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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 698 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss movies that never existed, from high-profile projects that got shelved at the last minute, to our own experiences with unmade projects. Then, it’s time for some listener questions covering multi-language dialogue and multi-part movies, among other things.

In our bonus segment for premium members, if no one paid us to write screenplays anymore, Craig, if they would never get made, would we continue to write them as a form?

Craig: Uh. [chuckles]

John: Yes, you have an hour to think about that.

Craig: I don’t know if I need an hour, but all right.

John: We’ll talk about the pros and cons of the screenplay format. It’s a literary thing independent of a way to make a movie. Craig, this last week, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Which was really fun. I’d done the second half of it six years ago. This week, I did the first half. As I was running it, I was thinking like, “I wonder if Craig knows these things.” How do they know when a racer crosses the finish line? How do they know the time of a racer?

Craig: If I had to guess, I don’t think it’s as fancy as like an RFID tag in a bib.

John: It is an RFID tag in a bib.

Craig: Oh, it is? It is as fancy as that.

John: The day before the race, you go and you pick up your bib, and that’s the thing you have paper-clipped onto your shirt, or we have little fancy magnets now because we’re fancy. On the back of that bib is an RFID tag, and so as you’re running the race, you’re constantly passing through gates that are tracking that you ran through. There’s an app that you install on your phone-

Craig: For friends and family to follow on.

John: -to find you, but also, it tells you in real time what your pace is.

Craig: Oh, so you actually carry a phone with you as you’re running?

John: I do carry a phone with me as I’m running.

Craig: Because that’s extra weight.

John: It’s extra weight, but it’s fine. Most people are, I think, are running with phones these days.

Craig: Running with phones, yes. It would be rough if you were tracking this, your loved one is in a marathon and they just stop.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: They stop for a long time, then you hear sirens. It’s rough.

John: It’s not good.

Craig: No.

John: It’s helpful for your friends and family because that way, they can figure out where you are on the race, so they can come and cheer you on on a certain place.

Craig: Yes, that makes absolute sense. It’s a nicer scenario than the one I suggested.

John: The whole idea of RFID and tracking leads to a bigger question because earlier this summer, I was on a cruise in Alaska. On this boat, you wear this little medallion that has an RFID with you, and it’s super handy because, again, you pull up the app and it’s like, “I want a cup of coffee.” Wherever you are on the boat, [crosstalk] press one button, they find you, they bring you this stuff. It’s nice.

Craig: Oh, they’re bringing it to you?

John: They bring it to you, not to your cabin, just to you-

Craig: To you.

John: -directly, wherever you are.

Craig: Yes, right now, I guess our phones are that thing, but eventually, we’ll all be chipped at birth.

John: Both the race and the cruise ship were cases where that kind of constant surveillance I liked, but I don’t want to have it everywhere all the time. I don’t want to be forced into it.

Craig: No, I don’t want to have a situation where a corporation can track me wherever I go, although, currently, that is the situation I have. Let’s face it.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: They know everything. I was just thinking in my mind, if you did start to chip human beings at birth.

John: Yes, because you’re a parent who wants to know where your kid is.

Craig: Let’s say the state has decided. In our rougher scenario, every human shall be chipped. I’m trying to think biologically where to put this so that it won’t be dislodged by growth. I’m struggling. I think everything grows. Nothing is fully sized when you’re born, not even one little tiny thing.

John: Yes, your eyes are bigger, proportionally bigger, but the eyes are still going to continue to grow.

Craig: Everything grows, so I don’t know where to put it.

Drew Marquardt: With animals, they’d put it under the skin and it sits on top.

Craig: Animals grow, yes, and they don’t grow as much as we do. Humans are ridiculous. We’re born so stupidly small compared to–

John: Early because–

Craig: Early, because of our dumb heads.

John: Otherwise, we wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

Craig: Yes, but I think you could put it under the skin, I suppose. I just wonder if it would get irritated, or it could move, it could shift.

John: Yes, you might swap that at a certain point.

Craig: Yes, maybe you do like a little baby tag. Then you do a kid tag. It’d be great. Kids would love it.

John: Oh, fantastic. Alrighty, the issue of tracking your kids and turning on Find My Friends and Find My is a thing. I remember talking with you at a certain point, and we realized that I think our daughters are at the same concert in Boston. You’re like, “Let me pull up,” and was like, “Oh yes, she’s there.” You did that. I didn’t do that because I sort of have an unspoken thing that I don’t find my friends when she’s not in Los Angeles.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I never have to look at it, but when Jessie was in school in Boston, I never went to go look for her. I would look for Melissa, like, “Where’s my wife?” Always at the tennis. The tennis is where she is. It has a list. It’s like, “Melissa is 8 miles away. Jessica is 3,000-something miles away.” Then I’d be like, “Oh yes, look, there she is in Boston somewhere.”

John: I only share location with family. I don’t share with

Drew. That feels like–

Craig: I share my location with Drew, which is weird.

John: It’s just strange. Yes.

Craig: I just want him to know. No, just family. Just really, just actually, not even my full family, just Melissa and Jessica. You know what I don’t use enough? When you are meeting somebody somewhere in a large public place, you can share your location with them, which obviously Drew and his generation does constantly. I’m like, “Oh yes, I forgot.”

John: Yes. I will do that temporarily, but I don’t do it with friends. Drew, do you share your location with any friends?

Drew: I only do the temporary. Even me and my wife don’t share. We don’t have Find my Friends.

Craig: What? Oh wow.

John: Wow.

Drew: Pure trust.

Craig: It’s not about trust. It’s not like I think, “Oh, she’s going whoring again.” I–

John: To me, it’s always like, how close is Mike to being home?

Craig: Yes, exactly. If I’m going to order food, should I see if she’s going to be here or–?

Drew: I don’t know. It feels like a threshold that because I haven’t crossed it yet, I don’t want to cross it yet.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: You’re up to something.

Drew: [laughs]

John: It’s all– [crosstalk]

Craig: I am absolutely [unintelligible 00:06:01] Drew is up to something.

Drew: I’m whoring.

Craig: You’re whoring?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I love whore as a verb–

John: He’s a secret assassin. He’s out there killing people.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. Some follow up. Hey, remember we wrote a book?

Craig: Oh my goodness. We wrote a book, and John, I have an author page-

John: On Amazon.

Craig: -on Amazon, which as you can imagine is populated with almost nothing. It’s got my picture.

John: Yes, got your picture. People have been sending Drew their pre-order receipts, which is great.

Craig: Amazing. How are we doing? Are we going to be doing a lot of signing?

Drew: We have about 150 so far.

Craig: Oh, that’s pretty good. Of just people that sent receipts?

Drew: Just people who sent receipts.

John: Oh. A reminder, if you pre-order the book from wherever you order it from, so not just Amazon, but any place– [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure, anywhere.

John: Send your little receipt through to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. We’re not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. It could be a bonus chapter. It could be some successful video report.

Craig: It could be a brand new car.

John: It could be something cool, but we’ll send that out well before the book comes out.

Craig: Do we have any sense, other than the receipts that you have received, does Amazon tell you how many people are buying it or–?

John: Pre-ordering it? I think Crown, our publisher in the US, has had this,-

Craig: Oh, they got– [crosstalk]

John: -and so at some point, they’ll tell us.

Craig: At some point they’ll give us the bad news.

John: They’ll say, “We’re really worried, John, Craig.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: No, I think they’re happy with almost anything.

Craig: Wow.

John: No, because here’s the thing, it’s–

Craig: That’s a low bar.

John: There are books that need to be giant hits out of the gate and needs to hit those lists. We are a catalog title, where there’s like, we’re evergreen.

Craig: We are not the latest Stephen King novel.

John: Yes. Questions that I got off of Reddit and other people asking, audio book. Yes, if you see, there’s a listing with a little button for audio book, there’s plans for an audio book. There’s nothing to announce yet, but there’s going to be an audio book. It’s not me and Craig talking.

Craig: Should we just get Ryan Reynolds to do it? [laughs] Just hold Ryan down and force him to do it at some point?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’ll be fun.

John: Yes, good.

Craig: Because occasionally, in the middle of an audio book, you get the sense that the person reading it is a hostage. [chuckles] They try and run, and there’s scuffle, and then they come back and resume reading.

John: For the podcast, they did lauch about the [unintelligible 00:08:02] books. The episode I did about the audiobook was actually really fascinating because I met the guy in LA, who actually recorded the book, and just his whole process was great and crazy.

Crown came to us and said like, “Hey, do you and Craig want to record the audiobook?” I’m like, “No. We record a podcast every week, and that’s plenty. No. No, thank you.

Craig: Yes, it’s too much reading.

John: It’ll be great to have a real professional do it.

Craig: Yes, terrific, so Ryan Reynolds?

John: Or somebody like Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Yes, somebody bigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: Tom Hanks? [chuckles]

John: Yes. Crown said we should go for Tom Hanks.

Craig: Tom Hanks would be great.

John: Yes.

Craig: is he doing stuff? We’ll check into it.

John: I’ve heard that the Britney Spears biography that is read by Michelle Williams is incredible, so maybe Michelle Williams should be the choice.

Drew: That would be perfect.

Craig: That’s kind of amazing.

John: The person who I think is actually going to record it, is actually listening to the podcast right now, and he’s so upset that–

Craig: He’s like, “I’m an effin’ person.”

John: He’s an effin’ person in the world.

Craig: I’m an effin’ person.

John: Other questions were about the international versions, and so, there are no plans right now for a translation, probably because if you’re listening to this podcast, you speak English, you can probably read English. People ask about like, “Oh, I want to buy it in Europe. I want to buy it in Asia. Where do I get it from?” I asked, and the real answer is, wherever you get your English books is where you should go, so go to whatever bookstore or whatever online site is that you buy books in English, because they will have it. They’ll either get the US or the UK version. They’re both basically the same.

Craig: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that the marketplace will determine these things, if there’s a clamoring from a particular country. I’m looking at you, Brazil.

John: Yes, my agent was saying that there are cases, you’ll be in India, and you’ll see the US and the UK version side by side on a shelf. That’s just what happens.

Craig: Does just that color is spelled differently?

John: No. Honestly, the UK version is not changing our spelling.

Craig: What is the difference? Page size?

John: I think page size and slightly different pricing.

Craig: Oh.

John: Because of imports and–

Craig: What, tariffs?

John: Tariffs and things.

Craig: What? What? What?

John: What? What? What? Books are physical things that are printed in places. Other bits of follow up. My game Birdigo that I made with Corey Martin is out now on Steam. It’s a whopping $8.49.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s a huge burden.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Ugh. We’ve gotten so many good reviews in the press,-

Craig: Great.

John: -and we’re currently 100% positive on Steam itself, which is great.

Craig: Only 100%?

John: Only 100%.

Craig: If I go in there just as a jerk, I can get it to 99%? [chuckles]

John: Weirdly, it would actually help us a little bit because how Steam ratings work is that it’s based on total number of reviews. We’re at the threshold where we’re listed as positive, but once we get to the next threshold of reviews, which is 50 or 100, then it becomes very positive.

Craig: I see.

John: Then it becomes overwhelmingly positive.

Craig: I see.

John: If you are a person like Craig who has played the game and enjoyed it and want to leave us a review, leave us a review because it actually does help.

Craig: That makes sense because if you put something on there, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to get 50 of my friends to do a review.” They need to know that it’s more than just the friends and family. I get that.

John: Yes, so that’s what–

Craig: That’s fantastic.

John: Yes, that’s good news.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: More follow up. Last week, we talked about Solar Storms as part of How Would This Be A Movie. Drew, what did we hear?

Drew: Multiple people wrote in that it sounded very much like the novel Aurora by a former Scriptnotes guest, David Koepp.

John: David Koepp, that hack.

Craig: Koepp, what can he do? By the way, David Koepp has quietly crushed the Summer Box office. Everyone was going on about Superman and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, Jurassic, Jurassic-ness?

John: The Jurassic World Rebirth.

Craig: Jurassic World Rebirth has done better than both of those movies. It’s just massive.

John: Massive. Massive.

Craig: It’s like it’s grossed like almost $800 million globally. That’s David Koepp still doing it.

John: Also, Presence, a movie that Drew and I both saw, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Drew: Black Bag too.

John: Yes, Black Bag also.

Drew: Black Bag is great.

John: Just killing it.

Craig: Just Koepp, just–

John: Keopp it in. Koepping it real.

Craig: You cannot beat David Koepp. Also, side note, and we’ve had him on this, one of the loveliest people. Just incredible guy. Love him.

John: Love it. I should not be surprised that he saw the scientific thing that exists in the world. It’s like, I should–

Craig: Of course he did.

John: I should write a book about this.

Craig: Yes, he’s sort of casually predicted that we would eventually get that and fumble it. Although, if you have a David Koepp novel, and it has not yet been turned into a movie, that is an indication that it should not be a movie because you know people must have tried.

John: Yes. What’s wrong with a book that it’s not–?

Craig: I think the book is probably great, it’s just that it’s not movie-ish.

John: Maybe.

Craig: How does that not happen?

John: He’s so angry now listening to this podcast.

Craig: I hope he is.

John: Yes. We were talking back in Episode 675 about lost genres or genres that people should see at least one example of a movie in. A bunch of people wrote in with recommendations for genres that people need to at least see one thing in. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Andrew writes, “Yakuza films, they are more often than not just as economical as noir films, but even more stylish, cynical, and tragic.” He recommends Pale Flower from 1964.

John: I’ve not seen any of these in the genre, and I think it’s a good recommendation.

Craig: Sure.

John: What else do we got?

Drew: John James recommends giallo, which is Italian horror.

Craig: Of course, yes, no.

Drew: Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

Craig: No.

Drew: No?

Craig: No. Not for me.

Drew: Not for you?

Craig: I’ve seen some of it. It’s not for me. It’s gross.

John: I’ve seen an Argento movie, and I do understand it as a genre. It’s just nothing for me. Either too, but it’s–

Craig: Right, other people, sure.

John: Should see it.

Craig: I think Suspiria-

John: Suspiria, yes.

Craig: -that’s the one to see, and then you would know.

Drew: I think nerds say that that’s not quite a giallo for some reason.

John: Oh.

Craig: No.

Drew: That would be my pick.

Craig: Nerds say that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m not going to listen. Let’s see if some of them write in. [chuckles]

John: What if we said like, David Koepp’s genre is dinosaurs, and then it’s just like, “Oh, but I also made Black Bag.” There’s no dinosaurs in Black Bag.

Craig: Black Bag’s not quite a dinosaur film. Then we’re like, “Yes, it is, nerds.”

Drew: [chuckles] Absolutely, and they just get angry.

John: Because this is about old spies and young spies.

Craig: Yes, it’s dinosaurs.

Drew: Dwayne writes, “Post-Michael Moore Americana documentaries, featuring cheeky editing, eccentric people, and small stories about the alluring weirdness of pre-9/11 Middle America. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body, or American Movie, or Wonderland.”

Craig: You know what? I’ve seen two of those movies. Yes, they were both interesting snapshots of a time.

John: Yes. Also like a style in editing. It’s good to point out what it is. It’s not that Michael Moore’s sort of like, “Here’s a broad statement about a thing.” It’s very specific on people and behaviors.

Craig: Hands on a Hard Body probably got 40% of its audience just from title confusion. Just brilliant.

John: Love it. So good.

Craig: Do you know what Hands on a Hard Body is though?

John: Absolutely, it says something about–

Craig: Oh, you might have seen even the show. They made a show.

John: Yes, they made a Broadway show of it.

Craig: Yes, I saw that show.

John: I never saw the show, but how are the songs? Were they–?” [crosstalk]

Craig: I remember there was one great one. I remember that. There was one really good, like eleven o’clock-ish kind of number.

John: How was the truck? Was the truck good?

Craig: The truck was great. They had it on a turntable, and the cast had to keep their hands on it. Although they were allowed to sort of like astral project forward to sing their solos and then move back to the truck.

John: Oh yes, that makes sense.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. Did you ever see Waitress either on stage or-

Craig: No.

John: -the musical version? It’s one of the rare cases where they captured the Broadway version and really filmed it in a way that’s impressive. I’d recommend it for people who want to see it. Last one.

Drew: Last one is Aldo says, “If John likes Memories of a Murder, he’ll probably dig Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the Japanese horror genre.

John: I don’t know very much about Japanese horror, and that’s another good recommendation for me. If we could combine Yakuza horror,-

Craig: I’m sure that’s good.

John: -that’s has to have– Oh my God. As I said the sentence, like that one can happen.

Craig: Japanese horror is pretty cool. I had a pretty cool moment. Then Korea came along and just ate its lunch-

John: Yes, crazy.

Craig: -for East-Asian horror films. Kairo, aka Pulse is Japanese, they tried to– Well, they attempted to adapt it here in the US. Didn’t go well, but that movie has one of the scariest single scenes in it where basically, nothing happens. Totally worth it for that. Just the scene of a ghost walking down a hallway. It was very cool.

John: Love it.

Craig: If you know, you know.

John: Some more follow up. We had Scott Frank on and we’re talking about writing education.

Drew: Tim says, “I’m a high school film and TV teacher, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of teaching structure as a shortcut to storytelling, mostly because I don’t get much time with my hundred plus students before we need to move on to the rest of film and TV production. The conversation about craft versus voice really landed.

The Scott Frank school of screenwriting seems to emphasize practice as a path to discovering voice, which also helps to answer a question I’ve been wrestling with. Why teach students to write screenplays if AI can do it better than most of them? The answer is ChatGPT doesn’t have a unique voice, we do. This year, I hope to shift my focus to helping students find their voice and maybe a little less on the proper use of a parenthetical.”

Craig: Oh, wonderful. That sounds great. Because structure and all the rest of it, these parentheticals, margins, rules, format, all that stuff, you can pick that stuff up in three days if you feel like it. What you can’t pick up in three days is knowing what to write. I could certainly see a class where everybody has to write the same scene, and they have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, until it’s something special. This is how you find your voice.

John: Love it.

Drew: More follow up, this one from Kate. “I’m a playwright and I teach theater at a small high school. I actually had to step into this job mid-year when the other teacher had to leave unexpectedly. I was so excited because in addition to my theater classes, I’d be teaching a screenwriting and playwriting course. The previous teacher had focused a lot on pitching outlines and working on index cards. Students wanted to talk about their ideas, but had trouble putting anything on the page.

I often got the feeling that students felt stuck or afraid when it was time to write their projects because they had an outline that they had to follow. Almost like they were afraid to write a scene because it may be wrong or different from their original outline. When you suggested writing short scenes with no pressure to be part of a larger script, I was practically fist pumping in my car. Yes, short exercises give young writers permission to experiment. Be messy, make mistakes. This is how we learned to write.”

Craig: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Look, we may be changing things one teaching program at a time. Again, here’s your assignment, a scene. Write it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. Have your classmates perform it. Rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. If you could take a class where you end up with one great three-page scene, you’ve come so far, baby.

John: Absolutely. Because you would probably have started this class thinking, “I cannot do this thing. I have no idea what this looks like in my head,” but the ability to actually visualize, “Okay, this is what’s happening in the scene, that I can picture the whole thing. I can hear the whole thing. Now I’m going to capture it down on paper in a way that makes sense,” is so crucial.

A thing I did for myself when I was in high school, I think, is I had an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had recorded on probably VHS. I just went and transcribed it, and then actually tried to write what the actual scene would look like on the page. That’s a good practice too, just like how do you– You see a thing, but what does it actually look like in words on paper?

Craig: Yes. The iteration, I think, is an incredibly important thing. I think that that’s not given enough attention. Being forced to rewrite the same thing over and over, it sounds bad, except you write a scene and then you share it. It is exposed. You learn how it’s landing. People give you feedback. Are we bored? Are we interested? Do we have questions? This doesn’t make sense. Or I’m just bored. What else could you do here? How could this be richer? What does the room smell like, look like? All those wonderful things we do. Then you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. At some point, you’re going to find something.

John: Yes. As you talked about in the episode, acting classes are so helpful because that paradigm of just like, you have to be on your feet and doing a scene and you’re getting feedback on it. It’s just like, you just have to do it.

Craig: You have to do it.

John: You can’t talk about acting a lot.

Craig: Because you’re performing the scene, you are required to think about the things that happen in between your lines. Where were you the moment before? Massively important. How did that statement land with you? Are you lying? All these wonderful things need to be in the scene you write when people are learning how to write. If they’re concentrating on hitting the fricking midpoint, whatever the hell, they’re just not going to get it.

John: All right, let’s go to our main topic today, which is movies that never were. I’m not quite sure how this idea came to me. It could have been an article I read, but this week, I got thinking back about giant movies that never happened, things I sort of know about or I’ve heard about, but it never actually became movies that we saw in the theaters.

A lot of these are superhero movies. There was the Tim Burton version of Superman with Nicolas Cage.

Craig: Yes, I remember that.

John: McG Superman that had a script by JJ Abrams. Okay. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. I’d actually read that script a zillion years ago.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: It was a, Spider-Man versus Electro. There was like a–

Craig: Oh, which they ended up doing anyway.

John: Yes. There was a Justice League that was supposed to be directed by George Miller.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. I think it was around the time of the earlier Record strike. Of course the Batgirl movie that was actually shot, but then it got shelved.

Craig: It got shelved.

John: Which is a really rare situation. Superhero movies are really common for this, but also Jodorowsky’s Dune is sort of legendary. There’s a documentary about that. Then Mouse Guard, which was the very expensive adaptation of a beloved children’s book or middle-grade book that Wes Ball I think was supposed to direct. They pulled at it the very last minute.

Craig: There are also these movies that I’m sure you either wrote on or somebody asked you to write on them that have been floating around seemingly forever.

John: Yes. Did you ever work on Bob: The Musical?

Craig: No, but I know that Alec Berg did.

John: Yes, I wrote on it. The amount of money spent on scripts for that movie, it’s got to be astronomical. Real composers did songs for it.

Craig: There are things like this.

John: Here’s the good scene of Bob: The Musical, a man who hates musicals wakes up and discovers he’s in a musical and has to get out of the musical. It’s a comedy in the world of a Liar Liar or those kinds of things.

Craig: Sure. Which it sounds like the premise of Schmigadoon!, which obviously came after the 800 years of development of Bob: The Musical. Yes, they’re just these movies. I remember in the ‘90s working on Stretch Armstrong. There are movies that they really wanted to make out of a toy or an object. Eight Ball’s been floating around for a while, the Magic Eight Ball. Then Monopoly. Monopoly–

John: Oh, yes. There have been so many versions of Monopoly.
Craig: I think they announced a new one recently. Every year, a new Monopoly is going to not happen.
[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually kind of amusing that that’s the property that people lose so much money on. [laughs]

John: Let’s just talk about the pure development projects. Because Monopoly, as far as I know, never went to pre-production, never spent that money. It was probably just on scripts.

