up, and then through this they — and so their love happen, you know. It was like there was some George and whatever her name was, you know. I’ll give her a name, Evelyn.

John: As I was reading through this, I looked at it more as a world in which you could set a story, rather than looking at George Bell because it felt like the people who were the investigators, that was a fascinating job and that fascinating job could take you into lots of really interesting places. So you could have the comedy version where — or the romantic comedy where people meet this — sort of meet-cute over death. But you also have lots of good thriller options. So you discover like — it looks like it was just a guy who died, there actually is a much more complicated situation. And once you start digging around, you yourself get in danger. So that’s the thriller way to take it.

With all these three scenarios, this one has characters and has a world which is great, but doesn’t really have a story. It doesn’t have a story driver. It doesn’t have like present day story drive, so we have to find a way to make the story drive take place. The blimp one has a lot of sort of like present day stakes, but there’s no characters, whatsoever, so we have to create a whole new characters.

Craig: Except for the blimp.

John: Except for the blimp. If the blimp is anthropomorphic and can talk. If the blimp can sing, well…

Craig: “Well, I guess they don’t want me no more.”

John: Yeah.

Nicole: Plush toy potential.

John: Yeah

Nicole: Inflatables.

Craig: Actually, you know who’d be a great voice for the blimp?

John: Josh Gad. Oh Steve Zissis.

Craig: A great voice for the blimp. He would, because he can bring sadness but then he can bring joy.

John: I like it — I like it so much.

Nicole: He can lift your hearts.

John: How do you feel about — ?

Craig: Look, look, that’s blimp. That’s it. That’s the blimp face. We should totally do this.

John: Zemeckis. Motion Capture. Steve Zissis. Done.

Craig: Wait, hold on.

Steve: Or it could be Andy Serkis being the blimp.

Craig: Yes, yes. Andy Serkis. He does the voice and he does the blimp.

John: That’s nice. I think Andy Serkis would be delighted to have someone else do the voice because it’s going to work out really, really well.

Steve: Sure.

John: And then the first one has characters and plot and there’s so much but it feels like it’s so already made. I mean it’s Spring Breaker 2 or like my first movie, Go. It has that same aspect of like all this stuff just happening.

Craig: It also has that thing that a lot of real life stories have which is that they’re incredibly episodic and then and then and then and then and then and then and you know what happens at the end? This.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And you’re like, okay, but that actually is a great example of a story that if you just took and tried to narrativize without re-contextualizing anything, people would go, “Why did I watch that?”

John: Although I would push back on that. Zola herself has a lot of agency in the story so Zola is the one who’s like taking photos of the girl and putting it on the back page.

Craig: I know. So who are we rooting for?

John: Yeah. It’s a real question.

Craig: There — I mean Zola literally starts — Zola starts out great like, “I’m not — I’m just a dancer and that’s fine.” And then she’s like, “Oh no, this guy is trying to hoe us. That’s no good.” And this girl is scared and says, “Please, you know, we just got to do this.” And Zola is like, “Well, okay, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. I’m now going to make a whole bunch of money. I’m going to pimp you.” Who are we — ?

John: Yeah, it’s Risky Business though. I think what’s fascinating is that —

Craig: Well —

John: If you would — well, if you take — I think Zola is part of the reason why she’s so fascinating is because she is a woman in that situation. She is taking control and ownership of —

Craig: Another human being.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yes.

Craig: Not good.

John: [Crosstalk] another human being.

Craig: Like she’s sex trafficking a person.

John: I also love that she will just run at the first sign of danger.

Craig: Right.

John: Anything goes, she’s out of there.

Craig: That was the other thing. Yeah. So this poor woman gets snatched up. What does Zola do? Runs. Does she call the police?

John: No.

Craig: No, just runs.

John: Yeah. So people who listened to the show before know that we’ve had a really good track record of the things we discuss on what would — would this be a movie. They always get kind of picked up. At least one of the three things gets picked up and so maybe an audience poll, of these three movies, which one do you think Matt and Ben are going to try to make into a movie first?

Craig: Right.

John: Because it’s usually them. Sometimes it’s DiCaprio, but usually it’s Matt and Ben.

Craig: Usually it’s Matt and Ben.

John: All right. So can I get by applause, who thinks the Zola movie will happen? Okay, by applause, who thinks the blimp movie will happen? And who thinks the George Bell movie will happen?

Craig: People love death. They love death.

John: They love death and uplifts. Yeah.

Craig: And there’s tragedy and it’s good. It’s Greek tragedy.

Steve: Yeah.

John: It’s good Greek tragedy. This is the time in the podcast where we open it up to questions which we can’t normally do because we’re usually recording this on Skype and there’s no one else in the room. But at this point, we would love to hear your questions.

So there’s not a microphone out there, so you’re going to just raise your hand to ask your question. I will repeat back the question and then we’ll answer it. So if anyone has a question, raise your hand. You have a question right there in the first row.

Craig: So the question is that, so this woman knew about the George Bell story, wanted to write the George Bell story. I assume you contacted the author of the story to try and get the rights, and the author said, “No,” and then sold the rights to somebody bigger.

So John Lee Hancock is here. He’s an excellent, excellent director and filmmaker. And John Lee and I tried to get the rights to a story and we failed, we got beaten out by Brad Pitt. It’s hard. The truth is that the people who write these things, they kind of go where they want to go. It’s tough, you know.

John: So let’s talk about what her options are. So I would say if there are things that are so appealing about that movie for you, you might be able to find different real life details or basically a fictional version that can get you to those places because the stuff we talked about with the George Bell movie, it doesn’t necessarily need to be George Bell.

There were things that were interesting about his specific case, but there were also just things that are interesting about that world and that world is —

Craig: I’d even go a step further. There’s actually nothing specific to his story that — I mean, well, the thing about the woman is great, you know. But you can invent a lot using — no, you can’t? Okay.

You know, and the other thing to remember is that the rights are granted on cycles. They are not in perpetuity usually. So they give people 18 months and if nothing happens in 18 months, a lot of times there’s an option to renew and sometimes they don’t and the rights become available, so stay on top of it. You know, that’s the best you can do, but it happens to everyone. And it’s not just, “I’m a little girl and I’m nobody.” Everybody has to deal with this. It’s one of those things.

John: John Lee should direct that movie. Wouldn’t he do a great job?

Craig: He does a great job all the time with all movies. Yeah. Thank you.

John: Thank you, John Lee. Another question from the audience. Anything you want to ask us. Such a quiet group. Right here. So I’m going to repeat the question. Question is, is anything happening with Challenger that someone might see down the line?

Nicole: Yes, this is the project, this is the zombie project that will not die and I’m glad because it’s my favorite but it keeps coming back from the dead and every time I’m sure it’s dead, it keeps coming back.

So yes, it’s been re-optioned, we have financing from E 1 but again this whole, it all really depends on casting. There’s like four people who could play the part and so if we get one of those four people, hooray. If not, it will die again until somebody else wants to option it.

John: I don’t even know what the project is so this is a script that you wrote?

Nicole: This is a script I wrote a million years — I wrote this script in college actually and it was a love letter to Richard Fineman because he was my childhood crush when I was in high school which is why I had no dates until college. But I really, really loved Richard Fineman. And so I wrote a screenplay about his investigation into the Challenger shuttle disaster and it was my golden ticket kind of, you know, my Willy Wonka ticket in a sense that that was what got me meetings and I won a bunch of contests and got my first job off of that as a sample.

And so it was this project that had, one day it’s like a hair raising story of lots of crazy experiences with directors and actors and it hit financing like five times. So it’s funny every time I get a new financier, I’m like, “Great, awesome, yay. We’ll see. That would be so great if it happens.”

But yes, I love that project. I’ve rewritten it a million times. We’ll see what happens.

John: I remember it now because you talked about it on the podcast the very first time.

Nicole: Yeah.

John: Great. Another question from the audience. Right here.

Craig: It’s a big question.

John: I’ll try to recap it. So what is the intellectual property at the heart of a movie and related, sort of what do we really mean when we’re talking about sort of what a movie is or what the fundamental idea of a movie is?

Craig: Well, I guess we’ll limit it first to screenplay, you know.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because once the movie is made, that’s the intellectual property. So intellectual property is unique expression in fixed form movie, fixed form done so that works, right?

Screenplay, that’s the intellectual property. It’s the unique expression in fixed form. Courts interpret this. That’s why judges sometimes go, yeah, no. We know that ideas aren’t intellectual property so the blimp idea is just an idea, right, plus it’s not written down. It’s not in fixed form.

If you write a screenplay, that contains dialogue but it also contains scenes that you’ve written, characters that you’ve described so everything that is evidenced by the text in your screenplay is in large part your intellectual property. It’s just the concept, the basic idea of it that isn’t.

So more is protectable than you think. In fact, that’s why so many of these cases fail because eventually somebody goes, “Well, show me what you have and let me see what you have.”

John: So arbitration which we talked about on the show is the WGA process for figuring out who deserves the writing credit on a script when there were multiple writers. And that’s not copyright. That’s literally looking at sort of the copyright is owned by whoever is making the movie.

The arbiter’s job is to figure out, of the things that constitute this screenplay, who did what and sort of whether that person did enough that it actually should count as being her movie or it should be shared credit. And that is a difficult thing. That’s why it’s a good thing overall that we are having screenwriters look at that stuff because it’s a hard thing to judge.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And when you see those weird copyright cases or those things where like, “Oh, this person stole my movie,” they’ll often be — those cases will often be brought in really weird venues because it won’t be sort of in Los Angeles, it will be in like some weird Texas court because they have a better track record of getting those things to happen there.

Craig: But they never —

John: But they don’t actually work. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah, but you’re protected. I mean — great example. Okay, so the question is, you write an in-depth outline for a movie and then somebody else takes that outline and writes a script. Have they infringed on your copyright? Essentially is what you’re asking. The answer is absolutely, no question.

One of the things that copyright gives you is the right to make derivative works which means other people do not have the right to make derivative works unless you license and grant them that permission. So the screenplay that is taken from an outline is a derivative work of that outline.

So this is why when we sell screenplays to the studios, they buy everything. They never leave anything out. They want to own everything. The last thing they want is for you to then go, “Oh, by the way, I’m writing another screenplay that you don’t own this derivative of my treatment that somehow you didn’t buy stupid, haha,” right? Okay.

So yes, that is a treatment and outline in fixed form is protectable copyright. That is intellectual property for sure.

John: Great. Question right back there. Nicole Perlman is a great person to answer that question.

Nicole: I don’t know if I could answer it particularly because I didn’t write samples of different genres. When I was starting out, I kind of got a lot of work from my Challenger sample, got me a lot of biopic, space, aviation, technology work and then randomly an Argentinean tango movie with Sandra Bullock. [laughs] Which did not get made. I can’t imagine why.

