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**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig has the week off, but luckily we have someone remarkably qualified to take his spot. Damon Lindelof is the co-creator and showrunner of Lost, a screenwriter and producer of films including Tomorrowland, Prometheus, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. And most immediately the guy behind the HBO series The Leftovers, which began its third and final season this past Sunday. Damon, welcome to Paris.

**Damon Lindelof:** It is so exciting to be here, looking out the window and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful sunny day here and a little stressed out about sitting in for Mr. Mazin. I feel like Jerry O’Connell must feel when he’s on Regis & Kelly or whatever it’s called now.

**John:** That’s a high stress job. I mean, Chris Hardwick seems like a very natural choice to fill in there.

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** But you have to be very up and present and it’s challenging, but we’re not nearly so demanding of an audience. People are driving in their cars or they’re walking around, so it’s not nearly–

**Damon:** No pressure.

**John:** No pressure.

**Damon:** I understand.

**John:** Yeah. Kelly, she’s always on at the gym. And the gym, that’s a high pressure environment. But you–

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** This is nothing. Why are you here in Paris?

**Damon:** I am here for Series Mania or that’s the American pronunciation. Series Mania.

**John:** Sure. That sounds right.

**Damon:** It’s a big TV festival that they have in Paris. And I’m on the jury. So, I’m also premiering the first two episodes of The Leftovers’ third season here in Paris, so that’s going to be tomorrow night at the time of this recording. And so we’re flying in a couple of the actors. So Justin Theroux and Christopher Eccleston will be here. Max Richter, who does our music. So, the premiere is going to kick off this festival, and then I get to watch a lot of great international television that I’ve never seen before. And sort of Sundance or Telluride where we will award a grand jury prize and a couple of acting prizes, etc.

But, it’s basically just an excuse to eat baguettes and coffee and stare out the window at the Eiffel Tower, which I’m going to do right now.

**John:** That sounds really good. So, on today’s podcast, I’m not going to ask you any specific questions about Lost or The Leftovers, because I feel like there’s probably 10,000 hours of tape of you talking about those two shows, which are both fantastic. And I’ve seen every episode of both.

**Damon:** Blah, blah, blah. Yes. Enough.

**John:** But I do want to talk to you about television, because Craig and I get a lot of questions about television and we really don’t know very much about television, so whenever we have a guest–

**Damon:** But you watch a lot of television.

**John:** I watch a ton of television.

**Damon:** So you know a lot about television.

**John:** Yeah, but like the making of television is a very different process. And it’s changed a lot even over the last ten years. So, I’ve not had a series on for quite a long time. But just watching you and sort of your career, it has just transformed a lot. I can tell.

So, I want to talk to you about sort of making a series. But also I’ve known you since before you were a television writer, so I sort of want to talk about growing up, becoming a staff writer, and going into showrunning.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And maybe answer some questions from listeners that have written in. And then finally I want to talk about sort of the back catalog of ideas, because you’re at a place now where you’re done with The Leftovers and you have to figure out what you’re doing next. And I want to talk about how do you decide whether to do something new or to visit something old. So, we’ll go through all of that today if we can.

**Damon:** Oh man. OK.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Damon:** What would Mazin do?

**John:** Mazin would find a way to cut this short and plow through it.

**Damon:** Joke it up.

**John:** He would joke it up.

**Damon:** God love him.

**John:** He’d bring out another character voice.

**Damon:** There’s a closet door behind you and I know that Mazin is going to pop out of it at any moment. And harangue me, which is just the way I want it to happen.

**John:** Sounds good. Let’s go back to sort of your origin story and how you got started as a writer. Because I think I first met you in ’97 or ’98. You were working–

**Damon:** I was working as an assistant probably for Toby Jaffe at the Ladd Company. And I think you were working on a project there. But I remember, like I think I had read Go, but before it was made.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And you came out of the Stark program, if memory serves. And I just thought, wow, you were the – not that you aren’t still – but you were the young, hot, you know, scribe. And this was a time where Hollywood Reporter and Variety were not yet really online. And you would buy the trades and there were always talks of sales and deals and etc. And I remember being in awe of you, which I still am, as I mentioned.

So you basically had the job that I wanted, which at the time I think probably in the mid to late ‘90s, a movie writer. A screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. I think at that point I had stopped working as an assistant and Go might have sold. We hadn’t gotten it made yet. And I had a few other assignments. But we had a mutual friend, so a guy who worked at your company was also a Starkie. And so I remember going to lunch–

**Damon:** Yes. That’s right.

**John:** I remember going out to lunch and going to the [Cuccaro] on Larchmont.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And how I first got to know you. And I think I remember, we’ll circle back to old projects at the end, but I remember you pitching me a movie you were writing, a script you were writing, that was about hemophilia.

**Damon:** Oh yes. What a genius idea that was. Just to contextualize, at that time still in the mid ‘90s, even though we were many years beyond the initial Die Hard, that idea of like when you were pitching movies or selling movies it was Die Hard in a blank. The specs that were selling were the kind of Shane Black, you know, big action concepts. And my idea, which I thought was brilliant at the time, was what if there was a guy who was a severe hemophiliac to the degree where any kind of significant subcutaneous cut would put him in enormous peril. And he was incredibly wealthy, like Bruce Wayne, and had a tremendous amount of resource, but was basically living in this penthouse apartment in New York City, but never left.

And he kind of had a – he was a grown man, but sort of a state of arrested social development because to get cut would basically kill him. And what if we took this guy and threw him into like an incredible action scenario where every single set piece he couldn’t end up like John McClane. Where it’s like just the single cut. So he is having sort of a Rear Window, like borderline stalking relationship with this beautiful woman who lives in the penthouse across from him. And she’s in a relationship with this dude who is like some kind of Russian – some bad guy.

And he is watching her and fantasizes about like what her life is, in a very cute, innocent PG-13/non-stalkery way. Although it is stalking in hindsight. And these toughs basically break into the apartment and kidnap her. And he realizes that he is the only one who witnessed this and must go and rescue her. And hijinks ensue.

**John:** Hijinks ensue. So, that was a script you wrote?

**Damon:** Oh, I wrote it.

**John:** You wrote it. And was it your first script?

**Damon:** No. I mean, I had probably written like maybe three or four completed screenplays, one of which was a bad Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, kind of like rip-off, like a party comedy, a John Hughes wannabe thing. And then there were a couple like busted action movie ideas. And then I wrote this western called The Perfectionists that was kind of like in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino ultra-violent comedy western set in Mexico. And that screenplay was the first thing that I wrote that I was like, “Oh, this isn’t the worst thing that I’ve read in my life and I’ll at least let some of my peers read it.” And got some positive feedback from them. And then I submitted it for the Nicholl Fellowship, which is done through the Motion Picture Academy.

At the time they got like maybe 5,000 submissions a year and I started getting letters that I made the first cut, and then the second cut, and the third cut. And it was down to maybe 50 scripts out of those 5,000. And I was like, oh, this is good. I have to choice to make, which is the next letter may say I’m no longer in the running, and that will be incredibly demoralizing and I’ll decide that I’m a terrible writer again. Or, I can just take all of this positivity and make a move.

And so I sent out an email to everyone I knew and at that point I’d just been watching a tremendous amount of television and I started to have some peers who were working in television. And it felt like my skill set would be much better suited to TV because I love collaborating. And I heard about this thing called a writer’s room, as opposed to the way that you know feature writing works, which is there’s no collaboration fundamentally. There’s collaboration between you and the producer and the studio, but those three entities are very rarely in the room at the same time. You’re getting mixed messages. And then if a draft doesn’t come in exactly the way they want it, they fire you and replace you, versus the way that it made much more sense to me and more fun is to basically take four or five talented people and put them all in a room together. And everyone is basically coming up with ideas and supporting one another and challenging ideas that aren’t working, et cetera.

That was only happening in TV. And a friend of mine, Julie Plec, who was running Kevin Williamson’s company at the time as an executive, and now Julie runs – she’s a showrunner. She’s been running The Vampire Diaries which just ended and The Originals, which is the spinoff of that show. But she emailed me back instantly and said, “Kevin just had a show picked up.” This was after Dawson’s Creek. “It’s going to be on ABC. But you need to start – could you start on Monday?” And this was on a Thursday. So, I quit my job. Ladd told me, both encouragingly and discouragingly, “You can always come back.”

**John:** Yes.

**Damon:** “I’ll be here when things don’t work out.” And I took the writer’s assistant job on Wasteland. And that was in the 98/99 season, so that was 19 years ago. I’ll be a professional television writer for 20 years next year.

**John:** That’s crazy. So, I remember Wasteland, because I was doing a competing show.

**Damon:** Really? Very few do.

**John:** I was doing a competing show. I was doing D.C. which was the WB show. Your show was like young twenty-somethings in New York, mine was young twenty-somethings in Washington, D.C.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** Yours lasted like 13 episodes. Mine lasted three.

**Damon:** No, only two episodes of Wasteland aired.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. So, I may have beaten you.

**Damon:** We made 13.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Damon:** And D.C. had a – you know, the premise of Wasteland was Friends as a drama series with no comedy. Like, it was just twenty-somethings having existential crises. But at least D.C. they were in pop–

**John:** Yeah, there was some kind of reason.

**Damon:** There was a franchise.

**John:** Mine was supposed to be like post-Felicity. So it was supposed to be fun. But it was not a good show. Have you gone back and watched any of those early things that you wrote? Because I’ve not gone back to watch DC at all.

**Damon:** Oh my god. No, I have not. But I think I probably should, just to–

**John:** Might be sobering.

**Damon:** Some sort of learning, yeah. I could use some sobering.

**John:** So, you start as a writer’s assistant. And were you able to write an episode during your time as a writer’s assistant? Was that an actual writing job?

**Damon:** What ended up happening on that show, because Kevin Williamson was the de facto showrunner, except he had just handed off Dawson’s Creek to Greg Berlanti who was like a one – I think he was like 24 or 25.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Running basically Dawson’s Creek.

**John:** And he still seems like a boy wonder.

**Damon:** Amazing.

**John:** The man does not age.

**Damon:** I mean, how prolific and incredible his shows are. Kevin was also directing this movie called Teaching Mrs. Tingle, for New Line, so he was not around for the early days of Wasteland. He would just basically buzz in for an hour or two a day and the room would pitch him ideas. But he was not able based on his other projects to take the reins.

And what ended up happening over the course of just about six weeks is that the showrunner quit, a number of other writers were fired, and by the end of six weeks it was the staff writers and the story editor and very junior level writers and me. And there was no material beyond the fifth episode. And we were about to go into production on it. And I was like I’m just going to write a spec Wasteland, just on my own. And I did that over the course of two days and handed it off to the staff writers and said, “If this is worth anything, rewrite it, put your names on it, but at least we’ll all be employed for another week or two.” And they went into their office and closed the door and I was feeling really anxious and the door remained closed for 45 minutes. And I was like I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve overstepped my bounds.

And then Kevin, he was a friendly guy, but he’d never – I didn’t even know that he knew that I really existed. And he walked right up to my desk, which was in the kind of bullpen. And he said, “Are you Damon?” And I said, “Uh, yeah.” And he said, “Did you write an episode of the show?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you have an agent?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “You better get one.”

**John:** That’s great.

**Damon:** And he went into his office and then moments later Jim and Andy, who were the staff writers, they came out and they were like, “We really liked the script. We called Kevin.” I was like, yeah, he just…

So, you know, it was off to the races from there. So, I ended up writing on three or four of the 13 episodes of Wasteland that were produced, but again only two aired before it was canceled. So, that’s how I got my WGA status and my representation and all that stuff was on that show.

**John:** I want to connect a few dots back earlier. So, Julie Plec was the person who brought you in to do this.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** How did you get to know Julie Plec?

**Damon:** I’m sure it still exists today, but there was just – there was like an assistant circuit of the assistants from agencies, studios, and production companies would have like these mixers, you know, on Thursday nights. And we would just go and basically network with each other and get drunk and make out and make friends. And so everybody started as PAs and then became assistants and then people started getting development jobs. And so I had known Julie, circling back to Jerry O’Connell, he and I were really good friends at NYU. He did Scream 2.

**John:** Which was Kevin Williamson.

**Damon:** For Kevin. And then that’s how I met Julie through that group.

**John:** So you didn’t show up in Los Angeles with any network of anybody? You just started working and built it out from there?

**Damon:** Literally knew nobody. Came out here with my roommate from college in ’94 and we wagon-trained from – he lived in – I came from New Jersey to Chicago. He lived in Michigan. And the two of us, his name is Erik Baiers, he is a big mucky muck at Universal now. He and I drove out and like basically just rented an apartment. And answered ads in the trades. Went to Kinkos and faxed our resumes in. And got internships and then just parlayed that into assistant jobs.

**John:** So, what I like about your story in terms of both leaving the Ladd Company and writing the script for Wasteland is you didn’t ask permission, you just sort of did it, and very politely waited for the next step to happen. You sort of put yourself into positions where you could become lucky by going out for that job, letting people read your script, by letting people read the spec you wrote which you decided to do. That’s a common thread as I’ve talked to a lot of writers who have progressed up is that they didn’t sit around waiting for someone to tell them that they could do something. They just did the thing and sorted it out as it happened.

**Damon:** Yeah. I mean, I think that it didn’t occur to me at the time that – it wasn’t like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Sort of like moxie play. Like in my brain at the time that it was happening it felt like it was a survival play. But there was also this other ingredient in what you’re talking about. Because I agree with what you’re saying. And I feel that there is commonality. But the missing ingredient, other than luck and let’s just say, you know, that you have some fundamental talents or experience, because a lot of people in that situation, you know, it does have to be on the page, or you do have to be able to speak articulately about story, but desperation also happens to be part – usually part of the story. And so I can guarantee you that had Wasteland been a successful show, like on the scale of Dawson’s, that I never would have made that move.

Like, I would have gone through the entire first season doing my job, the job that they hired me to do as writer’s assistant, but it wasn’t like, ooh, I see an opportunity, I’m going to grab it. It really was dark days. The show is going to go down. You know, they’re going to shut us down. We don’t have scripts. Like, I have nothing to lose.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** And it felt like a very low risk play.

**John:** Yeah. I had a good conversation with Drew Goddard and we were talking about sort of his first–

**Damon:** Hack.

**John:** Hack.

**Damon:** Hack. Oh my god. The worst.

**John:** A charming hack. He was talking about his first TV experience and it was with Joss Whedon. A similar kind of situation where like–

**Damon:** Haven’t heard of him.

**John:** You know, the show was really having a crisis and they were lacking an episode. And so he just happened to be the person who was nearby and just started up the conversation and became the idea between takes. And he wrote it. And as I was talking through the whole conversation with him, you see that at sort of every step along the way Drew just worked harder. And also just like he was the guy who did stay up all night to do the thing so it could sort of save the day.

**Damon:** Yeah. And you know I’m a big believer in when we hire writer’s assistants on shows that I’m running, I’m hiring writers. So, the de facto rule is that the writer’s assistant does not speak in the room, because their job is to basically synthesize everything that everyone else is saying. And if they’re thinking about pitching their own ideas, they’re not really listening. That’s the thinking. That said, there are moments in the room and out of the room, like when the room isn’t actually up and running, for the writer’s assistants to pitch. And because there is this – I don’t want to say it’s a political – it’s more of like sort of a social dynamic thing. It’s like you want to hire people who figure out like – who see their moment and take it.

And it’s very hazily defined. Like, you know when it’s too soon. And you know when it’s too late. And it’s hard to do it when it’s just right. But the thing is, you know, what I would say to all writer’s assistants or anybody in that position, you know, the first thing that you say better be great because if that first thing that you pitch is not great, then the second thing that you pitch has to be exponentially greater than that thing.

So, just bide your time, but essentially you have to jump into the Double Dutch jump rope at some point. That is an expectation. And certainly on The Leftovers over the course of the three years we promoted both of our writer’s assistants, both our writer’s assistant on season one, Nick, and our writer’s assistant on season two, Haley, because both of them demonstrated they were able to do the job of writer’s assistant incredibly well, but they also found those moments to demonstrate that they were writers.

**John:** So, when I was doing D.C., my first TV show, I had to put together a staff. I never was a staff writer, and suddenly having to assemble a writing team. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any real good sense of what I needed. So, now that you’ve done this a couple of times, what are you looking for as you’re putting together a writing staff, from writer’s assistant all the way up to the people who are going to help really run the show with you?

**Damon:** Well, almost everything that I learned I learned from Carlton Cuse. He’s been a mentor and continues to be a mentor to me on so many levels. But, following Wasteland, which was not the most functional staff in terms of the way that it was assembled at first, although consisting of amazing writers, I went on to Nash Bridges in its sixth season. Sixth and final season. So it was this well-oiled machine. But something happened at the end of season five where essentially there are just moments in television shows where the entire staff basically goes off to do other things, and it happens simultaneously just because they’re at the end of their three-year deals or whatever.

So, at the end of season five, Shawn Ryan, who basically wrote a spec called The Farm, because he wanted people to think that he could do more than just Nash Bridges, that ended up being like FX’s first drama, The Shield, and one of the greatest television shows of all time. And Glen Mazzara, they both left at the end of season five. So, Carlton basically reconstituted the entire staff because with the exception of he and John Worth and one other writer, Reid Steiner, there were five new hires. Because I think that he realized that Glen and Shawn were so powerful in the room that let’s just kind of do a complete and total overhaul. And I was one of those writers.

And so the first thing that you do is you read samples. And it’s not a zero sum game in terms of this person is a good writer, or this person is a bad writer. Like you have to be able to assess how are they with dialogue, how are they with character, how are they with plot, how are they with humor. How are they with pace? And nobody is going to check all those boxes. And the key is to basically not have redundancies. So, don’t meet with three people who are really great at dialogue because certainly in the sixth season of that show the voice of the show is already clearly defined. And so you have to be a good writer, but it’s a lot more technical.