Craig: Yes, endless development.

John: The endless development things, sometimes it’s all with one company. Therefore, it’s one property that has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of script fees against it. Some cases, which I suspect is the Monopoly case, they didn’t set up this place or that place or this place or that place. Those all become new projects, essentially.

Craig: The rights lapse.

John: Therefore, the studio burned a certain amount of money on a script, but they can’t make the property anymore.

Craig: Clue they’ve been trying to redo again. Risk is one that was going around for a while. What are you supposed to do with that exactly?

John: No. Yes. There’s a version of that movie that could have been terrific, but we never saw it.

Craig: Board games are not a great idea to adapt. I understand why everybody went for them.

John: Yes, it’s a recognizable title.

Craig: Clue–

John: Clue is a better idea than most. It actually has characters.

Craig: The Clue that was made is a cult classic and I love it. It is probably the one that’s most– Because there’s a narrative to it. Someone killed somebody with a thing in a place. Monopoly, Risk, they’re just words we know.

John: Here we’re talking about the IP that is just like, is that even a really good idea for a movie? In other cases, like they are good ideas for movies that are based on a really good book.

Craig: They just don’t seem to be able to happen.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the things that don’t happen and why-

Craig: Sure.

John: -they don’t happen. Sometimes there’s a piece of talent who was keyly involved in getting it set up and getting the momentum going on it. Like a Will Smith. I’ve been on a couple of really expensive projects with Will Smith that didn’t go forward. He loses interest or another thing comes up in front of it. When a director or a star has like 10 projects, nine of those aren’t happening generally. Sometimes you’re one of those things. People are gambling like this is going to be the one that they’ll say yes to.

Craig: Sometimes there’s projects where everybody, it feels like, is tight. The pressure to make it, the costs of the rights, some sort of window to get an actor or a director makes everybody tight. Everyone’s tense. Everything is overexamined, overthought, overanalyzed, and nothing can survive that generally. Nothing is natural about that process. Everything is hyper-coordinated, and you end up with a hyper-coordinated script, which nobody wants to make.

John: Some cases it’s not the script that was ultimately the problem though. It was that to actually make the movie, it just became impossibly expensive.

Craig: There is that BioShock.

John: Yes, so BioShock is a great, great property, but the world building in it is so expensive that it’s hard to justify making that as the movie. They’re trying to do it as a series now, we’ll see what that is, but those are real issues.

Craig: I think now in the era of these big streaming shows, it’s doable to do BioShock, for sure. I do remember being on the Universal lot. There was a building that used to be Ivan Reitman’s company, Montecito. It’s a big building, and they had all this great Ghostbusters stuff in there, and then–

John: Was that the big blue house or a different one?

Craig: No, it wasn’t big blue house. It was more like this squarish modernish building. It was pretty cool. It was near the big blue house. Then it got taken over by Gore Verbinski when they were well on their way to making that BioShock. I remember going in there, I think to meet with Gore, and there was a big daddy– I don’t know [unintelligible 00:26:23] Just this big oldie timey diver suit with a drill hand, full life size in the lobby. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

John: Then, it didn’t happen.

Craig: Then, it didn’t happen.

John: Let’s talk about that because more than I think the money you’re spending on scripts, that kind of R&D where you’re actually starting to really go into prep, that’s where you’re spending some real money. There was a project I was on a few years ago that I finally asked, “What actually happened?” I realized and I was told, they spent tens of billions of dollars that I did not know they were spending on storyboards and everything else.

That momentum, it’s a weird thing. You think, “Oh, it’s a sunk cost policy, so therefore, they’ll make it because we have to keep going because we already spent all this money,” but at a certain point, they realized like, oh, no, no, that the movie itself is going to be too expensive to make and we have to stop.

Craig: One of the things that is true about Hollywood, and I’m not sure it’s quite as true in other industries, is that there’s much more turnover. Now, Hollywood has actually been a fairly stable place leadership-wise over the last few years. When you look at how long Donna Langley has been running Universal, Bob Iger came back to continue to run Disney.

Generally speaking, every three, four years, somebody got kicked out and a new person got put in, and that was the point where they would sit down, look at stuff and go, “This isn’t my Concorde fallacy.

John: No.

Craig: -this thing is absolutely turning around.” They would just drop the axe on those things knowing full well that they couldn’t be blamed for the money that was spent. They could only be rewarded for not spending more money. In that regard, Hollywood had these weird safeguards against the sunk cost fallacy.

John: I’m sure there is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy where if someone just recognizes it doesn’t matter how much we’ve spent before. With the project I see right now, is there a way to go forward and have this make sense?

Craig: Yes, that’s the fallacy part, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody else comes in and goes, “Oh, I see we’ve all been engaging in the sunk cost fallacy on this. It’s over.” That’s a traumatic thing. When we talk about storyboards, and a large statue, and rooms of people that are trying to find locations. There’s a lot of jobs. A lot of those jobs at least used to be here too. Now, those too start to go away.

John: There’s other issues that come up. Once you think you’re making a movie, you’re starting to reserve a stage space, and so you’re like, “Oh my God, we need to shoot this in Australia. We need to shoot this in London. We need to scramble to get these things,” so you’re putting holds on things. I remember talking with a producer who coming out of the pandemic, it was like, “We have to reserve stage space, but I think we’re going to be okay to start shooting, but I’m not sure we’re going to be–“ Just having to make these calls, because it’s like, you can be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stage that you’ve rented that you can’t actually use.

Craig: Stage space is probably the largest pressure behind ratings for any network streamer to decide if they’re going to renew a show. They may be on the fence ratings-wise, but while they’re there, somebody from that show is going to say, “If you don’t renew us in the next week, we won’t have stages and we won’t be able to make the show.”

John: No.

Craig: “Are we going or are we not?” Stage space is the thing that makes some places– As attractive as the tax credits may be. For instance, in Australia, not a ton of stages.

John: No.

Craig: UK, amazing tax credits but not as many stages as you would think.

John: When I was shooting my one and only TV show up in Toronto, it was at a Canadian boom. There were so many things shooting in Canada, we couldn’t find stage spaces, so we ended up having to shoot like a warehouse.

Craig: Warehouses.

John: That was not really meant to be this. I’m sure you ran into similar situations like Calgary was not intended to have as much production as you were doing.

Craig: No, Calgary had one facility that was actually constructed to be stage space. The other large facility was two massive warehouses that they had retrofitted, but barely. In Vancouver there are both kinds, but there are a lot. Part of our thing, we’re going to be up there I think going side by side with Shogun this time, so Justin, and Rachel, and I are like, “Hey, are you using this person?” “Yes.” “Can I have that?” “No.” Where are your stages? Who’s your makeup person? It’s been a lot of that.

They have constructed more stage space there. When you look at other places the other issue is size of stages. Northern Ireland built quite a few stages during the Game of Thrones boom, but size like sometimes you need an enormous. Then there are the specialty stages, like at Warner Brothers, which has 20-something stages that are currently sitting mostly empty. Just tragedy. They have one, I think it’s stage 16, with the floor actually, you can remove the floor and it’s got a pit, which is very cool for all sorts of interesting things.

John: Let’s talk about this from a writer’s point of view and how this matters and what to think about with this. Some of the properties you mentioned early on, like the superhero movies or the things that are based on titles, the reason why a screenwriter might pursue them and take them is because they will pay you money to do the thing. It’s not like some wildfire. They’re actually going to pay you your quote to do a thing, and that can be great and that’s fantastic. I always go into those jobs knowing it’s like I might so naive to think like I’m the one person who’s going to crack the Monopoly movie that everyone else has been trying to do.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. I remember I think somebody had asked Ted Elliott around the time that the third Pirates movie came out, and they were saying, “How do you pick projects? Because people come to you and offer you things. What kind of movie do you want to write?” He said, “Movies that are getting made.” [chuckles] That was it.

John: That’s always been my answer about what genre- [crosstalk]

Craig: Genre is movies that are getting made. Yes, when you take one of those jobs, you have to know I am seventh in a line of 14.

John: You have to go in both hoping and expecting that it’s going to work, and then also, holding your heart a place that like, I understand why it could not work.

Craig: Yes, it’s a job. Yes. Everyone’s looking at it that way too. Sometimes the executives are like, “We don’t know why somebody made some deal with a wraith and we have to make this film or we’ll be cursed forever. We don’t want to, so we don’t really care.”

John: I want to distinguish between those two things. Listen, this is the luxury of where I’m at in my career, that I don’t pursue those things that I just don’t care about. Like Drew will say, like a lot of stuff comes my way, and it’s like, “No, that’s not for me.” I’ll often say like, “That’s not for me, but there’s a writer out there who will love that, and I’m so excited for them to do that adaptation of–

Craig: Monopoly.

John: Yes. There’s somebody who said that’s their favorite property at all time, but I try not to approach those jobs with such cynicism. For a weekly, if I’m just going on to fix a problem for a person–

Craig: Yes, I’ll do anything for a week.

John: Yes. Oh I know some of the movies you’ve worked on.

Craig: I’ve worked on just Extraordinary Girl. I’ll work on anything for a week. What do I care? You know what? I can’t make it worse.

John: No.

Craig: I try, I do my best, I make sure to listen to everybody, and I improve it. I really do.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I do the job I’m paid to do. What I know is, and I’ve said this at times to them, I’m like, “I just want you to know I’m making this corpse okay for an open coffin funeral. That’s what I’m doing. Just so you guys know. This is not a patient I can cure, but you’ll be able to look at it.”
[laughter]

Craig: They’re like, “Great. We thank you. That’s what we were hoping for. We just want mom to be able to see her boy there in his little suit. Sometimes that even that’s hard.

John: Yes. Sometimes there’s just this fundamental problems.

Craig: Yes, but I’m always honest about it, but yes, for a week. To actually do a movie– When I started out, there are movies where I’m like, It’s job. A job’s a job.

John: A job’s a job.

Craig: I got to to it. I need money. You know what, I will learn along the way.

John: I did.

Craig: I did. I will also gain fans along the way. People that hire writers. Everybody calls everybody and asks. They all have their lists. Writers move up and down the list.

John: I was on Zoom this week with an executive who I’ve known and then talked about parties and had meetings with for 30 years. I’ve never worked with him or for him, but like, “Oh it’s great to catch up with you, Michael. I’ve not seen you.” I’ve not had a chance to do it, and it would be great to be able to do this project with him.” Going and knowing like it may not happen, and it’s okay also it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Sure, yes. There are some things you can just sort of smell the curse on them.

John: Yes, and I will run away from those. I’ve also learned, it’s like, “Oh, there’s this terrible person who’s attached to this intellectual property.” I will never touch it because that person, I cannot have in my life at all.

Craig: Correct. There are things where people start talking about them, and I think, “Oh, this is– Oh. Oh.”

John: Sure, yes.

Craig: “I wonder why this hasn’t–“

John: Absolutely. I remember loving that book and like, “Oh that guy.”

Craig: “Oh, this person’s involved.” Goodbye.

John: All right, let’s get to some listener questions. What do we got first, Drew?

Drew: Vanessa writes, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now, and every time the intro comes around and the chime starts playing, I think I’ve heard that before. This email is asking if the chime is fully original or inspired by a movie or something like it.”

John: That is the “boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.” That is a thing I wrote originally for my short film, The Remnants. I thought I just needed a quick little intro that I sort of felt like The Office, but even quicker than that. I think it’s original, but you can actually find it in other things. Over the years, people have said like, “Oh, I found this theme from the ‘70s, which actually that has the same chord progressions.” It’s so simple that–

Craig: Yes, I know, it’s five notes. It’s five notes. Of course. It’s five notes that resolve. Yes, it will be in other things. It’s not like an identifiable jingle from any popular thing. Yes, but sure, you can find a five note progression before. There’s no new five note progression.

John: I will say, as we come up to episode 700, one of my favorite things about the show is that our incredible listeners starting with Matthew [unintelligible 00:37:03] who did so many of the incredible early intro, but just have taken those five notes and just done remarkable things with them. I’ll have a new one this week and every week. Please keep sending in your interpretations of the intro to make our outros.

Craig: Love it.

Drew: Larry writes, “”What’s the best way to watch a movie to put money back in the pockets of the people who made it? I half remember at one point that renting something out iTunes was better for y’all, but I feel like perhaps that’s out of date.”

Craig: No, that’s in date.

John: In date. We’re talking about the rental on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you rent those things. That rate is actually really good for us.

Craig: That is the best residual rate we have of anything. We got that all the way back in 2000. Yes, 2000, I’m pretty sure it was, or 2001. I think we got it mostly because the companies hadn’t really caught on yet. They were like, “What are you? Okay.” I remember the deal was that they refused to do sales. It was they were just like, “We’ll give you rentals. We’ll give you a great rate on rentals.”

John: If I’m this is a movie that I want to watch and I feel like I’m going to watch it once, I will rent it. If the movie is like, I think I may want to watch it again or if there’s something like an adaptation, I’ll buy it off of iTunes. Listen, there’s times where it’s like, “Oh, it’s got to go be streaming someplace,” and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll spend like two minutes to look see if it’s streaming someplace,” but just buy the movie or rent the movie because it’s just, I just have it.

Craig: I will say too that is very nice that he’s asking, but the truth is, the nicest way to watch anything, assuming you’re not pirating, is to watch it however you want. Rent, buy, stream, add support, doesn’t matter, just do it. Then, if you like it, tell other people to watch it too because the that’s the best residual rate we get is popularity. Spread the word, and that’s as best you can do, but you don’t need to be too concerned about the ethical viewing. [chuckles]

John: Yes, as long as you’re not pirating it, you’re making ethical choices. My movie The Nines, I think it’s it showed up on streaming every once in a while, but it’s basically always been a purchase or download, and so just like it’s cheap, it’s like $3.99 to rent the movie. Just watch the movie. It’s a good movie.

Craig: Just watch that.

John: Just watch the movie.

Craig: It’s all good.

Drew: Jeremy writes, “As a non-american, I’m horrified to watch what’s happening in your country, and my screenwriter brain was wondering how you would go about writing it in a humane, empathetic way. How do you write scripts in the era of neo-fascism that won’t dehumanize those who suffer most?”

Craig: I’m not sure I understand the question.

John: Yes, I think we may be some language barriers here, but I think I take this to mean like recognizing that your country’s is falling into fascism, how do you go approach writing movies, and does that change how we’re thinking about the stories we’re trying to tell and the choices we’re making?

Craig: if you’re writing a story that touches upon themes like that, then yes, you would want to touch on things, the part that I’m not quite getting is the, how do you be humane?

John: Humane. I think, from the context of the whole email, it’s something along the lines of like, if you’re writing about these big things, making sure that you’re thinking about the people who are affected by these big things.

Craig: Isn’t that what you would be writing about?

John: Here’s an example I can take from my own life. A project that we’ll see if I can end up getting it set up, but there’s a big military and international cooperation aspect of it, and it’s like, oh, it’s a different movie now than it would have been three or four years ago.

Craig: Sure.

John: Just because our allies are not our allies again. Europe isn’t necessarily on our side, and so those things change. You have to understand that, but in pitching it, it was actually nice to be able to say, “No, this is actually a moment where international cooperation becomes incredibly important, an outside threat unites us all together about a thing,” and that felt good and useful. In terms of, I’m not writing, I don’t have an extra appeal writing something dystopian and bleak, I think because I’m living in a bleak, dystopian moment, and I also know that I’m not going to get joy from writing that, but I also know that no one’s going to want to make that.

Craig: Right. I guess people have been writing about fascistic regimes, terroristic regimes, repressive regimes forever, whether they live in them or not. We are all, as artists, impacted by what’s going on around us. I don’t think it should be a challenge for anybody to write victims humanely.

I think sometimes there is an undertone of fear in some of the questions we get, and I don’t mean fear of fascistic regimes, although we should have that and quite a bit of it, fear that we’ll make a mistake in our writing. You use the phrase, make sure to, which is a very defensive position when you’re writing. I just want to make sure that I don’t blank, or I want to make sure I don’t blank. Make sure that you write something good, true and honest. If you do, some characters are going to be ugly, and I mean ugly on the inside, and like all of us, some victims will be imperfect. That’s part of what makes it true, interesting, and upsetting.

The weird attraction that Spielberg gave Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, that strange hypnotic power he had, made that interesting more than just, there’s the dickhead Nazi. Because he understood that the truer that person gets, the scarier he gets. Yes, I wouldn’t worry so much. I would just write what’s true.

John: Absolutely, and I also need to recognize that your movie, when it happens, will resonate with the culture of the time that it comes out. The most recent Superman movie really resonates with this moment that we’re in terms of world crisis, and yet it was two years ago, three years ago, that it got put in motion. It wasn’t actually responding to the moment that we’re in, it’s just because of when it comes out, it resonates with the world that it’s actually in.

Craig: Yes, things take on stuff. I wasn’t thinking about, Donald Trump wasn’t the president when I started working on Chernobyl. Truth wasn’t necessarily under global attack at that moment. If you write about things that are evergreen concerns for humanity, and you write them truly, without fear of making a ‘mistake,’ then I think you’re off to a good start.

John: Let’s go to this question here from John about stamina.

Drew: “I’m quite fortunately a consistently working writer who has had a handful of produced credits, and I feel like I’m firmly in the prime of my career. I’m suddenly becoming very aware that my stamina as a writer is nowhere near where it used to be. I’m starting to have more anxiety over whether this means I’m losing my love for the job, or that sometime soon I won’t be able to do it at a high level anymore. Then I stress over the actual work itself. Do you have any tips for how to keep your energy for the job up when you know that you’ll never be the version of yourself that you were 10 or 20 years ago?”

John: Oh, for sure. Yes, I nod with all of this, and I do recognize it. I think, John, you already have the insight of that you’re just never the same person you were at 20 or at 30. Because on those, I could stay up to like four in the morning writing a thing, and my life was just different. It was before I had kids. We often talk about how kids are just career killers.

Craig: Vampires.

John: Vampires sucking away at your life and your time, and yet, I’m still productive. I still get a lot done. I think if you actually look at the output of work that I’m able to do now, it hasn’t really diminished much. I have found my habits changing, and I do write in shorter sprints and get stuff done, but stuff does still happen. You can both recognize that your stamina has changed and not panic that it makes it incapable for you to write stuff.

Craig: This is one of those areas where– first of all, John, I’ve felt all of those things that you’re feeling, and I feel all of them. The other day, I had lunch with Brian Johnson the other day, and we were both talking about how like, “Are we just slowing down?” It feels like we’re slowing down, but the work keeps coming, so the problem is feels like. It feels like it sometimes.

I think part of it is because, okay, John says he’s in the prime of his career. What that tells me is he’s done enough work now at a professional level, seen enough of it go in and out of the machinery to have improved. As you improve, it becomes harder to write because you can’t write garbage the way you used to. When you start out, you’re just wee, right? I’m awesome. Because you don’t know enough to know that you’re not. You’re freer. It’s a lovely feeling. Then later, after life has beaten that a lot of you, but also after you create a little bit more of a sense of inner scrutiny, then the crucible of your own judgment becomes much hotter.

Yes, then it is a little harder, and it can feel like you’re losing stamina, but you’re not. You’re just more exacting, so you know more. You have the burden of knowledge, John. Your anxiety is normal. Just make sure to not draw any conclusions from it. You’ve made a mistake of drawing a conclusion from it. You think because you’re anxious, you are in trouble. You are not, you’re just anxious.

One of the things I’ve really tried to accept as I’m getting older now is that part of why I do what I do is because my brain is attuned to scary things. Everybody that we write about, we’re usually writing about somebody that’s afraid of something. We have very fear-attuned minds. No surprise, I’m afraid all the time. I just have to accept that is part of the package of doing what we do. What you’re feeling right now is incredibly normal. It’s actually a fantastic sign that you are a good professional writer. If you felt as free now as you did when you started, oh boy, I don’t know what to say. Something’s wrong with you.

John: If you were a professional athlete, you would have the same kind of questions, like, I don’t have the same stamina as I did earlier in your career. It’s like, well, that’s true. That’s objectively true. You can actually measure those sort of things. What we would have is experience, technique and all the other things that make it worthwhile. Unlike a professional athlete, there is no forced retirement date. You’re never going to break your back and be unable to play again.

At a certain point, you may decide you don’t want to keep doing it, which is great, but that’s not what I’m hearing in this letter. I think I agree with Craig, it’s just anxiety and fear.
Craig: Yes, you’re not at the place yet where you actually are slowing down and preparing to stop. That will be a different feeling. I don’t think I’m at that place yet.

John: A friend of mine did retire and he actually is a writer friend who worked in TV for many, many years and it’s just like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I love it for him.

Craig: Listen, in the throes of certain phases of making a large TV show, I fantasize about just pulling the old ripcord, but I know that it’s not time yet. Really what I’m reacting to there is this is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: When things are hard, there’s a little boy or girl in us that wants to quit. Then there’s our memory of our mom, dad, coach, older sibling, somebody saying, “You can want to quit, don’t yet, don’t.”

John: In the time of doing this podcast is when I started distance running. I will say that it’s been a useful metaphor for some of this stuff because it’s like, you just want to stop running. You just want to stop and just walk for a while. It’s like, no, but you actually, you really can just keep running and you just keep running.

Craig: You’ll be fine though, John. You’re in a good spot, actually, weirdly. It’s an encouraging question.

John: Let’s take two more questions, first from Kat here.

Drew: I wonder if you could settle a rumbling question for my university peers and I.

John: We can.

Craig: For my university peers and me.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m just going to correct right away. For me, object of the preposition.

John: We understand that it’s standard to render non-English languages as English on the page with the indication in parentheses that it is in Mandarin or whatever the language is, potentially mentioning whether or not it should be subtitled. Then along came Celine Song, who, as you’re aware, used Korean text on the page in past lives, setting an industry precedent by writing bilingually with all Korean translated into English.

My tutor has said that for the purposes of the degree with Celine’s industry precedent, I can use Chinese in my script. I would very much like to use this. Characters speak in their native language unless noted otherwise. Where rendered in English, the dialogue will be subtitled. Where written in Mandarin or Taiwanese is the intention not to use subtitles.
My cohort feels this would be unacceptable. to the industry. I could be getting the characters to say all sorts of nasties, unbeknownst to the producers.