So yeah, I would say that it can help you having a brand. I think that if maybe it’s not your strength, definitely try other things and if you might find that you — and I personally — I’m writing Marvel movies and big fantastical science fiction and fantasy kind of things and I’m also interested in space, technology, aviation as well at the same time so — which drives my representatives crazy, but I think it’s a — I think you write what you want to write and what you love and don’t really — if you have a great idea for romantic comedy, write the romantic comedy and then maybe people who are looking for romantic comedy wouldn’t have thought of you because they thought you only did, you know, thrillers so I’d say whatever is your best idea that’s most on fire at this stage in your career, write that, and don’t worry about it.

Craig: Have you sold a screenplay yet or — ?

Audience Member: No.

Craig: Then think of it this way, you don’t even have a brand yet because the brand thing is really just, “Well, we bought something from him so now we’re going to put him on a list for things like that.” So at this point, you’re free, free, free, and by the way, you’ll be free later too.

I mean the nice thing about writing is you can write yourself in and out of trouble. So yeah, now write that great script. There’s no need to worry about pigeon-holing.

John: We have time for one more question. Which question will be — right here.

Craig: That’s a good Zissis question because I feel like your character is a bit of a reluctant hero in Togetherness. I mean it’s not a movie, it’s — but I look at that season, that first season.

Steve: Yeah, in terms of the first season, Amanda Peet’s character is kind of like the catalyst. She’s the kick in the pants of my character that gets him going on a trajectory. But after that, after she does do that, I am on a mission to, you know, transform and pursue my acting goals and et cetera.

Craig: So there’s this tension that happens with the reluctant protagonist where we’re actually waiting for them. You know, a lot of times reluctant protagonists will take on some job begrudgingly just to go back to what they had. It’s very common. Shrek I think just wants to get his swamp back. He’s a pretty reluctant protagonist, right? But then they are transformed.

I think that’s the key for the reluctant protagonist is that we’re waiting for somebody to light that spark. They don’t really — they’re reluctant because they’re afraid, it’s probably a better word, the fearful — and I think all protagonists are afraid, on some level.

I mean your character, definitely, you can feel it. He’s just scared, you know, and then Amanda comes along and she forces you but then — and I love the dramatic irony of what it also does between the two of you which is great, you know, but that’s — that would be my short answer.

John: So what we’re describing with Steve’s show is a show where you have, you know, multiple characters who are functioning as each other’s protagonist and antagonist. They’re causing each other to change. Classically what we are often talking about with movies is you have one character taking a trip that they’re only going to take once.

And so I can’t think of a lot of movies where I’ve been willing to watch a character just never engage and like finally at the end engaged. That doesn’t tend to be a really successful paradigm. So you as the writer have to find a reason to get them engaged with your story so whether that’s burning down their house, so they can’t go back to their original ways, or taking that one thing that actually means something to them which is what Shrek ultimately does.

You are forcing them into because you’re creating a situation where they have to change. Go back to sort of those Pixar story rules, like every day is the same except one day and that’s usually the day that your movie is taking place.

Steve: I think it happens a lot with the lovable loser archetype actually now that I’m thinking about it. If you think about a lot of Bill Murray type movies, he’s usually in that role like Stripes where he is that reluctant — reluctant guy.

Craig: Groundhog Day, he’s just refusing to change, refusing, refusing, refusing to the point where he just, he would prefer to kill himself than change which is the sort of ultimate reluctant hero but again, there’s Andie MacDowell transforming him.

And so I love that you said that that because that’s the answer to every reluctant hero is a relationship that changes them. That’s why we go to movies. It’s for that. I think all heroes in a weird way are reluctant. I mean I don’t like heroes that wake up in the morning and go, “Time to kick ass, let’s go.” Jerry Bruckheimer loves that.

I wrote a movie for Jerry once and the first note I got back was, “He doesn’t seem like a hero on page one.” I’m like, why would — who wants to beep, that’s the movie, beep, hero, hero, hero, hero, credits.

John: Things blow up.

Craig: Yeah. Boom. That is not me.

John: But think about George Bell. Like George Bell is like a reluctant hero who never actually sort of kicks out of gear but there’s a version of George Bell where like he’s in that situation.

Craig: Right.

John: And something kicks him out of that life.

Craig: Okay, so —

John: And he’s a Shrek.

Craig: So have you seen the movie Marty, classic Paddy Chayefsky screenplay, 1955? Ernest Borgnine won an Oscar for it, beautiful movie, and it’s one of those old movies that honestly is not old.

And it’s a very simple story of a butcher who’s not a particularly good-looking guy and he’s lonely and he lives with his mom who harangues him, and he’s resigned and then he meets this woman. And stuff happens and there’s a transformation but it’s a difficult transformation. There’s a price to pay for leaving your shell, you know. You should come to this, I’m doing this structure talk tomorrow, I don’t know if you’re available, this is all I talk about — okay, good. You’ll hear it again but like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It will be a lot —

John: Okay, very quickly because we’re running out of time. I forgot to do One Cool Things. So One Cool Thing is a tradition in the show. My One Cool Thing is actually a little thing I used for filming this last week. It is called a Glif. It comes right here in Austin, Texas. It was a Kickstarter, so Craig’s favorite thing in the world.

It is a little device for holding your phone, being able to mount it on tripod which is tremendously useful when you want to shoot photos or video with your phone because the iPhone is a really great camera these days and so it’s a little mount for your phone so you can attach it to a tripod. That’s my One Cool Thing, the Glif.

Craig: Fantastic. Nicole, what is your One Cool Thing?

Nicole: I was in London last week and I went to the Cosmonauts Exhibit at the London Science Museum and it was amazing and the Russians had some great stories and I highly recommend you guys all look into Cosmonauts. They are fantastic.

John: Great. Steve, do you have One Cool Thing?

Steve: I was just going to recommend an animated film called The Man Who Planted Trees. That’s old but you can get it on Netflix. It’s one of the greatest pieces of animation ever.

Craig: Is it American, Japanese, or?

Steve: It’s, it was a Canadian animator and it’s narrated by Christopher Plummer.

Craig: Awesome. Well, my One Cool Thing is an update on an old One Cool Thing called Thync. I don’t know if you guys listened to the show. A while ago, I found this product that you stuck on your head and it sent electrical impulses into your head in an attempt to calm you down or perk you up and I thought, “You know, this sounds cool.”

And then every now and then on Twitter, someone will be like, “Have you done it? Have you done it?” I’m like, “No.” So I did it, kind of works. It kind of works. You definitely feel it and it allows you — you have an app that sort of is Bluetooth connected to this ridiculous thing and as you move the dial up and down, you can feel it. And if you move it too high, it hurts and you feel your scalp contracting, it’s bad.

So, but there’s this calm lady on your iPhone going, “Find your sweet spot,” and you’re like, “My head, my head, my head, my head, fuck” but then you get, and it actually did. I felt spacey. I don’t know if that’s calm, but I felt spacey.

Nicole: It’s like electroshock therapy.

Steve: I’m thinking of the last scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest right now. Craig, we might need to smother you with a pillow.

Craig: Pillow me. Yes, give me the L’amour treatment, I need it. Yeah, it’s time.

John: Excellent. So glad we actually got to shock you, Craig and actually — and attach you —

Craig: Shocking myself.

John: It’s so good.

Nicole: Can we get access to that? Can we just shock you whenever we want?

John: I think —

Craig: No.

John: We’ll build an app for that and soon everyone will be able to zap Craig.

Craig: Shock Craig.

John: Yeah. Nicole and Steve, thank you so much for being our guests.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

Steve: Thank you.

Nicole: Thank you.

John: We need to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us. It’s a huge pleasure to do this every year. Thank you guys for being an incredibly good audience. We need to thank Annie Haze who’s our assistant this week. So thank you very much. Guys, thank you so very much.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Austin Film Festival
• The Monty Hall problem on Wikipedia
• Nicole Perlman on IMDb and Twitter, and on Scriptnotes, 164
• Steve Zissis on IMDb and Twitter
• Togetherness on HBO and Wikipedia
• Papermag on The Harrowing Twitter Odyssey of @_zolarmoon
• The Baltimore Sun on the rogue JLENS blimp
• The Lonely Death of George Bell, from The New York Times
• Variety on Nicole Perlman and Challenger
• Marty on Wikipedia
• Glif tripod phone mount
• Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the London Science Museum
• The Man Who Planted Trees, on Wikipedia and Netflix DVD
• Thync
• Intro/Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-where-alines-show-debuts).

**John August:** Hey this is John. So today’s show we have a clip from a movie that has some strong words in it. Not the F-word, but other words. So, if you’re driving with kids in the car, that is a warning. That is going to be our third segment of the show today.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 219 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to be talking to Aline Brosh McKenna, our favorite podcast guest, our most repeated podcast guest. She is here to tell us about the launch of her show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she discussed way back on the Christmas episode last year. She’s the best.

Are you excited, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, she is and will always be our living Joan Rivers.

**John:** Yes. So, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show with Rachel Bloom, that debuts — it debuted yesterday if you’re listening to this on Tuesday.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting.

**John:** But we recorded this before it came out, so who knows. Maybe things went crazily wrong. But they didn’t, because the show is great. We’re also going to be talking about Indian screenwriters who have gone on strike and what that means and sort of what they can look forward to. And we’re going to be looking at three pages from this aspiring writer who I think, you know, we’ll see if he has a career ahead of him. His name is Scott Frank. And we’re going to be taking a look at these three pages he wrote and also a scene he shot that was in a movie he shot that people love. And it’s a good look at sort of how the conflict on the page between two characters in a scene with dialogue can translate into a movie and sort of what you look for in writing on the page.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. And this should be an excellent show. I have a good feeling about this show. We have Aline, so you know we’re — I mean, she’s about to come and we’re going to have a ton of bizarre mixed metaphors and analogies.

We have some interesting follow up stuff that we’re about to get to. And then I’m really excited to sort of tear this scene apart in a good way and really analyze bit by bit how these things happen. Because, you know, it’s been a while since we’ve really gotten super crafty, so.

**John:** Yeah, this will be a crafty episode.

**Craig:** Crafty crafty.

**John:** So, let’s start with the follow up. The t-shirts for Scriptnotes are now out in the world. And so as I was going to see — I saw Sicario and The Martian over the weekend. I was walking from the restaurant back to go see The Martian and I saw one of the purple Scriptnotes shirts out in the wild, like a guy on Sunset Boulevard was wearing it.

And so he saw my double take and he goes, “Hey John.” I’m like, hey. I was just so surprised to see the t-shirt out there in the world. So, if you are out there in the world wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, that is fantastic. If you want to #Scriptnotes or #ScriptnotesTee on Instagram or Twitter, that’s also fun and fine.

If you are overseas, it’s a chance that you’ve not gotten your shirts yet. If you’re in the US, it’s more likely that you’ve gotten your shirts. They all went out last Friday, so a week ago as we’re recording this. So, people should be having them in their hands ready to wear.

**Craig:** Spectacular. It is fun to see those shirts around. I do occasionally see them. If you are walking around with a shirt and John crosses your path, you too can have a conversation with John that begins and ends with, “Hey John. Hey.”