**John:** So, you were the person being staffed, so you weren’t reading other people’s things for Nash Bridges.

**Damon:** That’s correct.

**John:** So why do you think they hired you for Nash Bridges?

**Damon:** Carlton said he read two of my samples. I wrote a one-act play about time travel and a spec Sopranos. And he read those two pieces of material and met with me. And in the meeting, he was like, “Tell me what’s your story. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?” He didn’t really seem interested at all in what I had to say about Nash Bridges. He was more interested in who I was as an individual. And I think that was the other component which is try to build a room that comes from a different place than you do, and looks at the world in a different way than you do. But then in the overlapping Venn diagram you’re all going to meet at the show, so there has to be some common language.

But I was very candid with him in saying, “Here’s the thing. Nash Bridges is on Friday nights at 9 o’clock. I’m out, like partying. But the episodes that I’ve seen, and I love Miami Vice, I’m a huge Don Johnson fan. I love Cheech. I really think this is a great show. And I think that I could write for it.” But that was like 5% of an hour-long interview.

And to go back to your initial question, so you read somebody’s sample. That gets them in the room. But the intangible is you sit down with them for an hour or 90 minutes if the interview is going particularly well, and you just have to ask yourself could I hang out with this person in a room for nine to ten hours a day and enjoy hanging out with them? And that’s just a gut instinct. And there are some amazing writers, incredible on the page, who I just had very awkward stilted interviews with. We just didn’t click. Like, that’s just as much on me as it is on them. And I ended up not hiring them because of that.

And then each writer you hire you have to basically think about them now existing in that room as you start to build the room around them. And I don’t say this just because it is the politically correct thing to do, but having real diversity in a writers’ room, particularly on gender lines. I mean, I think that the industry has a huge way to go in terms of finding writers of color in general. The agencies are just – their rosters are very anemic when it comes to that. But in terms of men and women, there’s more of an equal balance. And so just start from a de facto place of the room has to be 50/50 because if it’s just eight guys in a room, it’s not going to be good for the show.

**John:** So, you’re making the decisions about who you want to bring on, but there’s also other voices saying, “How about this person? How about this person?” So there’s a studio talking to you, there’s a network talking to you.

**Damon:** Sure. Right.

**John:** There’s a bunch of agents talking to you.

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** How, as a showrunner, do you sort through all that? And when do you decide to read a person’s script or not read a script? Is there a first vetting process is somebody helping you go through that pile first?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, I think that probably the loudest voice in that mix is the network. When they’re staffing a show, either shows have just gone done, or they have overall deals with talent, probably less so now than before. Or someone that they’ve been monitoring and they’re huge fans of. So, you know, if HBO when we were putting The Leftovers together, Michael Ellenberg was basically our point exec on that. He had like seven people that he felt would be good on the show and that I should read. They came from a whole spectrum of they were playwrights, some of them were novelists. Very few of them had any actual television experience before because I think the thinking was like let’s put people in this room who haven’t done it before because maybe they’ll come up with more outside-the-box ideas.

So that’s first and foremost if the network says you’ve got to meet with these people, or I think that you would like – you have to do it, just on general principle. And chances are you’re not wasting your time by doing that. And then level two is Warner Bros., the studio, is producing The Leftovers. They also had talent that their executives had been developing. And I think that they have immaculate taste over Warner Bros. So, I met with those people.

And then my agents. So I’m represented by CAA. I’ve had a relationship there for 15 years. And so my agent is not going to waste my time sending me – they know me better than anybody else. Just as a person versus as a writer. And what I’ll try to say to them is just send me like your three or four best. I know that you’ve got a lot of clients to service, but your three or four best. And then the other agencies will send one or two as well.

And in the hiring process, I’ll probably generate a stack of between 30 to 50 scripts of writing samples. And I will read pretty religiously like the first 15 pages of every script. If something is like particularly spectacular, I’ll actually finish it, because I’m just like oh my god, like I just want to see how things turn out. But for the most part, within 15 pages or so I can kind of determine whether or not it’s going to be a match.

**John:** So, you’re putting together this staff for a writer’s room, but I feel like you have sort of different qualifications for writing on something like Leftovers, which correct me if I’m wrong – I think Leftovers you wrote all the episodes before you started shooting. Is that correct?

**Damon:** It is incorrect.

**John:** It is incorrect. So, on the first seasons of Leftovers, how far were you in to the writing before you started filming?

**Damon:** I think that we had three scripts completed and had broken the fourth episode and maybe an outline on it. And potentially had some sense of what the fifth episode would be. That’s beyond the pilot. So, HBO still pilots shows. And so Tom and I wrote the pilot together. We produced the pilot. And Toto edited the pilot. And then HBO said we will pick this up to series. So that was in the can.

So, I really only think we had two scripts when we went into production.

**John:** That’s much more like a traditional broadcast situation. We’ve talked to the Game of Thrones guys, and like they have to write the whole thing ahead of time because they’re block scheduling things that it’s impossible to sort of do that show any other way. But I guess going back to staffing, so you need to find people who can work well in the room, but you also are looking for some people who have the experience of actually producing television so that they can do that functional job of like going to set and looking at a cut. You have to find people who have some skills beyond just throwing words around on the page.

**Damon:** For sure. And that’s why there are staff writers are story editors and the expectation on them because they’re newbies is it’s primarily a writing job, but then once you get to the producing levels you do expect some producing acumen.

On Lost and The Leftovers, we migrated to a philosophy where the writers did not go to the set. And I know a lot of television shows do send the writers to the set, and that’s wonderful. But the model of both those shows was we had incredibly strong producing directors. In the case of Lost, Jack Bender. In the case of The Leftovers, Mimi Leder. And so the idea of having a writer on set felt like to do what. You know, to basically protect their material?

So the writers are always available. They would be involved in the tone. Calls with the directors, which are key. And very heavily involved in the prep phase. But all of which can happen by phone and did. And we had writer-producers, Kath Lingenfelter, and Jacqui Hoyt in season one, who never visited the set, but had incredible – like were totally producing their episodes and the whole series writ large. Gave notes on cuts. Watched dailies. All that stuff.

So, I think that that thinking not just migrated from eliminating the redundancy of nobody should be on set who doesn’t have a clear cut job, but the other issue was I’m just a very room-heavy showrunner. There are other showrunners who float in and out of the room and I want to be in the writer’s room six to eight hours a day. That’s my favorite part of the job. That collaboration. The kicking the tires. We beat out every story with a great degree of specificity.

If you send a writer off to set, and they’re going to be there through prep, on a show like The Leftovers, they’re gone for four weeks. And so the idea of losing a valuable player is like the equivalent of the designated hitter in baseball, where it’s like they only get one at bat every three innings. But you don’t get to use them in the field. And so I just kind of felt like I wanted the writers in the room. Not the best way to do it, but the best way for me.

**John:** So let’s talk about being in the room versus when writers leave the room. So you have your writing team assembled. You’re breaking an episode. So let’s say you’re on episode four of the first season of Leftovers. Is that process going up on the whiteboard? What is the process for breaking an episode of a show like that?

**Damon:** So by the time you get to episode four, you’ve already got some sense of what you want to happen in episode four because you’ve got some sense of hopefully what episode ten is going to be, and what it is you’re moving towards. You’ve learned things from the first three episodes. But essentially, episode three is off the board and is being written and exists in draft form. And you erase all the boards and you’re looking at these big white boards. And you start – we usually would do at least two, sometimes three days of blue-skying. Which is kind of anything can happen in this episode. Let’s talk about what we want to be happening thematically. What do we want to have happen between certain character relationships? In the storytelling mechanism do we want to focus on just one story, or are we doing three stories? So there’s a lot of experimentation and sort of fumbling around.

Until you basically land on what I would say is like the big idea. And in the case of the fourth episode of The Leftovers of season one, somebody pitched, you know, what if the baby Jesus gets stolen from the nativity scene. It’s just a prank. I was like, oh, that’s cool. It has thematic resonance for the idea of the show. It could be a little bit fun and silly. And we’re getting to talk about religion without talking about religion. And it’s something that our chief of police isn’t going to want to deal with because he’s got more important things to be dealing with, like the fact that his wife has joined a cult. But I was just like, OK, so that’s going to be the organizing principle.

And so then you start saying like, what are the beats of that story? And then someone pitched like, oh, it would be really cool to watch that baby being made like in a doll factory. And see the mold being poured. And then it being put on the assembly line. And then having its eyes painted and put in a box. And then the box ends up on a shelf in Target. And then a woman buys the baby and then she dresses it up. And then the whole end of that idea, she puts it in the manger.

And so we’ve just basically shone you how Jesus Christ is made in the real world. And everybody goes like, oh, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. And then that’s how it’s going to start. And then you try to figure out the corresponding bookend, which is what’s the end of this episode going to be? In the case of episode four, it’s interesting that you just threw that out arbitrarily, which is that’s the episode that I think had the most problems in the first season because we broke an entire story, an entire what we would call a B story, which we stopped doing towards the end of season one, and we started doing much more interconnected singular point of view stories, but we did a story with Kevin’s son and Laurie’s son, Tom, and this girl Christine as they joined this commune of barefoot people who are like these kind of hedonist hippies.

We shot the whole thing, and it was an utter disaster. And we scrapped it. It’s the only thing we ever shot for the show that didn’t air. And then basically re-broke it. And in the process of re-breaking it, we came up with a new ending for the Baby Jesus story which incorporated Matt Jamison, who we had now seen dailies for episode three and we saw what Eccleston was doing. And we were like, oh, we have to – like the payoff for the Baby Jesus story has to be a scene between Kevin and Matt, which didn’t exist in the original draft.

So, the show starts telling you what it wants to do. But, the story-breaking process is what’s the first scene, what’s the last scene, and now let’s just fill in everything that happens. What do you have to do to earn the last scene?

**John:** So this is all going up on a big whiteboard?

**Damon:** Yep.

**John:** And then ultimately whose job is it to transfer what’s on the whiteboard to a document that everyone else can look at?

**Damon:** The writer’s assistant.

**John:** OK.

**Damon:** So one of the low level writers, a staff writer or a story editor, is putting stuff up on the board. So for the blue-sky phase, once we land on something that we like, you just write a sentence. Like baby doll made in Tijuana. And then like last one is Kevin throws baby out window. And it’s literally just those sentences. And after two days, you look and you have about 20 of those sentences up on the board and then you’re ready to go into the next phase, which I think is what I would call the story-breaking phase, where you just go scene-by-scene and you start to pitch specific dialogue, character dynamics, etc.

And so it’s usually for an episode of The Leftovers, wire-to-wire, like a two-week process I think from the beginning of blue-skying until an episode comes off the board. But when it comes off the board, by then all five whiteboards are filled in super mega detail. And then off of that the writer will go to outline.

**John:** Great. So the writer goes to outline, so you assign one of the writers who is in the room, like this is your episode. And does that writer know ahead of time that this is going to be his or her episode?

**Damon:** Yeah. In the first season less so. I mean, usually you try to do it hierarchically, so the more experienced writer-producers get the first scripts. I told everyone when I was hiring them I’m going to be co-writing every episode of The Leftovers with you, so that we can develop and find the tone of the show together. Because I think that that’s going to help me learn how to write the show, but also it will put you in a position to be more successful. And also will generate material, the scripts a lot more quickly, if we’re co-writing them. And everybody was down with that.

So, we just had a rotation. But I co-wrote all the episodes in the first season, say for one, which was episode eight.

**John:** So it’s gone from this detailed five whiteboards to a document, an outline that everyone can look at?

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And off of that outline, are there notes or changes? Like does the studio see this?

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** Network sees this? OK.

**Damon:** The outline is the first that the studio and the network catch wind of what it is we want to do. They would give notes. Very good notes. Points of clarification. Our outlines were very detailed, like they were 20 to 30 page documents. Because more importantly, because the scripts were sort of the last thing to come, and we always had the scripts in time for prep, which is a week before the – a week to ten days before the episode shoots. But usually like right up against it.

But, we would also – production would have the outlines. And that – they’d have that like a month ahead of time, and that was really important because they’d know what all the locations were.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** What the cast asks were going to be. They could start to build a schedule and more importantly a budget off of the detail of those outlines. But then particularly in the first season of the show, the notes would sometimes detonate outlines. And I would come back to the room and say we just got blown up. And sometimes you get a note that blows you up and you immediately resist it just because you know how much work it’s going to create for you, but you know that it’s right. And other times a note is potentially explosive, but you feel like it is wrong and you can scrap it out.

We were getting many more good notes than bad notes. I can’t think of any bad notes that we got in the first season. So, the outline is basically the first test. And it’s a little bit like the Congress and the Senate. Like if the bill makes it out of outline, you’re going to have a lot less problems when it crosses the President’s desk. So, we wanted to generate – we didn’t want there to be any surprises in script.

**John:** Yeah. So from the five whiteboards, how long does it take to make an outline? Is that just a day to write that out?

**Damon:** No, because the outline is a piece of writing. So, it’s not – the writer’s assistant has taken what’s off the board and generated notes, but now the writer has to actually write it and create all the things that a writer does. So, it could take like a week from it coming off the board before the writer generates that outline. Because, again, like I said, it’s a pretty lengthy document. And because I would be chugging along on the next episode, that writer would basically generate that outline pretty much independently of me and then I would notes them or rewrite it. But I was much more involved in writing the scripts than the outlines for sure.

**John:** Great. So once you have an outline that everyone has signed off on, or signed off on enough–

**Damon:** Sometimes they say, “We’ll see. We’ll see how it works in the script,” which you know like oh my god that note isn’t going to go away.

**John:** How long is it taking you guys to go from the outline to the script?

**Damon:** That’s fast. I mean, that takes just almost the same amount of time that it takes to go from board to outline. Maybe just a week. And, again, because there’s two of us, we would just divvy it up.

**John:** You just pick scenes and do it?

**Damon:** In the case of the first season, there’d be like the Kevin story and a Jill story and a Laurie story, so you just say like, Kath, you take the Laurie story and I will take the Keven story. Then we started doing episodes like episode three which was just a Matt Jamison story, which I co-wrote with Jacqui. In that case I would be like these are the scenes that I feel like I have a beat on. And she would take the scenes that she felt she had a beat on. And then we would basically exchange notes to each other and then I would do a conformity pass.

**John:** So you’ve divvied up the scenes between the two of you, but in the outline stage is it so clear sort of how a scene is going to begin and end? Because I can just imagine if you have a scene that’s butting up against the scene that she’s writing, you want to have a natural transition between the two of you. Do you just not worry about it until you are assembling the whole thing together? Or are you asking her sort of like what the first thing is there? Or is that already in the outline basically how you’re going to start that next scene?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, for the first season of a show, as you’re determining what its rhythms are, I think that you’re asking the pivotal question which is how do the transitions feel. How to you carry water from one scene to another? And I think that we learned that essentially we would have a higher degree of success if I took the first 25 pages and the other writer took the last 25 so that you could build your own internal rhythm versus writing patchwork, alternating scenes, for exactly the reason that you specify which is I think that the outline sometimes did indicate here’s the first moment in the scene, but maybe not the first line of dialogue or you would find a different blow, a different out for the scene.

And writing The Leftovers was a much different experience for me than writing Lost at a number of levels, but just in terms of construction Lost had commercials. And so every seven pages of a Lost script had to have–

**John:** You had to start over, yeah.

**Damon:** Bum, bum, bum. Like, you know.

**John:** But you also have the joy of coming in with new energy. And being able to sort of open up the curtain again.

**Damon:** So you could just separate by act. You know, you’d basically say like, OK, Eddie and Adam, you guys take acts two and three and five. And I’ll write the teaser. That’s how you could divvy and you knew like you were just all building into the commercial. Whereas I think writing a pay cable drama, or even a show like Mad Men that has commercials, but those commercials in Mad Men were always like, what? It’s not meant to be watched with commercials. It’s meant to be experienced as a single one-hour movie or whatever it is you want to call it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s tackle some questions, and then I’ll get back to some of my own questions. These are things that listeners have written in. Sam writes, “I co-wrote a pilot script a few years ago, which went out to almost every major studio network. One of the major studios loved it and put a deal in motion to buy and develop the pilot. A few days later, the deal fell apart when it went to business affairs because a production company attachment we had that the studio did not want. Their attachment deal has now expired. And we have full control of the project again. But the development people that wanted the show are no longer at the studio and we’re starting from scratch. We still love the show and believe in it.

“Are agents and basically everyone else is telling us that once a project goes around once, it is old news and no one wants to look at it again. So they don’t want to take it out again. In your experience, is that true? Do we have any shot of reviving this?

**Damon:** The answer is yes and yes. So, yes, our industry does for some reason have a bias towards anything that is rehashed or old news. Or when they think about the narrative of a project, they want to be able to say this thing started with my enthusiasm for it versus somebody else was enthusiastic about it once and now I picked up something someone else rejected. Which to me is like a great narrative. But I do think that the reality is when I think about a question like this, I think it’s all in the hands of the representatives, which is like nobody knows that this event happened other than you and your rep and the development executives who are no longer involved.

And so unless your agent discloses that this happened with this material three to four years ago, there’s nothing that should prohibit them from presenting it as new, especially because you control it now. So–

**John:** Well, he does say though it did go out and everybody read it.

**Damon:** Oh they did?

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So he’s saying people were enthusiastic about it at one point, but are no longer enthusiastic because it happened years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** To be completely candid, that sounds like a polite pass to me. I mean, I think that strong material, if available, people will snap it up. And another Sam, Sam Esmail, who had no prior showrunning experience and is now on the short list of the greatest auteurs working in television today, you know, he wrote Mr. Robot as a movie, then repurposed it as a television show. And nobody is decrying the fact that it’s the same material in a slightly different format. But–

**John:** Wasn’t Mad Men also like an old script that he dusted off?

**Damon:** My understanding is that Matt wrote Mad Men while he was on Becker, and the Mad Men sample is what got him the job on The Sopranos. And that David Chase loved the Mad Men pilot and wanted to produce it, but HBO passed. And so he took it to AMC. And everybody scoffed because AMC, what’s that, and now 11,000 Emmys later. But he had that material for quite some time.