What are your thoughts on the wider industry acceptance of having small parts of the script unintelligible?

Craig: The answer is in the question. Celine, by the way, one of the best people. I like that when she did that, it became an industry precedent and therefore is now allowable at universities. That just tells me how broken the university instruction system is around screenwriting.

John: Because if there’s one movie from a filmmaker that was successful, now, I guess, sure.

Craig: What was the point of all of that dogmatic nonsense to begin with? The answer is do whatever you want. Clearly do whatever you want. She was nominated for an Oscar. Why is this person worried about what the university will think?

John: All choices you’re making have pros and cons. It’s the question of like, is it a problem that certain blocks of text in your script will not be intelligible to a person who only speaks English? It could be, but maybe it’s absolutely fine. You won’t know until you try it. Yes, if it makes sense for you, you should do it.

Craig: The whole point is to say to an English reader, you won’t understand this. Isn’t that the point?

John: Yes.

Craig: So, do it. The idea that you would be putting in stuff that so like, after the movie comes out, they’re like, oh my God, one of those characters said the Holocaust didn’t happen. That’s not a thing.

John: That’s not happening.

Craig: It’s not happening. That’s such a not worry. Who asked this question?

Drew: Kat.

Craig: Kat, listen, you write this however you want. If you are a good writer, Kat, who is going to succeed as a screenwriter, you are already beyond the concerns of this university. You have already escaped its surly bonds. If you’re not, you’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You write whatever you want.

John: Last question here from Henry.

Drew: A few big films recently are the first of a multi-part series, and while I’ve enjoyed watching them, I always leave the theater feeling that I’ve only seen half a movie. I think there’s something off with the structure here, where they’re basically making one really long film instead of discrete parts that can be watched on their own, because I don’t feel this way with, say, The Empire Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring. Do John and Craig have any insight into what’s going on here?

Craig: Money.

[laughter]

I mean money’s going on. Harry Potter, the seventh book, was broken into two books, because it was very long, and I think they looked at it and they were like, okay, so on the one side, a very long movie. First of all, people don’t like to see very long movies, so we’re going to lose some people. Two, fewer showings per day on a blockbuster, we’re going to lose some money, or we split into two and we get two hit movies.

John: Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a screenwriter who was approached with the property of Wicked, and was just like, so Wicked, you could do it as one long movie.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Somebody smart would say like, no, and actually, let’s approach it from the start, saying like, what if at the act break, we actually split it into two movies? How do we make sure that the first movie is as rewarding and successful as possible, and the second movie is as rewarding and successful as possible? I think Wicked made completely the right choice.

Craig: Oh, I’m sure they did.

[laughter]

John: Now, Henry, I will say that there have been some movies recently where I did feel a little bit of that, what, because I wasn’t expecting it. That rug pull can be a thing. I felt a little bit on the last Spider-Verse movie, where it was like, oh, wow, I really thought we were going to resolve this, and we didn’t, it’s just a cliffhanger. Same thing happens in the 28 Years Later, where the movie resolves nicely, but then there’s a code that’s not a post-credit scene, that just basically sets up the whole next movie. I’m like, wait, what?

Craig: Right. Certain things have built-in dotted lines that you could see yourself folding or tearing the page. Wicked is obviously one of them. It has a huge intermission, and the last song before the intermission is Defying Gravity and as I recall, someone saying to the people there, “How in God’s name can you sit around after Defying Gravity?” Defying Gravity happens, roll credits, go home. There are certain circumstances where it makes absolute sense.

There are movies like Harry Potter, where you’re like, look, you’ve been on this ride for six movies. Let us give you a larger feast for seven and eight. Henry, I do know what you mean, and I think sometimes there’s been a little bit of indulgence. It’s that same indulgence I see in limited series sometimes, where it’s like, oh, this is a seven or eight episode limited series. It should have been a five episode limited series.

John: There’s some padding and some, oh, yes.

Craig: It’s just some sort of stretch and pull and froth, and yes, I can see that is sort of happening as movies try to accomplish some of the things that television series can accomplish. In television, we can just work with a bigger canvas, and movies want that, but I know what you mean, and I think we all smell it when it’s happening.

John: The Avengers finale, which was a split over two parts, I enjoyed the entire experience, but I really couldn’t tell you what happened in one part versus the other part. It’s just like, it was a big two-part thing.

Craig: Again, if you have successfully laid out another sequel, I don’t know how many movies we’re talking about at any given point in that one. I think it was four total, right? Then, okay, if you want the finale to be a big, big finish, sure. If you’re just starting and you’re like, hey, or if it’s part of a series, but it’s not really like, each one of the series is its own thing.

For instance, I don’t know how many James Bond movies we’re up to, but if the next James Bond movie, just being made by Denis Villeneuve, it’s going to be awesome. If the next James Bond movie did that, it wouldn’t necessarily be earned because James Bond isn’t like, okay, it’s one, two, three, done. Avengers, I got that. They want to do a big finish. [crosstalk] Yes, I’m cool with that.

John: I’m cool with that, too. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is actually on the back of my phone right now, Craig, I’m going to show it to you.

Craig: Great.

John: It’s called the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand.

Craig: This is very much in my interest.

John: It is a little thing that magnetically clips to the back of your phone, and it magnetically clips down, so you can have it be a stand vertically.

Craig: I didn’t think that was going to be what it was.

John: Or horizontally.

Craig: Okay, that is cool. For what that is, what I thought I was getting shown was one of those back of the phone wallet replacers.

John: It is awesome. In that little slot, you can put two cards.

Craig: Two cards?

John: Only two cards now. If you want more than that, you’d need a different thing.

Craig: This is very slim.

John: It’s slim, and I don’t use a case on my phone.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve never used cases on my phone.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Not for a very long time. I also use it, just I loop a finger through it and just to help hold my phone, so that I’m not bending my pinky– I’m not holding the weight of it on my pinky.

Craig: What would you call the color of that, out of curiosity?

John: I would call it–

Craig: I have a color in mind, but I don’t know if I’m right.

John: Purple is probably the closest, but I think purple is a scrappier than that.

Craig: I’m going to say mauve.

John: Mauve, okay, yes.

Craig: But is that right?

John: That was my go, Mauve. Mauve, yes.

Drew: Mauve.

John: Yes, it’s a good color, I like it.

Craig: It’s like a grayish purple.

John: Yes, I like it. If you’re looking for something to help hold onto your iPhone, the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand, it’s like $28.

Craig: That’s fantastic. Oh, 28, that’s not bad. Just a little bit more than that, and you can get the Scriptnotes book.

John: Yes, delivered to your home.

Craig: Really, if you had a choice, I would say Scriptnotes.

John: I haven’t put it out, but as soon as I put it, it’s also available as a e-book. People are like, oh.

Craig: Of course, and that’s even cheaper, I assume.

John: People ask about the paperback, and there’s not currently plans for a paperback. We’ll see.

Craig: If it does well, there will be a paperback.

John: Probably, but there’s also increasingly some books are just never going to paperback, because-

Craig: Because the e-book sort of takes that place.

John: It does, and it’s also, our D&D books are never paperbacks, because they would rip apart. For something that you’re referring to a lot, it could be useful.

Craig: Sure. I remember my Syd Field book was paperback, and I’m sure the many Save the Cats is paperbacks.

John: Yes, are paperbacks.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a podcast that I appeared on as a guest. I don’t know if it’s– it must be out by now. The podcast is called Total Party Skill.

John: I’m guessing it’s a D&D podcast.

Craig: You know it, a little take on Total Party Kill, and it is a Dungeons & Dragons podcast that is, I wouldn’t say hosted the podcasters, are Gabe Greenspan, Dylan McCollum, and the delightfully named George Primavera. George Primavera, by the way, sounds like a bad character name, like– [chuckles]

John: Yes. Oh, 100%.

Craig: Yes, like Gene Parmesan from– [laughs] George Primavera, and all three of these guys were absolute gentlemen and scholars, all three deeply, deeply well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons as players and DMs. They’re just fun.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We had a fun–

John: You’re not playing the game, you’re just talking through stuff?

Craig: The topics, one topic was just, “Okay, it’s been a minute since we’ve got the 2024 rules. Now that we’ve had a chance to play with them for a while, what are the things that we really love? What are some of the pain points of things we don’t love?” We had a pretty good in-depth discussion of that.
Then they did a little fun draft where we were drafting classes.

John: Right.

Craig: The question was, you’re drafting classes to survive an apocalypse. Then, I think they’re a Patreon thing. One of their Patreon subscribers wrote in to say, “Oh, here’s a name of something. What would you home brew this thing to be? Item, spell, weapon, what would it be?” It was just a joy talking with those guys talking with those guys.

John: Love it. Sounds great.

Craig: Check it out, Total Party Skill, on wherever you get your podcasts.

John: I listen to so many podcasts, and deliberately have not added any D&D podcasts, because that’s just too much. I’m sure there’s so much good content that would just eat up more of my time.

Craig: You know I don’t listen to podcasts, but I actually will listen to this podcast.

John: That’s great.

Craig: Not the one I’m on, the other ones.

John: For Craig to start listening to a podcast is a pretty big deal.

Craig: It’s got to got to be about D&D, basically.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Outro this week is by Steve Piotrowski. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week, along with our videos and other things.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on whether we would still write screenplays if we weren’t going to sell screenplays.

[laughs]

Thank you for pre-ordering the book. Pre-order those books and send those receipts to drewaskatjohnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thank you.

[music]

John: This bonus topic came from a question. Drew, would you read us the question?

Drew: Your recent Scott Frank episode wrapped up with a bout of brutal honesty concerning the likelihood that any of us will have a career in screenwriting. I realized this was in an effort to encourage folks to be unique, advice I think I need myself, but I’d love to hear your perspectives on the idea of art for art’s sake. If, for whatever reason, nobody could ever pay you for a script again, would you still write them?

Craig: I wonder if Fraser– it feels like Fraser’s really asking this for themselves. Do I have permission to write screenplays if I’m not doing it professionally? The answer is, absolutely. I think for me, it’s a different question because I’ve written 4,000 scripts now and drafts and versions and things, and so, would I want to do it just for fun? No. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I would always want it to have a purpose just because I would.

If I hadn’t done so much screenwriting, I could see absolutely doing it for enjoyment.

John: I take this more as a question about the format of screenwriting as a worthwhile literary pursuit or a thing to spend your time on if it weren’t in the pursuit of actually making it into a movie or making it into a TV show. I agree with you. If I hadn’t done this job for so long, I could start writing screenplays.

I enjoy the form. I think it’s a great form, but it’s not a very shareable form. It’s not a form that other people are going to read and enjoy with you. I think having written books, and I have a graphic novel coming out next year, having written other things, I think there’s better stuff to write that for people out there in the world to read. You don’t have to write for other people to read stuff. You can just write for your own purposes and your own self.

Given what I like to do, I think I do like to write for other people to read it. I think books or stage musicals, or other things would be a better– it’s how I would spend my time.

Craig: One thing that this prompts is the idea that people pursue artistic expression for its own sake because it makes them feel good. It is part of our behavior as humans. We want to express ourselves creatively and artistically. I think it’s important that anyone give themselves permission to do so, as long as they acknowledge that they are not entitled to an audience.

If you want to write songs to make yourself happy, just don’t force your family to listen to 12 of them. You can play one maybe at Christmas, see how it goes. If you want to write a book or a poem or screenplay, great. Don’t make everyone read it. If people want to, great. I guess my point is, if you’re doing it for yourself, do it for yourself with no expectation because I think sometimes people say they’re doing it for themselves. What they really want is for everybody to tell them how great they are, and that’s a different thing.

John: It is. I feel like Fraser’s question is especially relevant in this era of increasingly powerful AIs that can generate things that look like the work that we’re doing, and just do it with seemingly effortlessly. Why even bother spending the emotional time and energy to write a thing when I can just generate a thing?

I still think there is meaning and value, and there’s discovery that happens when you’re actually trying to write a thing that is unique and wonderful. Those moments when I’ve written something, even if no one read it, I felt really good to have written it. Yes, fantastic, but I don’t necessarily need that to be a screenplay form. It could be something else.

Craig: It’s its own pleasure, right? If Fraser wants to write a screenplay because he enjoys writing screenplays and he’s able to accept that perhaps he may not write professionally, but that’s okay, he just likes writing, then that’s fantastic. There doesn’t need to be any reason to do that because there’s really no reason to do anything if we consider our mortality. What’s the point of anything? There is none. You die, so really, do you need to paint that painting? No.

We do it because it feels good. It helps us figure ourselves out and it might help us connect to one person. Beyond that, yes, just lower the requirements.

John: I always love the stories when they find some person who died and they find all this incredible writing or all these paintings that this person did. It’s like, oh my God, this person would have been a known artist, but they just chose not to do it or whatever circumstances, they didn’t. The work still is valuable and if they still enjoyed doing that thing, they did it for their own.

Craig: It’s not valuable for them anymore.

John: Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. They did it because it was meaningful to them.

Craig: Absolutely, it felt good. Then there’s the counterpart to that, which is the Kafka situation where while Kafka’s alive, he goes, “You know what, I hate all of this, I’m burning most of it.” No, don’t, and he did. That can happen too.

John: It can.

Craig: I think, make a good point, there are authors that are discovered posthumously, there are artists that are discovered posthumously, but it just doesn’t matter, actually. If you’ve decided it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would say, give yourself permission for it to not matter.
I wish I liked writing screenplays enough to just wake up and go, “You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to write some screenplay. Make myself feel good.”

John: Yes, that’s not me.

Craig: It’s not me. That’s the way I approach solving puzzles.

John: Playing D&D.

Craig: Playing D&D. Playing D&D, what’s the point of that?

John: No, it’s absolutely pointless.

Craig: Fellowship.

John: It is fellowship.

Craig: Fellowship, and it feels good. It’s fun, it’s interesting.

John: It’s problem solving.

Craig: It’s problem solving, but it’s creative. We get to–

John: Collaborative.

Craig: It’s collaborative, it’s creative. We get to express ourselves, does all these things. For its own sake, we are not critical role. Look, if we wanted to go, hey, some platformer, even if we went to the critical role people were like, hey, it’s me and John, and we’ve got Tom Morello and Dan Weiss and Chris Morgan, and all these cool da-da-da, Phil. Hey, we’re going to go ahead and just do it. Yes, they’d be like, yes, we’ll do it. You can make money off of it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: Of course, it would ruin it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: It would be horrible.

John: Also, the things we say around the table would get us canceled immediately.

Craig: I don’t think we would make it past a minute, but even if we could, the point is we’ve never even considered it because we don’t need it.

John: No.

Craig: Not because it’s that we don’t need money, it’s that we just don’t need to do it for a reason. It is ontological.

John: Also, we’re happily amateur D&D players.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes, and so I want to shout out to community theater because community theater is pointless, and also amazing and wonderful.

Craig: It is professionally pointless, but it fills people’s spirits and souls. And Waiting for Guffman, if that is not the most beautiful love letter to community theater, I don’t know what is.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
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• Aurora by David Koepp
• Pale Flower
• Deep Red
• Suspiria
• Hands on a Hard Body
• American Movie
• Wonderland
• Hands on a Hardbody the musical
• Cure
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• Total Party Skill podcast
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• Outro by Steve Pietrowski (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 681 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do you do when the answer isn’t yes or no, but an extended and interminable maybe? We’ll discuss strategies for coping and navigating periods of frustrating ambiguity as you’re trying to push projects forward.

Then it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at pages our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how to know when a movie or TV show has had reshoots or significant re-tinkering. Craig and I will spill the secrets that will help us notice that things have changed there.

Craig: Let’s ruin it for everyone.

John: Absolutely. That’s why I put it in the bonus segment. If you don’t want to be spoiled, you can just skip the bonus segment.

Craig: We’re going to spoil everything.

John: The tricks, the tips, the everything. First, we have some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Sure. Elizabeth writes, “Can you please ask Craig to stop joking that nobody in Post reads the script, supervisor’s notes? My notes are nearly always utilized by the editor and Post team, and the role of script supervisor has been dismissed, disrespected, and marginalized for far too long by directors and producers.”

Craig: Okay, Elizabeth, this feels like manufactured outrage. I’m literally expressing an opinion in support of script supervisors and the way that their work is overlooked, and your reaction is to say, “Stop dismissing us.” Here’s the reality. You’re not in the editing rooms. I am. I’m telling you, after 30 years, it is extraordinarily rare for the editors or the Post team to refer to the notes. Take my word for it. It’s extraordinarily rare. If you’re frustrated by that, imagine how frustrated I am about that.

I’m not saying it never happens. Clearly, you had a nice experience where it happened at some point, but Elizabeth, hear me out. I’m on your side. That’s why I’m saying this. I want editors, especially up-and-coming editors who listen to our show, to read the effing notes.

John: Yes. You have sung the praises of the script supervisor on The Last of Us so many times.

Craig: So many times.

John: Apparently, it’s fantastic, which is great.

Craig: Chris Roofs.

John: Great. I will say that even if those notes are not being used for the editorial process, I suspect there have been times where you needed to refer back to those notes because you’re doing inserts, pickup shots, you’re reshooting some things, you need to figure out like, what was it that we were doing here?

Craig: That’s a separate thing. In the crazy list of things that the script supervisor is responsible for, it’s the Swiss army knife of crew members. Keeping track of inserts that we owe is one of them. That is a separate list that is generated and shared with the post-production supervisor and the producer and the editors so that everybody’s on top of that. The ADs, most importantly, to make sure that they’re scheduled.

John: More follow-up. This one is from AI Guinea Pig.

Craig: Is this a real person or an AI guinea pig? This is a real person, okay.

John: This is a real person. Drew, it’s a long story, but I think it’s an interesting story because it feels like, oh, this is the bellwether of things that could come.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Drew: “In 2023, I had a script make the annual blacklist. The script led to the proverbial water bottle tour and eventually an option offer. The offer came from a producer with many produced credits on movies and shows over the last two decades. As my reps and I asked around, we also learned that he had a good reputation, both as a person and as someone with a knack for getting things done. What’s more, his pitch was compelling. He claimed to have access to financing, didn’t hurt that there was money on the table with the option agreement. I was going to become a paid screenwriter.

My lawyer negotiated the option agreement. I signed it. The check cleared and we were off. The producer and I had our kickoff call, and this is how he opened. ‘So, how much have you played around with AI?’

The producer, as it turns out, was intending to launch a new AI studio with my script as one of the headliners of its slate. After no mention of AI during our initial conversations or negotiations, I was now being told my project was going to be made using generative AI. What’s more, I came to realize that the producer’s so-called access to financing was not access to financing for traditional film production. It was for this technology specifically.

I tried to give the producer the benefit of the doubt. I expressed my many ethical and creative concerns around AI production. I asked if there was still a possibility of traditional production with a real live cast and a real live crew. The producer paid lip service to this idea, but once the announcement of the AI studio went public, it was clear to me that it was only ever that. I quickly got on the phone with my reps and my lawyer and asked out of the option agreement. I would gladly send the money back if it meant keeping my script and my soul intact. Surprisingly, the producer did not push back. It’s probably not a coincidence that the other movies in the announcement slate are all from unproduced screenwriters.

What’s the lesson? We now live in a world where we can’t take traditional paths to production for granted. We need to ask a prospective partner’s feelings about AI and even bar it contractually if we can. Yes, this producer kept their intentions hidden, but there was also nothing in their filmography or reputation that gave soulless AI tech bro vibes. Next time, I will definitely be asking.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Wow. A whole journey there. Usually, people are writing in for advice. In this case, the person is giving advice, but I thought it was good to keep all the context in there because this is a real thing that writers will be facing. You and I may not face it directly, but I think a lot of our listeners could be encountering this where, in a general case, you enter into an agreement thinking that you’re making one kind of movie, like a live-action movie with actors, but you find out, oh, it’s animation or it’s generative AI where there’s no people behind it.

Craig: I’m guessing this wasn’t a WGA agreement.

John: There’s nothing prohibiting that, no.

Craig: Oh, it’s just that it prohibits AI as literary material for the purposes of credit. The good news here is this was an option. Therefore, copyright had not yet been transferred, sold. There was no work-for-hire agreement in place. You didn’t even have to give the money back. You could just let the option lapse.

John: The producer could have exercised the option and he would have lost it.

Craig: They don’t have the money. I’m just going to say flat out, they don’t have it, but true. Hopefully, the money wasn’t a lot for the option. I guess it’s exciting when you get money for an option. It’s not so great when you have to give it back or you need to give it back. In this case, brilliant maneuver to get out of this mess.

Let’s talk a little bit, John, for a moment about, there’s a phrase that popped out here, and that is there was nothing in his résumé or past credits that would indicate AI tech bro. Probably there was. We need to think about producers in a different way than we think about writers and directors and actors. Because no matter what the quality is, if you get a writing credit, you wrote, directing, you directed, acting, you acted.

There are 12,000 flavors of producer. There are so many different kinds of producers, including producers that routinely do nothing that the producers themselves had to invent a fake guild, of which I am a member. I love that they call it a guild. It’s not.

John: It’s an association.

Craig: It’s a trade association to self-regulate which producers actually warrant the best picture award. One thing is to look at the credits. If, in movies, you see a lot of executive producer credits, well, that’s different than producer. In television, if you see a lot of producer credits as opposed to executive producers, the other way around, that’s also possibly a red flag that what this person is, and there’s no shame in it, is somebody that puts projects together but isn’t necessarily making them. And those people over time, like water, find the path of least resistance to escape and head towards money. In this case, it sounds like this guy thinks it’s AI.

John: It’s entirely possible that this producer who has a lot of credits rarely has that PGA after their name, which would indicate that they really did produce the movie. Let’s assume maybe for the sake of argument that they did produce those movies, and they’re at a place right now where they’re finding it very hard to make movies. Some tech people show up saying, “Hey, we have this generative AI technology to create the video basically on demand, and so we can film things without a studio, without people, without anything else.”

I could imagine them going to a person who has some respectable credits, who actually knows how to make some movies, and convincing him to do this. That’s also possible that it is a legit person who’s just at a certain point in their career realizing, “Okay, this is the thing I do next.”

Craig: That’s another tricky one. When you are coming up, and you’re trying to get your first thing out there, you sometimes meet people on your way up that are on their way down.

John: Very true.

Craig: Everybody’s in the middle of the ladder. Figuring out who’s on their way down can be very difficult to do, and producers are extraordinarily good at convincing you that they’re amazing. That’s part of their job. It’s part of their skillset.