**John:** I think there’s going to be a lot of those in Austin.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Speaking of Austin, the Austin Film Festival is coming up very soon. There will be two Scriptnotes sessions. There’s going to be a live Scriptnotes show on the Friday and there’s going to be a Three Page Challenge on Saturday. We were able to use our collective muscle to move the Saving Mr. Banks conversation between Kelly Marcel and John Lee Hancock, so it’s not at the same time as Scriptnotes anymore.

So you can go to both the live Scriptnotes show and to Kelly and John’s discussion and be happy.

**Craig:** As well you should. Yes. There was a little bit of a — I don’t want to call it an uproar, because it was about four people. But those four people were very upset, so we took care of them.

**John:** Yeah. We took care of those folks. So come join us for all those things if you’d like to. I don’t know our venues yet. I don’t know anything more about our shows, but I’m excited to be going to Austin and performing those shows with Craig and folks.

**Craig:** I think they said that we’re doing the live podcast in a church.

**John:** Yeah. And so the church last year, Craig wasn’t there last year. The church is a lovely venue, except last year we were seated on the — so, there’s pews, but we were seated on the floor. We weren’t up on risers. And it was actually very hard to see. So, I will do my best to make sure that we are up high enough so you can actually see us in that church.

**Craig:** No one wants to see us. They listen to us. It’s a podcast, for god’s sake.

**John:** Absolutely. Really what you can do is you can just put your blinders on and just pretend — like listen to it live before everyone else can.

**Craig:** Really what we’re saying is fly to Austin so you have slightly better audio.

**John:** That’s really what we’re going for. Actually, maybe worse audio, because now that Craig has a good microphone, we’re all set.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. So, a couple episodes ago we talked about how would this be a movie, and one of the things we brought up was the French train heroes, so basically these three Americans who were on a train in France and they ended like taking down this guy who was shooting at the train. And they were hailed as heroes.

A weird bit of follow up that happened this last week is Spencer Stone, one of the three guys, ended up getting stabbed repeatedly in Sacramento. And there was video of it. It was just a really strange incident.

So, it wasn’t related to the French train attacks directly, but we were really wondering as we were talking about the French train possible movie, well, what would the second act be? How do you structure that? And maybe that’s a possibility of how you would think about what the second and third acts of that movie would be is basically what happens after that.

If that big incident happened in the first act, what is the life like for those guys moving forward? And as those 15 minutes start ticking down, interesting to think about sort of what happens when this heroic person goes home and whether that becomes a factor in other things of his life.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little reminiscent of the Chris Kyle story, who was murdered here in the United States by an unhinged friend. This guy seems to have been stabbed in sort of just a random incident of guys out at night. And maybe getting into an argument or a fight or something.

He’s going to be okay from what I understand. It doesn’t feel — I mean, if I had passed on this movie initially and then someone came back to me and said, “Well what about now?” I’d say it’s still a pass.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s still a pass, too. And I don’t want to sort of make light of the real plight of what happened to this one true guy, Spencer Stone, by saying like, oh, well, it changes the plot of the story. Obviously we’re talking about sort of a fictional movie about maybe some fictional people. But I think it was an interesting way to think about sort of what happens next, if you structured this kind of story with the big dramatic train incident happening at the start. What is the ongoing story of these three young men?

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. You have a bit of follow up here about Craig and Ezra and Marissa. I don’t even know what this.

**Craig:** I know, isn’t this is exciting? So, I have the craziest. A couple of nights ago, Chris Morgan and I went to the guild to speak to a group that was sort of a hybrid group of Writers Guild members and members of the Universal Emerging Writers Program, which essentially it’s designed to promote diverse writers, African American, Latino, Asian American, LGBT, the whole — the usuals, right?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, like okay, these are the folks. And it was interesting because they expanded that beyond just the people who had gone through the program to Writers Guild members in general. And I’m not sure exactly how they expanded it, but it was by far the most diverse room I’ve ever seen in the guild, ever. I mean, it was actually really encouraging.

And so we had this really nice talk about stuff and then afterwards Chris and I went over to Canter’s, because I haven’t been to Canter’s in — you know, I used to live around the corner from Canter’s. It’s been like 12 years.

**John:** I’m going to pause you for a second, because people who don’t live in Los Angeles have no idea what you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Oh, Canter’s. Canter’s Deli is an institution. It’s been around since the — I’m guessing the 20’s? 30’s?

**John:** It feels like 20’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an old, old building in the old Jewish district of Los Angeles, which isn’t really — eh, it’s kind of still Jewish.

**John:** It’s Jewish and Ethiopian in a weird way.

**Craig:** Right. It’s Jewthiopian. But it is an old school deli. And it is unchanged. And it’s just a neighborhood institution. And I used to go there all the time. It was the closest thing that I could find to sort of New York Jewish comfort food.

And it is New York Jewish comfort food. It’s just in LA. So I’m sitting there and Chris and I are chatting, and then he gets up to go to the restroom. And this guy comes over to my table, young man, nice guy, millennial mustache. I love the millennial mustache.

**John:** It’s fun.

**Craig:** He introduces himself. His name is Ezra. And he says, “I’m sorry to bother you. Is your name, Craig?

“Yes.”

“Are you Craig Mazin?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a fan of Scriptnotes.” And he’s super nice. He’s wearing a Mets hat, which I don’t like, and I tell him —

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** We talk about that for a bit. And then he says, “By the way, my girlfriend is sitting over there. Her name is Marissa. Her family owns Canter’s.”

**John:** Crazy.

**Craig:** And I was like, what? This is awesome! So I just went over and sat down with Marissa. Her mother is Jackie Canter. And we talked about Canter’s. It was the craziest — it’s like the coolest thing to meet nice people. I feel like all of our listeners are super nice. They are dating people that own classic restaurants, which is a huge plus for me because Jackie did send over some free black and white cookies and rugelach to Chris and to me.

**John:** Aw. That’s very nice. My similar kind of Scriptnotes adjacent story is a friend of mine was talking about he went to his barber who is in the Valley, I believe, and they were talking. And it turned out the barber said he was really tired because he has to stay up late after his shift because he’s a screenwriter and he wants to work at night. And he said like, “Have you ever heard the show Scriptnotes?” And he was a big fan of the Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So I just love that we have barbers in the Valley who listen to the show as well. If you are that barber in the Valley, hi, hello.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know what? Ezra, I just want to say thank you for coming over. You were an incredibly nice guy. I loved how much of a fan you were. And thank you for interesting me to your wonderful girlfriend, who should become your wife, Marissa. Because, let’s face it, Canter’s.

**John:** So when I saw this on the Workflowy, the outline of the show, I was like — so I was thinking is this Ezra Miller? I’m trying to think who is an actress who could be the Marissa. I was thinking too much is really what I was thinking.

**Craig:** It turns out to be a very simple but beautiful story.

**John:** A similar simple but beautiful story is really the Aline Brosh McKenna story, who is our first and — she was our first guest. She’s our first guest on the episode today. She’s first in our hearts. Let us welcome Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m very happy to be here.

**John:** So, Aline, we are recording this on Saturday, but on Monday your show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, debuts.

**Aline:** It does.

**John:** And people are listening to this on Tuesday. So, it’s this weird state of being both before and after the moment. So, tell us about what you’re feeling right now, two days before your show premieres?

**Aline:** Well, I’m feeling quite after about the pilot, because we started shooting it a year ago. And we finished it around Christmas of last year.

**John:** You were actually on the Christmas episode and we talked about your pilot.

**Aline:** So, at what point in the grieving was I there?

**John:** It was pre-grieving. So, at this point you were like, “Oh, we’re a Showtime show and everyone loves us.”

**Aline:** Yeah. I think they did love us before they set us free. I think I’ve talked about the fact that the pilot sort of hung around for a while, got picked up by the CW. It was a shock to us how quickly it happened. We didn’t know we were going to be on the fall schedule. So we geared up very quickly. And the pilot we did a little tszuj on the pilot. We added some material and we edited out some profanity. And I’m excited that people are going to get to see it, considering how close it came to living on a shelf, or in a bin, in some garbage.

**Craig:** And so now you have this interesting thing. You ever see that — sometimes I’ll notice in a movie when I can tell when they’ve done a pickup or a reshoot because a bunch of times come by and the actor looks slightly different. With all the time in between, does everything still feel like, okay, from episode one to two does it still feel like, oh yeah, it’s still the same person, it’s still the same vibe?

**Aline:** Well we had a lot of the same crew come back, so we had a lot of people who were familiar with everybody’s look. And then one character was completely recast, so we didn’t have to worry about that. And there was one set, which is quite important to the series, but you only see it once in the pilot. And we were able to completely rebuild that. And that’s one that we use a lot.

So, I think you’d have to be a pretty fine careful student of the pilot to see the differences.

**Craig:** It’s the only way I’ll watch TV, just so you know. [laughs]

**Aline:** With a microscope.

**Craig:** With a microscope and a checklist.

**John:** Now, Craig doesn’t watch any TV, so the real question is going to be whether Craig actually watches your show. So far the critics have said that he should watch your show. This is Brian Lowry of Variety writing, “One of the fall’s most promising hours, full of infectious energy.”

Willa Paskin at Slate writes, “Charming, ambitious, utterly singular show.”

And there’s also a New York Times article which I’ll link to, because you guys have done a ton of press on this show. You’re actually one of the shows that people are singling out as being sort of groundbreaking and unique and something people are excited about.

**Aline:** Again, all the more gratifying. We’re very grateful. But all the more gratifying considering how close we came to being garbage.

**John:** I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and I was talking with an executive who works, I think, at CBS, and she was saying how much she loved your show and how excited she was. It’s so complicated, but CBS and Showtime are related, and so is CW. And so I said like, “I’m so happy and excited for Aline and for Rachel, but I’m also hoping that — I’m both hoping for their back nine and I hope that they don’t have to do the back nine,” because I’m just trying to think how will you possibly survive 22 episodes of your show.”

Because, you’re shooting what episode right now?

**Aline:** We are just in the middle of seven.

**John:** Great. And so you are only a third of the way through it. You must be exhausted already.

**Aline:** Well, I’m not thinking about it, because we don’t have our back nine order. They ordered five extra scripts. But we’re just kind of chugging through these first 13. You know, and it is what everybody says it is in terms of the workload is quite intense. But it’s been so fun. And it’s been such an interesting different kind of job for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. So, you know, as tiring as it is, I really don’t dwell on that. I’ve really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** I would love to know how you guys — I mean, look, any TV show is a difficult march. But how do you continually create new songs that rapidly and that frequently?

**Aline:** It’s, yeah, I mean, it’s quite something. We, Rachel and I, had thought about this show in quite a lot of detail when we thought we were a Showtime show. So, we had a bunch of stuff backlogged and that helped us. And when we started we hired — Rachel did the music on the pilot with her friend, Jack Dolgen, who now writes on the show and writes additional music.

But we hired this guy, Adam Schlesinger, who is halfway to an EGOT, among other things. He was in the Fountains of Wayne.

**Craig:** I love Fountains of Wayne.

**Aline:** He composed a Broadway show. He’s written a lot of comedy songs, including Broadway’s Not Just for Gays Anymore. And we picked him up at the beginning of this, when we got picked up. And he has been writing with Rachel, and with Jack. And they kick out the songs very quickly.