So, you know, I think that great material is evergreen and I would suggest moving on to the next thing.

**John:** I would suggest moving on to the next thing, too. A thing that I find really weird about TV and tell me if you find this to be true as well. I have friends who staff on shows and when they’re going to move from one show to another show, they need to write a new pilot to represent themselves. And it seems crazy, because I feel like if you’ve written a really good show, especially written on a really good show, that should show your talent. But, no, the agents want a fresh thing that they can send out for staffing, which seems crazy to me.

**Damon:** It does seem crazy to me, too. But I also sort of feel like television writing, and probably any kind of screenwriting, is like the singularity now where the rate at which TV writing is changing and shifting is happening so fast that a piece of material that someone wrote two years ago doesn’t feel of the now because it’s – when you wrote it, you weren’t aware that Stranger Things existed. You weren’t aware that Transparent existed. And so this idea of like a piece of material kind of has to push the buttons that like all this zeitgeist-y shows are pushing and sort of demonstrate kind of like some awareness.

I mean, I remember I wrote a Sopranos spec, and that’s not the same as writing an original pilot. Tony’s mom was in it. And then she died. Nancy Marchand died. And so I was basically like, well, who cares. I mean, it’s still something that I wrote. It’s still The Sopranos. But people would read it and be like, “This doesn’t feel like The Sopranos anymore because the character is dead.” And I think like writ large that idea of pilots have to kind of be of the now. They have to kind of feel like they have that sort of energy. But, I don’t know. I mean, I think a great piece of writing is a great piece of writing. And agents, it is their job to put you in the best possible position to get work. And so if they’re not seeing the best result from your old sample, or they just want you basically exercise that muscle again, etc., or I would venture to guess they’re trying to trick you into writing something that’s so good somebody wants to buy it as a TV show and that it’s not a sample.

I mean, I’ve read some samples, some pilot samples recently where I was like this should be a show this is so good. Like why would I hire this person to be on The Leftovers? This should be a show.

**John:** Cool. Lou writes, “I wrote a spec pilot based on a friend’s idea. He asked me to do it. The story in the pilot is from his real life experience. What would be the appropriate way to write credits on the title page? To clarify, we are not writing this script for anybody other than ourselves at this point.”

**Damon:** Sure. I don’t know what the Writers Guild response to that is, but Lou is the one who is writing it, so it would basically say the name of the – The Adventures of John August by Lou whatever your last name is. And then I put Inspired by the life of John August. Or based upon the memoirs.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So, you know, I’d solidify the fact that you are the only author of this material, but it is based on the life of your friend.

**John:** That seems fair to me, too. Again, this isn’t sort of the WGA credit. But when there’s an underlying source behind things, it’s important to acknowledge that on the cover page just so – it’s the morally right thing to do, but it’s also just – it’s going out there in the world and it’s based on someone’s real experience.

**Damon:** Completely agree.

**John:** Richard writes, “I’m writing a pilot that contains a mystery surrounding a certain symbol.” This feels very much up your alley. “That symbol is both the opening and closing image of the episode and it carries great importance. Since screenwriting is a highly visual enterprise, I would like to show the symbol in the script rather than just describe it, which would be tedious and devoid of impact. I’ve encountered the opinion that inserting pictures into a script exposes a hack and my screenwriting software does not even include such a feature. What are your thoughts about including a symbol in the script?”

**Damon:** Wow, that’s a great question because I agree with everything that you just said. Now the reality is because it is the first image of the script, normally I would basically say is there a way for the symbol to be the last image of the script. Because you don’t want to send that hack flag up–

**John:** On page one.

**Damon:** On page one. But if your writing is great and the story is great, then you can put it on page 50 and no one will think you’re a hack because they’re completely and totally into the storytelling. I agree that that sends like a real – having illustrations of any kind or symbols is, you know, is immediately sort of you have to find a way to describe the thing without showing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** I can’t even – I will say this, though. Based on this question I’m like, ugh, what is this symbol?

**John:** What is it?

**Damon:** Like–

**John:** My instinct would be to do it on a page between the title page and the first page of actual script. And so if there was an intermediary page that just had the symbol and didn’t even necessarily explain why that page was there, but then when you sort of read through it you get like, oh, that was what that thing was.

**Damon:** Got it.

**John:** But having it break in the flow of the text, that’s where it feels hack to me. That’s where I get really nervous about doing that.

**Damon:** Right. And the other thing is if you can’t describe it in simple – there has to be a way, even if the symbol feels like it’s complicated to describe, you know, you or I could describe Prince’s symbol in a sentence, which is like it’s kind of like the symbol for male or female but with some artistic flourishes, without saying it’s got arrows on the end of each – you know, you don’t have to be overly descriptive.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Rian Johnson’s script for Looper has one image in it, which describes like one thing sort of late in the script, but it’s not on page one, and he’s also Rian Johnson.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** And so that’s a difference between his situation and Richard’s situation.

**Damon:** Yeah. I think that once you’ve established yourself, then symbol it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Damon:** Go symbol crazy.

**John:** So, you’re wrapping up The Leftovers, and all the episodes are shot now. They’re all edited now.

**Damon:** Yep. It’s as done as done gets.

**John:** That’s great. So, a thing we were talking about before we started recording is that while you were doing Lost you kept getting hit with two questions. And I want to sort of address those two questions that everyone always asked you about the show and what effect they could have. So what are the two questions?

**Damon:** I could do like a psychic act where I can say if you were watching Lost, I want you to close your eyes right now and think of what is the one question, especially in terms of process. Forgetting about polar bears and all that fun stuff. Like what you would ask. And I will predict that it will be one of two questions.

The first question is were you making it up as you went along. And certainly as we were writing the show that was in the present tense, are you making it up as you go along? So that’s question number one. And when someone asks you a question like that, they’re not curious. There’s an answer that they want. Because who in the history of the world has been asked that question and you want the answer to be, “Uh, yeah, I’m just making it up as I go along, man. I’m just winging it. I’m President Trump. I’m just like tweeting and figuring things out as I go. This is a tough job.”

You want people to have a plan for sure. So that’s the correct answer is we are absolutely not making it up as we go along. There is a roadmap. There is a bible. All of these things exist. That’s the appropriate answer.

Question number two. How much influence does the audience/fandom have on the outcome of the show? We’re really engaged. We have theories. We go to fan events. We’re on Reddit and Twitter talking about and theorizing about the show. Do you read that stuff and does it influence you? And the answer to that question, the desired answer is, yes, you as an audience have a tremendous influence on the show and the outcome of the show. We’re listening to the things that you don’t like and we’re course-correcting and we’re listening to the things that you like and we’re doing more of that.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that these two ideas are paradoxical.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re completely antithetical. Like something can’t be predetermined and be, you know, have free will based on what the audience wants.

**Damon:** That’s a very Rousseau/Locke way of putting it. That those are the philosophers, not the crazy French women and the guy in the wheelchair. But, yes, if there is a plan, the audience has no effect whatsoever on its outcome. And if you’re always listening to what the audience tells you, then you have to be winging it. So, how do you thread the needle?

**John:** And so when you’re doing a show like Lost, which had 24 episodes in its longest season.

**Damon:** Yeah, 25 hours with Season 1.

**John:** It was crazy. And so on a show like that, you are writing the show while you’re filming the show. It’s an ongoing process, so you can actually see sort of what’s working in broadcast and change things.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** But with shorter seasons, that’s much less likely to happen. So, even on the first season of The Leftovers, had any of the episodes aired by the time you were producing the final episodes?

**Damon:** Oh, for sure. I mean, we produced the pilot in the summer. You know, in July. And then it got picked up. And then we went into production on the series I think the following January or February in New York. I think we were still in production when the episodes started airing.

**John:** But if somebody watched the first episode or the second episode or the third episode and they said like, oh, I really want it to be more like this, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for that to happen.

**Damon:** No.

**John:** Because it was–

**Damon:** All of the material was already generated. I mean, where the space exists is between seasons. So, certainly between the second and third season of The Leftovers had certain things that we did, like big swings – we did an episode called International Assassin that takes place in a – I’ll just say a different reality than the rest of the show. Had the audience rejected that idea instead of embraced it, that would have affected the storytelling in season three for sure.

In fact, you know, one of the big storylines of the third season, I’m not going to spoil anything here, but if you’ve watched any of the trailers or the promos for the coming season, you know, the idea that Kevin, our main character, died and came back to life is a major story thread. And I think had that not worked out in the second season, we would have just pretended that it had never happened.

**John:** So, this comes up, this idea of like is it all prefigured out or not prefigured out. Two recent series sort of brought this home to me, which were Stranger Things and Westworld. So, Stranger Things is a Netflix show. It all dumped at once. And so you knew from the start that nothing you thought about the show was going to change the show, because the show was done. Because you could see that all of the episodes were there, ready for you to watch.

Versus Westworld as I was watching it week by week, and I love the creators and I’m so happy with the show, but I detected a lot of fan annoyance about how slow things were moving. There was a frustration that was building from fans based on how the storytelling was reeling out which I don’t think would have happened had it been all dumped at once.

**Damon:** Oh for sure. It’s the – did you get me a bike? It’s a bike, right, for Christmas paradigm where your kid basically asks you for something for Christmas and it’s the big gift. And your kid knows that you love them. So, yeah, chances are they’ve got the bike. But they’re not getting it until Christmas. And so all they’ll basically say is whether they believe in Santa or not, another spoiler alert, you know, am I getting a bike? Am I? Am I getting a bike? Did you get me a bike? Am I getting a bike? And I think that there is a certain level of anticlimax and frustration, but your job as a parent is to basically preserve that moment on Christmas morning when they get the bike. And I think Jonah and Lisa have spoken pretty candidly about the idea that they didn’t expect Reddit to reach certain conclusions that fast–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** But the reality is when you can hive-mind a solution it only takes one person to figure it out before something catches on. And so if there’s millions and millions of people watching something like they are in Westworld, they’ll figure it out. And then I think the other thing that’s sort of worth talking about per both those shows and what you’re saying is there’s a time investment. And so what’s interesting is your time investment in watching Stranger Things and Westworld is exactly the same. You invest ten hours in watching those television shows. But in Westworld–

**John:** But they’re ten very different hours.

**Damon:** You actually feel like you’ve invested 100 hours because you’re counting the hours in between the weeks that you are discussing, debating, you know, doing the deep dive on, talking about the men in black. How far in the future are we? Are we on a different planet? All that stuff. That time and energy you also count as your investment. And so the more time you invest, the more possibility for frustration there is.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Unfairly, I believe.

**John:** I agree that it’s unfair, but it has to be something that’s on your head as you’re thinking about going forward. So, right now Leftovers is finishing up and you need to be thinking of what you want to do down the road. And I don’t know if you’re thinking about TV at all, but you have to be thinking about anything you do in TV now is going to be a decision of like is this a show that should all be watched at once, or are we going to try to do this sort of week by week basis. What’s your feeling?

**Damon:** Here’s what’s interesting. The answer is both. Because, so for me the “have your cake and eat it, too” scenario is you roll it out week by week, so for that portion of the audience, that’s how they watched Big Little Lies. You had to wait until Sunday night in order to watch it. And now it’s over and the finale was widely adored, including by myself, and so the people who didn’t want to take the risk that it wouldn’t turn out well or not to invest in it yet, they’re now going to binge it.

So, the way that the show lives on is always going to be in a binge model. Is always going to be in a you can watch all the episodes at your own leisure. But for this one period of time when you’re first rolling it out, as Dickens did with Great Expectations, you know, I mean, we all read Great Expectations as a novel, but when Dickens put it out it was serialized. So, why not have your cake and eat it, too, and do it both ways. Because I want to engage in shows. Like I wish that Stranger Things dolled it out. You know, because as much as I loved it, when it was over I was like, oh, that – I did it too fast. I wished that I could have been part of the community. Instead I watched this thing for three days and now we’re all talking about the entire series. But I wanted to speculate as to what Barb’s fate was, as opposed to I’m now exactly 90 minutes away from determining Barb’s fate.

**John:** Well, but in order for this cake and eat it, too–

**Damon:** #Barb.

**John:** Barb. You have to have an end. And so in the case of Lost, it was 100 episodes you did?

**Damon:** 121.

**John:** 121. And so it was so many episodes out in the future. And so I know you asked for a stop date at a certain point so you could plan for it, but someone who wasn’t sure whether they were going to commit to the show, they had to decide am I going to wait four years for it to finish. So something like The Leftovers, each season is very discrete. Like you can sort of watch seasons – well, you really can’t – it’s hard to sort of come into season two and for it to make a lot of sense.

**Damon:** Although I’ve heard.

**John:** People do it.

**Damon:** I’ve heard anecdotally some people are like just start with season two, and they’re a little confused at first, but it’s fine.

**John:** It’s fine. But the advantage to Big Little Lies or Stranger Things is that you know that it’s only ten episodes, and so you’re not going to have to wait that long to start watching it if you–

**Damon:** I think Big Little Lies is like seven episodes or something like that. Yeah. No, you know, the thing that I always say is people want to know how thick the book is before they buy the book. So, it’s sort of like it’s why Sorcerer’s Stone is of a certain thickness and Order of the Phoenix is of a – because it’s like by then J.K. Rowling is basically like I got you. So, these are going to be as thick as I want.

But I think if the first book was as thick as Order of the Phoenix, that certainly would give me pause. And so but television, almost until recently you don’t know how thick the book is. And so even Game of Thrones, you know, when HBO started airing it you knew before you watched the pilot of Game of Thrones, and I had read the first three of George’s books at that point, I knew that I was like signing up for the long haul. Like, oh my god, is this going to be ten years of my life if the show works? And I’m down with that. But that’s an intimidating commitment to make. It’s daunting.

And so I really feel like Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley are at the apex of the newest trend in television which is the serialized anthology. The way that every season of Fargo feels like it is self-contained but part of a larger, sprawling narrative. And they are interconnected in terms of how they move around in time. So, a massacre that was alluded to in season one is actually dramatized in season two. But season two doesn’t feel like a prequel, even though it’s chronologically taking – it feels just as important. And then they connect with the movie Fargo, so the money that Steve Buscemi basically hid and was unresolved in the movie is actually found in season one in Fargo in the Oliver Platt storyline, etc.

But there’s a larger – it’s not just, oh, here’s another season of Fargo. There is a sense of serialization in there. And then Ryan, of course, who with American Horror Story he’ll have actors basically play different characters, but there is also a sense of some meta interconnectedness. And I think that’s a new storytelling form, which is very exciting.

**John:** But, I mean, I will push back a little bit on Noah Hawley. Legion, which I thought was a terrific pilot and a really interesting show, it felt like it was designed for streaming, yet it came every week.

**Damon:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** And so I have a suspicion that the show plays much better if you actually just watch the episodes straight through. But with the week in between you lose the connective tissue. You just can’t actually kind of remember what happened week to week. It’s such a complicated show that without seeing it sort of back to back to back, a week between things have sort of destroyed the momentum.

**Damon:** I had an entirely different reaction to Legion which was that I loved having the anticipation of the next episode, but I also felt like that show was teaching me how to watch it. And you’re probably right in terms of there’s an intricacy in terms of storytelling and plot and figuring out who is Lenny, and is Lenny is a guy. Who’s the shadow king? Like all of those things. But, for me it was in the way that Twin Peaks was, it was more about a mood. And it’s sort of broadcasting at a different frequency. And so I feel like the penultimate episode of Legion, and again not to spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet, or something like that, like dropped into the middle of a binge, and then suddenly that episode would end and you just have – there’s just this amazing – they do this thing with Bolero and then it’s black and white and you’re in a silent movie. And there’s major revelations and this animated thing on a chalk – it’s just like the idea of that episode ending and then immediately going I’m now watching the finale, versus I need to just take some time with that one, I don’t know. I appreciated–

**John:** I can the arguments both ways. I felt like my experience of understanding what actually happened over the course of the season would make a lot more sense if I had watched it all together as one thing than just spread out the way it was spread out.

**Damon:** Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that sounds super pretentious/precious is that the showrunners of these shows, the storytellers of these shows, should start prescribing the way that they want their shows to be watched. And the audience can choose to ignore them. Like for me, I’d be like, “Noah, what do you want me to do?” And I just assume Noah wants me to watch them every Tuesday night, the week that they’re on, because that’s the way that he’s – Noah Hawley, if he wanted to, he could do the show on Netflix. I mean, maybe he’s in an overall deal at FX or whatever, but like I do want to have a stronger sense of how the people making it feel like it should be watched, even if they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah. J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter, her initial recommendation was that it’s designed to be like one book a year. And so it’s meant to be you grow up with the kids. And so the later books are more advanced because you’re supposed to be a more advanced person reading them.

**Damon:** For sure.

**John:** It moves from middle-grade fiction into YA.

**Damon:** And we’re reading Half-Blood Prince right now with Van, my son, who is ten years old, and we started Sorcerer’s Stone I think when he was six.

**John:** Yeah, that’s just right.

**Damon:** We’re a little bit faster than once a year, but there was no way that we finished Order of the Phoenix and he wasn’t like, next. At that point he was like, “Let’s get to it.” But you do appreciate how brilliantly she recaps the previous book, because when you and read them the beginning of episode six where they’re dealing with the British PM, having to like basically be apprised of the fact that Cornelius Fudge has been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour, and then all the things that happen in between books. I remember when I picked up Half-Blood Prince I was like, oh man, it’s been a while since I read Order of the Phoenix. How am I going to remember what happened?

**John:** And there’s a previously on…

**Damon:** And she just did it so brilliantly. Oh my god. She’s the best. The best. And you’ve seen–

**John:** I saw the play.

**Damon:** You saw it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. The play is really good.

The last thing I want to get to is this idea of idea debt. And so this was some articles I sent to you. The first one I read was by Jessica Abel. And she had a conversation with Kazu Kibuishi where she’s talking about this sense of the old projects that were sort of always lingering behind. So this is what she actually wrote.

“Let me tell you about Forest Lords.