In this case, what is so startling to me is that this producer thought they were going to get away with it by not saying anything until after the deal was signed. I’m going to go with idiot on that one. Great warning here. Let’s just get this out to all the lawyers around town. This should be standard now in option agreements that this material will not be used to assist in AI. It will not be a springboard for AI. There will be no AI development of this. I think that clause now needs to just be in there.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between generative AI as a technology versus animation or motion capture or other things which are different ways to do stuff. You had a good initial meeting with this producer and he was talking about a vision for the movie but apparently was describing a false vision for the movie or was being so vague about what it was he was trying to do that it’s frustrating.

Listen, would I fault Guinea Pig for making a deal with this producer that was going to try to use this AI thing? For a feature film, I think yes. I think that’s a bad look. If it was for a short film where they’re going to hire you on to do this little experiment, that’s a choice you make whether you’re going to do it or not do it.

Craig: It’s their original material. It just feels like if you’re going to go through the misery of creating something original, why then hand it off to robots to do what they do? The whole point is that you’re trying with your first thing to explain to everybody that you have value. If you immediately let them feed it into AI, you’re saying, “I don’t.” A very wise choice here. I think everybody should be looking out for this.

Also, I sure wish we could just say who these people were. We don’t happen to know who this producer is. This is the kind of person I’d love to bring on the show and just say, “Okay, let’s talk.” Not to beat them about the head and shoulders, but just to say what is going on here exactly and get under the hood of this.

John: I do wonder how this conversation will age 10 years from now. Because there’s the boundaries between what is using generative AI to do visual effects versus to film a thing and to replace the crew. Those are the first principles I think we keep coming back to, is that are you making this choice so you can avoid hiring the people whose job normally would be to do things? This does feel like that situation to me.

Craig: There are situations, I feel, where AI is replacing what I would call rote work. If the job is to take this peg and put it in this hole 4,000 times a day, well, automation has done that. That’s been around forever. That’s not AI. That’s just industrial automation. When the robots came, people in the auto industry were very concerned. Repetitive rote tasks are ultimately going to go to machinery. Words? No.

John: Words and the idea of putting together a crew to film something or a crew to animate a thing, to make those fundamental choices, that’s really what we’re pushing back against. You and I both discussed, if we are using AI tools to clean up audio in the way that we would normally have used other digital tools, I don’t see that as a crisis.

Craig: No, that is using a calculator instead of an abacus. I’m okay with that. I think with things like animation, it’s quite likely that we will progress to a place where an artist is creating the first frame of a two-second shot and the last frame, and then there is some interpolation, and then choices are made. Which one of these interpolations do I want? It will make things go faster. That’s sort of inevitable. But the key choices, I think, need to stay with us, or else we will end up with a whole lot of what the kids online call AI slop, which is a wonderful phrase.

John: I’ll try to find a link to this to talk about it. There’s a study that showed that you have people looking at a bunch of poems, and some of the poems are the actual real classic poems, and some are in the style of these things. People inevitably prefer things that are in the style of the things that are in AI. It’s just like taste is a weird thing. There’s a reason why people sometimes want the slop.

Craig: Oh, yes. Well, we know. We play D&D every week. As is tradition, I try as best I can to provide Cool Ranch Doritos at every session. When they came up with the Cool Ranch powder in the laboratory–

John: The geniuses.

Craig: Geniuses. That is synthetic, and that is short-circuiting a lot of work that our brain normally has to do to get that rewarded. When we were kids, you would get banana-flavored taffy. It’s an ester. It’s a chemical, and it certainly doesn’t taste like banana. It tastes like something else. It goes right into happy center in your brain way faster than a fricking banana would.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: AI is artificial flavoring, and it is chemicals. Yes, it can do those things. At some point, somebody does still have to make new stuff.

John: I continue to believe that as we move into this next decade, and more synthetic entertainment becomes online, I do think there will be a gravitation towards some live, in-person things, artistic plays that are staged in front of you. You feel like, “Oh, this is actually really happening. I’m not being fed a thing. This is a real moment.”

Craig: Absolutely, yes. Spontaneity and connection will not go away.

John: Agreed. All right, let’s get to our first topic today, which is something that I realized this past week was a thing I felt a lot at the start of my career. It never really went away. It just changed a little bit. I want to describe early in my career, and I’m sure you’ll recognize what this feels like.

I remember waiting for word back from an agent who was reading my script at CAA. I would come back from work every day and look at my answering machine, which was actually a physical box answering machine, to see if there was a blinking light, if there was a message from this producer, whether this agent at CAA had read it and hopefully liked it.

I’m waiting for like a month every day looking for that thing. There’s just a constant waiting. Early in my career as well, my scripts were being sent out and I was waiting to hear back from stuff.

Then this last month or two, and I’m being a little bit vague on some of these projects, but these are the kinds of things I was encountering, which was on one project waiting for the big boss to sign off on making my deal because it’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of speculation around town that this person may not be in that job anymore. Oh, well, does he actually have the power to sign off? Do you even want him to sign off? Do you want to wait for the next person? Because if he goes, then it becomes a project under the old regime.

Craig: Sure. I like the race between pay me and get fired, which will win– That’s exciting.

John: Another example of waiting is waiting for notes on a draft because the director is off busy shooting another movie. Waiting to take out a project because the rights holders have another franchise that they’re currently out shopping and they don’t want to confuse the market. Waiting for the company boss before taking out a different pitch because their attention is divided. I just want to talk about waiting. The frustration of a screenwriter is that you’re generating work, but you’re also waiting for results and for other people to do stuff.

Craig: It’s incredibly frustrating. Having now been on both sides of that ball, I can say that the waiting is worse. The making people wait is a constant churning guilt. But at some point, there is your limit for attention and your ability to focus on things because there’s a lot. The people who are making these decisions typically have too many decisions to make, too much stuff to read, and then the waiting happens.

Also, in our business, crises tend to occupy everyone’s time all the time. If you’re not a crisis, you just fall back to secondary position. We have to make peace with this horrible feeling, what Melissa calls sitting in your discomfort. We have to sit in our discomfort, which is awful. It is the most brutal indication that we are not in control of anything at all.

John: Let’s talk about control because I think one of the real gifts we have as writers is unlike actors and other people who make movies, we do have the agency to just go off and do other stuff. We’re not waiting for someone to give us permission to do our trade, a director needs to be hired on to do a thing. An actor needs to be hired on to perform in a role. We can just do new stuff. Obviously, the simplest advice is, well, go off and write the next thing and don’t spend too many brain cycles worrying about that other thing.

I don’t want to let us off completely there because I do think there is a responsibility for checking in and reminding people and finding ways to check in without being so annoying that they hate you. Most times, they won’t, but you are sometimes creating a bit of guilt so they actually do pay attention.

There’s a balance between how often you should do it and how often your reps should do it. I think one of the things I’ve learned over the years is how to stagger it so that the reps check one week and I check the next week.

Craig: Sure. Little pro tip for reps out there, and I’m sure they all do this. One of the things that happens with people whose attention is very divided is that they will swivel towards the potential for a loss as opposed to looking for the potential for a win. If a rep calls and says, “Hey, just reminding you. My client wrote this great script, you really should read it. That’s the potential for a win.” They’re like, “Oh, I’ll get to it.” “Hey, the script that we sent you, we would really like for you to be this person’s agent or this producer. Heads up, a couple other people now are on top of it and we’re getting a lot of incoming calls. Just doing you the courtesy of letting there’s heat now.” Oh, I might lose something? Oh, here we go.”

A little bit of a psychology there. It is much harder to do as the writer than it is, and this is why reps are useful. One of the reasons, I would say.

John: Agreed. Sometimes that ticking clock that you’re putting on there is John’s not going to be available anymore. Basically, you need him to do this next draft. We’re past the reading period and now it’s time to go on to the next thing. We should describe a reading period.

Craig: Sure.

John: In our episode where we talked about your contract, for each step in your deal, so writing a first draft, for example, there’s a certain number amount of time for you to deliver that first draft. You turn it in and then it starts a reading period. Reading period’s often four weeks. Could be longer, but it’s negotiated. It’s written down in your contract. They will ignore that. Expect that to be the minimum amount of time it will take them to read this and get you back to notes.

It’s useful that it’s in your contract because then if they come back to you after that time and say like, “Hey, we need to start this next thing.” They pass the reading period. You’ve got some negotiating room to say like, “He’s actually doing this next thing first because we missed this.” It’s also an invitation for your reps to call when that reading period is about to be over and say, “Hey, just so we know, this is the thing.” Occasionally, I’ve even been able to get people to commence me on the next step, even though they really haven’t given me notes because–

Craig: What happens is there’s a point where whatever the optional is for the next step, that number, that pre-negotiated number, only applies for a certain amount of time. If they missed that time, and this happened to me earlier in my career, where they blew past it, didn’t realize it, then they greenlit the movie. Then they said, “Okay, it’s time for you to do your optional polish.” We were like, “What optional polish?” Now it’s greenlit. We have a gun to your heads. I ended up getting paid more for that polish than I did for the first draft because they blew through it and they screwed up.

Patience is one of those things that is highly recommended, only because we aren’t in control and we don’t know where the ball is going to bounce. We think that we are responsible to force the issue. The answer, whether it’s I like this, I don’t like this, I want you to be my client, I want to make this or I don’t, is actually fairly unpredictable. The factors that lead to that decision are far beyond simply the writing.

If you wait three more days, something crazy can happen and now everybody wants to do it. You wait three more days, something horrible might happen and nobody wants to do it. Your specific movie about this one person and this one, “Tom Cruise just signed on to do the same story somewhere else, you’re done.” There’s no way of knowing. I think distressingly, Zen is called for here. Don’t be passive, don’t give up, but also be aware that whatever you do, maybe you can impart about 10% of spin on the ball and the rest of it is up to fate.

John: The other thing I want to make sure listeners hear out of this is sometimes that the waiting, the maybe, the we’ll see, is actually just a soft pass. No one wants to say no, and they can’t say yes. They say maybe, but really it’s no. Sometimes when you’re not hearing back from people, it really is that they passed, they’ve moved on, they’re not thinking about it anymore, but they just don’t actually want to officially say no.

That’s why I’m always so grateful when people are very upfront about like, “This is what’s happening. Sorry, this is where we’re at.” There’ve been times where I’ve vehemently disagreed on the decision but totally respected the person for actually having the courage to say, “No, this is where it’s at.”

Craig: Exactly. Maybe without conditions is no. If it’s maybe, the following three things need to happen, but if they do, then yes, and you understand those three things? Okay, let’s see if those three things happen. Now, sometimes because people don’t like saying no, they’ll say maybe these three things have to happen. One of them is Jesus needs to come back. Okay, if you create an impossible condition, then it’s no also.

John: We’re waiting to see what the market’s like in a month or two months. It’s a no. It could potentially come into a yes, but it’s not likely to be a yes. You really should not pin any hopes on that.

Craig: Typically, when we’re dealing with large companies, the amount of money that we’re talking about here is not enough to rattle a stock price, nor is it an amount that gets shaken loose by the market. They have it or they just don’t want it. Because if you said, “Okay, we can wait for the market. Just FYI, Spielberg wants to do it over there. Let me know how the market is by tomorrow morning. Otherwise, we’re going to Spielberg.” They’ll buy it before you hang up the phone. As we often said, almost everything but money is no. That’s how it goes.

John: Certainly, something you brought up early on is we recognize that sometimes we are that person who is being ambiguous or is in the maybe situation. That’s why I try to be that person who gives a clear, quick answer on things. If somebody sends me a thing for a possible adaptation or whatever, “Is this of interest to you?” I will try to take a look at it that day and I’ll try to get a no as quickly as possible if it probably is a no. On a call, I will pass on something. They sent it to me and five minutes later, I’m emailing back, “Not for me, thanks.”

There are situations where I need to stew and ruminate on things or it’s a big book to read and it’s like I’m interested and it takes a while. I just try to make it clear that this is how much time it’s going to take me to do it, this is why I’m thinking about doing it and not hold up the gears because I’ve recognized over the years, sometimes I’ve been that person, just ambiguously sitting out there.

Craig: We also have an advantage to decision making, which is that we are the people that make stuff. We’re not really operating according to heat or market interest or any of that stuff. We’re just going by instinct. One of the things that you do have to do is accept that you may not want to do something that literally everybody else does want to do. You need to be okay with that.

I’m just thinking of– there was a book that is not yet published, but it’s in galleys and went around. It was a proposal and I understood the story behind it. I read the proposal and I thought, “Yes, this will probably be quite good in adaptation. I don’t want to be the one to adapt it.” Now, I need to make my peace with that because I’m pretty sure in about three days, I’m going to read that somebody incredible is doing it, which is exactly what happened. I was okay with that because I made my peace with it. I think it’s harder for the other side because they panic. There have been situations where people call back and they’re like, “Wait, did I say no? I meant yes.” No backsies.

John: No backsies, yes.

Craig: No backses.

John: That FOMO, getting over that fear of missing out.

Craig: FOMO.

John: That’s really what it is. I’ve also been in that situation. When I feel it, something that’s helpful for me is to get right back and say, “This is going to be such a great movie. I cannot wait to watch it. I’m not the person to do this. I’m sure you’re talking to X, Y, and Z. They’re going to kill it.”

Craig: It’s a very reassuring way to say, “It’s no, but it’s obvious you guys aren’t going to be left here with an unsold item. It’s going to sell. It’s going to sell to somebody great. Good news. You don’t have to worry about me being the person,” and always thank you so much for consideration because it’s true. It’s very lovely to be considered for anything. On the other side of things, I think for those of us who are stuck in limbo, waiting for things, creating a little FOMO, probably better than being thirsty.

John: Absolutely. Let’s wrap up this topic. Just getting back to what Melissa said is that making peace with the uncertainty, with the discomfort. I think sometimes just like recognizing it, labeling it, naming it. This is an open loop that I have no control over. It’s there. I see it. Now, we’re moving on and we’re doing other things. It was in that weird storm of uncertainty that I ended up writing Go. It was actually a very productive period because I was just waiting on other stuff. It’s like, I had the agency to do it and so just take advantage of what you can do as a writer, which a lot of other folks can’t.

Craig: If you can forget that you’re waiting, you win.

John: All right. Let’s get to the Three Page Challenge. For folks who are new to the podcast, every once in a while, we put out a call to our premium subscribers saying, “Hey, send us the first three pages of your screenplay, of your pilot. We will take a look at this on the air.” We put out a URL. It’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. People fill out a little form. They say it’s okay for us to talk about this on the air. Everything we’re saying here is because people send us these things and ask for honest feedback. We are not being mean to anybody.

Craig: Have people been suggesting that we’re being mean?

John: I think some people get uncomfortable with our– This is like, “Oh, you’re ragging on them.”

Craig: They need to sit in their discomfort because we are actually so much nicer than what we have had to deal with.

John: The thing is, we’re actually saying stuff, whereas other people would just like, “Eh.”

Craig: If people are paying you, brutal.

John: Yes, that can be brutal.

Craig: Brutal.

John: Brutal. Now, Drew, help us out here because you put out the call for folks to send in these submissions. You sent out an email through the little system. Talk to us about what happened there.

Drew: Oh, yes. We got 250 submissions in less than 48 hours. It was amazing. It was really good work.

Craig: Sheesh.

Drew: My eyes are burning right now.

Craig: [laughs] You read all of them?

Drew: Basically, yes.

Craig: My God, 750 pages.

John: Now, so the filtering mechanism you’re using is we only want scripts that don’t have obvious typos that feels messy in a way that’s like, we’re going to have to talk about the mess on the page.

Drew: Typos are automatically out, and multiple submissions, I’ve caught those before too. I’ll start reading and be like, “Oh, this is the same thing. Okay, gone.”

John: Now, any other patterns you noticed in this tranche of scripts?

Drew: Yes. Actually, this one, I’ve been seeing several scripts where character age and gender are in message board formatting, if that’s the right way to put it.

John: Describe it.

Drew: F24, M30, or something like that, which is new. It sort of makes sense. [crosstalk]

John: As long as we understand what it is, as long as it didn’t stop me, I’d be fine with it. It also reminds me of an advice column like, “Me, female 35, and my partner, male 26 are doing a thing.” I get that.

Craig: F number, M number, sure.

John: Anything else you’ve noticed, Drew?

Drew: We had a few scripts with email and contact info directly under the author name. It was titled by this person, then it was sandwiched right up. I don’t know if people are doing that for the Three Page Challenge.

John: I feel like bottom left corner is a great place to put that. I like it better down there.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s not the end of the world.

Craig: No. If I like the script, I don’t care where the email is.

John: All right. Let’s start off here with a sample called Scrambling by Tania Luna. Drew, if you could give us the synopsis for folks who are not reading along with us. If you are reading along with us, you might want to pause right now. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to the PDF. You can read the PDF and then hear what we said. For Drew, everybody else, give us the synopsis.

Drew: Veronica, 24, walks quickly through the financial district of New York City, staring at her GPS, totally lost. She asks a stranger for directions to Front Street, which all the pedestrians are happy to give her, but their directions become this confusing cacophony of words. We intercut this with moments from her childhood. Lost in her school hallways, she imagines rolling fog and shadows until a teacher finds her.

Back in present day, when Veronica ends up on Fulton Street rather than Front, she hails a cab, which takes her to her destination only a few seconds away. She enters the ONG building, where the guard asks her which suite number she’s going to, and she’s overwhelmed by the amount of words in front of her.

John: All right. Let’s start with the title page here. Scrambling is written in a jumble of fonts. I actually really like the look of it. It’s fun. Then it says written by, and then it says Lania Tuna, and then that’s stripped through, and it says Tania Luna underneath that. Fun. We’re giving a sense of what the underlying dilemma is here for this character. It’s all in Courier Prime, which is a delightful typeface. I’ve always noticed that. It all looks really good. We got the email address and the phone number in the bottom left corner. Nothing on the cover page that concerned me. I had more concerns as we started going into this. Craig, talk to us about what you’re seeing as you enter.

Craig: Let’s talk about some good things first. These pages look great.

John: They do.

Craig: The way things are spread out is the golden ideal of a blend of action and dialogue. There’s some nice white space throughout. It was very easy to read. I moved across it nicely. The sentences were all well put together. The first thing that jumped out was this description. They walk fast, but Veronica, all caps underlined. I’m fine with that. Sure, why not? Veronica, and then in parentheses, 24, mixed-race, is faster.

I’m not sure mixed race is enough because that’s a very generic way to describe somebody’s ethnicity. If you’re going to make a point that it’s mixed-race, shouldn’t we know what the mix is?

John: Yes. In the next paragraph, we’re hearing long, straight black hair, yellow backpack, bouncing as she walk, runs, but we’re not finding anything more about her. Giving us just age and–

Craig: Basically, it was like saying Veronica, 24, won’t tell you what she looks like, is faster. That’s what it felt like to me. Either don’t or do. The halfway seemed a bit odd.

Now, what happens here over these three pages appears to be the demonstration of somebody struggling with some kind of information-processing disability. The glimpse of her struggling with this as a kid was interesting, but possibly out of place in this frantic opening.

The biggest issue I have here, as far as these three-page challenges go, this is a fairly high-level one. That’s good news because I think that Tania Luna can write fairly well here, is that if you’re demonstrating that somebody has a specific processing disability, don’t show me them doing something that I think they would be able to do regardless. If you’re 23 years old and you know that you have some issues processing information, direction, street names, things like that, and you’re going for a job interview, you will prepare. You’re not going to be helpless. You’re not going to wake up that morning and go, “Oh, right, I forgot I have extreme dyslexia or extreme dysgraphia, or I cannot remember names or places, or I’m face-blind.”

You know these things. Would it not be more interesting to meet this person in a situation where they did feel self-assured because they had prepared, and then something happens that they weren’t expecting, and then we see the expression of this disability and what it means for this person.

John: Yes. I think my frustration with the three pages on the whole was that it was three pages of just getting somebody to an office in a way that didn’t feel like, I didn’t learn that much about Veronica over the course of these three pages. I didn’t know anything specific about what she was. I didn’t get a sense of what her issue was. It’s some sort of information processing issue that she was overwhelmed by this scenario, but I didn’t know much specific about her, and that started with not getting a clear visual of her at the start.

I want to talk about just the very first lines here. With the New York City Financial District, skyscrapers jetted out of concrete like shiny Lego towers made by a kid without much of an imagination. I don’t see that specifically.

Craig: It’s also unnecessary because we know–

John: We know what skyscrapers are.

Craig: Yes, we know what New York looks like.

John: Cabs honk as they whiz by, a few meter trees, leaves yellow, dot the sidewalk. Not helping me get so much. Here’s my concern, tourists. So many tourists wander with the locals, business suits, business shoes, business expressions. I don’t associate a lot of tourists with the Financial District, so I think highlighting that there are people in business suits doing Wall Street work and that Veronica is maybe not part of that is actually more useful to us than the confusing thing of the tourists in there because I don’t understand who Veronica is in relationship to people she’s walking around. The GPS on her phone, the GPS just feels– it makes me think, “Oh, are we in the ‘90s?”

Craig: Right. It’s an incredibly ambiguous concept. It’s a technology that underpins all the other things we have.

John: We refer to it as a separate thing anymore.

Craig: Is she using Google Maps? Is she using Waze? Is she using Apple Maps? GPS is like a Garmin device.

John: Absolutely. Call up the map on her phone, which is fine. Beyond that, I mostly get it. Cutting back to the elementary school was probably not the right choice for cutting back and forth in these first pages leads me to think that we’re going to do this all the time in the movie, and that’s not, my friend. I get a little bit nervous about jumping back to the grade school so much at the start.

Craig: If you do jump back to the grade school, I need to know that it’s her memory. Otherwise, it’s the movie doing it, in which case I’m just frustrated. I feel, in this case, like the movie just said, “Oh, now, here’s her as a kid,” not okay, on her face, panicked, sweaty. There’s this memory of her being panicked and sweaty in a hallway. You’re absolutely right, where we place her in the beginning, none of those things are in service of her character. They don’t create specific obstacles. It isn’t a question that we almost missed her because she wasn’t interesting, but then we realized that’s part of the issue. It wasn’t that she was moving faster than everybody or getting jostled. Why the street? Why the here? What’s going on? Why not just, boom, panicked, running?