It’s funny. That has not been as much of an inhibiting factor. Sometimes we switch out the song that we want to do in a given episode, because while the songs are kind of standalone pieces in a way, they have to fit emotionally into the show. So, if the show gets rewritten, sometimes the songs change.

But Rachel and Adam, once they have an idea for a song, either separately or together, and then Jack as well, we’re able to kind of cook through those once they know what they are.

**John:** I have friends who write on other network shows, and they will get studio notes and network notes, and they’ll have to quickly scramble to incorporate those notes. And it seems like it must be an incredibly bigger challenge when you have so many other pieces that are depending on it. So, you have — not only you have Rachel being so busy, but you have the writing of the episode, you have the writing of the songs, you have the choreography. You have so many things dependent. So to try to make a simple, what seems like a simple change, would be incredibly difficult for your show.

Have they been mindful of how challenging that gets?

**Aline:** We hand the demos in as soon as we get them. And the songs — we try and get the songs with the lyrics into the script. Sometimes we’re behind. But conceptually they know where we are, song-wise, most of the time. And most of their notes reside in the storytelling, in the traditional aspects of the show. So, they’ve been tremendously cooperative. And I think people also people are real fans of the music, so they’re very excited to get those demos. And I think that is the funnest part of the show, for everybody who works on the show, including the crew. It’s just always fun when we have a day when we’re doing a video and there’s music and dance on the set. Sort of everybody wants to come down and participate. Those are fun days.

**John:** Talk to us about the writing. As you are figuring out an episode, there is a written document you’re turning in that is sort of for approval. Is that an outline? What does it look like? And how long is that?

**Aline:** Well this is new to me, because in features I try to avoid written outlines, because I find that people get bogged down and you end up in outline cul-de-sac. But in TV there’s really no other way to do it.

So we do two documents. We do a short document, which is like sort of a pre-outline, which is a couple of pages. We send that in. And then we get notes on that. And then we do a fuller outline. And then we try and make that as detailed as possible, so that when the writers go off to script they have a really detailed roadmap.

But I have found that I don’t mind the outlines as much when I know I’m in production. I think in movies what I never liked about those outlines is they just seem like it’s so theoretical. It’s so many steps to get to before you get to your job. Whereas in TV you know you’re making these things, so they seem like just necessary consensus builders, because not only do the networks need them, but every department needs them to sort of anticipate who is coming up casting wise, costume wise, art direction wise, and in all departments.

**Craig:** That’s the other edge of this brutal scheduling sword. I mean, they can pour notes on you and they can ask for outlines and all the rest. But the train is moving. So, their ability to influence things is limited as well. You’re right, in features, you turn an outline in and you could argue about that outline for a year if you feel like it. You can’t do that, for you.

And obviously the outline helps you — I’m going to use a phrase that I think fits you. It allows you to impose your creative will upon others. So, you’re in charge of this room now of writers, yes?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** What is that like coming from our world where you are in charge of your room, which is you, to now being in charge of all these people and now you have to be accountable for yourself, but you also have to be accountable for what they’re doing? It’s a huge transition.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve loved it, because I’ve always struggled against the isolation and the claustrophobia of screenwriting. It’s always been a challenge for me. And it’s why I did TV early in my career.

We really have a lot fun. Our staff is six women and three men. And then we have two consultants. I have to say, it’s really fun to be writing in a room with smart people who are kicking in ideas and jokes. And it’s much more social. I really have enjoyed that. And I have enjoyed collaborating with all of the departments.

It is, you know, one of the things about — I’m definitely busier, but I’m definitely — I’m less stressed. And my husband has been noticing this. I think a lot of the stress that I experience as a screenwriter, obviously your days are not as grueling. As a screenwriter, the stress for me was always trying to get your, you know, it sounds pretentious, but getting your vision up on screen when it has to be mediated through a director. If you’re not directing yourself, you know, it has to be interpreted through a director or producer. And you’re not really the person making the decisions.

I think I have found that enormously more stressful in my life, because I am a very direct person. And so being a screenwriter, communicating when something is being made, there’s a lot of indirectness built in. And it really, if you have access as a screenwriter, it’s by virtue of the relationships you had, or you’ve built. But as a showrunner, your access is a natural part of the process. So, I feel like I’ve traded in some of my leisure hours for a more directly satisfying process.

**Craig:** Good answer, Aline. Good answer.

**John:** I was having breakfast with a showrunner on Friday, and he was at the end of his 10-episode season. And so he was now in the editing room. And so it was such a change for him because this whole time through he’s been in the writing room, and then suddenly when you’re in production you’re doing all of these jobs at once.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And so now he was really relieved to just like, “I could focus on doing one thing rather than three things.” What is your favorite part of this process right now? Are you enjoying the cutting room, or the writer’s room? What do you like?

**Aline:** That’s a really good way to describe which is, you know, there’s a writer’s room happening, there’s a production in progress, and there’s a post-department in progress. And all those things are happening at the same time. And I can’t speak for other people who do this job, but for me it’s about finding ways to empower other people to help you do this job. And I have amazing people who work with me who are very, very able to cover me on set, and can also cover me in post as needed.

I have found that the writer’s room is the beating heart of the show. If the scripts don’t work, nothing else works. And I think everybody knows that, especially on a show like this that has a very specific voice. And so I spend most of my time in the writer’s room, even when I’m rewriting. Some showrunners when they rewrite they go out of the room and do it themselves. I rewrite in the room with people, so that I get their input.

My biggest challenge, which is somewhat unique to our show, is that Rachel who is, you know, the show is not my voice or her voice, it’s our voice. And she’s full time in the production department. I mean, she’s in probably 80% of the scenes, 85% of the scenes. So trying to get Rachel’s viewpoint/involvement/writing style, all of those things inculcated into the scripts at every point is our biggest kind of institutional challenge.

**John:** So that it feels like it comes from one brain, even though it’s coming from both of your brains simultaneously. And since she’s on set, it’s sort of like Lena Dunham being on set. She can see whether this is not a choice that makes sense for the show, and call you in when she needs help on that kind of stuff, too.

**Aline:** Well, you know, the good thing is — I’ve never collaborated with an actor who was also writing with me. Obviously that’s an unusual situation. But I never worry about if there’s someone on set who understands the intention of these scenes, because she always understands the intention of these scenes. And if she doesn’t, she and I can huddle pretty quickly. So that’s really wonderful to have an actor who is your partner in that way. And we really love that. But we were laughing yesterday that when the show got picked up we thought, oh, we’re going to spend so much time together. Isn’t that going to be fun? And yesterday was a rare moment where we were walking across the stages together. And it was after the writer’s room had closed. And it was during a turnaround in the shooting where she was getting changed. We suddenly had 15 minutes together, which it felt like — you know, we always feel like we’re lovers sneaking around trying to find an extra moment together.

She’s shooting most of the time. So particularly when we’re on location, we actually don’t get to see each other as much as we would like. Ironically.

**John:** So the show will have debuted yesterday. What will your phone calls be like on Tuesday morning? Have they given you any sense of sort of what the expectations are? What you need to be able to do? Because it feels like you’re in this kind of nice spot, where people really like your show, but you’re also sort of the underdog. You’re like a well-regarded underdog going into the situation. So you just have to sort of clear the bar and get people to come back.

**Aline:** Well, you know, one of the things that’s been nice is I’ve been doing the other job, being a screenwriter, for many years. And I’m new to this job, so every day is a new thing for me. A lot of the people I work with have more experience than I do, so I’m often asking them like, “Now what happens?”

In terms of the reception of the show, I mean, obviously we hope people love it. I don’t have a lot of expectations. I mean, whatever you’re doing when a movie is coming out and you’re looking at tracking, which I try not to do too much anyway with a movie. But with a TV show, I mean, I don’t see why or how I could worry about that. There’s virtually nothing I can do.

My Facebook page is not going to help drive people to the show. So I’m not thinking about ratings and those things. I will be thinking — on Monday I will be thinking, okay, what do we start shooting this week. That’s what I’ll be thinking

**Craig:** Good for you. That’s the way to be. You know, because the truth is the world will do what the world will do. You know, for movies, our stuff is done by the time the release comes around. There is no possible creative impact that obsessing over tracking and box office can have on the movie itself. Not the case for television. And if you’re sitting there spazzing over numbers, I could see where it starts to get in your head and maybe influence how you’re doing it.

You know, I agree with John. I feel like my sense is this show — I don’t understand exactly what the parameters are for success and failure, but I know there is a breadth there. And clearly they like the show, because they’ve given you this extra vote of confidence. And it’s different, you know. I would be surprised — honestly would be surprised if — look, I mean, obviously if the ratings come in early and they’re terrific, then all’s good to go.

But if they come in and they’re not like over the moon, so what, they’re going to give you time. I do believe that.

**Aline:** Yeah. It’s an unusual show and so it might take people a little while. I mean, one of the funny things is I don’t have any of the familiar screenwriting excuses. For starters, their marketing has been phenomenal.

**John:** They really have done a great job.

**Aline:** So I cannot blame the marketing. And the other thing is it’s been a really interesting experience because this network in particular for whatever reason is extraordinarily supportive of women. They have a tremendous number of female showrunners. And they have shows with female content. And they’re so considerate of women that it never comes up. You know, that’s how kind of pervasive it is that no one is ever saying to me, talking to me about the women’s audience or girls, or their perspective. They’re just treating you like you’re making a show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** They don’t look down at the audience. You’re not ever gaming that point of view. They just want you to make a good show. And it never comes up. You know, we do jokes about female-driven stuff frequently. And it’s not even part of the conversation. So that’s also been a really wonderful experience.

I didn’t plan on doing television. And I think you guys, I’m sure, have been on conversations with me over beers where I’ve talked about why I wouldn’t do it, but now I think we’re in a time where you just go where the satisfying work is. And it doesn’t really matter what the format is. I feel like even the word television in a way is sort of a misnomer now because people are watching it in so many different formats.

You know, for me this has been one of the best experiences because I never made a decision to do any of it.

**Craig:** Right. It just sort of happened. I love that.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And you were ready for it. I know you have to go, but thank you for joining us for this segment. Because you’re Aline Brosh McKenna, you’re allowed to do one thing out of sequence if you’d like to. So, if you have a One Cool Thing or anything you want to share with our audience, you can do your One Cool Thing midway show.

**Aline:** Well, I do want to do a One Cool Thing. Thank you for asking me. I’ve worked on movie crews and they’re amazing. And you guys, I know, feel the way I do that crews are incredible. And I so admire what they do. But I’d never seen a television crew in process and they jam. I mean, they’re working so fast. We’re shooting so many pages a day. And I just am so impressed —

**John:** How many pages do you shoot in a day?

**Aline:** Seven or eight.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yeesh.

**Aline:** And I’m just so impressed with everybody, just sort of the alacrity, and they’re on top of it. And they’re moving quickly and they’re anticipating stuff. And the crew has really blown me away. And I wanted to give a particular shout out to — we have a person who is to Rachel what Tony Hale is to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Veep.