Forest Lords is a series of ten fantasy novels, each a 1000-page brick, about the epic adventures of Greenleaf Barksley, elf proletarian, and his journeys to attain the Golden Leaf and save his homeland from the scourge of the Curse of the Titaness Denox.

The thing is, none of this series exists—not even Forest Lords Volume One: The Elven Soul. There are binders and binders of “lore.” There are a hell of a lot of character designs (that look suspiciously similar to Elfquest characters). There is the vivid, lively picture the putative author has in his head of how it’s going to feel to write a fantasy series that has everyone panting for the next book or movie or TV show.*

But there is no book. There is only Idea Debt.”

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** So, this felt really familiar to me.

**Damon:** Yeah. It felt really familiar to me, too. And I had the same smile on my face as I read the article that you have on your face as you read aloud that part. Look, I think that world-building is super exciting. And I think that this idea of a broad and expansive universe and saying that this thing is epic in scope, it’s a saga, is a wonderful thing. But the grounds of creative storytelling are littered with the corpses of these elven warriors. And I think that ultimately my takeaway from reading that article and the others is that that’s the fun part, this world-building. The hard part is actually just writing the first one. And the more worlds you’re building, the less storytelling you’re doing. Because it’s sort of like the world-building is easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** But what’s getting me into the world, like if you just basically think about like how much time did George R. R. Martin spend building the world of Westeros before he actually started typing chapter one, and now there’s dire wolves. Well, chapter one is kind of our introduction to the White Walkers. But now basically dire wolves pups are being presented to all the Stark kids and Jon Snow. And I guess that there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the idea to do Game of Thrones and the writing of that chapter. And then he started building his world along the way.

And I think that this idea debt is basically prohibiting people from actually working.

**John:** Yeah. I think people approach it with these weird expectations where they think they need to build George R. R. Martin’s world for Game of Thrones, or they need to build the Potter-verse for J.K. Rowling’s universe, without remembering like, oh no, you actually have to write the book first.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And that the universe doesn’t come before the actual text comes. But I think the reason why people want to do that world-building is because there’s no risk. You can’t fail at the world-building because there’s no actual product. But the minute you actually start to write something, it could suck. And that’s the fear. And so you put it off because you’re worried about it.

**Damon:** I couldn’t agree more. And I also feel like the thing that the world-building is devoid of is the fundamental thing that we attach ourselves to in story, which is the characters and the emotions. And if you read George Lucas’s original treatment for Star Wars, you know, whatever, when it’s Luke Star-Killer and it’s, you know, the Wills and all that stuff, is like it’s all that stuff. It’s all that world-building stuff, but it’s lacking the moment on Tatooine, looking out at the twin suns. It’s certainly – he had to write Star Wars to learn that Vader was Luke’s father. Like, that was not in the world-building part.

And so you have to – I know that there’s a lot of debate, and I don’t even know if J.K. Rowling has spoken about this or been asked this, but it seems to me that had she known about Horcruxes prior to when they were revealed in the books that she could have used that word once or twice casually by Azkaban. And the fact that she didn’t leads me to believe that it was an idea – the story was telling her what to tell, because you have to listen to the show. You have to listen to the story. And all the time that you’re not writing it, it’s not telling you what it wants to be.

**John:** Absolutely. The sense of what it wants to be and what it doesn’t want to be, the second part of this idea that like all of those things that you have sort of abandoned along the way, those ideas that sort of got half-developed that you’ve never actually done anything with.

And there’s a guy named John Sexton who has a good piece I’ll also link to in the show notes talking about all those things that you’re sort of dragging with you from apartment to apartment, project to project. Those things you always meant to write that you’ve never actually written. And I found myself nodding a lot as he was going through his list, because I have all those things, like someday I’ll get back to that stuff.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And I’ll never get back to those things.

**Damon:** Right. If it sits in your storage unit for like a couple of years, there’s a reason for that. It wants to stay there. But I would say that certain things that are tickling you or get you excited as a writer, they will work their way into – like for example, I always wanted to do a show about time travel. And then I suddenly realized, hey, Lost is that show. Like there is not time travel embedded in the pilot of lost, but J.J. and I tried to do everything that we could to open up all possibilities in the pilot so that if we wanted to get to time travel, we could.

And I always wanted to set a show in the ‘70s, and I was like, well, we’ve got time travel now. So Lost is that show, too. And I’ve always wanted to do like a pirate show. Well, Lost could be that show, too. .

So, if you basically find the canvas that can accommodate all those disparate ideas and you can kind of cram them in there, it’s amazing how resilient television storytelling can be, particularly in this day and age. Where the audience will sort of let you go. And the idea that Noah Hawley is like maybe he – I haven’t heard him talk extensively about Legion yet, but he’s a colleague and I’m a huge fan of his, but the idea that Noah Hawley had always wanted to do a super hero show and it ends up being Legion, you know, is sort of like he seems much more interested in other genre elements than the super hero genre, but there are some things that are distinctly super hero-ish in there that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And that makes the show all the more fascinating that it’s like, oh, like this is an X-Men show. Like it can be this, too? Oh, that’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. Circling back to this sense of the world-building and sort of knowing everything that’s out there before you get started, you know, we were talking about J.K. Rowling, whether she knew Horcruxes, but like you guys didn’t know everything that Lost could be when you were writing the pilot for Lost. You guys were just writing the pilot to make the most compelling pilot possible. And sort of to stake out a giant circle of possibility around you.

But if you had actually had to go into it with a plan for like this is the six seasons. This is how it’s all going to work. This is how these two things connect. There’s no way you could have done it. You had to discover it by doing it.

**Damon:** Yeah. You’re back to do you have a bible. You know, and even the bible was written, you know, I mean I guess there are people out there who believe that the Bible was written by God and then dictated to man, but even the Bible was written one verse at a time, one story at a time. And in the pragmatic reality of storytelling, that’s the only way that you can do it because J.J. and I had ten weeks to basically write and produce and deliver a two-hour movie. That was the two-hour pilot. And the idea that we also in our spare time were able to get together and say like, hey, let’s talk about what season three of Lost might look like. It just didn’t exist.

It’s also hubris. I mean, I think that I always say to studios and networks who are saying like we need a bible or we need to know what season two is, I understand that concern. You’re investing in this thing. You want to know that we have some sense of where we’re going. But, the job – my job right now is to just make one great hour of this thing, not just the pilot. And then episode two has to be – that’s the real pilot of a television show is episode two. But if you make three bad episodes in a row, the audience is out. And it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got a great idea for what season two could be. You should have been more focused on what episode four was.

And so I’m a big believer in look at the episode right in front of you and do everything that you can to make it great. Have some sense of where you want to take things, but then there has to be a discovery process along the way.

**John:** Cool. Let’s go to our One Cool Things.

**Damon:** I discovered the show called Occupied on Netflix. It was recommended by a friend. And I don’t know when it was made, but I have a feeling it was made in the last two years. And it’s about a silk glove invasion of Norway by Russia. It’s kind of I guess got 24 and Homeland baked into its blood. But what’s sort of fascinating about it is I didn’t know anything about Norway. And I’ve always had this idealized version of what it is to be Scandinavian. And this is kind of the nightmare scenario. The storytelling set up is that each episode is a month. It doesn’t take place over a month, but is titled like April, May, June. So they jump 30 days between the ending of and the beginning of episodes, so part of the fun is like, hey, what happened in between these episodes. There’s a little bit of catching up. But essentially over the course of the first season you see what it looks like for a country to be invaded by another country. And particularly in terms of what’s happening in the world right now, it’s the most like V, which is a show–

**John:** Oh, I loved V.

**Damon:** I loved.

**John:** Oh my god. I loved V.

**Damon:** Of anything that I’ve seen in the last two decades, but it’s sort of like what if V happened in the real world. And I’m not saying that the Russians eat guinea pigs. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying they could.

**John:** They peel off their skin, it is reptilian underneath.

**Damon:** But the Russians are–

**John:** Who is the Diana of the show? Is there a person–?

**Damon:** Yeah, there is a Diana.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Damon:** You know, it’s a Russian woman who is essentially – she’s very charismatic. Like the Russians are not just straight up bad guys in it. That’s what’s really interesting about it, too. I would say like the Norwegian Prime Minister is not being presented as this incredibly noble and flawless individual. Lots of different shades in it. And also there’s a lot of English. It makes you, again, hate yourself as an American because every Norwegian and every Russian speaks fluent English. So when they’re talking to each other they speak in English. When the Norwegians are speaking to each other they’re speaking in Norwegian. But you’re like, oh, like all these people are all multi-lingual and here I am like I can order like a burrito and I feel proud of myself.

**John:** I always feel bad on The Americans, because there are times where I’m sort of half paying attention. Like it could be the radio play, where you can sort of hear the discussion, but then they’ll switch into the Russian section and you have to–

**Damon:** You got to watch.

**John:** You got to watch close, because it’s going to be something about the food supply.

My One Cool Thing is also a series. Fits in really well with this idea of recycling your old ideas. It’s called City Girl. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s a romantic comedy done by Parenthood’s Sarah Ramos. And she wrote it in 2003 when she was 12 years old, but it tells the story of this 28-year-old boutique owner and she has this weird affair with her allergist, like her migraine doctor.

But basically, this writer, she found her old script and shot it the way – she didn’t change it. She didn’t update it. She actually just shot it the way she wrote it when she was 12 years old.

**Damon:** Oh my god.

**John:** And so it’s like this weird misunderstanding of sort of like what a 28-year-old is like, and what the motivations are.

**Damon:** Oh, that’s great. They just shot it as is?

**John:** They just shot it as is.

**Damon:** Where is it?

**John:** It’s a series of like web shorts. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. But it’s really–

**Damon:** Oh, that sounds fascinating.

**John:** Brilliantly done.

**Damon:** Can I do one more tiny one?

**John:** Please.

**Damon:** Which is the writer and personality John Hodgman, who is a genius, super amazing. He wrote a pilot that you just reminded me of. They did a live reading of the pilot, because it never got produced. But the premise was that it’s his – it’s a coming of age story of him as like a 13-year-old boy, but it’s played by John Hodgman as an adult. He’s the only adult on the show, so all the other kids are played by actual 13 year olds, including his love interest, who is also a 13-year-old.

It’s amazing. And they did this live reading of it that is listenable. I think they did it as a podcast. It’s amazing. It’s so good.

**John:** Cool. We’ll find a link for that in the show notes as well.

**Damon:** Do it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Damon is not on Twitter at all.

**Damon:** I’m off Twitter.

**John:** He’s fully off Twitter.

**Damon:** Craig can keep his day job, because this is big boots to fill.

**John:** Yes. You can find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s also where you can find us on iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That’s always helpful.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. There’s apps for both Android and for iOS. You can listen to all those back episodes.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts and links to all the show notes. So, Godwin gets the transcripts up about four days after the episode airs. This one might take a little bit longer because it was a longer episode. But, Damon, thank you so much for coming to Paris and being on the show.

**Damon:** It’s so weird, because we live so close to each other in Los Angeles, and you made me come to–

**John:** Yeah, I made you fly all the way here to do this.

**Damon:** But it was worth it.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Good luck. Bye.

**Damon:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_296.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 716 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you dramatize the untold aspects of an historical moment as a limited series? No, Craig, we’re not talking about Chernobyl again. This time, it is the assassination of US President James Garfield and the chaotic, dysfunctional political system surrounding it. We’ll also discuss personality typologies, the systems for categorizing what makes people and fictional characters tick, plus listener questions. To help us do all that, we welcome back Mike Makowsky, who joined us last time on Episode 448 in 2020.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you for having me.

John: Welcome back, Mike.

Mike: Good to be here.

Craig: Yes, blast from the past. I love this.

Mike: Yes, it was a COVID Zoom.

John: It was a COVID Zoom, yes.

Craig: Back in the COVID days, yes.

John: Back in those days. Your screenwriter, whose credits include HBO’s Bad Education, which is what we talked about.

Craig: Which we loved.

John: Which we loved. Death by Lightning is your new series, the Garfield assassination series. It’s now out on Netflix. It’s just terrific. Congratulations on it.

Mike: Thank you so much.

John: I want to talk about the production of it, the intention of writing about this obscure president and what happened there.

Craig: How dare you, by the way? Obscure?

John: Obscure. Also, just the notion of limited series because they’re increasingly hard to make. We’ll talk about that. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about coaching trees. This is an article that we found this last week, which was about which TV shows, writers’ rooms generated the most other creators of TV shows. There’s like a–

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: It’s a branching sort of–

Craig: Like Sid Caesar, our show of shows was sort of the ultimate.

John: Absolutely. That’s sort of the iconic one, but there’s many other ones along the way. Maybe just talk about what the culture is in those shows. That allows for so many writers to grow out of them. First, if anything is going to grow or change, it’s going to be in a new ecosystem because, as we’re recording this, which is sort of two weeks ago for our listeners, Netflix is apparently buying Warner Bros. Craig, how do you feel about that?

Craig: Well, it’s interesting. I work at HBO. HBO is owned by Warner Bros. I think everybody was sitting around going, “Well, it looks like David Ellison and Paramount are going to be buying Warner Bros. Then Netflix, and was it Universal? Both took a swing.

John: Yes, Comcast Universal.

Craig: Yes, Comcast Universal. Then it turned out that Netflix was the one that came out on top. Now, the thing is, we kind of don’t know. We all got the email from Netflix’s subscribers, right? They were like, “We did it.” Yes, they did it in the sense that the board of directors agreed to sell the company to Netflix, but there will be some significant regulatory issues here. Apparently, this is another horseshoe effect where the far right and the far left are very excited to join hands to try and block this sale.

John: It’s also worth remembering, like you were here with us in 2020, the universe conspires to do weird things. Anything that seems like a given or granted is just going to often not happen the way you expect it to happen.

Mike: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s far above my pay grade to be able to speculate what is going to happen here.

John: I think the only thing I would come back to as sort of ground truth is that I’m really concerned about the idea of making theatrical movies, because Netflix–

Craig: If you’re only really concerned, you’re not concerned enough. [laughter]

John: I just want to state sort of, basic foundational principles is I genuinely believe that movies, by which I’ll define as being roughly two hours of experience, of a narrative that is filmed, I think they belong in theaters first. The theatrical experience is crucial. Once they’ve made their money there, then you can release them for purchase, or for streaming. The goal should be to maximize the value out of each individual title and then reach the widest audience possible. That sounds so basic, but it seems to be so forgotten in all of this.

Craig: It’s not forgotten. I think it is rejected. I think Netflix has rejected that theory completely. They put things in theaters now for a week or two to mollify the filmmakers that they want to attract to their not theatrical experience. They do give Greta Gerwig or Rian Johnson a little taste, helps them qualify for the Oscars and so forth. Really, they just want it on their platform. I’ll make a few predictions because, unlike Mike, I do not have the humility of understanding when things are above my pay grade. These are above my pay grade, I don’t care.

John: Here to promote a Netflix show today, definitely.

Craig: Yes. Well, most shows are Netflix shows, and even more shows are about to be Netflix shows if this goes through. If it goes through, I think Warner Bros theatrical is toast. I think the only question is, what do they do with HBO? Because you don’t buy HBO to not have HBO, that would be crazy. The worst possible view is that Netflix bought Warner Bros for the library alone. Now they will just make Lord of the Rings shows and Harry Potter, which HBO is already doing. HBO is one of the only brands that means something in our ecosystem.

Prediction is that they actually keep an HBO app. It won’t be HBO Max anymore. It can finally just go back to being HBO. Well, it’s one last change. It will be a bundled app with Netflix that you get for free as part of your subscription, and HBO will live as a little island. It’ll obviously all be owned by Netflix. Then, when the Emmys come around, HBO, Netflix will win all the time.

John: All of the Emmys.

Craig: Constantly. It’s them, and then FX picks up a few here and there. That’s my prediction.

John: I can see that happening. We should acknowledge that as we’re recording this, there’s a lot of public statements about, oh, no, we’re going to maintain Warner Bros as an entity, and they’re going to still release things theatrically. They also said that about Fox. Fox exists kind of a name only. They are making movies.

Craig: That was Disney, that likes making movies.

John: They like making movies.

Craig: I think what Sarandos said was something like, yes, we’ll take a look at it, and then as things evolve, we’ll re-examine. It was sort of like, no, we absolutely won’t use this gun pointed at this head to shoot it. It’s a bummer.

John: It’s a bummer.

Craig: It’s a bummer. It’s not that I don’t like Netflix. I subscribe to Netflix. I watch Netflix. Netflix makes great shows like Death by Lightning. They make a load of great shows.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s just that I also like going to the movies, and that’s an area where I disagree with them. I know that when somebody like Ryan Johnson says, “You must give me a theatrical release,” clearly, he does too. We all want a theatrical release for things like that. I’m not stupid enough to root for one corporation over another. They’re all corporations. It will be interesting to see. It’s going to take, what, 18 months? Is that what they’re saying?

John: Yes. It’s going to be a while before we sort of know how this sorts up.

Craig: This will be the fourth corporate parent that I’ve experienced at HBO since I’ve been there. I’ve only been there since 2015.

John: That’s crazy. All right. We will not be able to resolve the Netflix of it all, but we can talk about something much more local, which is the Scriptnotes book. As we’re recording this, we don’t have the actual sales figures, so we don’t know how it did its opening week, but it did really well. We’re really happy with the launch of it. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered it. Thank you to everyone who bought it the first week. Thank you for everyone who came out to our live show to buy it there. Everyone who posted about it, that’s awesome. Drew has been reposting a lot on the Scriptnotes Instagram.

Drew Marquardt: Yes. Basically, anytime I open up the app, there’s five or so people who have posted about it, which is great.

John: Yes. We’re resharing their stories. Thank you to everyone who’s left a review on Goodreads or Amazon, because those help us get the word out about the book. One thing that’s come up frequently, and Mike, you have your copy of the book in front of you, people say it’s lighter than you expect it to feel, that it feels light in your hand. Do you notice this?

Mike: So light. I have to compliment the binding as well. It’s a beautiful-looking tome here.