John: I want to get back to the thing you said early on. I said a person with this situation, this information processing disorder, would have a strategy going into it. They’d have a plan for coping ahead. That might actually be a more interesting thing. If we’re going to cut away from the moments, it might be more interesting to see what her plan was for that day, and then watch it fall apart.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You sit there and you make a plan. If I’m watching a 23-year-old young woman at night in her apartment practicing the map, practicing the movements, I would be so curious as to why. Then when I see her the next day moving, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, so she has some issue. That’s why she prepared this.” Then, “Oh, Con Ed has closed the street off. You can’t go that way. Oh, no.” Then I’m connected to her panic because I’m experiencing it. I’m part of it because I’ve been prepared for it.

One thing to consider, and I don’t know if Tania has this processing disorder or not, but one thing I would suggest, Tania, is to think, okay, sometimes reality gets in the way of what we think would be dramatic. Don’t worry. Better to be realistic. Then say, well, then what are the pettier, the smaller, the more mundane obstacles that will be unique to this situation?

John: As you were talking, I was thinking about, let’s say she’s coming from uptown to the Financial District. She gets on a train and she assumes it’s local and it’s going to stop, but it turns out to be an express, and so she goes three stops too far. We’ve all been in a situation where we’re like, wait, you just saw the stop go past you. We can handle that. We have an expectation of how we can handle that, but if we then cut back to her planning for how many stops it’s going to be, and you realize like, “Oh, this is a much bigger deal to her than it would be to me,” we’re leaning in, we’re curious.

Craig: Yes. If we replace this character with a blind character, we would not accept an opening where this blind character is moving through the New York streets with their cane, completely unaware of where they are. You would prepare, but we would be very invested if, for instance, like what you just said happened, and you realize, “Oh, my preparation is useless now. Now what do I do?” That creates connection with the character. What we don’t have here is a rooting interest because we’re just watching. We’re not invested.

John: Agreed.

Craig: I will say the ability to put sentences together, to lay things out in a convincing way, read, it was smooth as silk, so it’s all promising.

John: Absolutely. We’re sure pitching a better version of what’s already been solved.

Craig: Which we usually don’t have the opportunity to do, so that’s a good sign.

John: It is, agreed. Drew, our writer also sent through the logline to explain what’s happening in the full script. Tell us what else is happening in Scrambling.

Drew: The logline is, a dyslexic woman with a wild imagination accidentally lands a high-stakes job and must scramble to prove she belongs in a cutthroat corporate world that wasn’t built for her to succeed.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s right. It’s working girl. Great, love it.

Craig: Sure.

John: Let’s move on to our next script by Leah Newsome. This is Lump. Drew, help us out.

Drew: A desert town in the year 2140. Very pregnant Ingrid, early 30s, is being given a cervical exam by a doula in an old dingy motor home. The doula is feeling for something. She finds it, says no, and ends the exam. Ingrid hangs her head. On her way out, the doula encourages Ingrid to go to a hospital across the border as they’re cleaner. Ingrid is reluctant. Driving home, odd beeps and screeching comes over the radio. Ingrid accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic but avoids a crash. At home, Ingrid makes tea but panics when she drops some of the water on the floor. Sean enters, informing her that the water filter was jammed, and fence was cut.

John: All right, and so on the title page here it says, “Inspired by the mythical epic The King of Tars.” I’ve never heard of The King of Tars.

Craig: I’ve never heard of The King of Tars

John: I believe it exists.

Craig: It has to.

John: It makes me curious.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, and I also like that you’re saying the medieval epic because it’s like, nothing about this feels medieval. Great.

Craig: Yes, that’s inspiring.

John: Yes, if you’re just making it up just to pique our curiosity.

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Brilliant.

Craig: Actually, a genius movie.

John: Well played. All right, let me start us off here. We are starting off in this doula’s motorhome. I like the visuals that we’ve got here. I like sort of how we’re being set up. The super title over it says The Excised Lands 2140. I bristled a little bit at The Excised Lands. It just gave me that sort of fantasy sci-fi thing.

Craig: Slightly fanfic-ish name.

John: Yes, fanfic-ish. Yes, it does feel a little bit like that. This is a small thing. In the Courier Typeface, you use dash, dash. There’s no such thing as like a long em dash. Whatever Leah’s doing here to create those em dashes, those long dashes in the first paragraph and second paragraph, just a little bit weird. Just it bumped for me. I noticed it. Not a big thing.

What is a little bit bigger of a thing for me is fourth paragraph. She leans over Ingrid’s legs, finding the right angle. The last person who’s named was Ingrid. I didn’t realize it was the doula immediately. Just say doula. Just keep it. It’s that read to make sure that everything is unambiguous the first time you take a look at it. I was a little bit frustrated by the end of this first scene. Doula says, “Sorry.” I wanted more. I felt you were being ambiguous for no purpose. The doula would have said more there.

Craig: Yes, this is the reaction. The doula is doing a vaginal examination to check what? Dilation possibly to see if it’s time for the baby to be born. It’s a cervical exam. Cervical exam would imply, yes, that it is. We’re checking dilation, right? Then the doula feels for something difficult to find. The cervix is not difficult to find. Now I’m like, “Okay, well, what is difficult?”

John: Is something else happening in there?

Craig: Something else happening. Okay. We are in the future. Are we hoping for a two-headed baby? I don’t know. All I know is that the doula says, “No,” which is very casual. No, sorry. Ingrid drops her head onto the table defeated. It’s a bit like, I didn’t get the job. Not my baby’s dead. If your baby isn’t ready to be born, then that would be a different response. I had no idea what I was meant to feel there.

John: Yes. Here’s why it matters because we’ve established she’s very pregnant. We say that she’s very pregnant. We’re just seeing this exam or calling a cervical exam. Then the idea that she’s going to cross the border to do a doula makes me wonder, and not in the right way, is to wonder what’s going to happen next. I feel like if she’s close enough that she’s there for this exam, that the baby’s just about to come.

Craig: Let’s talk a little bit about the post-apocalypse, if I may.

John: Do you have any experience about that?

Craig: When you begin, it’s important to introduce changes slowly. The things that are contrasted to our life are important, but you don’t want to just pile on 12 of them at once.

John: No.

Craig: Because now nobody knows really what the rules are. Nobody knows quite what the connection is to the past. There’s so much going on here in this first scene that I don’t– They don’t have stirrups. She’s got to hold her own legs back. It’s in a motor home, but they do have rubber gloves or latex gloves. Then there’s an oil drum fire pit, which I have to say, I have a rule on The Last of Us.

John: No oil drum fire pits.

Craig: No oil drum fire pits. It is the most possible cliche thing to do in the apocalypse.

John: Where do we think– Was it Mad Max where we first established the post-apocalyptic oil drum fire pit?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Because they used to actually exist. In the Great Depression, that was actually a way that people kept warm.

Craig: From oil drums? It was a metal thing.

John: It was a metal– [crosstalk]

Craig: When do you find– Oil drums exist. You’ll see oil drums in the second season of The Last of Us, but not for braziers. Isn’t it rare to just see oil drums with the top lopped off that you can fill with garbage and light on fire, and they’re always on the street corner? I think it’s because it’s just they’re easy to source for productions. They’re at a height that makes it interesting. Otherwise, people have to sit. I don’t know. Anyway, but here’s what I really don’t understand. There’s an oil drum fire pit and it’s 100 degrees out.

John: Yes.

Craig: What? What?

John: Yes. What is that? They’re playing a card game near the fire.

Craig: Why would they be near the fire sweating through their clothes when it’s 100 degrees? Now, that may be explained also, but then I want the script to tell me that’s weird. At least to acknowledge to me, I’m supposed to note that that’s strange. One thing I do think that would help this is if we took the excise land 2140, moved it down a bit.

John: I was about to say the same thing. If that’s, as she’s getting back to her truck and everything else, that’s when we’re saying that, great. Because then also it makes that first scene clean. It can be about the duelist medical examination. We’ll notice like, okay, is this just a– what’s happening here?

Craig: Generally, you want to put that title over the widest possible shot.

John: Agreed.

Craig: Where you get the full scope of the world and you go, “Oh yes,” that’s not just that I’m in this horrible junkyard or a terrible mobile park. Look at the horizon, look at the sun, look at the sky, look at whatever.

John: I want to make a proposal for the second scene. In the second scene, we’re outside the motor home and Ingrid is walking to her truck. She gets in her truck. I would propose that we start the scene a little bit later on, because right now we have an action line. Ingrid pulls her keys out of her pocket. That’s not an interesting line to give to itself. If she were to get into the truck at that point and the rest of the conversation is there, then we can end on the finally get the car to start the engine rumble into life. I would say just get us into that car sooner. It’s probably going to be your friend.

Craig: This is also a place where knowing where people are and how motion is functioning will help. Why is the doula following her? I didn’t even know the doula was following me until she started talking. Is she trying to keep up with Ingrid? Is she worried about Ingrid? What she’s saying here, I can’t tell what the intention is. Is she worried for Ingrid’s life? Is she just being just a know-it-all? I can’t tell because I don’t know how she’s moving with her.

John: Yes. If that first line from the doula is like, listen, you could probably make it in time if you left now. If she was following her and like that’s the first line, in the sense that she’s restating a thing she said before.

Craig: Also it says exterior doula’s motorhome day. The motorhome door slams behind Ingrid and the doula. That’s it.

John: Who slammed it?

Craig: Then they don’t seem to be walking. They’re just standing there. Is the truck right next to the motorhome? Where is everything? This is the classic Lindsey Durant question. Where are they standing? Are they moving? Where is the truck? Where are the women relative to the motorhome?

John: My instinct is they should be in motion as the scene starts.

Craig: It feels like they should be in motion because I would understand that the doula is worried about her. For the doula to be worried about her, I need to go back to the prior scene where Ingrid drops her head onto the table, defeated, then starts to get up. The doula goes, “Wait, wait, wait.” Cut to, boom. “Hold on, hold on.” Just because I don’t know why this next bit is happening. Just thinking about how people actually function. They don’t just do nothing and then suddenly appear together outside of the door. Find the intention.

John: Yes, agreed. As we get into Ingrid’s truck, she’s driving back. I was confused by the radio voice because the radio voice to me feels like, at first I thought, is it a dispatcher? No, it’s just convenient radio-

Craig: It’s the news.

John: -telling up the news.

Craig: It’s the news. I really struggle with this. Three arrested west of the former municipality of Phoenix.

John: Oh, come on.

Craig: If it is 2140, you’re not calling it the– That’s like us referring to New York as the former New Amsterdam today. We don’t do that, right? You could call it west of Phoenix territory or west of– Fallout would call it New Phoenix. That’s what they do. New Vegas. Why is there just this casual– If you have this casual news update, I feel like there’s way more civilization going on than we thought there would be.

John: With this last line, suspects were found with stolen rations on their persons. That feels police-y. That feels like police dispatcher. Finding the right level for that is interesting.

It sounds like, Leah, we’re really harping on a lot of stuff. I want to love this. I actually like the space of it. I love a pregnant woman in this space and trying to make a decision about what to do next. We’re about to get to Sean, who’s apparently the father of the kid. We’re about to meet him. That scene is better. We don’t know who Sean is. He’s not given any other uppercase name. I’m curious to keep reading based on what you’ve done so far.

Craig: Yes. I love a scene that begins with a cervical exam. If you start with a cervical exam, hats off, good for you. Audacious, bold. There is a lot of clunky, cliche, sci-fi stuff going on here that you have to be better than because you just don’t want to end up in a Wattpad world with this stuff, right?

Last thing is to just think about where everybody is, give the audience a chance to visualize things. It means say less and make the things you say matter more. We are interior cat house evening. What does the exterior look like? Where is it? I don’t know.

John: I don’t know what interior cat house means.

Craig: I don’t know either. Cat house could be whore house.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then it says her house. I don’t know what’s going on. Then, listen, Sean is saying a bunch of things that I suspect are intentionally confusing. The filter, what is it? The fence, don’t know. Something with the water. Not sure. All fine.

John: All fine. He’s entering in as if he’s just continuing a previous conversation, which makes sense for people who know each other well.

Craig: She knows something from the doula. She hasn’t told him. Am I looking at her face? Is she contemplating telling him? Is she worried about telling him?

John: I don’t know what she knows.

Craig: I don’t know either. All I know is that she doesn’t seem to be concerned about it here anymore either. I think all this is to say to Leah, “If there’s one word I could give you, Leah, as advice for this, it is to focus. Focus in on what you want me to see. Focus in on why it matters. Focus in on, visually, on your frame, the movement, all of it.”

John: Yes, watch the scenes.

Craig: Watch the scenes. These feel written. They don’t feel watched.

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? What is the log line? What else is going to be happening in Lump?

Drew: Over a century into the water crisis, a couple moves to the former state of Arizona where they’re pulled into a violent and mystical cult of doulas following the birth of their Lumpchild.

Craig: Okay. My interest is piqued. I’ve never considered that there would be a cult of violent doulas. That’s hysterical. I don’t know what a Lumpchild is. Cool. A lot of questions.

John: A lot of questions. I would say I’m intrigued because the fact that the doulas are an important part of the whole story, I wasn’t getting that out of them.

Craig: Not at all.

John: I’m surprised that thing we saw in the first frame is actually a crucial part of the whole rest.

Craig: Because they showed us doula.

John: Doula, yes.

Craig: Not doulas.

John: There were other dusty old women out there, but–

Craig: They were playing cards by a fire in 100-degree heat. The thing that I think is missing from that log line that I’d love to hear is some brief reference to why doulas matter at all in this new world, or at least more than they did now, or why they would conglomerate into a violent cult in a world with terrible infertility problems. Yes. In a world where no new babies have been born. In a world where only 1 out of 1,000 children survive. Something to create relevance so that it’s not just– Because you could take the word doulas out and replace it with janitors, bubblegum manufacturers, girl scouts.

John: It doesn’t matter. The thing I was missing in that log line is Ingrid must make a choice. Basically, what is the decision that this central character has to make? Yes.

All right, let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is The Dread Pirate Roberts, written by J. Bryan Dick. Drew, help us out.

Drew: “We’re dropped from space down towards earth, specifically the Carolina coast, and into the middle of a 17th-century naval battle between two ships, the Revenge, which is filled with pirates, and the Queen’s Pride, which is a Navy ship. The captain of the Queen’s Pride believes they’re winning, sends his steward, Wesley, 18, to go get his victory snuff. As he does, the Revenge turns and rams the Queen’s Pride, and pirates storm the ship. Too scared to do it himself, the captain gives Wesley a dagger to cut them free from the pirates’ grappling hooks. Wesley is quickly stopped by a pirate named Scars, who encourages him to jump into the ocean like the rest of the Navy sailors.

Wesley pretends to run away but grabs a rope and slingshots back and knocks out Scars to cut the rope. Soon, a pirate in all black soars over them all, swinging up to the crow’s nest triumphantly, and a knife is put to Wesley’s neck.”

John: Now, for listeners who are saying, “Hey, that sounds familiar,” we should say that underneath the title on the title page, it says, a pilot for the lost adventures of the black-masked scallywags from The Princess Bride, William Goldman’s timeless tale of true love. This is literally fan fiction.

Craig: Yes, and that’s fine.

John: Fine.

Craig: Are you allowed to sell this? No, not without permission. Are you allowed to write it as a sample? 100%. Absolutely, nothing wrong with that.

John: I actually applaud this choice, because if I needed to read a sample, and I sort of know what the source material is, can this guy write in this kind of a style? Can it? Sure, and I think, actually, J. Bryan Dick did a nice job here. I enjoyed reading these pages.

Craig: Yes, the challenge with this is the bar gets higher.

John: It does.

Craig: Because everybody’s aware that you’re cheating. You’re not creating new characters. You’re not creating a new world. You’re not creating a tone. You’re building off of something. Therefore, a little more expectation, because you haven’t had to cook at all yourself. In addition, when it’s something that’s derived from a beloved movie, like The Princess Bride, that, basically, everyone has seen in our business multiple times, you need to also nail it. It’s not enough to be good. It felt good, but I wasn’t delighted. It just sort of was a pretty typical naval battle.

Listen, you’re trying to write like William Goldman. What a target that you put on your back. It’s confident. It’s crackling. There was one moment where I thought, “Oh, there’s a missed opportunity, where the captain gets scared and sends Wesley.” That felt like it could have been a little bit more of a Goldmanesque turn from overconfident bravery to, oh, you there. I have a thought. It just felt so quick as to be almost arbitrary. Yes. It’s a naval battle. I will say, I appreciated that J. Bryan didn’t bury us in action description. The boats collide and side by side. Got it. Okay. I can do that math.

John: Absolutely. We were focused on characters during it, which was crucial. I did feel there was a missed opportunity with the captain who’s just captain. Give that captain a name that crackles. His first line is only okay. The first line is, these pickeroons will be food for the sea. Reload. Make this pass our last. There’s a better version of that first line. I like pickeroons, but like these pickeroons will feed the sea, man. Something about that could feel fun. Let us also know that this is a bit of a comedy, because I didn’t feel like we were quite getting to the joke. Even though the captain is not going to be a crucial character, he’s the first person who speaks, and that becomes important.

Craig: Yes. That’s the issue is everything has to be as good as The Princess Bride.

John: Reading this made me think back to Mindy Kaling when she was on the show. We were talking about when she’s staffing for shows, she gets frustrated by reading original pilots, and she’s like, “I really miss the day when you would read, specs of existing shows, because then you can see like, can this person write in somebody else’s voice?” That’s obviously what she needs to know. It’s this, can this person do somebody else’s thing?

I think what’s nice about this is, as a sample would be like, “Oh, this person is adaptable and can answer, can get a thing, which is really useful.” In a weird way, I suspect that this pilot script, which you can’t shoot. If it’s all at this quality and beyond this quality, will be useful because it shows the ability to match a style that’s not their own.

Craig: This would obviously hinge on the relationship between Wesley and the Dread Pirate Roberts. The promise of that story is enough to keep me going. One thing that’s important tonally is that The Princess Bride was framed as a tale where a grandfather is reading from a novel to his grandson. I think that that is baked in to the world of The Princess Bride. Even if you just want to start inside of it, which I think is reasonable, here’s what you can’t do.

On page three, Scars says, “What’ll it be, boy?” With that, young Wesley charges to the side of the ship. Scars reacts. That was too easy. Young Wesley doesn’t go overboard. He launches himself into a taut rope and slingshots back at Scars. Scars says, “Oh, shi–.” We don’t curse in The Princess Bride. Ever. That’s not a thing. We don’t do that. Understanding tone is massively important.

John: Absolutely. That oh, sh, could be a reaction from Scars. You can put that in italics after that. We wouldn’t say it.

Craig: We just wouldn’t. We would not say that.

John: We would not say that. That idea of do you, will J. Bryan Dick adopt that framing that this is a tale being told within this? Maybe. I can imagine at a certain point, I think something just stops. It’s like, but what happened next? Sure. Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Promise of fun. Zippy pages to read. Not a ton of what I would call fresh invention here. Enough to make me wonder like, okay. I will say like the great idea here is to meet the Dread Pirate Roberts. Because we never met him. Yes. We met Wesley. He was not the first Dread Pirate Roberts. [crosstalk]

John: That’s fine. What’s also helpful about this is like, if you had to pick between 10 things to read and you saw this one, it’s like, oh, I know what this is going to be. There’s something comfortable about that.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Drew, help us out. What else? The long line for the rest of this pilot.

Drew: Set in the Princess Bride world, the Dread Pirate Roberts TV series, follows the adventures of each person who donned the black mask to sail the high seas and command the Revenge.

John: Oh, well, that’s an interesting idea that it’s not just Wesley. It could also be like the history of.

Craig: Then why are we starting with Wesley?

John: What, that he was the last one?

Craig: Then we go backwards?

John: Maybe there’s a whole cadre of other folks who are still around and a lot.

Craig: I don’t want to watch that. I’ll tell you why. Because television shows, unless they are anthology shows like Black Mirror, where everything is a different story. It’s about connecting with the characters and relationships. I want to watch the Dread Pirate Roberts tutor this young lad, to whom he says at the end of every day, “Well done, probably kill you in the morning,” and then doesn’t. I want to see that father-son relationship happen. I don’t want to just keep meeting new Dread Pirate Robertses.

John: Yes, I do. I guess the version of this I want is basically Hacks, but it’s pirates.

Craig: Sure. Did you see Our Flag Means Death?

John: I did not get into Our Flag Means Death. But it’s in that same space, for sure.

Craig: It is in that same space, although definitely a different tone. What I loved is you got to meet this ship full of wackos and got under the hood of those wackos. It was appreciated if I kept going to different ships and different people.

John: I doubt that’s really what’s happening here. This reminds me of, because I was just editing the chapter on what kind of story this is. Basically, we’re talking through in this strip dance book chapter, I have this idea. Is it a movie idea? Is it a TV idea? There is a movie idea for the Dread Pirate Roberts, where it’s all contained within one thing. The TV show version of this is fun in the same way that Cheers is fun. Is that like you are following a group of people and sort of the adventures of the week.

Craig: They don’t change.

John: Exactly. They don’t change.

Craig: That’s the key. Every week we meet a new bartender in Cheers. That part, I do think it would be a wonderful, I presume that this would be a movie.

John: It feels like it should be a movie. Let’s talk about just the final, could you actually make this thing? You could if this were terrific. I don’t know who owns the rights. Is it Castle Rock? Who would own this?

Craig: Yes. It’s Castle Rock, but you would probably need– yes, you wouldn’t need permission from William Goldman. Unless you were, no, you might-

John: Because of the underlying book.

Craig: Because of the underlying book.

John: Yes. I suspect in buying the rights to the book.

Craig: They probably bought it all out in perpetuity across the universe for all time. Yes, you’re probably right. Then it would be Castle Rock. Not impossible, but you’d have to know there would be a tremendous outcry.

John: There would be. The standards would have to be really high.

Craig: This is meant for, hey, I’m a good writer. Not, hey, make this show.

John: Yes. I think it’s a good writing sample. We want to thank everybody who submitted, all 250 of you who submitted, especially these three writers for letting us talk about their work on the air. Drew, thank you again for burning your eyes out to read through all of 250 of these.

Craig: I don’t know how you did that.

John: It is time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show that’s actually in the same space. It’s a specific episode of a TV series called The Goes Wrong Show.

Craig, you may have seen on Broadway, there’s a show, The Play That Goes Wrong. There’s also a TV series, which the premise is that it’s a theater troupe that puts on a show for television each week. A director explains what the goal was and also tells what challenges they felt they encountered that week. Never mind, it’s going to go fine for this live TV thing. Of course, things go wrong at the premise.