**John:** Bag man?

**Aline:** Yeah. We have — and her name is Bola. And she’s fantastic. I mean, she gets Rachel everywhere she needs to be and anticipates her every need. And she’s a huge Scriptnotes fan —

**Craig:** Yay.

**Aline:** And she geeked out when she met me because she’s seen all the episodes and she was excited. So my One Cool Thing is the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend crew, with a shout out to Bola.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice.

**John:** Aline, congratulations, good luck, we’re so happy to have you with your new show.

**Aline:** Thanks guys.

**John:** And everybody tune in, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on the CW in the US. If you are overseas, you should find a way to pirate it so you can watch it yourself.

**Aline:** It’s on Hulu the next day, I believe.

**John:** Oh great.

**Aline:** Yeah. And I think it’s also —

**Craig:** Do not pirate it. It will be available. It will be available.

**John:** What I will say is that so often these shows are put up online so people can see them for free. And clever Internet users can find a way to see promotional episodes.

**Aline:** Well, here’s the other thing. It’s on free TV. It’s a network. So you don’t you have to pay to see it the first time. You can pay to see it the second time if you want.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s free!

**John:** And you should buy all the products that are advertised on the show to support the show and tell them that you’re buying this brand of whatever because of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Aline:** You know what? Particularly Hyundai. Hyundai was our first product placement. They were the first people to come to the table. And we have a big shout out to them in the show, obviously.

**John:** We’re you able to form a rhyme with Hyundai in a song?

**Aline:** No. They’ve not made it into a song. But let it be known that if we find the right advertiser with deep enough pockets…

**John:** It’s a good day for Hyundai.

**Aline:** There will be a song.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Aline:** All right. Thank you, guys. I miss you guys. All right, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** We miss you too, Aline.

**John:** And that was Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Ugh, I’m exhausted.

**John:** A national treasure.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** Similarly exhausting is the process of making a movie, and especially a Bollywood epic. And this last week there was news that the makers of Bollywood films were going on strike. There is a sort of general strike against Bollywood, but writers were a particular focus in this issue. And, Craig, you put this on the list, so tell me what you know about the Indian writer’s strike.

**Craig:** Well, this is really bigger than an Indian actor’s strike. This appears to be an Indian movie business strike. So you have directors, actors, music directors, cinematographers, all other technicians, junior artists, screenwriters, lyricists currently on strike, meaning everyone.

We are more familiar with the terms of writer’s deals and what it means to be a writer working under various jurisdictions. So, Anjum Rajabali is the — this is an interesting title — convenor of the Film Minimum Basic Contract. So, they have a union of some kind. I don’t know what labor law is like in India. I suspect quite a bit different than here.

They have something, it just seems to be either very week in areas, or completely disregarded and contravened by the behavior of the companies. Now, interestingly, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about, but the United States is unique among all nations when it comes to copyright. We have work-for-hire law, which says that somebody can commission a unique work from someone and the commissioner can own the copyright entirely. And the person who actually creates the work has no copyright.

No other country has it the way we do. Every other country is protected by the moral rights of authors, including India. And yet they’re still getting around this stuff, which is amazing. So, what it boils down to is that Indian writers don’t have essentially any of the creative rights we have here. They keep copyright, but it is essentially —

**John:** Worthless.

**Craig:** Worthless. It’s stripped down. They don’t get any royalties, because apparently they’re forced to sign them over, or something ridiculous like that, or waive them, which this gentleman argues is illegal. They don’t have any creative rights when it comes to credits. And they’re not guaranteed any credit at all. And this is — and this is amazing to me — they’re not guaranteed credit on screen for work that they share copyright in by law. That’s remarkable and incredibly abusive.

And I just think that those of us here in the United States who work in the intellectual property industry of all sorts should be watching this carefully and supporting the Indian filmmakers and Indian crafts people who are involved in making because it’s an enormous film industry there. Massive. And it is just remarkably exploitative, if this is correct. And I have no reason to think it’s not.

**John:** Yeah, so we will link to the article in the Times of India that talks through what’s going on there. And I can’t pretend that I understand very much about how the Indian film economy works, much less how the labor market in the Indian film economy really works. To me it was just interesting to see and to be reminded of the fact that things are different here and things that are sometimes annoying here, well, they could be much worse. And this a situation where things are much worse, where you have a film industry which is obviously incredibly vibrant and actually very productive, but it’s not necessarily productive in ways that are beneficial to people who do what I do for a living. And that is a real challenge.

So, I mostly read this as a, wow, let’s make sure we don’t slide back from the things we’ve already gained here. And look for like what are the possibilities of the things that do work here, how to spread those out to other places around the world.

**Craig:** No question. It’s a nice reminder of what we have. And all too often I will hear people in our union in their zeal to improve things denigrate what we have to the point of dismissiveness, first world problem whining, et cetera. And here is somebody saying, you know, even — he’s literally saying even the Writers Guild had to strike to get to their enviable position.

So he calls our position currently enviable. And it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s a remarkable thing. It’s good to be reminded of it.

**John:** Yeah. As listeners who are listening overseas, there are Writers Guilds in other nations, but they’re often more guilds of artisans, and they’re more sort of about the craft of things and promoting the craft of things, rather than a true labor organization the way that the Writers Guild of America is.

They may not be able to do any of the protections that something like the Writers Guild can, because they’re just not set up that way. And we could probably point you to which ever episode that Craig really talked through part of why it’s different in the US because of the nature of copyright law and work-for-hire, which seems like an abusive thing, but it allows for writers to be covered in labor unions, which would not be possible if copyright were something that we held onto individually. If we were not employees of a corporation, we couldn’t get some of the things we do get.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And it’s interesting, the Indian situation is remarkable. They have 23 separate unions covering workers in their movie business. And I don’t know exactly how the definition of union there. But I’m just going to say presumably it’s similar. But of those 23 unions, there is one what they call the mother body, FWICE, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees.

So, there is some kind of overarching body that we don’t have here that is coordinating this massive inter-union strike. All 23 unions are on strike. This is precisely the kind of thing that calls for a strike. And I’ve always said the only strike worth taking is the one that you have to take because the only thing worse than it is the alternative, which is essentially death. Union death.

To me, if they don’t get this, they are effectively union dead.

**John:** So, what this massive union reminded me more of than anything else here is IOTSE, which is the union which covers many of the trades in the film industry. And they cover some things which are writing. They cover some animation writing. They cover things that many of our listeners may be involved with. And especially because we have many listeners who also work below the line. And certainly happy that there is IOTSE protection for so many of those job. But the IOTSE protection for crafts like screenwriting and animation writing, they’re not as strong as what the Writers Guild is able to provide for those writing services. And I hope that in the zeal to get all Indian film people paid fairly and treated better, and that the creative rights of the writers, directors, lyricists are at least given more than lip service. So, I’ll be curious to see how this shakes out.

And I’m not sure I will necessarily understand how it shakes out because I won’t have a great picture of what it is like right now.

**Craig:** Right. Well, we’ll follow it. And I think once there is a resolution of some kind, hopefully that resolution will make it clear what’s changed. And by looking at what’s changed, we’ll probably have a decent sense of what it was and what it is now.

**John:** Great. So, I’m so excited for this next section, because this is something Craig has recommended. This is actually something you talked through way back when. You had a site called Artful Writer, which if you try to visit artfulwriter.com right now you’ll get redirected because the page has gone away. But through the wonders of Internet archive, Craig was able to find what he wrote about this scene. And the scene is written by Mr. Scott Frank, who we know from Out of Sight. This movie is The Lookout. But he is a screenwriter’s screenwriter. And he is known for writing amazing scripts, but also helping to write a lot of other movies you’ve seen out there in the world.

And this was a scene that you picked out of his movie, The Lookout, and I’d love for everyone to sort of read along with us, but we’re also going to play the clip from the actual finished movie. So it’s not going to be one of those classic Three Page Challenges where you have to download the PDF and read along at home, although that link we’ll be there. We can actually listen to this scene.

But first, I think Craig should set it up, because I watched it without any setup and I was a little bit confused.

**Craig:** Sure. So, The Lookout is essentially a movie about a young many who has a promising future ahead of him. He comes from a wealthy family. And he gets into a terrible car accident. And as a result, he suffers lasting brain injury which is impairing him. It’s not impairing him physically as much as it has disrupted his ability to concentrate, his memory, and to some extent it has damaged his personality. He is a bit of a broken guy.

He actually has to live with another gentleman who is in the same kind of rehabilitation, or I guess you would call it adult monitoring program that he’s in. And this other guy is blind, so that’s his issue. So, you have a blind man and a brain-injured man, both living in an apartment together, kind of helping each other, and looking out for each other.

But The Lookout is not about that. The Lookout is about the fact that this young guy, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and remarkably the character’s name is Chris Pratt.

**John:** Yeah. I found that hilarious.

**Craig:** Isn’t that wild? This movie came out, I want to say, gosh, 2005 maybe, something like that. 2007. So, in 2007 nobody knew about Chris Pratt. [laughs] And so Scott Frank wrote a movie with a character named Chris Pratt. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt. And Chris Pratt is at a bar. His job is he’s the night caretaker at a bank, at a small branch in a rural bank.

And he meets up with an old guy he sort of knew from high school, but doesn’t quite know, and his memory is not working very well. And this guy realizes that Chris works as the night watchman at this bank and slowly starts to pull him into a plan where the bank is going to be robbed, Chris will be the lookout, and he will get a share of the money.

And at this point in the movie, Chris who wasn’t necessarily interested in this has kind of fallen for a bit of a baited hook. The bad guy’s girlfriend is a woman played by Isla Fisher and her name is Luvlee, Luvlee Lemons. And she just thinks Chris is the best. She’s falling for him, and he can’t believe it. And, in fact, she’s come back to the apartment that he shares with Jeff Daniels, who plays the blind gentleman named Lewis. And she has just had sex with him and everything is pretty great.

**John:** With Chris Pratt. With the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character.

**Craig:** Correct. She’s just had sex with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He thinks everything is wonderful. And that’s all really all that Lewis, Jeff Daniel’s character, knows is that something is up. And that’s pretty much it.

**John:** All right. So let me do some descriptive storytelling for people who are listening to this clip, but not watching the clip. So this clip is going to have Isla Fisher and Jeff Daniels. Jeff Daniels is mostly in shadow. Isla Fisher at the start of the scene is at the refrigerator. Then she comes over and sits across from Jeff Daniels as they have their conversation. There are moments at which we cut away and you’ll hear the audio shift. And that’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt listening in the other room to this conversation that’s happening in the main room.

But everything else is just these two characters talking, which is why I think it’s a good scene for our radio theater of Scriptnotes. So, let’s take a listen to the clip.

**John:** All right. And that’s our scene. So, if you want to read along with the script, which is very much like the scene, but there are a few changes in dialogue, you can. That’s also in the show notes, johnaugust.com. There’s a link there for the YouTube if you want to watch the YouTube and see sort of how it was shot.

So, Craig, talk us through what you see in the scene. How you think it’s working and what got you excited about this scene.