John: It is a gorgeous book. I want to talk a little bit about why it feels lighter in your hand, because it’s one of the most consistent things we’ve heard. Craig’s like, “Oh, did they make it out of balsa wood? Is there something strange about this book?” I went down a rabbit hole, and I did the math. I did some research on it. It actually weighs about what it should. If you compare it to another hardcover book that’s the same size, so I Have Atomic Habits, which is a bestseller that’s also the same number of pages, it weighs more than that, which it should because it’s physically wider than that. It’s 24% bigger by volume, but only 13% heavier.

It’s a little bit different than should you expect. Mostly, the effect is that it’s called the size-weight illusion. It’s what makes your brain make predictions about how much it thinks something should weigh. This is actually a documented phenomenon. I’ll put a link in the show notes to it. Craig, you like psychology. This is certainly up your alley.

Craig: I love psychology.

John: Your brain makes predictions about how much something should weigh so that as you’re reaching for it, you have an anticipation about how much force you’re going to use to lift something. That’s based upon visual information. What you see, it’s size, it’s thickness, it’s apparent material. It’s based on semantic clues. You have a sense that a brick should weigh more than a book should weigh. Then, just prior experience with similar objects. I think that’s mostly what is throwing people off about it is because it looks more like a textbook, and we have a sense of how much a textbook should weigh, and it just weighs less than a textbook.

Craig: Why does it weigh less?

John: It’s a different paper stock. I think it’s mostly what it is. This is the standard hardcover book paper stock, whereas opposed to a textbook has that glossy paper and that glossy paper just weighs more. There’s an area called expectology, which is the expectation factor. When you make a prediction error about how much something should weigh or what it should sound like or feel like, you get this moment of cognitive dissonance. I think that’s what’s happening with the book.

Craig: To me, it still feels like when you pick it up, that it’s one of those fake books that you open and it’s hollow, and then you put your keys in it or something.

John: Absolutely. You store your hooch in there. You store your sippets.

Craig: Also, who needs a heavy book? Holding a book actually is annoying after a while when you’re reading it. Where do you think people are going to read this, John? Physically, in space, where are they reading this?

John: As we talked about from the very start, I think it’s an ideal bathroom book.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’re sitting there–

Craig: You’re on the toilet, and you’re getting smarter.

John: Yes, as you’re doing it.

Craig: Yes, I always wanted to be one of those books.

John: Yes, so good. For me, growing up, my D&D manual is one of those books.

Craig: Do you know who we had in our bathroom growing up? Reader’s Digest.

John: So good.

Craig: Yes. Did they even make that anymore?

John: I suspect Reader’s Digest still exists. I remember there was the word power. It pays to increase your–

Craig: Then there was Laughter is the Best Medicine. It was so clearly meant for old people because there were ads in it, and I recall they were always for pheniment or aspergum, basically just arthritis medications. I’m like an eight-year-old sitting on the toilet reading books for 80-year-olds. It was nice, though. I learned.

Mike: They do still exist in print, but it seems like it’s a bigger, it’s like a magazine size. I remember them being smaller.

John: It should be a little folio size. Oh my gosh, that breaks my expectation, and therefore I hate it.

Craig: Yes, therefore I hate it.

John: We also have some follow-up about Orange Books. Mick wrote in. On a recent episode, you referred to the Scriptnotes book as The Orange Book. As a former Nickelodeon writer, producer, and longtime listener, I feel a duty to mention that on my first day at the network in 2001, the creative director handed me a copy of The Orange Book. This incredible tome is a creative guide to all aspects of Nickelodeon’s brand. It’s legendary amongst Nickelodeon writers and producers, and it takes its title from the famous orange splat logo. I fear that you may be served a cease and desist order by the Bikini Bottom business and legal affairs team over your claims to the term The Orange Book.

They sent through a photo of The Orange Book, or a copy of The Orange Book, which still remains. I couldn’t find a copy of a PDF of it online, but I found some other material referring to it and drawn from it. It looks like a really good brand design book. I will say that Nickelodeon, at its peak, you clearly understood what Nickelodeon was. It was a very consistent sort of space, the same way Disney is very consistent branding. Good on them, but also don’t sue us.

Craig: I don’t think I’ve ever reflected on how odd it is that the cable children’s channel that was, I guess, at one time, the best, or the peak, was Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon is the most old-timey word ever.

John: It’s also a word I can never spell properly. I keep wanting to do it like a C-H rather than a K, or the L-E as opposed to the E-L.

Craig: That’s Nickelodeon. That’s different. Yes, but Nickelodeon?

John: It’s a word like chariot, where it’s just lost all reference to what it was really meant to stand for.

Craig: Yes, it’s a very strange thing. It’s something that they would never do now, but see, it worked. Children don’t know what an actual Nickelodeon was, which was, what, the five-cent thing that you would play the silent movie in while you stuck your face in it. In 1920, I guess.

John: I also feel like they, at some point, just shortened it down to Nick, and that they don’t say Nickelodeon very often anymore.

Craig: Nick, Nick.

John: Nick Jr. There’s Nick at night.

Mike: We have more follow-up about breaking into your 30s. Anne writes, after spending my 20s and early 30s working in a rock and roll concert production, I was in need of reigniting my creative side. With a stack of writing samples and a surprising number of contacts I’d unearthed, I moved to Hollywood at the age of 35. To support myself as I navigated this new world, I began temping at the studios as an assistant and quickly discovered that my age and experience were an asset. I became known for being able to parachute into high-level executive offices and keep everything flowing smoothly.

I found my home in the Disney Touchstone film division, where I rotated through executives while I inhaled the script database and watched the movie-making machinery in action. I don’t know if what is left of the studio still uses temps, but if so, this is an avenue that the person who wrote it earlier should explore.

John: Temping is a thing we didn’t talk about in that, and it does make sense. I think the original writer was saying, “Oh, I want to get a writer’s assistant job. I want to do this kind of thing.” I said, that’s a challenging way in. What Anne’s describing, which is being that temp who actually knows what they’re doing and can just show up on the day and make stuff work and happen, that’s great. I would say a lot of these companies do have internal temp pools or floating workers, and that feels like a really smart choice.

Craig: That was the first couple of jobs I had were temp jobs. I think we’ve talked about. Do they still have the Friedman agency, the temp agency just for entertainment business? I think it still exists.

John: Live Google.

Drew: F-R-E-I-D?

Craig: Yes, Friedman.

Drew: Yes, Friedman Personnel Agency. It seems to still exist.

John: Yes. A place like that could make a lot of sense and also give you a chance to just see a bunch of stuff. If you’re just at one desk at one studio, you’re not seeing a bunch, but if you’re floating around, you can have a chance to read a bunch of things. Also, the expectations of ability to do stuff as a temp are pretty low. Basically, just keep the lights on is probably a lot of it, so that may help.

Craig: Yes, you can easily exceed expectations.

John: All right. On the subject of exceeding expectations, we have Mike Makowsky here. Your show is delightful. It details the assassination of James Garfield and the man who assassinates James Garfield. Spoiler, he’s going to die. I want to first just start with a fundamental question. Why make this show? It’s based on a bestselling nonfiction book. It’s not called Death by Lightning. How did it come upon your reading list, and what made you want to make it?

Mike: About seven years ago, I was at the Grove Barnes & Noble at the Buy 2 Get 1 Free table, and I needed a third book. I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination. Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard. First, I obviously made sure it was the proper weight. I made sure that from a semantical perspective.

John: It looks like a book. In your hand, it felt like a book.

Mike: Yes. It wasn’t orange. It didn’t conflict with Nickelodeon or anything.

Craig: It sounds nice to be honest, they’ll get sued.

Mike: I read the back cover, and I think I had known that James Garfield had been assassinated. I dimly recalled that fact.

John: It feels like Jeopardy information.

Mike: That’s the reason I bought the book. I was like, I think I want to be on Jeopardy one day. Let me educate myself. I felt very embarrassed that I knew nothing about our 20th president. To me, James Garfield, his name evoked a little more than a very anonymous bearded portrait on a wall sans any real context. The book sat in a pile for a couple of months to get up the juice to read the James Garfield book. It wasn’t necessarily a priority for me. I wound up reading the book eventually in one sitting, which was atypical for me.

I found it not only propulsive, but very moving and tragic and crazy and absurd. I kept having to go to Wikipedia every five pages to make sure that this historian in Kansas wasn’t making all this shit up because it seemed way too crazy.

John: I will say that the show is absurd, but also it’s funny in ways that you wouldn’t expect it to be.

Mike: I found myself laughing a lot at this book that’s not written with any real explicit levity or mirth, but there’s a deeply ingrained situational absurdity to virtually all of the proceedings.

John: This man should never have been president.

Mike: He was nominated for president against his will, ostensibly. James Garfield shows up at the 1880s Chicago convention for his party to nominate an entirely different candidate. His speech is so profound and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country that someone stands up in the rafters and shouts, “We want Garfield.” Which is so crazy. In many ways, Garfield was this poster boy for the American dream. He was a Civil War hero. He was this outspoken progressive advocate for civil rights and civil service reform, and universal education.

He was largely self-taught, grew up in abject poverty, just the right man for the job. He was not a popular figure prior to stepping on that stage and delivering an Obama in 2004 level speech, where everyone’s just like, who the fuck is this guy? Eventually, the voting reached a deadlock because no one could agree on a candidate. There were a lot of warring factions within his party at the time. On the 36th ballot, Garfield is accidentally nominated for president.

John: There’s a version of that which is essentially Conclave because that’s the underlying–

Mike: It’s very much like an American Conclave. I wrote the show long before Conclave existed, but I remember seeing that in theaters last year and being like, “Oh, that’s just like, it’s very similar.”

John: You’re reading this book, and you have to make a decision like, okay, you want to do something with it, but when did you know, like, oh, this is probably a limited series versus a feature? What were your next steps after reading the book?

Mike: Yes, I think instantly. Again, I read the book. I found myself laughing a lot. That’s not normal for me, but my tone tends to be a little bit more darkly comic. I think the fact that I was laughing a lot led me to believe. I think that this is indicative of my voice and my perspective. I don’t know that other people would necessarily receive this story in the exact same way. I think I should try and pursue this thing. I ended up getting the historian, Candace, on the phone and pitching my heart out to, “Please let me adapt this.” She was like, “Yes, okay.”

I ended up optioning the rights to the book myself because there wasn’t anyone that was going to pay me to write a James Garfield show anytime that I told, whether it was my agent or executives that I was friends with, that I wanted to write a limited series about the Garfield assassination, they were like, “Good luck.” [crosstalk]

John: Let us know when you actually want to work.

Mike: My agent was just like, “Do you despise me? Do you hate me?”

Craig: At the same time, you probably understood that that’s why the show could work because nobody’s expecting anything. Then you go, surprise, there was this entire thing under your nose that is extraordinary. You’re sitting on a gold mine. That’s a good feeling, actually.

Mike: The great joy of Chernobyl was obviously very instructive for me in a lot of ways. It was a five-episode limited series about a subject that, on the surface, most people probably wouldn’t think that they would be terribly interested in. Then they would assume that any telling of that story would be a little bit dustier, didactic, like a history lesson. To be able, as a writer, to create an interest where there was none before. I have absolutely no illusions that most people are going to want to readily watch a James Garfield show or learn a ton about James Garfield.

Certainly, in the 150 years since his death, there hasn’t been a ton of interest in him.

Craig: That’s good news, though. That’s good news.

Mike: It’s a sort of tabula rasa where you’re like, you actually get to present, hopefully in a compelling enough way, a story that people really don’t know anything about.

Craig: I think it’s wonderful.

Mike: That’s so exciting.

Craig: It is exciting. When we think about the choices of what we’re going to do, it is true that if you say, I want to do a story about James Garfield, everyone’s going to either laugh or make fun of you.

Mike: There’s a lot of jokes about him hating Mondays or my agent loves lasagna. Keeps calling him Andrew Garfield by accident, so I just stopped correcting him.

Craig: That’s all fine. The problem is, if you say, I want to adapt blank, and it’s something that they would be excited by just because of the subject, it’s been done. It’s been done a million times. What’s the point of saying, “You know what I want to do? I want to do a story about Vietnam.” Oh, yes, the Vietnam War. I know about that. That’s a thing that people like. That’s why we made 400 movies and shows about it. Finding something like this that is this little hidden gem, and we know that oftentimes these are the things that just seize people. I’m thinking of Scott Frank’s Queen’s Gambit. I want to make a show about people playing chess.

Mike: The metrics for how few people who engage with the Queen’s Gambit have actually even played chess before is pretty fascinating. Again, you’re creating an interest where there was none before. From a marketplace perspective, these are, as I know you know, from Chernobyl, incredibly difficult propositions. No one’s lining up. There’s no ready-made comps for what you’re trying to achieve. You’re not trying to make the next Stranger Things that ends up being a pale imitation of Stranger Things. It is a wholly original proposition, and that is really scary. It ends up being incredibly difficult.
99 times out of 100, you don’t get to actually follow through with it, which is heartbreaking. It feels in many ways like we got to pull off this incredible heist by getting this show made.

John: You’re saying we, but you were just off writing this by yourself. What happened next?

Mike: I spec’d the pilot script, and it was immediately–

John: You didn’t say pilot, but you knew it was going to be four episodes, five episodes?

Mike: I originally intended for it to be six, and for a number of reasons, it ended up becoming four prior to ever being written. I wrote the pilot script as a proof of concept because, again, anytime I told people I wanted to make a darkly comic and subversive take on the Garfield assassination, they were just like, “No, fuck you.” I wrote the script. I was super proud of it. Then just through the different machination, it took about a year, but it ended up getting in the hands of our mutual friends and the producers of the show, David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Caulfield, who gratefully fell in love with it and were able to champion it at Netflix, and at least get Netflix to agree to let me write a second episode.

It was a development process that lasted about three, four years, ultimately, because I had to jump through every conceivable hoop imaginable over there. I wrote a 70-page bible after the second episode. I ended up writing four more episodes, then condensed those back down to two more episodes. We had a director. The director fell out. We got another director. We had to cast the two leads. We were in Budapest scouting for the show, backing into a start date, and we weren’t actually greenlit yet. Again, I feel like we just slipped in under the wire on this thing.

Craig: I was going to congratulate Netflix on their impressions and their risk-taking. Now, I’m going to pull back a little bit just because it does sound like they really put you through it. Then again, HBO put me through it, too. Nobody’s just going to casually go, yes, here, make this thing that’s probably just going to run in social studies classrooms. They are going to put you through it, which I understand. I have to assume, based on Budapest, that budgetarily, you did not have a lot of wiggle room there, I’m guessing.

Mike: Yes. Whenever people ask me how the show got made, I hold up the one Dr. Strange finger from the Avengers. I don’t know that there were multiple pads to get this James Garfield show made in 2024 when he shot it. I’m extraordinarily grateful to Netflix. I don’t know that anyone but Netflix would have made this show at all. We had a slate of executives who were also extremely passionate and grew extremely passionate about the show. Even that only really gets you so far. No, we had to pass a lot of litmus tests in order to ever see the light of day.

John: Can we talk about Budapest? One of the things I was surprised about, but I realized I have not seen that era of American history very much on screen. Budapest, I suspect, had buildings and places that actually looked like that in a good way. I’m sure there was a lot of visual effects to create the depth behind things. It looks great, and you also have scenes with 500 extras in them, which is just very difficult to do in the US or even in Canada to get that sense of scale. That’s all really helpful. It’s also challenging just being in Budapest for six months or so.

Mike: Yes. It was funny. I got married, and two weeks later, I was in Budapest for five months. Now I’m getting divorced. No, we’re good. She’s finally out of that here on air now. No, Cara got a line in the show, which she was thrilled about. She’s crowd woman number one. She came out for one week, and she was treated as a queen.

John: Boo. Well, congratulations on the show. I’m just so happy that it exists and that it got made. I remember Dan and Dave talking about, like, oh, yes, we’re doing this crazy Garfield thing. They didn’t say it’ll never get made, but it was clear this is going to be a hard lift to get it there.

Mike: I’m not sure anyone but them could have really mounted it.

Craig: I love that they did that. Mike and I would pass each other in the halls over at Formosa Sound, where I was mixing the second season of The Last of Us, and he was mixing Death by Lightning. That’s where I found out that this was a show about Garfield. I was just to give a little salute to my dearly departed dad. He was an American history teacher, and he loved Garfield. He loved Garfield. He thought Garfield was one of the only good presidents of that era. Also, just as a musical fan, I love Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and Charles Guiteau’s song is the best song in the show. It’s the best.

John: I need to go back and re-listen to it. I’ve seen Assassins, but I don’t know it off the top of my head, so I–

Craig: Because he’s crazy.

John: Yes.

Mike: Charles Guiteau is the guy that assassinated Garfield, who is a very fascinating character in his own right and is this perverse funhouse mirror image of Garfield in many ways. These are two guys who operate at opposite ends of the American social spectrum. On one end, again, you have this poster boy for the American dream who falls upward accidentally to a presidency just based on strength of character and merit. Guiteau, who also grew up in abject poverty, but worshipped Garfield. As soon as he heard about Garfield, he was like, “This guy gets it.”

Craig: I deserve a job from him.

Mike: Right. I need to do everything in my power to get this man elected because once he’s elected, he’s going to see that the two of us are kindred spirits, and he’s going to appoint me to an ambassadorship to Paris. Guiteau, unlike Garfield, had failed abjectly at everything that he had ever attempted. He was a failed lawyer, failed public speaker, failed newspaper editor. He had spent a couple of years at America’s first-ever free love commune, the Oneidas, and he was kicked out. He was the one guy who couldn’t get laid at the sex commune.
He refused to do the manual labor required of him, so the women on the farm would call him Charles Get Out.

Craig: Charles Guiteau.

Mike: Once Garfield is elected, it’s the first time in Guiteau’s life that he’s ever put his energy into something and succeeded in some warped way, and derive so much of his own self-value from Garfield’s. There’s this weird, toxic parasocial obsession quality that feels so modern.