The episode, if people are, if that’s at all appealing to you, the episode I recommend to folks is one called 90 Degrees. It’s a Tennessee Williams type play. The premise of the episode is that the set designers mistook 90 Degrees as instructions for how one set was supposed to be built.

Craig: Everything is turned.

John: Everything is turned. It’s turned 90 degrees. The cameras also turn 90 degrees for it. You have characters who are trying to sit around this table and they’re falling down, and gravity just works against them. It’s incredibly dumb, but also just delightful.

Craig: I love dumb.

John: It’s a thing you could also watch with your kids because it’s absurd and it’s completely safe.

Craig: Where would I find that?

John: I think we found it on Amazon Prime. I would just google and see what servers you can find it on.

Craig: Sure.

John: All right. What do you got for us?

Craig: My one cool thing is someone I met in Austin. We were down there for South by Southwest and myself and Neil Druckmann and the many of the cast of The Last of Us got to meet Cookie Monster.

John: Oh my God. Cookie Monster’s the best.

Craig: And Elmo. No offense to Elmo. Elmo’s great. Cookie Monster has been there, John, for our entire lives. It was so strange to meet a puppet as a 53-year-old and feel like you might cry because it’s like when you smell something from your childhood, it’s just this instant thing of getting back. Now, one thing I noticed about Cookie Monster that I did not expect is he’s enormous. Those puppets are huge. They’re so much bigger than you think they are. They’re so big.

It was pretty, it reminded me of how powerful Sesame Street is as a cultural institution. To the extent that these kinds of cultural institutions are being assaulted and undermined, it’s so distressing because it is just an absolute positive thing that has lasted. Every generation of children that comes along magically loves Cookie Monster. The color of the blue, just his blue made me so happy. I just want to thank Sesame Street and Cookie Monster for welcoming us into their studio. I still don’t know why, but they did. [laughter]

John: Craig, tell me, so I’ve never interacted with Muppets. Was it hard to maintain eye contact with the puppet and ignore the puppeteer?

Craig: No, because the puppeteer gets very low. There’s a camera that’s filming things and the puppeteer gets very low. In fact, there’s quite a bit of scrambling right before they roll, which is like, lower, no, see you, lower. That’s why the puppet is so big. Because it actually has to fill a lot of space below frame to make sure that the puppeteer is not in the frame.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our host for this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You will find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record on the secret things we noticed that let us know that something has been re-shot. Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, you are watching a movie, you’re watching a TV show, and your little radar is like, okay, there’s a recut here, something’s changed, something went off. What are some things that are tipping you off that things changed here?

Craig: The biggest indication is there is a rather long and explainy bit of dialogue that is not on camera. Someone is, the person who’s not on camera that’s talking to the person who is on camera says a long thing that explains a thing that they wouldn’t have normally said or needed to explain because he would have seen it, which is probably covering for the fact that that thing was essential to know for the plot, but the scene just wasn’t working and so they cut it.

John: Absolutely. We’ve both been in situations where in post, you are adding ADR lines, looping lines to take care of a little bridge or situation. ADR is used to fix little technical mistakes but also can be used to correct some narrative issues because a scene got dropped out because a scene where that information used to happen is no longer there. Watching the current season of Severance, and we’re recording this before the final episode, and I don’t really know any of the backstory on Severance, what happened this season.

Watching it, I did notice a few moments in these last few episodes where like, okay, something shifted here. One of those things, situations was a crucial word or term was used and we were not on the characters while they were saying it or we suddenly cut incredibly wide when a character says a certain phrase. It led me to believe like, okay, something shifted here. There was also a situation where one character had a confrontation, drove away to leave the show and then comes back and then leaves the show again. My suspicion is that the episode in which those were happening got shifted later on in the season and we were moving stuff around to accommodate that change.

Craig: That could absolutely be true. The interesting thing about the streaming world now is that episodes have variable lengths. It’s not necessarily the case that if you see a very short episode or a very long episode that things, may have, but sometimes when an episode is very short, it’s because there were some scenes, it’s rare to plan for an episode to be say 35 minutes if you’re an hour-long show. There may have been some things that got cut.

The other thing, let’s talk about an additive thing that is an indication. When a sequence occurs that is very self-contained and exciting, actiony, scary, sexy, one of these big, loud, noisy scenes that didn’t really feel like it needed to be there, didn’t change anything, suddenly sort of happened, didn’t impact stuff. That is oftentimes the result of a studio network going, this thing needs to be louder, sexier. I need a car chase, and so they just make one happen and shove it in. If you ever feel like something got shoved in, it’s probably because it got shoved in.

John: A thing I will notice is that you have key characters having a scene on a set with nobody else around them. It feels like a reshoot. It feels like we haven’t established anybody else in the world who could be in this thing, but we need to have this moment happen. Therefore, we’re putting them in this set. One of the recent Marvel movies, I did notice there were some sequences were like, “Wait, why are we here? What is this place that we’re in?” It’s a place that was not established. It’s a place that serves no other function, and yet we’re in this place for this one scene to happen. To me, it felt like six months later, they brought everybody back and shot this one thing.

Craig: If you see something like that that isn’t really set up and isn’t used again, either it was created for that, or there were five scenes in that thing. All of them except one guy. That’s another good point. Sometimes that can be an indication.

You’re right to suggest that sometimes it’s those scenes between two characters sitting somewhere that are additional photography, but sometimes those are the best scenes. Very famously, we had David Benioff and Dan Weiss on our show, and they talked about how in the first season of Game of Thrones, they just missed the target on how long the episode should be and needed to go back and put stuff in.

They were out of money, so they did the cheapest thing, which was write conversations between two people in a room that already exists, and lo and behold, those are some of the best scenes in season one because they’re good writers. They did a great job of creating scenes where you, what happened inside of there wasn’t just plot or filler, it helped inform the conflict and the character.

John: Yes, one of the issues with the way we make TV shows now, especially for series on streaming, is that we’ll often block shoot things. We could block shoot the entire eight episodes or 10 episodes of the season, but more likely we’re doing things in chunks and stuff moves around. I’ve talked with show owners who they need to do reshoots, and suddenly they have like four directors who are like all shooting the same week in the same space to do stuff. It gets to be really, really complicated. It’s not surprising that you didn’t go in intending the scene to work that way.

Clearly, that was what you could do with the situation you had. You have a character giving a piece of information that’s like, is not the most organic way to do a thing, but it’s who you had available at the moment to make this bridge fit.

Craig: Yes, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. You either are on a show where you have the resources to accommodate those things. It was raining that day and we needed it to be sunny. We’re going to wait for it to be sunny and do it again. It was raining that day, we needed it to be sunny. They’re going to be in the rain, and we’re not going to really talk about it. The fact that the scene before and the scene after are on the same day are sunny, just going to happen. Things like that do happen. It is remarkable what people notice and don’t notice.

One of the things about all of these strange bumpy moments is that we’re very well attuned to them, but they wouldn’t happen so frequently if they didn’t work. They actually get away with it all the time.

John: The other thing I’ll notice about, something has changed here. A scene got dropped, something got wedged in there, endless days or nights, or it goes day to night, day to night in a way that’s not really possible. These two things could not be happening simultaneously, and that’s just a thing. No, the writers aren’t idiots. It’s just that something changed and something shifted, and this is sort of what we can do. This is where we’re at.

Craig: Yes, if something occurs that is jolting in a superficial way, it’s probably because there was something in between that got lost. If you have characters who are getting to know each other at work, and then the next scene is it’s the evening, and they’re at some sort of very swanky party, and the woman is dressed in this like rotten ballgown. The guy’s in a tux, and you’re like, where did you come from? Why is this totally occurring now in this way?

Something got lost here, and one thing that we always have to watch out for when we’re doing all of our work is that if the people who are paying for it are losing faith in it, or their faith is wobbly, they will generally resort to faster. Go faster. You don’t need that. It’s slowing us down, and they have such a lower sensitivity to things not making sense than we do. We’ll say, well, that literally will not make sense now. If we take that out, this will not make sense, and they don’t care a lot, and that’s a fight you have to have.

John: Because they are familiar with the bad version, and it’s like, let’s get rid of the bad stuff, and if we get rid of the bad stuff, it’s all really good. It’s like, no, it may just not make any sense.

Craig: In their defense, I have watched things before that I’ve enjoyed, where at some point I went, I don’t know, I don’t understand that. Anyway, okay, still, what happens next? You can get past some of those things.

Now, what’s interesting is when you have a show that is built heavily on intentional mystery/confusion puzzle boxing, like Severance, it can actually be very hard to tell. Did this happen because you’re screwing with my head? Did this happen because something went a bit awry in production? It’s hard to tell. I give Severance the benefit of the doubt that everything is intentional. There is that illusion of intentionality that no matter what we see on screen, it was exactly the way they wanted us to see it.

It could be, well, maybe that was a stylistic choice to have them say that line over this big, huge wide shot. It’s hard to tell sometimes, but it’s cumulative. You get one of those, okay, you let it go. Two, eh, you start getting four or five of those things, the boat’s going to sink.

John: Yes. Over the summer, I helped out on a show that was doing reshoots, and you’re trying to be surgical, and you’re trying to not break any of the good stuff, but there have been times where it’s like, okay, that’s actually a pretty good scene, but it just doesn’t make sense with where we are right now, and we’re going to have to take all that information and put it into a new scene where it actually is where things fit better, and that’s, the frustration is that sometimes you have to lose good stuff in order to make everything else fit together right.

Craig: I’m going to give you, I rarely do this, but I will give you a specific example from my own career. I worked on the second Snow White and the Huntsman movie, and what had happened was they had a script, well, I’d actually worked on a script, I think, and that had gotten the thing to a green light, and then someone came on to make the movie, and they rewrote the script completely, and got all the way, I think, to they were like a week away from shooting, and the studio said, “Wait, hold on, we don’t like this.”

They then came back to me and said, “You’ve got about two weeks, and here’s the deal. These sets have been built, and these people have been cast, and this stuff is occurring because we’ve already spent the money on the visual effects development, so that’s not changing, but we need to make this all make sense, and so then it became an exercise in, right: I’m going to get some blue index cards that are stuff I can’t change, and now I have all these white index cards, and I have to figure out how to lead into those blue cards and out of those blue cards and into the next blue cards in a way that is at least coherent, and then provides hopefully what the actors are looking for, the studio’s looking for, there’s a new filmmaker on board, what is that filmmaker looking for, and that was very difficult, and in the end, you don’t get a prize for solving the math problem. Basically, people didn’t like it very much because it was, you could tell, it was like something had gone wrong here.

John: Absolutely, so what you’re describing is very analogous to what I was describing in the sense of things hadn’t been shot, but they might as well have been shot because you were locked into certain sets, I was locked into certain scenes, which that already exists, we’re never giving that actor back, so we got to go get me into it now in a way and put that in a place where it actually makes sense.

Craig: It doesn’t matter how much you protest, it doesn’t matter how much you say, if you would just not have to have this in that, and they’re like, yes, but we do, so that’s what’s happening, and also, you can’t write anything that would require a new set build. We don’t have the money or the time. Those kinds of math problems are sometimes how movies happen.

John: Absolutely, and sometimes creative constraints can lead to great solutions, but in two weeks, they’re not going to likely get you the best solution.

Craig: Everybody’s thinking maybe this will be, because it’s happened, maybe this will be that chaotic thing that comes together and is brilliant, because it’s happened. Usually, the best you can hope for is coherent.

John: Let’s wrap this up by saying, these are things that we’re noticing when we’re watching other people’s projects, but there’s so many things we’re not noticing at all. The patches were so well done that even we couldn’t see it. It was like the hardwood floors, they somehow matched everything together. It’s like, wow, you did a great job, because I did not know there was that issue there at all.

Craig: Listen, the first episode of The Last of Us was the first two episodes of The Last of Us that were combined together with some stuff removed and some stuff that I redid, and just a lot of interesting, careful weaving to make it as seamless as– and to make it seem inevitable, like it was meant to be that way. Tricky.

John: Tricky, yes. When it works, it works.

Craig: When it works, it works. That’s great. Thank you.

Links:

• Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! SCRAMBLING by Tania Luna, LUMP by Leah Newsom, and THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS by J. Bryan Dick
• The King of Tars
• Sesame Street
• The Goes Wrong Show on Prime
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 648 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you say goodbye? We’ll take a look at farewell scenes to explore what makes them work. We’ll also answer listener questions about managers, fairies, and moving to Los Angeles. To help us do all of this, let’s welcome back our OG guest host, Aline Brosh McKenna. Aline, welcome back.

Aline Brosh McKenna: I’m actually Craig Mazin.

John: You are Craig Mazin. Craig always affects different voices, and he’s been working-

Aline: Je suis Craig Mazin.

John: I really respect his dedication to the craft. He really finds what it is, that unique kind of thing. As busy as he’s been doing The Last of Us, he still found time to. Craig, thank you again for all of the hard work you’ve done.

Aline: He’s doing a great impression of Aline. I’m doing a really good impression of Aline.

John: We’ve lost the thread here. Aline, it’s so nice to see you.

Aline: Thank you. Thank you for being so gracious about me being late. Anyone who knows me know I am scrupulously on time. And I was on time for the time I thought I was, which was 11:00. But for 10:30, when it actually was, not on time.

John: Not on time. Aline, I haven’t seen you for a bit. Tell me in just a general sense – you don’t have to name projects, but what are you working on? What’s under your fingers right now?

Aline: I have two thrusts to my day. There’s the things that I personally am writing, and then I have a company called Lean Machine, which is run by the wonderful-

John: Can I stop you for a sec?

Aline: Yeah.

John: I just recognized that Lean is actually related to Aline.

Aline: It is.

John: I’ve known you 10 years. I just now got this.

Aline: It’s because when I met my husband – people really love to call me AY-leen, and my husband said, “You should tell people it’s Aline Mean Fighting Machine.” When I started my company, I had to choose between Lean Machine and Fighting Machine.

John: No Fighting Machine.

Aline: I chose Lean, because we’re on time and under budget. I have a company that I run with this woman named Heather Morris, who’s wonderful, fantastic, used to work for Mindy Kaling. We have about 15 to 20 projects. About maybe 30 percent of them are things I’m writing in TV and film, and then the rest we work with other writers. That has been just a pure delight.

I’m not shocking anyone when I tell you it’s a tough time in the business right now. And so what I’ve really focused on is trying to be the producer that I would have wanted to have, which is someone you can really call for story input, because sometimes you work with producers and they are really helpful for story, and sometimes you work with producers and you call them when you have a story problem and you’re like, “Never mind.” It’s like when you ask your parents for advice about your friends, and then they start and you’re like, “Never mind.”

We provide a lot of story support. We help break stories. We make decks for writers. We proofread their scripts. We get sandwiches from Sycamore Kitchen. We try and get things in as good situation for the writers, so that they’re very proud and excited about what they do. I was telling you we started this company in 2019, which was just really great time to start.

John: A great time, because the business was expanding, so there were many more opportunities. However, you could not have known all the roadblocks ahead.

Aline: We did run into a buzzsaw. In fact, Heather started February of 2020, and we moved her right into her office, and then she wasn’t there for months. But I’ve really enjoyed working with writers. There is something fun about breaking a story with a writer and then seeing what they come back with. We work with wonderful people. That’s been really fun.

In this time, still creating things in collaboration with people, which is my favorite thing, I still get to do that. Then I split time between TV and movies. Right now, I’m working on a rewrite, and then I have another movie that we’re making a deal for. Then we have a project that has popped out of a place that it used to be, and we’re trying to find a home for that.

One of the interesting things is, in addition to the market being very soft, I don’t know if you found this, but the making-a-deal process has become glacial beyond my understanding. We have a running joke, because it’ll be like, “Oh, the BA guy is water skiing. Oh, the BA guy sprained his Achilles.”

John: BA being business affairs.

Aline: Yeah.

John: A thing that’s important to understand is, when they say, “Oh, congratulations. We’re gonna have a deal. We’re gonna hire you to do this thing,” that is the start of a process. When you and I started in this business, it could take not usually days; it was weeks to get that deal settled. Your agents and your lawyers and everyone would go back and forth, but you’d come up with a deal, and then you’d start writing. Over the course of the last decade, but really I think in a crisis point since the pandemic, to make a deal has taken forever. There’s times where you’re waiting 11 months to actually make your deal and start writing. Just crazy.

Aline: The movie stuff that I’m doing has been okay, has moved apace really, because if you’re working on something that they have in their mind as like, “Oh, we need this,” or, “We’re making this.” But TV is the thing that used to be, we would be saying, “Oh, TV’s so great, because they need things every season.”

John: There’s a season. There’s a schedule.

Aline: But there’s no seasons anymore. One of the things we’re taking out soon, we’re adding a producer, and we had this writer, and I think that deal took 10 months to make or something like that. And then some of these deals were interrupted by the strike. So we would’ve started it, then there was the six months of the strike, then you come back and you’re still making the deal.

Those poor BA people opened a door and a bunch of snow fell on them, because all these deals that had not gotten done before the strike, they’re doing those. So there’s just been, especially in TV, where you often have numerous components… Sometimes when I come onto a movie, it’s just me; it’s not my company. But things where you have multiple companies coming together with the writers, with maybe a rights deal, a book deal, it’s so funny, because as you said, all this enthusiasm, we’re making this thing, and then 10 months later you’re like, “Oh, right, yeah, no. Yes, this guy.”

John: I’m in that same situation right now. There’s two feature projects, both of which I would love to do. I’m halfway allowing myself to commit to them, like, “Oh, these are things I’m going to write.” But I’m also recognizing it could take so long to make the deals, I’ll probably be writing something else before I’m writing those projects.

I just came off five weeks on a project, which was really interesting for me, because you and I have done weekly work on features, where we come in and we’re working on a thing that is in trouble. It’s about to go into production, it’s in production, or maybe it’s in post and they’re gonna do rewrites. I had this situation for a series that had already been shot and was going to go back and do rewrites.

It was very challenging, interesting work, because I had to write new material that could fit between things that were already established and were gonna stay in the series. But then I had to keep in mind that, “Oh, this new scene also has to pay off in Episode 2, 3, 4, and 5.” Then there were things that could change and couldn’t change. It was really difficult. Drew had to go through all this with me, because there were times where I had to ask. I’m like, “Wait, what happens in Episode 4?” because I want to make sure I’m not duplicating this thing or making the thing that happens in Episode 4 impossible.

Aline: That’s kind of cool. We like to do our puzzles. That’s a puzzle.

John: It was a jigsaw puzzle, the kind of thing that Craig would hate.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: But Craig’s not here to complain about it.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: We’ll talk about these things, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I thought we might talk about journaling. I don’t know if you journal at all. It’s a thing I keep trying to do. I never actually do.

Aline: Great.

John: But should we be keeping track of what we’re doing all day?

Aline: Oh, can’t wait to talk about that.

John: We’ll talk about that. In the news, Inside Out 2 opened huge. It opened in $155 million in the U.S. and Canada, $295 million worldwide, a huge, giant opening hit for the summer. I’m so happy for everybody at Pixar and the people who made it.

Aline: God, I’m rooting for anything that works. Rooting, rooting. Just need those things to work and for people to be excited.

John: Yeah, so it was great to see that. I was honestly surprised. I didn’t know that the world had a huge, pent-up demand for Inside Out. I liked the first movie. It wasn’t like, oh, that’s a surefire sequel. I was surprised.

Aline: I think that that has built up an increased following on Disney Plus, where kids have really dug into some of the older animated titles. I know Moana and-

John: Encanto.

Aline: Encanto. Those have I think become huge juggernauts on Disney Plus. I think that that’s Inside Out. If you’ve been watching it at home, it’s exciting to take your… It’s an all-audience… I think because that movie’s a little more sophisticated, in that it has these more, almost Charlie Kaufman-y themes to it. It’s like a Charlie Kaufman movie for kids. I think adults enjoy unpacking the math of that.

John: It wasn’t the only good news about the box office. Bad Boys 4 opened up really well, and opened up better than I think people expected as well. A $56 million opening weekend, made $214 cumulative as we’re recording this. That’s great for them. Good job, Sony.

Also, Sony and George Gallo settled their suit. Apparently, there was an ongoing lawsuit for many, many years. The original movie was based on a George Gallo short story, and it was a question of, do they have to pay him for that short story for the other things. Apparently, they finally settled that lawsuit that had been going on for years and years and years.

Aline: Do you know how that was settled?

John: Of course no one ever talks about what the actual settlement details were. But both sides are apparently happy that the thing is resolved. It’s really about derivative works, because obviously they buy the short story to make the first movie, and then it’s a question of are all other movies based on that short story or not.

Aline: Got it.

John: Sony’s also busy; they’re buying Alamo Drafthouse. I don’t know if you saw this.

Aline: I did see that.

John: Do you like the Alamo Drafthouse? Have you been down there?

Aline: I love it. I love it. Now, how branded is it gonna be? I saw a movie at The Egyptian, which is owned by Netflix.

John: It’s Netflix’s Egyptian, right?

Aline: Yes. It’s beautiful. I don’t know what it looked like before, but it’s sparkling new. Concessions are good. It’s a really nice place to see a movie. I just wonder, are we gonna be looking at Charlie’s Angels everywhere? How branded do you think it’ll be?

John: I doubt it’ll be very branded, but we’ll see what happens. For international listeners who aren’t familiar with the chain, Alamo Drafthouse came out of Alamo, Texas and was known for having a real love of movies and retrospectives of films, older things in addition to new releases. They also had food that came to your seat, which was delicious. Just a really good movie-going experience. We have one in Downtown Los Angeles. For me and Aline, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to, but it’s worth it when you want to see a movie down there. I’m hoping that the chain stays the same and they keep that same vibe.

But it’s important to bring up the fact that it feels like this was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be allowed to happen, because we don’t think about movie studios being able to own theaters, because of the consent decrees. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but back in 1948, the government said that you could not be both a movie studio and also own the theaters, because that was a vertical integration. That was bad. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Apparently, that only applied to Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. It didn’t apply to Columbia, because Columbia didn’t own movie theaters at the time. And so even if that had not been overturned relatively recently, nothing was stopping Sony from owning a theater.

Aline: Listen. I wish someone would buy the ArcLight. I miss the ArcLight every day. I know they’re gonna reopen the Cinerama Dome, but the actual ArcLight, that’s where my kids grew up going to the movies. It was the greatest. I wish someone would buy that and bring that back.