**Craig:** Well, to me the scene is really valuable as an instructive tool. We are always looking for examples of good scenes to show to people. Most of the time, what ends up happening is we show them exciting scenes. But exciting scenes are capable of hiding certain deficiencies because they’re full of fun. It’s a little bit like on a cooking show, it’s one thing to say, “Look at this. I made this remarkably complicated soufflé,” versus, “I made you a scrambled egg, but man, it’s a great scrambled egg.” Right?

So, what I loved about this scene was it was paired down to almost the barest minimum you can have in a scene. There is literally I think one or two lines that occur while Luvlee Lemons is walking into the room, but then she sits down and that’s it. It’s just two people sitting, they barely move, and it’s just talking. And, yet, I think it’s a great example of conflict and of what I would call scene harmony.

People will say sometimes, you know, it would be good if your writing were a little tighter. And it’s hard to understand what the hell that means. And what I think it means is that things are serving more than one purpose at a time. So sometimes I think about scenes as moving on three different axes. There’s whatever is going on inside the main character, there is whatever is going on between two characters or two or more characters, and then there is whatever is going on in the world.

And there are wonderful scenes that have only one of those things, but the best scenes to me have all three working together and affecting and impacting each other and kind of unfolding like a little puzzle. So I really thought that there was just some wonderful stuff going on here, and I would love to — I mean, I would literally go through this bit by bit and talk about what I love.

**John:** Great. Let me restate your three things just to make sure that I understand them and maybe anchor them more in people’s minds. So, in any scene, let’s say this is a scene with two characters, you’re looking at what is the inner state of that character, you’re looking at what are they trying to do, what’s driving them, both in the immediate term, but also longer term. So that’s one level of what you’re looking at.

Second level you’re looking at what is the conversation, what is the external thing that they’re showing. So, in this case, it is the ball that they are hitting back and forth. It is their conversation. And so it’s the nature — the scene is really just them talking. So, what words are they choosing, how are they responding to what each other character is saying? How are they both alive and present in that scene, pushing back and forth?

And that third thing is what else is happening in the world. What is the nature — it’s all the scene description, really. It’s the non-dialogue part of this story, which is what is the setting, what are the other sounds, who else is observing this. How does the situation present itself? What is the movement? All those other things that you’re seeing in the scene that aren’t part of the dialogue itself.

Are those these axes you’re looking at?

**Craig:** Yeah. Essentially we’re talking about internal, interpersonal, external.

So, the external ones are the easiest ones. A car crashes into your car. Things happen. Gun shots ring out somewhere. We tend to focus most of our work on the interpersonal. Scenes tend to be mostly about relationships and how people are, like you say, ping-ponging off each other. But there are some wonderful scenes where people are alone and realize the thing.

All of your good revelation moments generally are internal, but we understand them.

The fun of thinking about scenes this way is that you start to focus in on a really important question when you’re writing a scene, every scene, scene after scene after scene. At least one of these states — an internal state, an interpersonal state, an external state — at least one of them must be different at the end of my scene. Or this scene is not a scene. And it doesn’t belong in my movie.

And that’s where we talk — when you and I talk about intention and purpose, this is where the intention and purpose starts to happen. The changing state. What has changed inside of you? Nothing? Fine. What has changed between you and her? Nothing? Fine.

What has just changed in the world? There are times when you can get all three working kind of nicely. And I love that.

**John:** Yeah. Do you want to talk about Scott Frank’s intention as the author as we start this scene, or what the two character’s intention is? Because I think they’re both really interesting things to look at. I mean, Scott Frank has a checklist of things he sort of needs this scene to accomplish narratively and why it needs to fit into the story.

But we can also look at sort of what each of these characters is trying to do over the course of the scene.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s actually a great question to ask. And here’s the nice part and the good news for everybody else. Scott does not have complicated intentions here. Your intentions really never should be that complicated.

Here’s what he’s hoping to accomplish with this scene. He wants Luvlee to be confronted by somebody quite a bit wiser and smarter than the dupe. And he wants that person to start making her feel guilty, because she is guiltable. Whereas her boyfriend, the bad guy, and poor Chris Pratt doesn’t know that that’s her boyfriend because he’s a little brain damaged — her boyfriend is not guiltable. Her boyfriend is just a bad guy.

She’s being used here, too, and so he’s — that’s what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not Lewis is going to become the superhero of this movie to try and stop her. It’s entirely about having her character have a moment where she’s caught and needs to start contemplating a big choice. Am I going to follow through with this plan, or am I actually going to start honor the legitimate feelings I’m having for this dupe I’m supposed to be duping.

**John:** Great. So that is a goal for Scott Frank with his character. So it’s a change he’s trying to effect in Luvlee’s character.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And as much of a change he’s trying to effect, he’s trying to raise the audience’s question about sort of what her real motivations are and whether it’s possible to shift those motivations.

**Craig:** Exactly correct. And that’s key. Because in this moment, he is essentially creating an expectation for a resolvable drama. It’s a question of will she or won’t she. Is she going to do the right thing or the wrong thing? Does she really love him? Does she not really love him? Is she redeemable? Is she not redeemable? What is going to happen to the lookout?

And it all comes out of this scene. But what I find so wonderful about the way Scott has written this is that he took it upon himself to entertain us the entire time. And his entertainment revolves around revealing information about a character, the dreaded backstory, the dreaded exposition, that normally we’re trying to hide and bury. Here, actually works in service of his greater intention.

**John:** Yeah, the backstory he’s trying to reveal here is that issue of like how he became blind, which is one of those sort of like origin stories that weirdly is not so important in the movie as I recall. It never really comes back around. But it helps to explain how he recognizes the kinds of people that she is and that Gary is. That he’s been around those types of people before.

**Craig:** That’s correct. Suddenly his character starts to come into view as somebody that is more than we thought. He seemed like an avuncular, nice, blind fellow who out of brotherly love was helping this poor kid. And yet now we realize perhaps he sees more than we thought, no pun intended. And his revelation of this puts her in an interesting spot. Her response to it is what starts to make us learn about her.

So I want to talk about this interesting little moment here. The way this begins, she’s coming into the kitchen after post-coital to get something to eat. And it’s dark. And he startles her by saying, “Luvlee, I presume.” And he’s sitting at the table, but in the dark, because he doesn’t need lights.

And she sees him and he says to her this kind of nice — I call this Colombo stuff, like I’m going to lure you in by just being a nice guy. I recognize the perfume. Can I offer you some pie? It’s not homemade, but it’s very nice.

And then he says, “Got to watch your figure, I imagine, your line of work. Nice name by the way, Luvlee Lemons.” This is the first time anyone in the movie has mentioned that she’s a stripper. Or that she was a stripper. Oh, this is how he recognizes the perfume. He’s seen her before, sort of, like he’s been around. He knows that she’s a dancer, even though he can’t see.

And she admits it now very casually. And I love this. And this is when I talk about subtext and dialogue, a lot of times new writers struggle. They have a response. This guy has just picked at this little scab, this thing that she thought was hidden away. And he’s right away in a very pleasant, unassuming manner just gone, oh, I noticed you have this little scab here. Let me pick at it.

Of course, if we put ourselves in the point of view of a character hearing that, we immediately get defensive. And we want that person to be defensive. But in reality, if you think about the way you are with people, when someone puts you on the defensive, if you are a certain kind of person, a capable person, the first thing you do is immediately attempt to mask that you are defensive, because you understand inherently, but to show that is to show weakness.

**John:** So her line back to that is, “I don’t dance anymore. I was never very good at it.” It’s a way of throwing away a reaction to it. Just like, oh, that doesn’t bother me at all.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oh yeah, no, that’s right. Yeah. I was a stripper. I wasn’t very good at it. See, I can play the casual game, too. But already now, and for those of you who write three pages and send them in, think about how much we have learned in a half a page. An enormous amount, not just about who she was as a person, but about who she is now as a person.

And, then, there’s some comedy, which is great. She waves her hand in front of his face. This was a big laugh in the theater because she starts moving her hand in front of his face and he says, “Please tell me you’re not waving your hand in front of my face.” Big laugh. And it’s funny. But also why is she doing that? And you learn something else about her character now. She’s not willing to take it on faith that he really is blind.

What a fascinating thing to reveal about somebody, because now just casually — and by the way I do believe that when we’re in an audience we don’t necessarily pick it up overtly, but it seeps into us that she is suspicious. And who is suspicious of a blind man? Maybe somebody who is a little bit of a con-artist themselves.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing which this is doing is showing that sort of third axis you talked about, which is what is the actual situation giving you. And so this is the setting, this is — it’s what it’s really like to be in that space. And she’s not convinced he’s blind. He’s already sitting in the dark. And so she’s doing a very natural human reaction which is is he really seeing me and he gets to hit that ball right back to her.

**Craig:** Right. And notice that at this point we don’t necessarily know what Lewis’s goal is. But, as every scene is a little mini-movie, the protagonist of the scene has a goal. The goal, the intention, is what is driving everything in the scene. It is driving his point of view. Everything he says. How he responds. And for the performer, how they are going to play the part.

He has a goal right now. We don’t yet know what it is. So then she says, “Have you been blind your whole life?” And it’s a perfectly bland question. And you might think, well why is she just asking a bland question right now?

What I get off of it is that this is a smart person. I notice that the way she answered his stripper question. She’s playing dumb. She’s playing innocent ingénue, because that’s the safest move. And he says, “Most of it.” And she says, “How did it happen?” And he says, “I looked at the sun too long.” And she says, “Wow, you hear about that.”

Now, another big laugh. When she says, “Wow, you hear about that,” here’s what he doesn’t say, “Uh, I think you know that I didn’t go blind by looking at the sun too long.” He lets it go. Instead he says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?”

Now I love this. So, again, playing at home, for your Three Page Challenge, and by the way, Scott cheated. It’s actually 3.5 pages, but fine. We’re at the top of page two. And by the top of page two I now know that she is a not trusting person. She is crafty enough to hide her defensiveness. I know that she used to be a stripper. I know that she likes to play dumb to avoid being held accountable. And I also know that he notices that she’s doing it and is going to move right by it, because he’s now interested in upping the ante. He’s chasing something and he feels like he can get her.

We are watching a fight, whether we know it or not. This is good as karate as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** So the next phase here is the “let me ask you a question, what’s your real name? Why, you going to Google me? If I did, what would I find? Probably nothing.” Here you’re making clear what is the intention of the scene, that Lewis actually is approaching the scene with some agenda, which is to try to figure out who she really is. And she is deflecting these questions. She’s answering a question with a question, which is a very classic technique to sort of avoid answering anything.

I think our expectation is that he’s going to keep asking her questions when in fact he doesn’t really care about the answers to those questions. He mostly wants to demonstrate that he’s on to her.

**Craig:** Right. Great point. So, what is the value of demonstrating that you know you’re on to somebody? You start to see what his real purpose is. He doesn’t really care, because he already — I mean, he doesn’t really care what she’s up to, because he knows it’s no good. He already knows it. He knew it before she walked in the room.