John: It feels incredibly modern. It feels like it’s a pre-social media time, but you recognize, oh, I see there’s that. Rather than retweeting him, he’s like, I’m going to shake his hand, and therefore we are best buds, and I know him. It’s interesting to watch that.

Mike: Once he’s rebuffed by the Garfield administration, he just descends into madness and becomes convinced that his way to matter and to etch his name in the annals of American history in a positive way is to save the country from James Garfield.

Craig: Well, he’s etched his name into the annals in the strangest way. We all know the name Charles Guiteau, just not for the reason you wanted. I’m very glad that you made this show. I hope it’s doing well. I would urge people, as they’re listening to this, if you have something that you’re obsessed with in history, I hope that you’re pulling out of this. The most important thing that I think Mike said about the genesis of this is how he became passionate. He felt like, “Ooh, I can’t wait to tell people about this.” If you start telling people about these things, and they go, “Oh, you got something.”

If you start telling people about these things and they’re like, “No, that’s pretty much as boring as I thought it was,” then you don’t. Follow that, at least that initial thing is very exciting to find something that we haven’t seen a million times.

Mike: James Garfield was my Roman Empire for about seven years. To anyone that would listen on the street, I would pull them up with the lapels and be like, James Garfield’s the most fascinating story you don’t know. I had a birthday cake one year that my parents made for me with Garfield’s face on it. They were just like, “When are you going to stop talking about James Garfield?” What a privilege to be able to help reintroduce this man to modern audiences. In the process of my research, I went to Ohio.

He’s the only president who is not interred or cremated, or buried. His coffin and his wife’s coffin are on twin pedestals in their crypt in Cleveland at their memorial. Anyone can go and spend time with Garfield. Obviously, the coffins are behind broad iron gates. You can’t touch the coffins. I went there in 2019 when I was first starting to do research on this. For the full hour that I was down there, I was the only visitor, which felt crazy to me.

Craig: That sounds about right.

Mike: No. To you, it seems crazy, but to everyone else listening, like, no, that makes sense.

Craig: I’m routinely the only person at Buchanan’s grave. That just happens. It’s just standard.

Mike: Buchanan, that’s not a good one.

Craig: No. It’s not. It’s just fully bad.

Mike: As a bonus, I also get to tell the story of Chester Arthur, who is Garfield’s vice president, or [crosstalk] Nick Offerman. Yes, our buddy Nick Offerman, who is just such a dream. Of all of the characters in the script, I wrote Chester Arthur with Nick Offerman’s voice in my head the entire time.

Craig: Which makes it so easy. I was just saying this the other day. If you can just sit there in your mind and go, well, it seems to me that you’re not, and you just start slipping into the cadence. You’re like, I know what to write. I know how to do this.

Mike: It does help. He was so great. I’m so glad that he said yes.

John: Mike, the first time I met you was on Zoom because you came on for HBO’s Bad Education. Then, post-pandemic, you and I met up for coffee, and we got to talk a little bit. At that coffee, we were having a conversation about your writing practices, your thing, how you do stuff. I think I noticed this in the Bad Education script is that we talk about how much things look on the page, how you want a good-looking page. Your pages were, all the margins were exactly identical. Each line was the exact same length.

There was a precision that I worried was a little bit overkill because you’re not making the best choices on words if you’re actually worried about the character length. I asked whether you’d ever consider talking with somebody about your writing practices and things like that. We had a little conversation about that. How much are you comfortable sharing what you’ve done in the meantime?

Mike: I didn’t know we were going to be talking about this. We had coffee a few years ago. You guys have done however many episodes of Scriptnotes. It’s 714.

John: 16, yes.

Mike: 16. I have a very, very specific way of writing. I think it’s a low-grade OCD where a lot of people don’t like orphans or orphan lines. I think I’ve taken it to an obsessive level. I think I showed you a sample page from something that I was currently working on, I think probably Death by Lightning. I was like, have you seen this before? You looked at it for about 30 seconds, and then you looked up at me, and you were like, “Are you in therapy?” [laughter] I was like, I’m not. You ended up introducing me to my therapist, who’s also a frequent guest on this podcast as well.

John: Dennis Palumbo, Episode 99. A famous episode for our listeners, which we talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and specific things that writers may benefit from therapy. Was it helpful? Again, as much as you feel like sharing or don’t feel like sharing, I’m curious because I feel like we have other listeners who probably have similar sort of things that they’re working on.

Mike: Here’s how I feel about writing. I probably spend about 50% of the time that I write making sure that the lines fit correctly for me. Sometimes that means sacrificing a really great line, but it also leads me to over-scrutinize every word in a way that I think actually does ultimately improve the writing. Nothing about my writing process is passive, and it needs to fit a specific way. The one sheet that I do, I don’t fuck with margins at all, but sometimes I will reduce the space between two words from a 12 to a 10 just manually.

I spend a lot of time obsessively just making sure that the dialogue looks like blocks and that there’s not just one or two words hanging over. I didn’t always used to be this way. It’s actually grown more cute as I’ve gotten older, which I think is a little bit worrisome. It’s also become almost like a good luck talisman. I want to present the best-looking aesthetic version of a script because I do believe that there is a subconscious quality to reading a script. If it just looks sloppy on the page, at least for me as a reader, it does sometimes affect how I read.

Craig: I wonder if, as I listen to you, I think a couple of things, that one, that’s crazy, but two, so what? Because you’re good. I guess whatever helps a good writer write. We are not perfect. We all have our things. As you mentioned, maybe there is a theoretical, better version of a script you write that is less concerned about these things, but you don’t write that script because you are concerned about those things. If the script is good and you need to not use the letter Q for some reason, what do I care? We’re all crazy.

What we do is a kind of insanity, and we all have our weird things. It sounds to me like maybe you’ve made your peace with it and you accept that it’s part of your process and it’s a good thing for you.

Mike: Yes, it’s never felt crippling. Then once you get into production and there’s just the realities of talking about the actors, and then you’re like, you know what? I don’t think I’m so hobbled by it, but I do think in those early drafts that it does help my process to over-scrutinize and be a little bit obsessive with the words that are in the script. Yes, I’m probably insane. When I first spoke to Dennis, my therapist of about three years now, I showed him a sample page, and he was just like, “Do you feel like it helps you? Do you feel like it makes you better at doing this?”

I think at least in the short term, it does. In the long term, we’ll see. For right now, I think it leads to a more thought-out product and one that I do think, from an aesthetic perspective, it is helpful to be presenting something that looks clean.

Craig: It may not really matter to anyone but you, but that’s fine.

Mike: It does matter to you.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I want to go back to my initial instinct when I saw your page. My concern was this may be getting in the way of you doing the best work that you know how to do. To hear you articulate that you feel like this is a helpful way for you to get that best draft that you feel good about that feels like it is your work, then I totally respect that. It sounds like Dennis provided a perspective on, is this helping or is this getting in your way? That would be the crucial question. Is this helping you do the work that you want to do, or is it a thing that is stopping you from doing the work or distracting you from doing the work?

It sounds like you believe at this moment, it’s helpful, but you’re also mindful that at some point, it could be not helpful.

Mike: It has to be. I’ve never run a writer’s room or really been in a writer’s room. When you’re collaborating with other writers, yes, you have to throw that in the garbage immediately, that notion that your script should look like someone else’s. At moments, I’m not that crazy.

John: Also, there are a lot of people who are listening to this podcast who are looking at their own scripts and their own pages. Listening to the three page challenge, and we’re talking about how it looks on the page. We’re talking about widows and orphan some, but also just how lines are broken up and how this all feels.

I want to make sure that in the conversations that Craig and I have about the pages that we’re looking at, no one is taking it to an unhelpful extreme. No one’s being so obsessed with it. They’re not actually focused on what the words themselves actually are. Which is, it sounds like it is for you, a tool to really help you inspect what are the word choices you’re making, not just is it exactly 60 characters long?

Mike: I know, I think every word has a cost to it, so hopefully it leads to a tighter draft.

Craig: It leads to a draft. That’s the–

John: It leads to a draft. That’s a crucial thing.

Mike: As long as it leads to a draft.

Craig: It’s how it comes out. That’s how it’s organized with you. Our brains are complicated. One of the things I’ve been really working on for myself in this area of– I don’t know what you’d call it, human growth and enlightenment, is understanding that the process that I follow to make stuff is flawed because I am flawed, and that’s okay. That’s standard. Standardish human being, not a god, flawed. It works. It’s just the flaws are part of it.

You have to accept it. You can call the flaws at that point not flaws, just characteristics. You don’t actually get to write anything if it doesn’t go through the machinery of, and I also want it to look like this. It’s the same thing. You can’t separate them. When you get to a place where you’re like, “I actually don’t like this. This is holding me back. Now it just feels like a bad habit,” then you become aware and then it is recontextualized, and perhaps it is teased apart, but if it never gets teased apart, if you spend the rest of your life turning things to make them fit, if the scripts are good, this is how you do it.

John: You said bad habits. I think I often say is that early in my career, I felt like I had a lot of bad habits, and at some point, stopped labeling them as bad. They’re just my habits.

Craig: They’re your habits.

John: They’re the way I do things, and that’s actually okay.

Craig: That’s part of it.

John: Some of my procrastination is just my habit, and I can’t fix it because it’s actually just how I work. That’s also okay. If at a certain point it does get in the way of how I work, then I need to really stop and examine them and see if there’s a thing I can do to not fall into that pattern again.

Mike: It’s actually incredibly helpful to talk about this with you guys. In no way would I recommend that anyone else do what I’m currently doing.

Craig: No one else is going to.

Mike: I’m not preaching the gospel here.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like fun.

[laughter]

Mike: No.

Craig: It sounds like you.

Mike: To me, it’s a version of problem-solving and puzzling in a way. It’s an added component to the way that I write. I think that at times it ends up leading to something beautiful. Other times, I do have to sacrifice my first blush best line, and maybe I find something better. Hopefully, if I’m ever on this podcast again, we can check back in, see if I’m still doing it. Right now it’s proved I would say mostly helpful and not too benevolent.

Craig: It seems like it’s been incredibly helpful, actually. Sometimes people will talk about these issues, and they will put them under, “Oh, I know I seem a little OCD about this.” We tend to concentrate on the O, which is obsession. I think it’s the C, it’s compulsion that is far more frequent among people who do what we do in a large sense, because we’re compelled to do it in the first place. It is compulsory. Then there are these kinds of compulsions that occur as part of this compulsory behavior of writing.

Mike: I think all screenwriters are bound by this. We’re all compulsive, we’re all a little crazy. We’re all neurotic. We’re all in our heads, locked ourselves in rooms, and written these things in a vacuum. There is a compulsion there. Sometimes that comes out sideways, like in my case. We all have different processes, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about it, especially with two guys like you.

Craig: You are not alone. To say that we are all idiosyncratic in our own idiosyncratic ways would be an understatement. This is actually great for people at home who may feel sometimes like they’re weird. Yes, writing is a weird thing to do. Imagining that you’re 12 different people who are all disagreeing with each other is a weird thing to do, coming up with these scenarios all the time, and what we do is weird.

It is neurologically weird. How could you not, as part of the neurological weirdness, have quirks? To the extent that you can accept those quirks as long as John says, they’re not things that you don’t– if you don’t feel a great need to get rid of it, then you and Mike Makowsky have something in common, and me, and John.

John: Next thing I want to talk about is typologies. This came up because my husband, Mike, I was describing to him this person I needed to work with and some frustrations I was feeling about our working relationship. Mike said like, “Oh, well, she’s a questioner.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” It’s like, “Oh, Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies. There’s a questioner.”

He brought this up before, and he is like, “I will show you the chapter on how to deal with a questioner.” He showed me the chapter in the book. I’m like, “Oh, wow. That is exactly right. You’ve precisely diagnosed why I’m having a challenging time with this and what the best strategies are for getting into consensus with this person.” I want to have a general conversation about personality archetypes, the ways we saw people, both in the real world and also our fictional characters.

I think there’s this instinct that you should be able to neatly categorize all these people and their personalities and their types. Craig, you and I have talked about Myers-Briggs before. In addition to Myers-Briggs, there’s Enneagram, the Big Five, you hear about the four behavioral types from DiSC, and the four tendencies from Gretchen Rubin.

Mike: I remember I read a book in high school when I was buying all the screenwriting books called The Writer’s Guide to Character Traits.

Craig: Sure.

Mike: I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that one.

Craig: Is it Orange? Does it–

Mike: I’m sorry. I’m frantically–

Craig: Is it light?

Mike: It was blue.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I’m frantically trying to Google it right now, but maybe we can-

Craig: Blue books are out, orange books are in.

John: Absolutely. I remember an early book I read was The Gods in Everyman, or The Goddesses in Everywoman. Basically, it was talking about personality types that way. I’d love to have a discussion about to what point is it useful and to what point is it just astrology, and you’re just randomly assigning labels to things.

Mike: Oh gosh. I don’t–

John: You don’t think of your characters in terms of a bundle of attributes that sort of fit neatly together?

Mike: I don’t think so. I tend to adapt. I adapt a lot of true stories. I definitely gravitate to characters that have similar misguided impulses to one another, but I wouldn’t say that I try to be too prescriptive by sorting them into boxes.

John: Craig, have you ever tried to do Myers-Briggsy on any of your characters or how they approach things?

Craig: Hell, no. Everybody goes a phase where I don’t know– Melissa’s family was super into Myers-Briggs, but I never thought that it was particularly interesting. There’s probably a character type called person who likes character types, and they get value out of this.

John: I bet there’s a large number of our listeners, or at least a sizable percentage, who really want to neatly be able to categorize things.

Craig: You can’t.

John: That’s part of their process.

Craig: You can try, but-

John: You can try.

Craig: I personally don’t think this is a good– because it’s post, it’s not pre. Writing is about creating somebody. When you are introducing characters to an audience or a new relationship and a story to an audience, they need to see the birth of it, and they need to see people discovering each other. As they discover each other, they should be changing each other. We tend to look at people when they’re in moments of change. These things are sort of this is who you are, not changed. It’s simple, and they tend to go over the same things. Really, as far as I could tell, these things exist to sell books.

John: To sell books and to do workshops to understand your coworkers and things like that.

Craig: Here’s the thing, I’m fascinated by people who aren’t like me. I’m also fascinated by people that are fundamentally not like me. It is interesting. I don’t necessarily know if the people I’ve liked the most as I’ve gone through my career have been a certain type. My guess is no, I think generally what I seem to be attracted to is intelligence. There are intelligent people in all of these. You and I are not the same personality type. Did you know that?

[laughter]

John: I did notice that. Somehow over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed that. It’s funny. Yet we do have significant degrees of overlap in terms of our desire for logic, our desire for-

Craig: Also, you’re smart. Bottom line is you’re smart. That’s what I go for. I like smart. I like smart people who are so wildly different on only scales. When I meet somebody that has my characteristics, who’s just dull, I don’t need to hang out with them.

John: There’s a thing we’re developing internally for– so we made a writer emergency pact, which is, as you get stuck in a story, ways to navigate out of a jam. A thing we’ve been working on is a version that is more character archetype-sy, but rather than being expose facto, ways of thinking about if someone has these two characteristics together, what character would have that?

What would a nurturer or explorer feel like? What kind of character is that? Useful storytelling thinking tool, but it’s not meant to be, “Oh, you have to have this exact mix of characters in order for it to work properly.”

Mike: To what end do you think D&D character classifications?

John: I feel like I am constantly referring to characters as chaotic neutral. The alignment charts, yes.

Craig: Alignment charts are fun, but again, post-facto fun in and of themselves, they’re pretty blunt tools. There’s also quite a bit of fuzziness between some of them.

John: Here’s where I imagine it could be useful. None of us traditionally work with a group of other writers, but I could imagine, as you’re having a conversation about a character or a new character you’re introducing, how it fits together, rather than trying to apply an exact label to them, look at some of the spectrums that they lay out there. To what degree are they introverted or extroverted? To what degree are they rebelling against external expectations, or are they intrinsically motivated to do certain things? How agreeable are they? To what degree do they want to challenge authority? Those are useful conversations to have, but rather than reduce them to one little label, I think you’re probably better off.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. What does Julia in Oxfordshire ask us?

Drew: I’m a novelist who teaches creative writing. I would be interested in your views on what someone with IP, like a popular novel, should look out for when people start circling. What’s the ideal journey from page to screen, and what’s the nightmare?

John: I’ve had a couple of adventures with adapting books, or you’re dealing with a property that’s becoming popular. I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences with authors in that situation. I won’t talk about the bad experiences. My Arlo Finch books came out at the same time that Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi came out. It’s been interesting watching that development cycle because that came out in 2017, and the first movie version has only coming out next year or 2027. It’s like a 10-year journey.

Looking through the number of times it got set up and then fell apart and then got going again, as the author, I used to say, you just cannot know when a thing is actually going to happen, when it’s all going to come together. Mike, you bought this woman’s book, optioned this woman’s book, and it took years. At no point did it seem like a certainty that it would ever actually make it to the screen, even two years out or a year and a half out.

I would say that talking with authors whose books have been optioned or purchased for adaptation, you have to treat it as this will probably never happen and make peace with that. You won’t have the kind of control over it that you do over your own book. It’s just like your kid is going off to college, and it’s just going to become its own thing.

Mike: Yes. I think a lot of authors have really challenging relationships with the eventual product, and so many other times. Some of the greatest books of the last 10 years, books that maybe in a different era would have readily been ripe for assassination or-

Craig: Wow.

John: For assassination. [unintelligible 00:52:50]

Mike: -for adaptation. I recently went on a big Barbara Kingsolver kick over this past year, and reading books like The Poisonwood Bible or Demon Copperhead where you’re just like, these are some of the best books of all time. Why hasn’t this been made as– You weren’t the first person who ever thought of doing it. It’s hard to get things made. Yes. It’s just really, really, really difficult.

John: I would encourage Julia Nostrachir, if someone’s circling your book, you might think, “Oh, a director would be fantastic.” Directors attach themselves to 19,000 things, and none of them ever happen. If a Mike Makowsky approaches you, who’s a writer who’s obsessive, who can actually do the thing, it’s generally a better choice.