John: I feel like eventually ArcLight Complex will reopen. It’s been so tough to see it happening. What I’ve heard is that the ongoing issue is that ArcLight Theaters owed money to the studios and basically had to figure out some sort of settlement for unpaid film rental, and that may be what’s actually keeping them from being back in business. I hope it gets resolved. It was such a great place to see movies.

Aline: The best.

John: The best. More follow-up. Drew, talk to us about 3 wing 4. I did not understand this.

Drew Marquardt: In our last Three Page Challenge, there was a script called The Long Haul, where two of the characters were talking about 3 wing 4. You and Craig and me had no idea what that meant. Several listeners wrote in that this comes from the Enneagrams.

Aline: Oh, I’ve done this. I’ve done this.

Drew: Which is a personality profiling system kind of like Myers-Briggs.

John: Great. 3 wing 4 refers to what your personality type would be. In Myers-Briggs, I was an ENTJ or whatever that was.

Aline: So am I.

John: Not surprising that we’re successfully driven screenwriters and have the same kind of things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to what these descriptions are.

Aline: I did this, but I can’t remember what it was. There was a thing where this was going around. Someone sent this to me. Whatever I got, the person who sent it to me was like, “Oh yeah, you’re such a that.” But I don’t know. How useful do you think this is?

John: I don’t know if it’s especially useful for an individual or for a character. I guess there’s two threads I want to talk about. The fact that Craig and I didn’t understand what this was would mean that a lot of people are gonna have no idea what the hell you’re talking about on page 2 of a screenplay. So that’s an issue there.

I always look at these kind of things like astrology. It’s just like, okay, everyone says that this is what your energy is. It’s like, okay, fine, great, if it helps you as a writer make choices for the character that underline that. But I worry that it could be a shorthand for not actually doing the work on the page to create that character who has these characteristics.

Aline: I know this is not a thing that will endear me to folks, but I have an easier time believing in these things than astrology. I’m puzzled. Maybe I am under-informed. But there’s so much chance that goes into when you’re born, like when the doctor can get there or when you push or how you’re pushing or who’s there or whether your mom got there yet.

John: Yeah, or did they fill out the right thing on the form? Turns out you were actually born the next day. They just wrote the wrong thing down on this.

Aline: It’s really, really popular among younger people, especially women. And so often people want to talk to me about it. I usually say, “This won’t be a fun conversation for you, because I will not be yes anding you. I will be wondering why.”

John: I think I’m in your camp here, because it feels like things like Myers-Briggs or what this Enneagram is, which I don’t really know very well, it’s based on, okay, looking at the choices that you make in your life, what are characteristics that group together like that. That kind of tracks for me. But where you were born, when you were born, where the stars were, how Mercury was doing that day doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Aline: I think it goes to, you know in scripts, the idea of the chosen one, the Harry Potter? It’s most religious things. It’s like, oh, no, this guy matters more than all the other people. I think there’s a fantasy in your specialness that even the stars would pull you in certain directions.

Listen. I get it, because as I was saying to someone the other day, it doesn’t sound cute, but we are meat that will be dirt. Of course we will look for greater meaning. I get that. It’s just the exact moment of when you were born, as someone who gave birth twice, just don’t know what that would correlate to, because there is actually a bit of… You could nudge it if you wanted to.

John: My daughter, we had to induce. When she was born was kind of a choice that a group of people made.

Let’s talk about these kinds of scenes. This is a feature we do on Scriptnotes every once in a great while. The first time we did this segment, it was about your first day on the job, and we referenced Devil Wears Prada. We’ve also talked about breakups. Today I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye presumably for the last time.

We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also, what are the characteristics of a farewell scene. This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. And so Big Fish, of course, obviously has a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart. Maybe buddies who’ve come to – they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there.

But I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?

Aline: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada where they see each other on the street and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. And then Meryl says, “Go.” I say Meryl, because in the way it was scripted, actually, in the screen description, it said, “She looks at the driver. Go.” It was in the scene description, and they had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver. It snaps you back into her actual MO.

It’s funny, because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing, and that has a finality. But you need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final, because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca and then they ran into each other at a bar two days later. The same thing with rom-coms. If it’s like, end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back, you don’t want to feel like, cut to four days later where it’s like, “This is insane. You leave your pants on the floor. What is this?” How do you make any ending feel like it stuck?

John: That’s why I think because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time.

But let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end. The location they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.

Aline: That’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Ah. The irony.”

John: It could be the location rhymes or we’re back in a place we were before, the dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes a thing that happened before.

Looking through these examples, we’re gonna see that there’s a bunch of nonverbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these. That’s honestly the characteristics of these. And it’s why sometimes we’re not gonna be playing the audio for this, because it’s a lot of people not talking.

Aline: I hope you’re gonna put these up on the website, because this is fantastic. Drew, did you make this? This is fantastic. This is really good.

I did send you that funny – there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big, that he goes back to class and there’s a girl named Susan in his class and they wink, like, this is gonna be Elizabeth Perkins. But they dropped that, and so they’re never gonna see each other again. I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. E.T. is probably one of the…

As we had discussed, I think Past Lives is – people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of, they’d been separated for so long, and this is another separation, and possibly permanent.

John: I think what’s important – and Past Lives is a good example of this – is that you’re closing hopefully two characters’ arcs. And so it’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that.

If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate. But I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.

Aline: Can I ask you a question?

John: Please.

Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?

John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating. And also, as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that it was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all. And then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did?” That sounds weird. It felt like it was more of a-

Aline: Of a cheek moment.

John: Yeah, a cheek moment rather than an on-the-lips moment. I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.

Aline: Lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple friends who were lip kissers, which was always like when you saw them coming towards you and time slows down, because my lip kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to. That’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you and you’re like, slow motion turn the face. But I think it’s post COVID.

John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.

Aline: Can you imagine if I lip kissed John on the way out of here?

Drew: I don’t-

Aline: Drew would be so uncomfortable. Or if I lip kissed Drew on the way out of here. It would be so weird.

John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.

Aline: So weird. The French…

John: Yeah, but it’s the cheeks.

Aline: The cheek. The cheek. It felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker, but we don’t do that in America. But I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not.

John: It’s not.

Aline: You’re saying it’s a full lip kissing. Interesting.

John: Full lip kiss. We can look at the video.

Aline: But what do you feel about not knowing what he said?

John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?

Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think suits Sofia Coppola’s vibes, so I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that people are layered and mysterious. I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.

John: We as an audience need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us unless we’ve seen the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do.

Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it, because oftentimes in these things, one character’s being stoic and holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves. But we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.

Aline: Something I think about a lot is that, because if you have a quieter moment movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. E.T., interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. The enemy is Keys. It never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.

I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space, that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge.

I would put this up there with Casablanca for me, in terms of merely really meaningful goodbye. And I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies then. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. And the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground, with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.

John: Let’s take a listen to Casablanca. Of course, we’ve avoided Casablanca throughout almost the entire podcast, just because it’s so cliché. But of course, as farewell scenes go, this is the one that people think about. So let’s take a listen here.

[Casablanca clip]

Rick Blaine: If you don’t mind, you fill in the names. That’ll make it even more official.

Captain Louis Renault: You think of everything, don’t you?

Rick: And the names are Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.

Ilsa Lund: But why my name, Richard?

Rick: Because you’re getting on that place.

Ilsa: I don’t understand. What about you?

Rick: I’m staying here with him until the plane gets safely away.

Ilsa: No, Richard, no. What has happened to you? Last night we said-

Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.

Ilsa: But Richard, no, I-

Rick: You’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you’d like to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of 10 we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?

Louis: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we’d lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.

[End of clip]

John: This is a situation where one character knows this is gonna be a farewell leading into it, and she doesn’t know this, and she’s processing this in real time.

Aline: I don’t love the use of the word “kid.” I’m not loving that. That’s giving infantilization to me. I’m just wondering if you could just say a normal goodbye without… I’m not calling you “daddy,” so I’d appreciate not being called a kid. That would be a slightly different ending.

John: Yeah, it would be.

Aline: But I think this idea that’s embedded into this goodbye is this idea that they’re sacrificing for the greater good of the world. Does that still resonate? Do you feel like if you made a movie where it’s like, I need to go do this more public servicey – not public service, but global redemption thing that they have to go do. They’re dedicating themself. Their problems, their love is less than what the world requires of them. Maybe a climate change movie?

John: Or perhaps a movie about a robot apocalypse. Let’s take a listen to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Aline: Just his best transitions.

John: Right now, they’re at the forge, and they’ve just thrown the chips into…

[Terminator 2: Judgment Day clip]

Sarah Connor: It’s over.

The Terminator: No. There is one more chip.

John August: He points to his forehead.

The Terminator: And it must be destroyed also. Here. I cannot self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel.

John Connor: No. No.

The Terminator: I’m sorry, John.

John Connor: No!

The Terminator: I’m sorry.

John Connor: No, it’ll be okay! Stay with us! It’ll be okay!

The Terminator: I have to go away.

John Connor: No, don’t do it, please! Don’t go!

The Terminator: I must go away, John.

John Connor: No! No, wait, wait! You don’t have to do this.

The Terminator: Sorry.

John Connor: No, don’t do it! Don’t go!

The Terminator: It has to end here.

John Connor: I order you not to go. I order you not to go! I order you not to go!

The Terminator: I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.

[End of clip]

John: So again here, we have a character who knows that this is going to be a farewell and the other character does not know it and is resisting that moment at the same time, and it’s for the greater good. This is self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Aline: One thing I will say is that where movies really let me down is – not to bring this way, way down, but dying in movies is really glossed over, even in movies about illness. Everybody looks real pretty. They’re beautifully arranged in a bed, and they go cough, cough, and then they look to the side and close their eyes. I had not had a lot of experience with that. My dad passed away two years ago, and the process of that was kind of shocking to me.

I know that love is not what’s in movies, so I don’t know why… And birth is not what’s in movies. People in births are always screaming, and screaming at the husband. I know that those things are not… But we do a very bad job with what it actually looks to leave this world in movies. Maybe it’s too nitty gritty. Maybe all those things are too nitty gritty. Maybe movies don’t need to show people peeing or people performing basic body processes. But maybe these are stand-ins for that. There’s a goodbye we all know is happening, is going to happen, and that these are wonderful, satisfying goodbyes that you can cry at. None of these are death, right? No, Philadelphia is.

John: Philadelphia, I want to focus on a moment that’s not the actual death. It’s not the moment on screen where he dies, but it’s the farewell moment. Initially, it’s Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington talking, and then he’s saying goodbye to other people. But if you listen, he’s never actually saying goodbye. Everyone’s basically saying, “I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” Let’s take a listen to Philadelphia here.

[Philadelphia clip]

Joe Miller: How you doing?

John August: He’s taking off the oxygen mask so he can speak.

Andrew Beckett: What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?

Joe: I don’t know.

Andrew: A good start. Excellent work, Counselor. I thank you.

Joe: It was great working with you, Counselor.

John: Here, Denzel Washington is putting the oxygen mask back on Tom Hanks’s face, because he was having a hard time doing it himself. It’s a moment of tenderness that we’re seeing.

Joe: Well, I’d better go.

Andrew: Yeah, sure thing.

Joe: I’ll see you later?

Andrew: Thanks for stopping by.

Joe: I’ll see you again. Well, I’ll keep it on ice for you.

[End of clip]

John: He just brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the winning of the case. He’s putting it there and he’s saying goodbye to the rest of the family. Over the course of the rest of this, we’re gonna see the rest of the family members say goodbye. Some of them happen more emotional; some of them don’t. Of course the conscious is they’re saying goodbye for the night, but it’s clear to an audience that this is the last goodbye. Really well done. Not surprisingly, really well done.

It’s a great example of how it’s the subtext that is carrying the scene. They’re not actually saying the things they’re supposed to say, but the writer, Ron Nyswaner, has created a space to let the actors play those things in eyes that they’re not actually saying.

Aline: Beautiful.

John: That’s a final goodbye. But I really want to play this clip from Weekend. Have you seen Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s film?

Aline: It’s the top of the list of things I should see.

John: It’s really terrific.

Aline: I know.

John: I pulled this because I just did the Sundance Labs, where we were talking with filmmakers about the next things they’re gonna shoot, and the theme for the clips we were supposed to bring in was finales or conclusions. What I loved about this moment at the end of Weekend is…

So the premise is it’s these two guys who hook up on a Friday night, not really knowing each other, and they spend the weekend together. But one of them is going off to America, and so they know there’s no future for this. The one guy, he’s at a kid’s birthday party for a friend. The guy’s like, “If you like this guy, why don’t you just into the train station and stop him?” He’s like, “Oh, no, that’s too movie of a thing to do.” I just love that these two characters realize that they’re in a movie kind of moment. Let’s take a listen to a scene from Weekend.

[Weekend clip]

Russell: Looks like it, eh?

Glen: So is this our Notting Hill moment?

Russell: You know, I’ve never seen it, ever.

Glen: Neither have I, but I imagine there’s a declaration of love and everybody applauds.

Russell: Yeah. Do you reckon that’s what would happen with us?

Glen: Might do. Could give it a go. They’d either clap or throw us under a train.

John August: What happens in this next little sequence is there’s a train going by, and so like Lost in Translation, we’re not able to quite understand what they’re saying. But clearly, one character is telling something more meaningful, and then we catch in at the end sort of what that conversation was.

Automated Voice: 24-hour CCTV recording is in operation at this station.

Russell: I want you to not know I’m not here to stop you from going.

Glen: Please be quiet. Shut up! No, no, no.

Russell: I just want to… I just want to… I just want you to know that…

Glen: Oh, fuck. You’re a bastard for coming down here. Fuck me. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Russell: You’ll be great. You’ll have the most amazing time.

Glen: Fuck’s sake. Fuck.

[End of clip]

John: Like Past Lives, there’s a lot of sounds, there’s a lot of things left open, which makes the moment feel very real and very extended. The kind of thing you couldn’t probably do earlier on in the story, but because you’re invested in these characters, you’re willing to watch them struggle to figure out what the next thing is to say.

What I also liked about it is that these characters are recognizing this is a movie kind of thing to do, to race to the train station to stop him before he goes. But once they get there, like, am I actually stopping you? They don’t quite know themselves what the real goal is. They’re just recognizing that this is probably the last moment that they’re gonna have together.

Aline: Has anyone ever done, in a rom-com, a run to the airport where you can’t park, you can’t get through TSA? Actually trying to stop someone at the gate now… That’s ’70s only. Post 9/11, actually trying to say goodbye to someone at a gate is science fiction. You can’t do it.

John: I think probably two examples of it. First, in 30 Rock, there’s a moment where Liz is trying to get to Jason Sudeikis’s character before he moves off to Cleveland. She tries to do the whole thing. She has her special sandwich. They give her a sandwich to get through the TSA. But I also feel like David Wain’s movie They Came Together, with Paul Rudd and…

Aline: Amy Poehler.

John: Amy Poehler. I feel like that must’ve happened in that, because it’s playing all of those rom-com cliches. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot of these other clips.

Aline: This is beautiful. This is a great resource. This podcast is free.

John: Free.

Aline: You don’t have to fast forward through ads. This is great stuff right here. This is great. This is the kind of thing, if I was a baby writer, I would be so grateful for, just to focus yourself in on. As you’ve often said, pick the thing that has the best ending. Write something where you know the ending. If something occurs to you for a final scene, that’ll guide you through the whole writing of your movie. It’s really great to study these things. I think this is a wonderful resource.

John: Big Fish would not exist if it weren’t for that last scene. You’re leading up to that. I always describe Big Fish as it’s a long joke that ends in tears rather than a punchline. And it’s getting to that place. The other ones we’re gonna include on the show notes here. The end of The Wizard of Oz, of course she has to say goodbye to all of her friends, that she’s leaving. E.T., of course, saying goodbye to E.T. Toy Story 3, which is a sort of special case. Oh, god, Michael Arndt.

Aline: It’s a killer.

John: Killing us here.

Aline: Yeah, killer.

John: It’s Andy giving up his toys and sending them off to the girl who’s gonna take care of them. Dead Poets Society. All such great choices. Farewell scenes.

Aline: Well done.

John: Well done. Let’s continue with momentum and talk about some listener questions. We’ve got a manager question here from Annie.

Drew: Annie writes, “My manager and I recently broke up. We weren’t a good fit for one another, but he also wanted 10 percent of my day job salary, a gig unrelated to what they were representing me for. However, a script I wrote was doing well on the blacklist, and a studio reached out to my manager during the fallout. But my manager won’t give me the studio’s contact info. It’s been a month. So should I assume my project’s dead? I looked on IMDb Pro for an assistant or someone to reach out to at the company, but I was unsuccessful. If the studio really wanted the script, they would find me, I guess. I’m pretty sad about it, and I’m not sure how to find new management. Thanks.”

Aline: That’s not nice.

John: That’s horrible. That’s horrible on every level.

Aline: That’s really not nice.

John: First off, that manager should not be trying to take 10 percent of your day job salary. That is crazy. I’ve not heard of this.

Aline: Craig would be turning this desk over.

John: Absolutely. Craig has destroyed so much furniture on this podcast. It’s really tough.

Aline: This is shitty.

John: This is. Let’s talk about what happens next. First off, on your script, you have contact information on that. Hopefully, they’re not stripping that contact information off the title page, so they can get a hold of you directly. You, Annie, need to have some public presence out there in the world, Twitter, Instagram, some other place where people can find you, because they will be able to find you if that comes up. Put up a website, Annie, whatever your last name is, screenwriter. Make sure you have a way that people can find you. Obviously, if you’re a WGA member, you’re in the WGA directory, and so people can always look you up there.

Aline: If they were desperate, if they really wanted it. And it may have been an idle inquiry. But this actually just sounds like someone being sadistic and just trying to punish you.

John: Annie, when you say it’s doing well on the blacklist, I assume it’s the blacklist-

Aline: Ratings.

John: The ratings site and not the-

Aline: List.

John: Not the actual list, the end of the year stuff-

Aline: That sounds like it to me too.

John: … because that’s a thing when people would’ve tracked you down more specifically. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. As you’re looking for new managers, new reps, try not to be too burned by this experience. Remember that you’re always advocating for yourself first, and keep doing the next thing. It’s good that you had a script that people liked. It’s proof that you can write a thing that people will like. You need to keep writing those things. I’m sorry. All I can do is commiserate with you here.

Aline: Same, same.

John: Question from TJ here.

Drew: TJ writes, “Like many feature writers, I cheered the huge and very real win of guaranteed second steps in the new MBA, but I’m wondering what, if any, recourse we have if a second step remains unstepped. Chalk it up to strike disruption or executive turnover, but I have two feature projects at major studios, with multiple contractually guaranteed rewrite and polished steps, that have been sitting on ice for over a year. I’ve been doing this long enough to understand the writing is likely on the wall for these projects – or not. Who knows? And that’s fine. I’m an expert at moving on. But negotiating guaranteed money and turning in a draft, only to get ghosted on further steps, feels extra mega shitty, especially while trying to string together qualifying years for health coverage. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.”

John: I’ve had this happen too. Let’s remember what a guaranteed second step is. It’s that if you’re hired to write a feature project, you are hired for the initial draft, and if you’re under a certain cap, they have to also guarantee you a second step, a chance to do that rewrite on that project. This is good. This is a big win. Sometimes what happens is you’ve turned in a first draft and there’s a guaranteed reading period, and after that point they should be coming up to you for the rewrite. Sometimes this stretches out for a very long time, because things are just not-

Aline: But they’re supposed to pay you at the end of that reading period.

John: They are supposed to pay you at the end of the reading period. It’s your reps who are there to remind them, “You need to pay them.”

Aline: I’ve done that, for sure.

John: I’ve done that too, fairly recently.

Aline: Some people don’t know that they have a limited amount of time to get back to you and that they have to get back to you.

John: Someone made this deal. If it wasn’t your agent or manager, there was probably a lawyer involved. It’s time to call them and say, “Hey, we need to nudge this.” What can happen sometimes is there’s a little bit of a negotiation, like, “We don’t really don’t want to do this some more. Can we figure a thing out here?” You might be able to settle for less than that if they really don’t have you doing that next thing. There may be a way out of here. But you should be getting paid and-

Aline: On a schedule.

John: On a schedule. TJ, your concern about getting paid money so that your health insurance and everything else continues is correct. And so get that money coming in.

Aline: God, two of the most depressing things when you’re a young writer is trying to get paid, especially when it’s not a ton of money to other people but it is very meaningful for you, and then the other thing is – have you ever been on a money where they don’t want to give you your per diem? Then you’re calling your agent about something so minor. I have friends who were just telling me that this happened to them. It’s literally the most embarrassing, because you’re just trying to get money for a sandwich. There’s this embedded idea that you get paid enough, you should be fine. But if you’ve relocated, then you want that.

John: Totally.

Aline: But there’s nothing in it for your reps really. Early on in my career, I remember having to do that, and it was just so embarrassing, which is like, “No, I really would like money for that latte, so if you don’t mind.” Then the people they’re calling, they’re production people, not the creatives, creative executives. I don’t know. Anything where you have to ask for money, it’s such a bad day. It’s just such a bad feeling.

John: I recently re-watched Tropic Thunder, which largely holds up. Some stuff didn’t hold up so especially well. But one of the ongoing jokes in it is that in the actor’s contract he’s supposed to have a TiVo, and his TiVo didn’t show up. And so he’s like, “Where’s my TiVo?” The agent, Matthew McConaughey, is always trying to track down this guy’s TiVo. It’s silly. My daughter ended up not wanting to watch it, so I wanted to ask her, what is a TiVo. Does she even know? There’s a sense of-

Aline: That’s how my son taught himself to read was to use the TiVo, because he would run down in the morning to turn on the TV and figure out where Sesame Street was. That’s how he taught himself to read and work the TiVo at like four.

John: Of course.

Aline: It’s just funny, the tiny humiliations that we sustain as a writer, that are like, you’re just asking for the basic thing that you’re guaranteed, and then everybody acts like you’re a weenie for asking. It’s one of those things that can really grind you down.

John: This is a bit in the weeds here, but on this project I mentioned that was a five-week rewrite, it came at a time in which I did not have an agent or a manager, because I switched representation. It was just negotiated with my lawyer, who did a fantastic job. But also, it meant we actually had to bill for stuff ourselves. We invoiced for ourselves. It was weird dealing with it.