What he wants to do is make her know that he knows it, and make her start to question whether she wants to go through it. Whatever it is, he will not know at the end of this discussion what these two are doing. So, she again continues to play dumb. And he says, “If I did what would I find?” “Probably nothing.”

And that is a poor me. You know, like I’m no, you know, I’m no good. Now she’s trying a little sympathy. And he doesn’t pick it up. And he says, “And what happens if I Google Gary?” That’s the bad buy. That’s the boyfriend. And she goes, “I don’t know.”

“How’d you meet Chris?” Great. Great.

Now, I mention this because a lot of times when I read screenplays by new writers, or seasoned writers, arguments become very much to the point. And oftentimes in life they are very much to the point. It’s a rare thing to have a fight with your wife that goes like this. They don’t. But then again, fights with your wife, fights with your husband, they’re fairly mundane and low stakes. Or if they’re high stakes, they’re between two reasonable people who are not trying to entertain anyone with a narrative.

These two people are dancing. So much fun to watch.

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about just the words on the page, because this is basically just a two-hander, just dialogue conversation. But Scott is breaking up the page with these interjections.

So, Lewis asks, “And what happens if I Google Gary.” In the scene description, “She shrugs, hums ‘I don’t know.'” So this is a case where there’s sort of dialogue being put in the scene description, but it’s basically helping us show what it is that she’s trying to avoid saying, the I don’t know.

And also just keeping us from being just a solid gutter of dialogue on the page.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the shrug and the hum as an action does help us understand a little bit better as we’re reading it. This is let’s say we have not seen the movie. We’re thinking about making the movie. It helps us get a little bit more of what she’s really doing there with this clear change.

Now, another wonderful moment here.

“How’d you meet Chris?” Nine out of ten writers would say, “Why are you changing the subject, Luvlee?” Because that feels fun. But I love that Lewis just answers it. Because he’s better than she is at this. He has no problem being a little patient here. Sometimes in chess you move your piece backwards. Great. This is jujitsu.

You know, there’s times to punch, there are times to feint. A lot of writers forget about the feinting part. So he answers. “Center put us together a few years ago.” She says, “And now he’s your best friend.” Lewis says, “He’s a good friend.” And she says, “Maybe your only friend?”

Now, by the way, this is now at the 1.5 page mark. Let us review. She used to be a stripper. She is suspicious. She knows something about con men or at least has that instinct in her. Lewis is insightfully determining that she’s up to something, he’s not sure what. And he’s not going to let her off. She tries to play dumb. It doesn’t work.

She tries to get sympathy. It doesn’t work. She tries to change the subject. It doesn’t work because he lets her change the subject which takes the power away from it. So now she’s going to stick it to him. This is the first moment where she jabs back and lets him know don’t think that this is going to be that easy.

And so what is his response, John?

**John:** “Hey Luvlee, that thing about the sun, it was a total lie, total bullshit.” So this is, okay, you’re going to hit me with this, then I’m going to lay down a few more of my cards here on the table. And it’s a change that we’re seeing here. Now I want to acknowledge that I am not as much of a fan of this middle section of the scene as I think you are. And I think there is a way this could have been taken out and we could have gotten a slightly better through line on this.

But I do like it more on the page than I liked it staged in that what Scott chooses here on the page, that may be your only friend, I could imagine a line reading of that where the energy really shifted dramatically in that scene. As filmed, I didn’t feel that shift as much I felt the possibility of that shift here on the page.

I think the transition from the earning “that may be your only friend,” and then getting to how he’s getting to “Hey Luvlee,” I really see the possibilities here on the page. I didn’t see it actually performed as much as it was cut together.

**Craig:** Look, I do love the scene as it is, but I understand what you’re saying. This is where the craft of screenwriting can be frustrating. Because, let’s put it this way, the person who staged and shot the scene is the same guy that wrote the scene.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So now imagine what it’s like when you write the scene and somebody else — I mean, the way that things are imagined are often so different, for those of who write them, or those of us reading the writing than they are from what we see. And there will always be those things.

But I do love how Lewis — so on the page she says, “Maybe your only friend?” He doesn’t answer that. Finally leans forward. Okay, I was waiting for you to show that you had a stinger. You did. Thank you. Now let’s talk real. Let’s get to it.

We’ve been dancing, feinting, and jabbing for a page and a half. You’ve now finally admitted that we’re in a fight and that you’re capable. Fine. Here we go.

So he says I’m going to now tell you the story of — he tells her the story of how he went blind. And what’s fascinating is we were not expecting this at all. We had no idea how he went blind. In fact, I remember watching the movie thinking I just assumed that he was blind. I didn’t know that there was a moment he became blind. And, in fact, when he said I stared at the sun too long, I presumed that was just his snarky way of saying I was born blind, duh.

But, no, and now he tells this story. And the story that he tells says that he went blind because he was one of the people cooking meth back before cooking meth was fashionable, and back before people knew what they were doing cooking meth. And he did not know that working with those chemicals in an unventilated room could blind you.

And he says something which probably could have been avoided had I just stopped and bothered to ask a simple question: what am I doing here. Mm-hmm. And at last, right, he reveals his goal. Not only does he reveal it — so, I just love the synchronicity. I love the harmony. What is happening here?

We have learned something that is a fact about our character, his back story. We have learned something about his internal life. Suddenly, this guy has become a different guy to us. He is not just a nice sweet blind man who is worried about his friend. He’s a criminal. Once a criminal, always a criminal. He’s a bad guy, too, in his own way.

And we now know why he’s blind and we have a certain appreciation for the tragedy and drama of that. We now know why he’s protective of Chris, somebody who is innocent and not a criminal and yet on the verge of becoming one. And we now know why he sees her for what she is.

And we also get all of that to change their relationship, which has been changing throughout to something very, very different.

**John:** So, he is telling this story about himself, but he’s putting her into the place of the story. He’s saying, like, you know, I did these criminal things and I should have stopped to ask myself what am I doing here. And that the I pronoun is really meant to be for her. Like what is she doing here? And that she should be asking herself that same question. It’s a way of very classically you tell a story about yourself hoping that the other person will see themselves in the story that you’re telling.

And it’s a smart move for Lewis to do that I largely believe, because he’s able to sell it as if it’s answering her question about how he became blind, but it’s moving forward his agenda with her.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And his — as his tactics have shifted, we arrive at this fascinating one, because the initial tactic was to be gentle, and then it was to be snarky, and then it was to be challenging. And now it’s to be empathetic. When he tells her this story, he’s revealing something of himself almost in trade. What he’s saying is I’m you. Don’t think of me as not you. I’m actually in the thieves guild, too.

So, pay attention now. You’re not getting hectored and lectured by a do-gooder. I’m trying to save you here. Then her response to that is, “What a sad story, if it’s true.” He hasn’t gotten her —

**John:** Yeah. So, once that story, if it’s true, that feels like a recall to “maybe your only friend.” It’s her finding backbone again. My — if I have an issue with Luvlee in this scene overall, it’s that she’s being asked to play dumb and smart simultaneously. And so I look at her lines at the bottom of page two, when he says, “It was a lie. Total bullshit.” She goes, “Oh…” “We started to make money.” She asks, “You blew yourself up?”

And, again, it’s hard to separate myself from the performance that I saw before I read the page, but it seemed like an earnest question, like she’s asking with a sort of baby doll voice, “You blew yourself up,” as if she really believed it. Whereas that doesn’t seem to track with the intelligence that I saw with “maybe your only friend,” or at least what her intention was with “maybe your only friend.” Does that make sense?

**Craig:** It does. The way I got it, I mean, when I watched the movie and the scene again, is that this is her move. Every character has a move, and this move has worked for her a thousand times, a million times. This is someone who has stolen a lot of money and manipulated a lot of hearts while she has lived a sad life. She’s probably also lost quite a few bites in her day.

And she is a stripper and she is using her body and she is using her wiles to survive. And she can’t help but presume that her best shot, her right hook, is going to be the one that will take this guy down. And so she’s going to keep going back to it, like a fighter with a bad habit who can’t believe it’s not working.

So, you know, you can look at her kind of choosing to do the same thing and expecting different results as a flaw in the execution, but you can also look at it as a flaw in her character, which is the way I do. That she can’t stop. But when she says, “What a sad story, if it’s true,” you’re right. That is her coming back to, okay, let me drop that tactic, it’s not working. Let me try a different one.

And also let me reveal that my initial suspicion of you, waving the hand in front of your face, hasn’t gone away. I don’t know — I’m not willing to let you in yet, give you the credibility to make me feel something that I’m probably already feeling. And this is when Lewis finally just says, “We’ve arrived.” We’re at page 2.5 now. “Tell me, what are you all cooking, sweetheart? Why are you here?”

And this is also just craft now, folks. He’s cooked food. She’s going to eat the food. He’s already eating the food. He’s a meth cook. What are you all cooking up here? Subtle. It’s not a big deal. It just makes things feel like a piece, which I like.

**John:** Yeah. It’s rhyming. It’s rhyming a word literally. I mean, it’s rhyming an idea. And using that to make it clear that there’s intention behind the words that Lewis is choosing.

**Craig:** Correct. And so we enter act three. Because I really think of that — that’s like let’s talk about the scene like a movie, act one presumes, and we get into act two when Lewis says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?” That’s the beginning of act two. The end of act two is, “Tell me, what are you all cooking?” Now we begin the climax.

She is now in full struggle mode. She’s losing. And she’s going to just start now throwing wild punches. “Same reason you are. Chris Pratt.”

He says, “Sweet. Of course, not quite as sweet as meeting at a bar, or giving someone a cellphone.” He knows things. She’s squirming.

Now she just says, “Gary wants to help Chris.” That’s out of nowhere. That was a mistake, right? Like you know how, I don’t know if you ever looked at the chess column in a newspaper where they analyze a game, or a bridge column. They report the moves. And when they get to a move that’s a mistake, they put a question mark next to it. This gets a question mark next to it. She made a mistake. And he’s got her now. And he says, “I’ve known lots of Garys. A few Luvlees, too.” [laughs] It’s so good.

She says, “Meaning?” But it’s over. And he says, “Meaning that something tells me you don’t really believe that you’re going to be invited to the next Pratt Thanksgiving.” Ow. Right? Just like, look, you’re a stripper. You expect me to buy this bullshit that the wealthy Pratt family is going to welcome brain-damaged Chris’s new stripper girl into the house? You don’t believe that. You don’t think anyone would ever believe that. That’s not what you’re up to here at all. This is about Gary. What are you doing?

And she says, “Well I could be.” And he says, just in case you didn’t get it, “Sometimes I wake up, I think I can see, until I walk into a door. The Luvlee Lemons of the world don’t end up with Chris Pratt.”

And she says, “Well thank you, asshole.” That’s it, right? She’s, okay, I’ve lost. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of admitting I lost. I’m just going to revert back to hurt girl and I’m going to stick with my lie.

And so now he has a problem. Because she’s pulled the rip cord and she’s exiting. And this is a great thing to think about when you’re writing arguments. When we have arguments with people, we’re in three states. We are pressing. We are sparring. Or we’re retreating. An argument is going well when you’re pressing. It means you’ve got them on the ropes and you’re just hitting them, right? Sparring means you’re in that ping pong zone. You guys are going back and forth. It’s an even match. Retreating is when you know this is not going well for you.