Mike: I tend to classify myself more as compulsive than obsessive.

John: I’m sorry about that, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Well done, sir.

John: I don’t want to mislabel you or put you on the wrong side.

Mike: Yes. If I call you, please say yes. I agree.

John: Let’s answer one more question. Oh, here’s one from Marco about writing with a bad back. Craig, you may have an opinion about that.

Drew: I remember you mentioning back injections for pain. I’m turning 50 and right when things are finally starting to go well career-wise, my back decided to revolt. I can barely sit for more than 5 to 10 minutes without serious pain. The price of 15 plus years glued to a chair, I guess. I have scoliosis, facet joint arthritis, mild anterior-

Craig: Anterolisthesis.

Drew: There we go. Oh, boy. A couple of disc protrusions, probably the usual writer’s cocktail. Surgeons say it’s not bad enough for surgery, so I’m stuck in this frustrating in-between zone where something could be done, but hard to figure out what. Did you ever find something that actually helped? Do you have specific physio or exercises, or a special chair? Any professional tips would be a lifesaver.

John: Pretty sure many of the Scriptnotes audience might be in the same boat. Craig, you and I were talking about this just backstage right before the curtain opened at our live show, and you were about to get another injection. Did that happen? Did it help?

Craig: I had to make the appointment, but I’m going to be having it when I’m back home right after Christmas, right before New Year’s. In between Christmas and New Year’s, that’s back injection season. It’s going to be lovely. First of all, Marco, I certainly sympathize with you. Yes, you’re in your 50s, and yes, this is how it’s going, and you already had issues. Scoliosis has been there almost certainly since you were a kid and just gets worse over time.

Anterolisthesis is not fun, and any arthritis anywhere in your back, and disc protrusions, that’s really the worst of it because that starts to push on the nerves all around. That’s what the pain is. The pain is nerves. It’s not bones. It’s not the rest of it. It’s the nerves. Yes, physical therapy can help. There are some stretches that I do every morning that seem to help. I would not suggest you do those because those are for what I have, which is spinal stenosis and [unintelligible 00:55:35] and I don’t know what stretches would be good for you, but I think physical therapy, it could help.

Pretty much every single back doctor in the world suggests that you strengthen your core muscles, which I would do if I had them, but I’m pretty sure that my abs have actually dissolved. I don’t think I have abdominal muscles. [laughs] I basically don’t have a butt muscle or an abdominal muscle, and those are the muscles that they want you to strengthen, your glutes and your abs. That is something that they will always recommend.

I do use an Aeron myself, and it works very nicely for me. My body conforms to it, and it feels good. The special chair you should use is the one that makes you feel the least pain. Back surgery is a nightmare. If you can avoid that, I would avoid it. PT, for sure. Strengthen the ab, core, and butt, and find a chair that is okay. If you need to sit up in bed and write a bed, you write in bed. What can you do?

John: A friend of mine with back issues swears by peripheral nerve stimulator implants. Basically, once a year, they implant a little thing that basically keeps stimulating those nerves until your nerves just go like, “Oh, well, this must be normal. There’s actually not a problem,” but it’s a hassle to do, and you can’t get your back wet for a while, and things like that. There are other alternatives.

I would just encourage, and Craig, I want your opinion on this too, for Marco, this person says it’s not bad enough for surgery. That shouldn’t be the last person you go to. That shouldn’t be the last word on things. There may be other solutions out there. Don’t assume that you have to live in pain.

Craig: Well, as we get older, we will all be living in pain. Pain’s coming. You hear that, Makowsky? It’s coming.

Mike: Oh, no.

Craig: There are levels, of course, and there are remediations. The other thing that they sometimes will mess around with is radio frequency ablation, where they use radio waves to fry the nerve tips. It didn’t work for me, but some people have gotten relief from that. I don’t know where you live, Marco, but in Los Angeles, Cedar-Sinai has a pain center. That’s where I go, and it is a building full of doctors that are there to deal with pain.

The good news is that they have never suggested to me that the answer is opioids. Don’t worry about that. They’re not going to turn you into a junkie, but they really do concentrate on how to alleviate pain and to get to the root of it. It’s been good for me. I get basically two of these shots a year, and they work pretty well.

John: Let’s do our one cool thing. Craig, your one cool thing looks like it’s related to opioids.

Craig: It is. Opioids on my mind. I’m here in Vancouver. The guys here on the podcast who see me on my Zoom thing can see lovely gray slate rainy Vancouver behind me.

John: I want to say yes.

Craig: That is standard. Vancouver is a fantastic city. It has a brutal opioid problem. Anybody who lives or works here in Vancouver knows that there are about, I don’t know, six, seven straight blocks of East Hastings that are populated almost exclusively by people who are using drugs and primarily fentanyl and also now some sort of tranquilizer thing, like another veterinary tranquilizer. It’s bad.

The fentanyl epidemic is at this point just become the problem everywhere. There is an effort now to create a vaccine. You guys have probably heard of Narcan, which is naloxone, the thing you spray– Oh, you’re at a party. You see somebody go, and they thought they were injecting heroin. It was fentanyl. They’re dying. You spray this in their nose. It blocks all of the opioid receptors in the body and can help keep them from their central nervous system plummeting to zero. The issue, of course, is that has to be administered after the fact.

What they’re working on now is they call it a vaccine. It’s really more of a prophylactic. The idea is they inject you with something that binds to the fentanyl molecule, but along with it has a larger chunk of protein that keeps it from crossing through the blood-brain barrier. Basically, it can’t go anywhere, so it can’t hurt you. It just runs around your bloodstream doing nothing. This would be for people who are like, “Hey, look, I do use this drug, but I don’t want fentanyl, I just want heroin, I don’t want fentanyl.” It protects you against the thing that might kill you.
There are issues that this could create.

John: I could imagine.

Craig: For instance, then people are like, “I want fentanyl, I got the fentanyl vaccine, but I really want to get high off of fentanyl. I think I’ll just take twice as much as I normally did to overwhelm this.” That is a potential danger because one thing we do know about people with substance abuse issues is that they’re incredibly persistent and clever. The other issue, of course, is if you ever did need some sort of surgical intervention or something, if your blood-brain barrier is blocked from one or more methods of anesthesia, you may have a serious problem.

It does feel like, given how bad it is out there, something like this might be a good mitigation solution. It’s a very interesting thought because we do– Here’s what we absolutely know, telling people to not use opioids does not work. That is useless. We know that for a fact. Let’s see, maybe the fentanyl “vaccine” will gain some traction.

John: Great. Mike, do you have one cool thing to share?

Mike: Yes. In adapting this true story from the Annals of American History and then trying to make a show that appeals to more than just the 2% of people that would pick up a book about James Garfield, but also to the other 98% of people who are quite certain at the outset that they do not care about James Garfield and making a show with a little bit more of a modern engine behind it. There are a handful of other shows and films that have done it well, a small handful, one of which is a show called The Good Lord Bird from 2020.

It’s so good. It’s based on this incredible James McBride book, and it’s about John Brown, the abolitionist in his reign on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that, in many ways, precedes the Civil War. It’s adapted by Ethan Hawke, who plays John Brown and Mark Rashard. It’s so funny and weird and incredible. It’s one of the best adaptations that I’ve seen in a really, really long time, and I think very much is of a piece with Death by Lightning, hopefully. It’s just a show that I thought was really, really remarkable and that I wish more people still talked about because it’s great.

Craig: The Good Lord Bird?

Mike: Yes. It’s on Showtime in 2020, which was probably one of the reasons.

John: It’s probably Paramount+, I would suspect.

Mike: That’s a great question. I don’t know. I hope it’s available somewhere.

Craig: Let’s do a quick Good Lord Bird. Let’s do a little quick live Google. Good Lord Bird-

John: It looks like it’s on Prime, but I don’t know.

Mike: It’s really, really great. Would recommend it to anybody that likes my show and would want to do another historical deep dive. It’s very different from what you would expect it to be. It is rollicking and funny and strange.

Craig: Looks like it’s on Apple TV, and that’s about that. Oh, no, I see Prime Video. Yes. I think you got Amazon or Apple TV, both of which will be purchased by Netflix Warner Brothers within days.

Mike: Ethan Hawke is so, so good on the show, and Daveed Diggs is there. He plays Frederick Douglass.

John: That’s great. Again, that was peak TV, and so much was being made, it was so hard to just find an audience for anything, especially if it wasn’t on HBO or Netflix, even Netflix stuff disappeared. My one cool thing is a show that was made for Canada, made for Crave TV, is now available in the US on HBO Max called Heated Rivalry. Gay people know what I’m talking about because every gay person is obsessed with the show.

Craig: Every gay person.

John: Every gay person in Los Angeles or New York City. Basically, everyone on my Instagram knows about Heated Rivalry. What I admire so much about the show so it’s based on a book by Rachel Reed, and it’s created, produced, and directed by Jacob Tierney, who I want to get on the show at some point. The show is about professional hockey, and so it’s these two hockey players and their romance between them.

What is remarkable about it is, remember, Craig, we had Rachel Bloom on the show talking about sex on screen, and sort of like why we’re not seeing good sex on screen, and the show does it and delivers it in a really good way. There are sex scenes that are actually narratively important, really well shot, and story happens during sex scenes, which you just don’t see. It’s not just like a little bonus you put on there, it’s like, no, it’s like the sex is the point and the story purposes are happening during it. Just incredibly well made. Don’t watch it with your family, don’t watch it with your kids. [laughter]

Craig: Don’t watch it on a plane.

John: Don’t watch it on a plane. It is unapologetically smutty in a great way. I just really respect that they were able to make this show and put it out there in the world. Heated Rivalry.

Mike: Where is it?

John: It’s HBO Max in the US, and it’s just really, really well done.

Craig: Yes, so Crave is the HBO output channel up here in Canada, so typically it’s HBO shipping things to Crave, but I like that Crave is shipping something back.

John: Yes. It’s shot in Toronto, but set in many places around the world. Clearly, it made smart choices in pulling in the horniness of Challengers, the tennis show, but it’s actually making that subtext text and really nicely done. Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Foster. If you’ve an outro, send us a link to ask@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 signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. Please keep sending through those posts about the Scriptnotes book. Those are delightful. We’ll continue to repost those.

We have T-shirts, and hoodies, and drinkwear. They’re perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to 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 each and every week. You also get the first emails about live shows and other stuff that’s coming up.

You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and bonus segments. You get Mike’s episode from 2020. You get the Rachel Bloom sex episode, all those things, and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coaching trees as sort of the growth of one show leads to showrunners of other shows. We’ll talk about that after the music. Mike Makowsky, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much for having me. It was a blast.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. This topic came from a listener, Rob G., who sent us in this article by Alan Sepinwall, who was writing for The Ringer, on which TV show has the best coaching tree. Here’s the setup. Football fans often talk about coaching trees, how so many currently successful NFL coaches used to work for Mike Shanahan, or how Bill Parcells at various points in his career employed Bill Belichick, Sean Payton, Tom Coughlin. I see you shrugging like you don’t follow football.

Mike: I don’t know who any of these people are.

Craig: John knows all of them.

John: I’m impressed I was able to pronounce these names.

Craig: The only thing John knows about sports are the names of those two guys in that hockey show.

John: Oh, really? [laughter] Hollander and Ilya.

Craig: There you go.

John: There you go. Absolutely. There are also TV coaching trees where producers or shows bring together many writers and directors who go on to have these amazing careers and, in some cases, create their own coaching trees. I’ll talk you through some of the ones they sort out, but then I also want to discuss why this may happen. The first one is The White Shadow, which I don’t really remember. Ken Howards.

Craig: I love that show.

John: John Falsey, and Joshua Brand, Mark Tinker, Thomas Carter, Tim Van Patten, Kevin Hooks all came out of that.

Mike: Well, Tim was an actor on the show.

Craig: He played Baloney. What was it? Oh, Salami. It was Salami. That was his name. Not Baloney.

John: Ken Howard is an actor. [crosstalk]

Craig: The former president of SAG.

John: SAG. He was Hank Cooper on 30 Rock. 30 Rock’s so good. Great.

Mike: He died a few years ago. When I first moved out to LA, I didn’t really know anyone, but my dad and stepmom were doing this dog charity that he and his wife were really passionate about. I got dinner with Ken Howard, and we really hit it off. He was the first person I ever met in the industry. He saw me as, I don’t know, someone that he would say [unintelligible 01:09:11] sure. Then he died three years into me living in LA.

My parents had a holiday party that year, and his widow comes to the holiday party, and she gives me this box. She’s like, “Put this in a safe place and open it tomorrow.” I was like, “Okay.” I was a little drunk. I was like, “Yes, thank you. It’s so good to see you, Linda.” The next morning, I open it up, and it’s this translucent blue and orange paperweight. I’m like, “Oh, that’s so nice from Linda Howard.” I’m like, “I’ll put this,” I don’t know.

Underneath it, there’s this note being like, “I just wanted you to know that Ken thought the world of you, so it seems only right that you would have a piece of him.” I have one-twelfth of Ken Howard’s ashes on my desk. The paperweights, it’s a company called Artful Ashes, and it’s the white shadow colors. They purposely did the white shadow colors. I see Ken every day. He’s my roommate. Isn’t that wild?

Craig: I’m thinking about who is going to get a little piece of me.

John: My instincts as well.

Craig: By the way, we now, both of us, have to send a little bit of our ashes to Mike Makowsky. He needs [crosstalk] weird collection.

[crosstalk]

Mike: My stepmom’s mother, who I was also really close with, died, and she was so inspired that she then contacted Artful Ashes, so I also have one-twelfth of Jan, and they live next– I’m collecting infinity stones, essentially.

Craig: Unfortunately, when you die, someone’s going to have to get all of your dead other people.

John: Wow.

Mike: That’s my Ken Howard story. That’s an incredible Ken Howard story. Whenever the white shadow comes up, obviously, I need to tell that story. He was such a great human being.

Craig: That’s awesome.

John: Let’s talk about that because it sounds like he was a great human being who also cared about the next generation. That’s partly what the coaching trees things were talking about. It’s like people who were apparently– they not only ran really great shows, but people developed underneath them who could take those lessons and do their own things. The Golden Girls, obviously, ran for a long time, was an accommodate institution. Mitch Hurwitz, Mark Cherry, Christopher Lloyd, all came from that. Christopher Lloyd went on to do Modern Family. Nash Bridges, Damon Lindelof, Sean Ryan, Glenn Mazzara.

Mike: Was Carlton [Cuse] on-

Craig: I believe he was.

John: I feel like they met on that.

Craig: I think that’s where he took Damon under his wing.

John: X-Files, Howard Gordon, Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, Tim Minear, Darin Morgan.

Craig: Wow. Look at this.

John: Incredible. When you get to The Office, of course, we’ve had Mike Schur on the show, but Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak, but also Paul Lieberstein, Justin Spitzer, Lee Eisenberg, and Gene Stupnitsky. Incredible writers who all went off and ran things.

Craig: Your show of shows.

John: Your show of shows.

Craig: That’s the immediate thing I thought of, and it is number one on this list. This was their stacked writing staff. Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. What the hell? There’s a really interesting book about them that’s called Madness on Something Floors. It was just like the story of what that place was like with those guys when they were all, I guess, in their 20s and 30s. Neil Simon alone. Incredible.

John: The article also talks about Roseanne was not a happy place to be working, but obviously, amazing people came through there. Josh Weed, Amy Sherman-Paladino, Chuck Lorre, Norm MacDonald, Dana Jacobson, Bruce Helford. A difference, though, is that these are shows that most of these are– they ran 22 episodes per season. They had large writing staffs. There was a lot of you’re at that a lot, and so you got a lot of chance to just do stuff, and that helps you develop your craft and your career. Shows where you’re writing eight episodes, there’s just going to be less opportunity to learn from all that stuff.

Craig: Or a show like the one that Mike does where there’s nobody. Nobody learns. By the way, that’s my- [crosstalk]

John: Nobody learns. Chernobyl.

Craig: Exactly. Yes. Nobody learns, but it is interesting to look at how many shows there have been that were in this model. Quite a few shows now, even though maybe they’re not doing 22 episodes, maybe they do fewer. I’m thinking of shows like Hacks or something. There are still people on staff who are learning and growing.

John: They will [inaudible 01:13:57] it.

Craig: What it really comes down to, I think, is who’s running it and how good are they at picking talent? The people who were running these shows, Sid Caesar had choices. He was like, “All right, out of all the people I could hire, I like these people.” 100% accuracy on that. You have to look at the folks that were running White Shadow or Sopranos, David Chase. These guys had been around with some of these other people in other rooms before, but they knew, okay, I’ve been on a bunch of shows. I now have my chance to write my show. I’m taking this one, this one, this one, this one. Then those people are like, “Ooh, and you should take this one and this one.” The coaching tree is really a taste tree, I think.

John: Yes, I think that’s crucial. Thinking back to our guests, Abbott Elementary. We had Quinta Brunson on. We also had Brittani Nichols on, who’s grown season by season by season. She’s now an EP on the show. Five years from now, as we’re looking at this list, there’s going to be a ton of writers who’ve come out of Abbott Elementary who are controlling this business. It’s thanks to end the show on some happy news that sometimes things grow and change, and develop because people are good and they make good things.

Craig: Then you die, your ashes go into a chunk of Lucite, and it is sent to a guy.

Mike: To me. I will take your ashes.

John: You’ll take your ashes. On the future side, there’s less of this because you don’t have a chance to develop a staff. I would hope that I’ve had a very good run of assistants who’ve gone on to do amazing things and grown their own places. Rawson, and Dana, and Chad, and Stuart, and Drew, and Megan McDonald, and Megan– everyone’s gone off and killed in industry, which has been nice, too. That’s also a testament to you.

Craig: I’m sure you have great taste in picking assistants. You’re really good at this. As a recipient of this, I do have to acknowledge David Zucker, who taught me a lot, and Todd Phillips, who taught me a lot. Both of those guys didn’t need to include me to the extent that they did in the process of directing feature films, but they did. Without that, I would not– Those are essential things that I learned about filmmaking and writing and all of it.