When you and I are starting a project, it goes from some special magic development account, and it’s this thing. But when you’re actually on a thing that’s running, it’s being paid out of the actual payroll for the actual production. I was talking to the accountant for this thing. It was clear that I’m filling out these forms that, as a writer, I should not be filling out this form. It was weird.

Aline: Wild.

John: Ultimately, the checks still cashed. Money is fungible. But it was weird to be paid out of just different pot of money.

Aline: Please, sir. Please, sir. Please, sir, may I have my paycheck. I’m sorry, TJ. You just have to find the right person to ask. But they do owe you something. Guaranteed means guaranteed.

John: Early on in my career, I did a project for Fox 2000. I did my draft and my set, and I had no more guaranteed steps. But my agent got a call saying, “Oh yeah, we decided to let the option on this book lapse, and so we’re closing out the books on this project. And there’s one polish step on his deal that we’re not gonna use, and so we’re just gonna settle that out and pay it.” I’m like, “But why are you doing that?” They wrote me this check.

Aline: Nice. Take that out. Take that out. Take that out. That never happened.

John: The statute of limitations on that has passed a long time ago.

Aline: That’s right. That’s long ago been spent on some fabulous vacations we’re gonna hear about.

John: We have a question from John about NDAs.

Drew: “I’m new and started shopping my first script around that I’ve written. I’m unrepresented at this point by an agent or manager, though I have a new lawyer. I’ve submitted the script to the US Copyright Office and the WGA. I’ve labeled the cover page with copyright at 2024, my name. I sent a log line to an executive. He responded favorably and asked to read it. I sent it. My lawyer told me that I should get an NDA signed by anyone who wants to read the script before. Is that necessary or common? My instinct is that it adds friction to the process, and if it’s copyrighted, what’s the risk? Is it common practice to have people sign NDAs?”

John: Uh-uh, absolutely not. This is not a thing that happens. We’ve had many fabulous guests on the podcast. We had Christopher Nolan on the podcast. I bet you probably have to sign an NDA when you read a Christopher Nolan script, because he sends a person over with a script that you have to read in person.

Aline: I will say this. If someone sends you, John August, a script to read, and they are not represented, then they would have to sign a form. But just watermark it.

John: You’ve written the script. You own the copyright on it. Worry less, John. It’s just not a thing. It’s a thing that happens with super high secret projects where there can be NDAs on things. This is not that situation.

Aline: You’ve seen the scripts printed on red paper?

John: Yeah.

Aline: I once worked on a project where they insisted on printing it on that silver, iridescent paper. Do you know what I’m talking about?

John: I’ve done another different thing.

Aline: It’s silver, iridescent craft paper. 99 percent of the things that I’ve written are just – people are not digging through files to find romantic comedies or whatever. But this particular company, we had to send it out. And that paper weighs like 100 pounds. We submitted it to a director who’s a friend of mine, and he was like, “I’m not reading that. That’s insulting to me that it would be sent in 20 pounds of iridescent paper. I promise I’m not doing anything with it.” But in a world where things can leak… That’s not this though. Just watermark it. Really, watermarking it takes two seconds, and then you’ll feel like you did something.

John: I would disagree on the watermarking. Anything that gets in the way of a person’s picking up the script and reading it is a barrier, and I feel like that watermark could hurt you.

Aline: Maybe it makes it feel-

John: Special.

Aline: Special. I don’t know. But definitely, you don’t need an NDA. If it’s submitted through a lawyer especially.

John: I feel like if I got something that was watermarked from some person who didn’t have stuff, I’m like, “Wait, you don’t trust me to read your script? You think I am going to steal this thing? That I am going to do something?” I get when a studio sends me a thing that’s a little more secret to me. But also, I would say in this day, in that situation, you’re probably not getting the pdf anyway. They’re sending you some special link to some dumb thing.

Aline: Have you had that, where they can tell how much you’ve read and where you are on it?

John: Yes. That’s spooky.

Aline: That’s a weird feeling, because you want to feel like I’m spending enough time on each page. You don’t know how much data they’re getting. But you don’t want them to know if you were whipping through it. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I haven’t gotten one of those in a long… Maybe just because I haven’t done as many of those rewrites. But I haven’t had as many like, give us a vial of your blood, and then disappearing ink on your computer. Also, by the way, half the time I don’t know how to do it.

John: I don’t know how to do it. I was talking with a showrunner who was describing a situation where they were meeting with two different actors for something, and so they sent them that script through that process, in a situation where they had to read it in an app in order to read the thing. They said, “Oh, no, we’re gonna go with this one actor,” and so they pulled the script from the other actor in the moment.

Aline: Off the computer.

John: Off the computer. He tried to flip a page, and then it was all gone. That’s how he found he didn’t get the… Brutal. Let’s talk about some fairies. What does Chris in Ireland have to say?

Drew: Chris in Ireland writes, “I’m writing a spec animated feature set in Ireland where a group of fairies are the antagonists. In Irish folklore, fairies are seen as unpredictable, mischievous, and often malevolent, the complete opposite of Tinkerbell, who I feel has become the dominant representation of fairies in popular culture. I want this movie to celebrate Irish folklore and culture with people around the world. But as the primary audience is children, I’m wondering how to navigate the Tinkerbell issue with, A, potential investors, and B, with audiences. So do I stick to calling them fairies, or should I refer to them as something else?”

John: I say you just redefine what fairies mean in your world. I think it’s great.

Aline: Yeah. I don’t know. It depends on the tone. I was just thinking about that. You may not want to go too meta. If it’s a comedy, you can talk about the fact that people have a preconception about what fairies are, but they’re actually not. Tinkerbell is one of my favorite Disney characters, because she is kind of a pain in the ass. She’s jealous and she’s capricious, and that’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s giving a word I can’t say on this podcast. But I love that about Tinkerbell. I think mischief is part of it. But I know, he’s talking about van art fairies. And so I agree with you. If you can redefine fairies, that’s fun.

John: Absolutely. Obviously, what you’re trying to do with any movie you do is let the audience know what genre you’re in but also how you’re changing the rules of that genre and what you’re bending in that world, and that feels like that’s what you’re bending. So go for it. Let’s wrap up with Dave.

Drew: Dave writes, “I’m an Australian-based DP and I’ve been listening to the podcast for many years now. I’ve been shooting a Netflix show since it started in Australia, and this year I’ve been fortunate to come on board as DP of the latest season of the U.S. version. I moved to my Santa Monica apartment yesterday and I’m looking forward to my next five months in LA. A big part of why I felt comfortable saying yes to the job was because Scriptnotes has made the idea of being in LA a whole lot less intimidating, so thank you. I’d love to know if there’s any resources you’d recommend for looking up screenings or industry events that might be handy for someone like me with a bit of time on their hands.”

John: Dave, you chose to move in Santa Monica. I’m sure you had a reason for doing that. It probably feels most like Australia. You’re kind of a ways away from the center of town of stuff, but that’s fine. Hopefully, you can get on the freeway quickly. What things should he be doing in LA?

Aline: This is a good segue into talking about something I love, which is Revival Hub. Do you follow Revival Hub on Instagram?

John: No. Tell me all about it.

Aline: Revival Hub consolidates all the revival screenings in LA, so all the rooftop screenings, the cemetery screenings, the Alamo special screenings. There’s the Academy Museum, which is open to the public. Every day. Maybe we could put the link to that. It’s every one that’s happening. Back to the Future was playing last week, and E.T. If you go to those, it’ll be packed with industry people generally are the ones.

I’ll tell you a hilarious thing. On Memorial Day, when most would be barbecuing, me and my son and his girlfriend went to the Academy Museum to see Shiva Baby. There were a fair number of people there, but not a ton. That’s not the traditional way of celebrating Memorial Day. And in comes Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and their son, who we know. Phil and Karyn and I have been laughing for weeks about – I saw them walk in, and I was like, “That tracks.” And they were like, “Yeah, that tracks,” that that’s what we’re doing on that holiday.

You’ll find like-minded people who want to go in a nice air-conditioned screening of Shiva Baby, which I loved – we all loved. You’ll find your people there if you’re comfortable chatting with people. And if you’re working on a project, maybe you’ll know some people there.

John: Absolutely.

Aline: Or you can put up on your Facebook page, “Hey, I want to go see this revival screening of Urban Cowboy or whatever. Does anybody want to come with me?” That’s what I would recommend, because if I had more time, I would be doing those all the time. Obviously, there’s New Beverly. There’s lots of them.

John: I was gonna recommend the Academy screenings, which you can just find online. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But Revival Hub sounds great, because there’s always a ton of them around town. There’s an upcoming July 5th Charlie’s Angels at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with fireworks afterwards, so I’ll be going to that. There’s gonna be retrospective screenings of Go coming up. There’s always gonna be those things that happen.

Aline: It’s really fun. It’s great. It’ll make you feel like you’re in the biz, because LA is really dispersed.

John: Fewer things out in Santa Monica, but even out there, there’ll be some stuff.

Aline: Oh yeah, there’s places that are close to there. There’s the New Art, some of the places in Revival Hub. But also, summer is a great time for special screenings. In Malibu they do them on the cliff. It’s fun.

John: I love it. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Malta. I just got back from Malta. Have you been to Malta?

Aline: I have not, no.

John: Malta is really cool. It is an island nation, of course, south of Sicily. It feels kind of impossible, because it is a foreign country that speaks English. You definitely know you’re in a foreign country, but everyone speaks English, because it’s the second language of the island is English.

It’s incredibly urban and dense, except for the parts that are totally rural. It’s really cool. All the names seem like they’re Arabic, because it’s Semitic language, and yet it’s not. It’s really a very cool place. I really dug it. A lot of stuff has filmed there over the years, like Gladiator stuff, a Popeye film there. They kept all the sets from the Robin Williams Popeye.

Aline: How do you get there?

John: We flew. I was in Italy for a conference, and we flew. We were so close. I could literally almost see it. But we had fly back to Rome, and Rome to Malta. Air Malta was good. I just dug it. I’m thumbs up on Malta. They have a nice big tax credit. I’m looking for a thing to shoot in Malta, because it’d be a cool place to do a thing. Everything is white limestone, and it feels like you’re in North Africa.

Aline: Cool.

John: That was great.

Aline: Love that. I did enjoy it on your Instagram.

John: Thank you. Game of Thrones shot some stuff there. Things like a lot of exteriors got shot for various seasons in Malta. So check out Malta.

Aline: Check out Malta.

John: I’m head of the tourism board.

Aline: Have we discussed that I am the other person who loves this drink?

John: She is pointing at caffeine-free Coke Zero, or Coke Zero Zero, as we call it in the house.

Aline: That’s the best stuff. I would drink 10 of those if I could.

John: What’s stopping you?

Aline: Because it disrupts my biome. It’s really not good for you. But that is the best one.

John: Craig Mazin does not believe me on this. I will bring it over to his house.

Aline: Incorrect.

John: He’s like, “Oh, I’ll have regular.”

Aline: No, it’s this.

John: He’ll have caffeine-free Diet Coke, which is not nearly as good.

Aline: No, no, this is the thing.

John: This is the thing.

Aline: It’s not my One Cool Thing, but it’s our one cool thing.

John: But Aline, it’s hard to find.

Aline: Oh, believe me. I have it always stocked in my office and at my house, so come over.

John: When people are shopping for you, they may have trouble finding it, but the one hint-

Aline: It’s red.

John: It’s red. You need to find it at the Ralph’s on Wilshire. Will always have about eight of them, and so I will always take seven, so I can leave one so they remember it.

Aline: I have two One Cool Things. They’re short. But I like to do something girly always on this most male of podcasts. I chose a color that was too dark today. I have two, and I picked the wrong one. There’s a thing called peel-off lip stain.

John: What’s this?

Aline: You put what looks like a very, very dark lipstick on. You’d actually like this, because it’s pretty cool. You put a lot of lipstick on, and then over the next 10 minutes it dries into a film, that you then peel off.

John: I like peeling off stuff. That feels great.

Aline: It’s a delight.

John: Like glue on your hands as a kid. Love it.

Aline: It’s like that. It leaves this color on your lips. There’s a few things you gotta master to get it right. You can just go to Amazon and write peel-off lip stain. It’s fun. The one I used this morning, as I said, is too dark, but look. It’s not moved since I’ve been here.

John: It matches your shirt.

Aline: It’s not moved since I’ve been here. It’s just a fun, silly thing that I got from TikTok, which leads me into my last thing that you would love. Are you a TikTok guy? You’re not.

John: I’m not. I’m a Reels guy, so I watch like TikTok two weeks late.

Aline: No, not two weeks late, my friend. Six months later. I love when someone puts up a funny song clip or something. There’s two that are really big right now. What happens is somebody will put up a funny song clip and then people will duet it. They’ll play along to it. They’ll sing along to it. They’ll rearrange it. They’ll do dances to it. There’s two right now that are big on TikTok. One is “I’m looking for a man in finance.”

John: Of course. Love it. So good.

Aline: You know that?

John: Yeah.

Aline: There’s a million remixes of “I’m looking for a man in finance” that are great. The newest one is a hilarious guy who does comedy songs. This one is (sings) “put a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man in case he comes to town.” People have sung along to it, played along to it, danced to it. If you go to TikTok and you find the original – you’ll just put “a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man” or just put “dirt man,” and then you’ll find the original one. Then what you do is you click on that sound. Watch the ones that have the most views. The ones that have like two views are not gonna be great. But “looking for a man in finance” has just taken off like a rocket. And Dirt Man, which is a real ear worm, has also taken off. I just recommend, especially if you’re new to TikTok and you’re trying to figure out what’s fun about it.

What I love about TikTok is that people are so creative. They are so creative. And so many people can sing. I really love the ones where people sing in harmony. But dancing, adding saxophone, they’re really fun. And maybe we can link to some of the better ones for those two sounds. But “looking for a man in finance” has now become iconic. Ariana DeBose did a parody of it for the Emmys.

I know that in a world where we are constantly afraid of what social media is doing to us, I see TikTok and other forms of social media too can be an area for great expression. YouTube is how I found Rachel Bloom. There’s good stuff on the internet.

John: My newest obsession in TikTok/Reels is I love seeing incredibly talented music producers take a thing and redo it. What I found this morning was a guy who could take a Dua Lipa, like, “What if Phil Collins had written this Dua Lipa song?”

Aline: Yes, I saw that. It’s fantastic.

John: It’s genius. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that too.

Aline: It’s great.

John: It sounds great. It’s like, I really love this. I want Phil Collins to have done this song.

Aline: There’s that Celine Dion remix that started on TikTok. Then sometimes things get popular on TikTok and it takes them a while to clear it legally so that they can stream it. But the Celine Dion one, which they turned it into a dance song, you can now get on Spotify. Humans are awful, but also wonderful and so creative. And there are so many talented people out there. And TikTok is a good venue for that and for some horribly useless things. But it’s also a venue for some wonderful stuff.

John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Matthew Jordan.

If you have an outro, you can send your link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glasses and hats now. You can find all those at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Thank you to all our Scriptnotes Premium Members. We’re gonna be talking about journaling. But it’s always lovely to have you here on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna.

Aline: I’m actually Craig.

John: Yes, really, your commitment to the bit, Craig, I really respect that.

Aline: He did good.

John: He did good.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Bonus Segment. I want to talk about journals and journaling and this idea that we should be writing down what we did all day, because it feels right and feels useful and I’ve done it at times, but I don’t do it consistently. I’d like to do it more often. Aline, are you doing it?

Aline: I shockingly don’t. Not only do I not journal, I also don’t copiously write down ideas or bits of things. Very rarely do I do that. My husband is shocked at how little I record. I think I have this core belief that – I don’t know what the term for this is, but I don’t have a specific episode memory. I have a synthetic memory. That’s the term I would use, which is when I walk around the world, I’m noticing patterns more than I am trying to record actual instances of things. I find that if I concretize things too much too early, it prevents me from doing that process of synthesis.

Who doesn’t write in their diary when they’re a teen? “Nobody here understands me.” I certainly did that, but I have not found it useful. I know we’re gonna talk about journaling. I know I’m supposed to do it. I know it’s good for you. I know both those things are good for you. But I think it depends on what sort of person you are. I find that I do my ruminative stuff in a different way. We can talk about this on another episode, but do you narrate your life to yourself, or do you not?

John: I guess I narrate to the degree to which I am aware of the thing I’m doing. I have a very active internal voice, if that makes sense.

Aline: You do. I don’t. Some people are like, “Oh, here I am. I’m at the podcast. Look at Drew,” and they’re talking to themselves. I don’t, in a flow state. And I also can visualize things. I think that part of like – I’m gonna make up a word – synthetic memory, I assimilate things and sort them. I don’t dwell on specifics. Look. So many people do it. It’s probably better, and I should do it, but I don’t.

John: This is not in any way meant to be like, “This is a thing you should do.” I just want to talk about when it’s been useful and when I’ve done it and why I mostly don’t do it often.

A couple years back, I went through a really rough time. And one of the things that people recommended was this Five Minute Journal, which is this little white book. At the end of every day, you write down, like, here are some good things that happened today. It has these specific prompts. It sounds really stupid, but it’s just incredibly helpful, just by putting some context around stuff, like, “Oh, today wasn’t entirely shit. There actually were some good things, some things I noticed. Okay. Take a deep breath. It actually wasn’t awful.” Sometimes even over the course of the day, it got me thinking, “Oh, this is an actually okay moment.”

Aline: “Good latte.”

John: Take the small wins for what you got. I’m not using that book at all anymore, but it was useful for that. On the iPhone now, they have this app called Journal, which is a built-in app from Apple, which is surprisingly poor. It doesn’t actually do very much for you. But I thought, oh, that’ll be a good way to remind me to actually write down some stuff, because what I find I will do is I will happily email a person about the stuff I was working on or text somebody, but I won’t spend the time to actually text myself about, like, this is the thing that happened, and so there’s no record. I don’t have a good way of looking back, like, “When did that happen?”

Aline: My husband has an amazing book. We went out to dinner last night. He gets the card for the restaurant. He puts it in his journal. It says dinner with so-and-so at this restaurant. He has these little notebooks, and he’ll just paste them in. He has a record of the things we’ve done and the places we’ve been.

I think it depends on what sort of brain you have. But I had read a thing which is – and this is good for writers. You know when you’re working on a long-form thing and you feel like, “What did I do today?” Making a list of what you actually accomplished in a day, “Did a workout. Wrote four pages. Called my mother,” things that you to-done list. I did that for like three days.

John: Now, your husband is an attorney.

Aline: No, he works at a mutual fund.

John: For some reason, I was convinced your husband was an attorney. I was thinking there’s people who have billable hours who need to actually show the work they’ve done. That feels like a natural instinct.

Aline: He doesn’t have that. He doesn’t do that. People’s brains are a lot more organized that mine. I guess we’re at the age where you decide your faults or your strengths. I think I have more of a birds eye view than a day-to-day view, in a certain sense.

John: One of the things I recognized is that my photo roll becomes essentially my diary, because it’s like, “What was I doing in April?” Then I scroll back to April, like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing.”

Aline: Yes! John and I are sort of the same person. Have you noticed? ENTJs who like the exact same kind of Diet Coke. That’s exactly what I do. I love looking back and saying, “What was I doing a year ago?” Then you send it to a friend and they go, “Okay.”

John: “Okay.” But one of my frustrations I’m recognizing is that – I’ll get to what I’m actually doing and trying to do more now – but on my trip to Italy and my trip to Malta, I will think through, like, what am I gonna post on my Instagram stories, but I won’t do that for myself. I’m fine publicly presenting a history thing, but I won’t keep that for myself.

Aline: That’s what those social media things are. They’re like we’re writing our own lovely tribute to ourselves. I wonder if she would be okay with us name checking her, but Katie Dippold once said to me and Craig – we were talking about something, and she said there should be a button before you post something online that says, “Wait, but why?” It’s so true.

Listen. I started an Instagram for my dog, Sir Jimmy Jim. Why? I don’t know. I put one-second work into the caption. They’re terrible. But there’s a need to concretize. Now that you can publicly concretize, it’s very tempting. But you’re right, why not privately concretize?

John: What I’m using right now is called Day One. It’s an app that’s for iOS and also on your Mac. You can write some stuff in there about what happened. You can also link it to things. I use Strava for running, and so all my runs show up in there, and so it keeps track of that. You can add photos to it and make stuff work.

What I’ve found has been helpful for me to do is, on my iPhone I will start a new entry and then I’ll just hit the voice transcription thing, where you click the button and you just talk at it, because I don’t care that it’s perfect or that it’s exactly right. I just want to dump it out there and make a record, because I’m probably the only person who’s ever gonna read this again. That’s been useful. It’s one less barrier of a thing to do.

Aline: There’s a thing called the external brain that my husband talks about where getting things out of your brain into Evernote or into something-

John: I use Notion for that.

Aline: Because otherwise you wake up in the middle of the night going, “Oh.”

John: I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but I keep a stack of index cards by the bed, in the bathroom, and various places. I’ll write the thing down and then it’s done. I’ll put it by the bedroom door. It’s out of my brain. I can stop thinking about it.

Aline: You should do that. Again, these are all things that I should do and don’t.

John: Listeners, if you have suggestions for journaling things you want to be doing… Oh, but I do also want to ask you – several writers who we know do things called Morning Pages, where they write all the stuff… I see you shaking your head. That does not feel like an Aline thing. The idea behind these is that you unlock the artist within and fight the war of art and get all that stuff out of you. I’ve just never found it super helpful. I’ve tried it. It’s like, sure, I can vomit out a bunch of stuff, but my day isn’t better for me having done it.

Aline: The time that I’m writing, I want to consolidate into purposeful writing. I think it would make me feel despair.

John: Yeah, it could. Aline, always a pleasure having you here.

Links:

• ‘Bad Boys’ Settlement by Dominic Patten for Deadline
• Why did Sony buy Alamo Drafthouse — and is it actually a good thing? by Ryan Faughnder for LA Times
• The Nine Enneagram Type Descriptions
• Farewell – Casablanca
• Farewell – Past Lives
• Farewell – Lost in Translation
• Farewell – Weekend
• Farewell – Philadelphia
• Farewell – The Shawshank Redemption
• Farewell – Harold and Maude
• Farewell – Terminator 2
• Farewell – The Way We Were
• Farewell – The Wizard of Oz
• Farewell – E.T.
• Farewell – Toy Story 3
• Farewell – Dead Poets Society
• Revival Hub LA
• Visit Malta
• Peel off lip stain
• Dirt Man by Carter Vail, and some of Aline’s favorite remixes, via TikTok
• Phil Collins’ Houdini
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.