And when we are losing an argument, everyone has a strong instinct to say something that will get them out of it. They’re trying to run away now. So this is when people say things like, “I don’t know what you want from me.” Or, “What do you want from me?” Or —

**John:** “Let’s agree to disagree.” Yeah, the closers. Yeah.

**Craig:** Get me out of this. What makes this stop? And the problem is it’s effective. The person who has been pressing suddenly now knows they’re getting out of the ring now. Or the bell is about to ring and the round is about to end. I need to just throw the punch, the only punch that I have left. And so here, at the very top of page four, he says, “Sad but true, but it takes me back to that original question, Luvlee. So tonight, in the dark, let me help you out. Help you out. And ask it again: what are you doing here?”

And she has no response. At which point he gets up and says, “There’s some killer chicken salad in the fridge. My secret is the apples. Gives it a nice texture.” He’s like, all right. That was it. I’ve got nothing left for you.

But we get that his goal has been achieved to some extent. We can see it in her face. He’s planted the seed now. And it’s not a seed of you’re a bad person. And it’s not a seed of stop what you’re doing, or tell me what you’re doing. It’s a seed of using guilt to make her reconsider whatever the hell it is.

**John:** Yep. So, let’s talk about the differences between the scene we’re reading on the page and the scene as staged. And so one of the big differences is that in the scene in the film itself, we cut away to see Chris Pratt is listening to some part of the conversation. And so that is not reflected in these pages. So he’s overhearing some of this, which definitely changes the nature of our audience focus, because we’re always going to be sympathetic to our hero, and sort of what our hero knows. And it changes how Chris is perceiving both this girl and his roommate.

And so it really shifts the nature of the scene to insert that cutaway. It takes away from the sparring match to a certain degree. It’s like every time you cut away to an audience member in a boxing match. Like, well, you’re not in the boxing match to some degree. And it does change the nature of this conflict, because a scene about two people is now a scene about three people.

That’s one thing I noticed. I don’t know at what point during the process the decision to include Chris in that shot occurred.

The other thing I want to take a look at is if you’re watching the scene on YouTube, the conversation between the two of them, once they’re seated at the table, is very much the tennis match. It’s very much I hit the ball, you hit the ball, I hit the ball, you hit the ball. And doesn’t change a lot over the nature of the argument. There’s no — while there’s some pauses, the film itself doesn’t reset itself for some of those other moments and shifts along the way. So it’s a very straightforward way of covering this, which may be the best choice for it. But you can imagine a director taking other ways to sort of visualize what the shifts are in the conversation.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I suspect that the cutaways to Chris were something that they worked out maybe as they were planning how to shoot that. Because they needed to know that they were going to be in his room and shooting him listening. But it’s not on the page here, so I suspect it was a later decision. It’s an interesting one. And it’s also interesting and brave that Scott has this scene dialed in as carefully as he does, and yet is okay with losing some of the words, even in the audio, to really focus on Chris and how this is sinking in.

But it is an interesting choice and I actually think it pays off well, because we want to know that he also is starting to be concerned. And we want to know that this can set up conflict between him and Lewis.

It’s only interesting for Luvlee to do the right thing if she knows that she can get away with it. And so seeing Chris make a choice to believe her puts her and us in a more interesting dramatic state of mind.

The execution of the scene editorially, you’re correct, is very much about competing singles. You know, it’s funny, I remember talking with Scott. It was actually during the process when he was editing A Walk Among the Tombstones. And he said that he kind of had this big epiphany moment in post where he made a concerted effort along with his editor to reduce cuts and try and stay in takes as long as he could, especially in moments like this. And there are some excellent moments.

Another really, really good movie I think, A Walk Among the Tombstones, if you haven’t seen it. Some really good interesting conversations in that movie. And, yes, I agree that when we cut the audience will not necessarily make the conscious calculation that you’re cheating, but it starts to sink in. We know that the rhythm is being manufactured rather than actually being played. It’s a huge thing in comedy.

I mean, one of the great rules of comedy I learned from David Zucker is if you’re going to do a physical gag and it’s a thing where something happens that causes someone to get hurt, it must be in one. You cannot show the thing that’s going to cause them to be hurt and then cut to them being hurt. You’ve lost the credit for rigging the gag.

And similarly here, I do think that there are a couple of spots where it would have been better had it been in one long shot, to see that the two of them actually have that rhythm. Of course, who knows? See, the thing is —

**John:** Yeah, we don’t see the footage. And we don’t know what the actual day was like and sort of what the —

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This may have absolutely been the best version of this scene with what they had, and that’s totally great. And there may be reasons why these were the performances that really landed. And so I can’t sort of second guess what that is.

Just in the hypothetical version, I love that you were talking about the physicality of her, and her stripper body, because I think that’s a real potential that her nature is — it would actually help sell some of those lines I had an issue with. If her nature is just to go to her baby doll voice and sort of use her body and then — I would love to see the moment of recognition where she goes, oh shit, I can’t do this because he’s blind. He can’t see my tits. So this is not — I need to stop doing this thing.

That is a potential, but that only can play if you have a little bit wider shots to sort of see what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I wish I could round up movie reviewers and force them to sit and watch movies be painstakingly created, I wish they could see this. There are times when for whatever reason you can’t do what you want. It’s not that you didn’t know. It’s that you could do it. One of the things that comes up all the time when you’re shooting is well how will we cut this. Will it cut together? But, you’re also — when you’re doing takes you’re thinking where do I get the scissors in here? And can I get the scissors in? And do I need to get the scissors in?

Some of the most valuable direction that I’ve seen directors give actors is, “Great. Let’s do this again. And now let’s do it faster.” Because if there is a rhythm to this that is at the tempo I want, I won’t need to cut. But sometimes they flub a line. Stuff happens. This is life. So, I would have been fascinated to have been there that day.

But for people that are writing scenes, what’s so fantastic about this is that it really does focus everything down to — it’s as if Scott has pulled away every easy trick available. There are no guns. There’s no chasing. No one is entering or exiting once it begins. There’s literally barely light. It’s just two people and it’s entirely about the internal and the interpersonal.

And then at the end it is creating an external. It is creating this state that is going to either occur or not. And we know there is going to be a choice in this movie that’s coming down the line.

So, so well done and really worth studying.

**John:** Yeah, I think Scott Frank has a career ahead of him if he keeps writing at this level. We should all be so lucky.

So, Craig, thank you for that suggestion. I think it really is great to look at some finished — we’ve done episodes where we’ve looked at finished movies and we’ve talked through Raiders and Ghost, but this is great to look at sort of the words on the page, the scene, and be able to really focus in on just one specific moment.

I think it’s now time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually just a simple thing you can do if you’re ever traveling overseas. You will tend to have a little bit of extra money in whatever native currency as you head back to the US, or head back to your home country. A great thing to spend that on is iTunes gift cards. And the reason why you may want to do that is there will often be situations where you want to watch something that is not available in your home country.

So, for instance, we love to watch Downton Abbey. And we love to watch it when it comes out in the UK, not when it comes out here. Because we have some iTunes gift cards from the UK, we’re able to set up a British iTunes account and use those to fund it. And so we’re able to spend that money to watch Downton Abbey. Sometimes even a movie will be available on iTunes UK and not be available here. And so we spend that iTunes money to do that.

So, really useful if you’re traveling to — if you’re an American traveling to the UK, traveling to France if you love French movies, or Spain, to spend that leftover $25 you have to buy an iTunes gift card.

If you are traveling from overseas to the US, by all means do the same thing because it’s a way to get some of those shows like very soon Crazy Ex-Girlfriend before you might be able to see them in your home country.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a One Old Cool Thing. It’s Games Magazine. First of all, it’s a magazine. My wife gets Bon Appetit. She loves Bon Appetit. She has actually a very cool thing. They have like a club of people in my town that get together on a particular like one day out of the month and each one is assigned a thing from Bon Appetit magazine. And I actually think Bon Appetit is great. But other than that print magazine, everything else is gone except for Games.

Games Magazine has been around forever. It was around when I was a kid. And David Kwong, my favorite magician, and I — who we’re constantly doing puzzles together — he said you’ve got to just get Games Magazine again, because they have really good puzzles. And they do.

So, I love that I can still support a good old paper magazine that shows up at your house once a month. I forgot the fun of a surprise subscription. You know, when it comes in the mail it’s like, oh my god, I got Games Magazine. So, that’s my One Cool Thing this week, Games Magazine.

**John:** Fantastic. So, you’ll see links to the things we talked about on the show at our show notes at johnaugust.com/podcast or /Scriptnotes. Both will get you there. We are on iTunes. So, if you’re listening to the show through the website, better that you go to iTunes and actually subscribe, that way we get credit for you subscribing and other people can find the show.

We have an app for Android and for iOS. You can find that in their respective app stores. Through those and through Scriptnotes.net you can access all the back catalogue, so you can listen back to episode one, or to the Christmas show where Aline first talked about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with Rachel Bloom.

If you would like to send us a question, you can write short things on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, write in to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you have a t-shirt that’s on its way, give it an extra few days. And if it has not shown up then write into orders@johnaugust.com, and that’s what Stuart checks to make sure people have actually gotten t-shirts in right.

Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth, who has written many of our great outros. If you have an outro for us, just write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to wherever you have it on SoundCloud or wherever and we will put it in the hopper. So thank you for everyone who has sent in those great outros. And that is our show this week. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/2015-panels/)
* [Train hero Spencer Stone stabbed](http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article38180571.html), and [Scriptnotes, 214](http://johnaugust.com/2015/clerks-and-recreation)
* [Canter’s](https://www.cantersdeli.com/home)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular), [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular) [152](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90), [161](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-cheap-cut-of-meat-soaked-in-butter), [175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes), [180](http://johnaugust.com/2015/bad-teachers-good-advice-and-the-default-male) and [200](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-200th-episode-live-show)
* The New York Times on [The Great American Musical, Side B, in ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/arts/television/the-great-american-musical-side-b-in-my-crazy-ex-girlfriend.html?_r=0)
* Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgen (and Aline) on [Scriptnotes, 175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes)
* [Bola Ogun](https://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm4459589/?ref_=sch_int), and the full cast and crew of [Crazy Ex-Girlfriend](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4094300/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) on IMDb
* [Bollywood to go on indefinite strike from October 3](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Bollywood-to-go-on-indefinite-strike-from-October-3/articleshow/49183357.cms) from The Times of India
* Scott Frank on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Frank) and [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291082/)
* The Artful Writer on [Scene Harmony](https://web.archive.org/web/20120323053754/http://artfulwriter.com/?p=216)
* Three Pages by [Scott Frank](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/luvlee.pdf), and [the scene from The Lookout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmYaR_ZllQ)
* [Use gift cards from other countries to make purchases in foreign iTunes stores](http://www.elftronix.com/easy-method-make-us-itunes-purchase-from-any-country/)
* [Games Magazine](http://gamesmagazine-online.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))