John: Cool. Mike Makowsky, thank you again for being on our show.

Craig: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, guys, so much.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Death by Lightning on Netflix
• Mike Makowsky on IMDb and Instagram
• Episode 448 (The last time Mike was on the podcast)
• Which TV Show Has the Best Coaching Tree? Alan Sepinwall for The Ringer
• Size matters: a single representation underlies our perceptions of heaviness in the size-weight illusion
• New evidence for the sensorimotor mismatch theory of weight perception and the size-weight illusion
• Friedman Personnel Agency
• Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
• The Ballad of Guiteau from Assassins
• The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
• Writer’s Guide to Character Traits by Linda Edelstein
• A Fentanyl Vaccine Is About to Get Its First Major Test by Emily Mullin for WIRED
• Heated Rivalry on HBO Max
• The Good Lord Bird
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Luke Foster (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 697 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s a new round of how would this be a movie? We’re going to look at four stories in the news and examine their cinematic essences. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about kindness, Craig. The quality I feel like we’re undervaluing and sometimes confusing and conflating with other things is niceness and politeness. Kindness is different.

Craig: Yes, it’s sort of out of fashion, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. I think it’s an evergreen value. We’ll talk about kindness.

Craig: Sure.

John: Most crucially and fundamentally, we have big news today. We are officially announcing the Scriptnotes book. Long spoken about on this podcast, but it is now available for pre-order starting today as you’re listening to this podcast.

Craig: It’s an actual book.

John: It’s an actual book. You’ve seen the PDF of it in this typeset.

Craig: Oh, yes. The book is an object you could now hit somebody with in the head. It’s real.

John: It’s real. I don’t have a physical book in front of me, but underneath the laptop here, there is a copy of the German edition of Arlo Finch. That is the size and dimension of the book.

Craig: Perfect.

John: That’s what it’s going to feel like.

Craig: It’s a real book. For a long time, we bemoaned the state of screenwriting books. Yes, I think of all the screenwriting books on the shelf, at the store, the virtual store, I think ours is the best. I really do.

John: I genuinely do too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Our book is 43 chapters.

Craig: 43?

John: Yes.

Craig: But they’re short.

John: Yes, they’re short, but they’re important chapters.

Craig: Great bathroom book.

John: Yes, great bathroom book. It says so in the book that if this were to become your bathroom book, we would no higher flatter.

Craig: Thrilled.

John: Absolutely. 43 chapters, 335 pages. Responsibility for this, we have to acknowledge. It fell upon Drew Marquardt, our producer, Chris Csont, Megana Rao, our former screenwriter and producer, and Halley Lamberson, who was our former intern. They wrestled through a thousand hours of transcripts to pull chunks together to figure out what this was and then get it into a prose form that is not me talking or you talking, but it’s us talking, which was a difficult thing to do.

Craig: It’s like a duck press. Are you familiar with the duck press?

John: Tell me about a duck press.

Craig: It’s a little disgusting, but it’s very French. Duck press, you basically can put duck inside of this and squeeze. It’s like a huge lever and it squishes [crosstalk] all the juices out. It basically pulls out the most basic, concentrated form of script notes. We’ve put it through the duck press.

John: Oh, okay.

Craig: Certainly, you deserve acknowledgement. You’ve done a lot of work on the book.

John: I had this fantasy that between the four of them, they’d be able to get a written tone that feels right. Now I did have to run my fingers through everything and do it.

Craig: I deserve no credit, other than the fact that I talked for a lot.

John: You did talk for a lot.

Craig: A lot.

John: You created credits on the front of the book.

Craig: Listen, talking is really important. It is the essence that comes out of the duck press.

John: Let’s talk through what is actually inside the book. We have the topic chapters. There’s 21 of them and there’s guest chapters, which are 20. Should we just read through them one by one sort of what the chapters are, so people know what they’re going to be getting?

Craig: Sure, that’s quite a few chapters. We’ll talk about the top. My goodness, 21 topic chapters. I’m almost tempted to just rattle these off to overwhelm people.

John: We’ll alternate.

Craig: Oh, you want to alternate?

John: Yes.

Craig: I love it. The rules of screenwriting.

John: Deciding what to write.

Craig: Protagonists.

John: Relationships.

Craig: Conflict.

John: Dialogue and exposition.

Craig: Point of view.

John: How to write a scene.

Craig: Locations and world-building.

John: Plot and plot holes.

Craig: Mystery, confusion, suspense.

John: Writing action.

Craig: Structure.

John: The beginning.

Craig: The end.

John: How to write a movie.

Craig: That’s a good one. Pitching.

John: Notes on notes.

Craig: What it’s like to be a screenwriter.

John: Patterns of success.

Craig: Appropriately, a final word. John, that covers everything.

John: The goal was to cover the craft and the business. It’s more craft at the start and it gets more business towards the end.

Craig: Great.

John: Just the psychology of what it feels like to be a screenwriter. You’ll recognize some of these titles within titles of episodes, but nothing is basically just one episode, except for how to write a movie is very much your talk that you gave at Austin, which you did as an episode, which is in prose form.

Craig: It’s basically, you can just go boop with that one. I can see how a lot of different episodes have been combined and refined into these things. It is true that it’s impossible, really, to listen to all of the episodes of Scriptnotes at this point.

John: People do it.

Craig: It’s impossible to do it in a way where you would retain everything. This is pretty awesome that you could just go, or here, read this and then start listening to the show for the next 5,000 episodes and see where we go.

John: Published by Crown Books. One of the things that makes me excited about being at a big publisher is they have a whole academic arm, which is just about getting the book into universities.

Craig: Oh.

John: That feels good, because I feel like for a film student, this is a thing that you could use in a class.

Craig: Are they going to do that thing where they charge $5,000 for the book in a university?

John: No, it’s the same price as it is a list.

Craig: What is that?

John: It’s just nuts. It’s a special academic edition or something.

Craig: What do you mean? My God. What a scam.

John: What a scam.

Craig: Going back to the Scott Frank discussion, but we also have these amazing guest chapters where we boil down the best hits of so many great people that we’ve interviewed.

John: One of the fun things about the guest chapters was finding ways so that they are interacting with the chapters around them. If we’re talking about a certain topic, they’re generally related to that or there’s things they’re saying that are-

Craig: It’s like there’s a Segway man.

John: Built into the book.

Craig: Making sure– yes, makes total sense.

John: All right, let’s go through who our guests are.

Craig: All right. We got Christopher Nolan.

John: Michael Schur.

Craig: Lulu Wang.

John: Lorene Scafaria.

Craig: Sam Esmail.

John: Greta Gerwig.

Craig: Justin Simeon.

John: David Koepp.

Craig: David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

John: Damon Lindelof.

Craig: Rian Johnson.

John: Christopher McQuarrie.

Craig: The Daniels.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna.

Craig: Lawrence Kasdan.

John: Eric Roth.

Craig: Seth Rogen.

John: John Lee Hancock.

Craig: Mike Birbiglia.

John: Mike Birbiglia and Ashley Nicole Black.

Craig: What a lineup? Except for Mike Birbiglia, that is an incredible lineup.

John: Yes, just really all-stars and Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Also- [laughs]

John: He’s so angry right now.

Craig: No, but he’s just like, okay, guys. I could see his face like, huh-huh, okay. We love Mike Birbiglia.

John: We love Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Maybe more than anyone. When I say more than anyone, I don’t mean more than anybody else that’s on our show. I mean more than anyone on the planet. I mean more than his wife loves him, his child.

John: The shrine you have in your house to him is just a little bit creepy at times, but also, the way you pours the milk, it works.

Craig: A lot creepy all the time, but you know what? Love him.

John: Love him. There’s two special chapters. There’s a deep dive on Die Hard.

Craig: Oh, great.

John: We have that. It’s both our initial conversation and our subsequent conversation with one of the screenwriters of it and an oral history of Scriptnotes with Julia Turner. Remember that 10th anniversary episode?

Craig: Sure.

John: From behind the scenes.

Craig: Oh, yes. Great Julia Turner.

John: The book is available now for pre-order. If you go to scriptnotesbook.com, it’ll lead you to the right bookstores for it.

Craig: When will it actually be on sale?

John: If you pre-order now, you get it December 2nd.

Craig: Oh, this feels like a good Christmas gift.

John: It does feel like a good Christmas gift. You could order for yourself or tell your parent to order it for you.

Craig: Right, or tell your spouse, your partner.

John: Yes.

Craig: Honestly, if you are partnered up with a dork, they’re going to want this probably.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s very cool. I hope it’s a hit.

John: I would say it too. It doesn’t need to be the out-of-the-gate runaway bestseller, because it’s an evergreen title. There’s always been screenwriting, the fact that it’s not going to go out of date.

Craig: No, nor will it be the hot read over the Christmas break.

John: Would it be great if it were though?

Craig: Yes, sure. I’m not expecting to land on the New York Times bestseller list, but I think at a minimum, now there’s a book that’s worth buying. If your kid is interested in screenwriting and they’re in high school and they’re starting, this is just a simple, easy one. What does it cost, John?

John: The U.S. version I think is $32 or $35.

Craig: That’s reasonable.

John: Yes, and the U.K. version, I’m not sure what the final price is.

Craig: £400.

John: £400. It’s U.K., Australia, New Zealand. They all get one version. It’s largely the same. It’s like the format is slightly different.

Craig: Just colors has a U in it?

John: No. We’re actually not doing any text changes.

Craig: Oh, good.

John: Keeping it American.

Craig: Good.

John: Good. Good, but the cut of the book is a little different. We actually had a phone call, a Zoom about this. Basically, their printing prices just don’t work the same way.

Craig: Interesting. Still Gutenberg-ing it?

John: That’s what it is. That’s how it fits. If you are a listener and you are pre-ordering it today, thank you so much. If you send your receipt for it to Drew at askjohnox.com, we will send you something. We’re not quite sure what that’s going to be, but we’ll send you some of the extra thing for you having pre-ordered it.

Craig: Oh, that’s nice. Cool.

John: Cool.

Craig: Like an object or?

John: I think it’s going to probably be some sort of video of something. Some sort of acknowledgement and a thank you for your pre-order, which is nice.

Craig: What if there’s 10,000 people that pre-order it?

John: Drew’s going to be really busy.

[laughter]

Craig: Oh, Drew, Drew.

John: The other thing you can help us out with, if you are a listener of the show, we are going to be doing some press as we get closer to the time. We are making a list of, what are podcasts we can go on? What are live shows we could do in certain places? There’s limited availability, but there’s things we can do. If you have a podcast or a publication, you think like, oh, John or Craig or both of them should talk to them about this, also, email in to Drew and let Drew know, because we’re trying to get together that schedule for things.

Craig: Fun.

John: Fun. Cool. I will be talking more about this at the Austin Film Festival, but for today, just order your book.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to the Austin Film Festival, fantastic.

John: Scriptnotesbook.com.

Craig: We’re back.

John: All right. Our marquee topic today. How would this be a movie? Craig, can you recap this segment or set up the segment for people who are not familiar with this?

Craig: Sure. In this segment, we take some stories that have been in the news. Sometimes they’re news stories. A lot of times they’re essays. Sometimes they’re actually quite technical. One of them is today. We ask ourselves, okay, if we were running a studio and someone said, oh, we just bought the rights to this thing, how would we make it into a movie? This scenario plays out in studios every day, five days a week, year-round.

John: Absolutely happens in studios, but also happens with producers. Producers are reading, they’re talking to their assistants, their creative executives, there’s this thing, what could this be? Who would we get to write this? What does the actual movie feel like if we’re going to try to do this?

The four things we picked today, three of them are about sort of difficult personal things, and one of them is about a big scientific thing, which is a palate cleanser. Let’s start with A Mother’s Revenge. There’s several articles we could link to for this. The one we’re going to link to is in Slate. It’s as told to Christina Cotterucci, but it’s actually a first-person interview that’s been turned into prose form. It talks about Charlotte Laws, and she has a 24-year-old daughter named Kayla whose email was hacked.

Kayla had a topless picture in her email, which she never sent to anybody, but when she sent it to her computer to save it through her email, that topless picture ended up on one of the most notorious revenge porn sites, isanyoneup.com. Hunter Moore, who ran that website, called himself a professional life-ruiner.

Craig: Great.

John: He put that out there. The mother, Charlotte Laws, wants to get the picture taken down. She calls the FBI, tells her to file a report, so she takes it on herself. She calls everyone, including Hunter’s mother, trying to get this picture taken down. After nine days, it’s finally taken down. They think they’re done, but Charlotte continues to take on the cause of bringing this revenge porn website to justice and take down Hunter Moore.

Finally, the FBI does get involved. Hunter attacks Charlotte online. Anonymous steps in to dox Hunter, and Hunter is ultimately arrested.

Craig: Everybody doxes everybody.

John: This is the account that’s told the slate. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to a Guardian article that has a little bit more on the Hunter side of it all. Craig, what did you take of this situation, this place, and is there a thing about her specific story that’s interesting to you? Tell me what you’re thinking about.

Craig: Yes, this feels very sort of modern Erin Brockovich. A parent or an individual who isn’t necessarily empowered within the justice system, takes it upon themselves to force everybody that is to pay attention to something that’s a real problem. There is also a don’t mess with mom vibe to this, which I love. It is also interesting because it begins when this initial crime occurs. It’s 2012, so it’s a different time.

John: It’s a different internet.

Craig: She actually makes a really interesting point here. There is a ripple effect from what she did. One of the things that we’re always looking for when we’re saying, okay, like how could this be a movie, is how is it relevant? It’s relevant because the work that she did starting with this one picture, which in modern terms almost seems quaint.

John: It does.

Craig: One topless picture? I feel like everyone has everything [chuckles] I don’t.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s like, it’s so much out there.

John: In a world of AI generated fake images.

Craig: Right, but because of that one picture and her, I think, brave pursuit of justice, eventually laws are created. There were no laws anywhere. Now there are laws in all 50 states against revenge porn.

John: You can imagine the end title card of the movie. It’s like, this law is now the law in 50 states.

Craig: Yes, and it’s got a great villain. You would have to figure out a little bit more about the villain, just so it’s not– I mean the thing is, from her point of view here, she’s talking about this, Charlotte Laws is relaying the story. From her point of view, she literally describes him as a monster and portrays him as such, and it sure seems like it from this account. Of course, as writers, we’re like, but who are you, Hunter? Why are you doing this? Who hurt you? To sort of just figure out who the other person on the side of this is, without taking away the villainy, it’s just really just more like making a real character.

It’s funny because sometimes I think in real life, people are mustache twirling villains. It’s just that we don’t like them as much in our stuff.

Great crusade at the heart of it. I’d want to also dig in a little bit more of the daughter because she almost seems like a prop

John: What was interesting is that she’s 24 years old, which seems like if it’s a 16-year-old girl, an 18-year-old girl, then you feel different. A 24-year-old girl, I–

Craig: Things have changed, man.

John: Yes, but I wonder about the agency of Kayla herself and the degree to which her, and that’s actually an interesting point of conflict, the degree to which it’s like, no, it’s done, mom. It’s like, no, it’s not done. It’s like, stop dragging my name into this.

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know how that all went, but it does seem like the relationship there has to be figured out, because it is a part of it and it is a question. Naturally one would say, oh my God, maybe mom, stop, but as long as you could make everybody a bit rounded and no one’s too much of a white knight and no one’s too much of a mustache twirler, there is a pretty interesting story here. Now, it’s small.

John: There’s a Lifetime movie version of this. I think there’s a bigger version of this too. It’s a question of, can it get up to an Erin Brockovich? I’m not sure it can.

Craig: Erin Brockovich was trying to save lives and did. Where this gets interesting is, and she mentions that, there is a woman who’s a victim of revenge porn who commits suicide. Then you start to get real about it. I think the relevance really is now for parents who are struggling to figure out how to deal with this with their own kids, because this is the new playing with matches.

I think people would connect to it, at least parents would, but it feels like you’re going to have to either go all the way over into indie zone or mainstream. I could see a nice, shiny Netflix thing for this. [crosstalk]

John: Netflix makes sense for that too. We’re talking about this in the Erin Brockovich mold where this is based on a real person. We would likely get the life rights to Charlotte Laws. Basically, you’d want to have some ability to portray her and there’s a question of how you can handle Hunter Moore and to what degree, you don’t need his life rights, no. You don’t want his life rights, but there are going to be liable concerns about what you’re saying about him. You have to be able to back up everything you’re having him do with reality.

Craig: Doesn’t seem like it would be a problem, because in real life, he did all of this. He left a public record behind, like a trail of posts and tweets and all the rest and emails, and so forth and he was convicted. As far as those concerns, it’s as close to a layup as you’re going to get.

John: Now, if you were to do the fictional version of this where you didn’t have to use any of the real people’s stuff or you weren’t using any of the real people’s stuff, I think elevating Kayla over Charlotte and having the girl herself take the initiative in this thing feels probably right. It feels like it’s the more direct way to handle this in the sense of coming into ownership of your own story. Because in taking these photos yourself and then having them laid out there, you’ve lost the narrative and sort of reclaiming control over your life feels like an important version, if I’m not bound to reality.

Craig: Sure, you could absolutely argue that the value of the fictional version comes down to, I’m going to punish the person who punished me. Revenge against the revenger. Also curious, his site was a revenge porn. It didn’t seem like it was revenge, he didn’t even know Kayla. I think that also, there is something unique about mom going out there fighting on behalf of.

John: It doesn’t show in this article, but the other article, she’s physically small. She’s like Kristin Chenoweth’s size, and that feels right too.

Craig: Always interesting. There is something just about how powerless you can feel as a parent and how I can see as a mom just how fierce you can be. That is sort of the thing that makes this special, I think.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: But in a fictional version, I think you have to make it about more than just, I’m trying to get a picture down, I’m trying to remove a topless picture. There has to be– in reality, she says years into this process, or it was months or years, it was quite some time, somebody out there committed suicide. I think this is, in a fictional story, that would be something you would realize very early on had already happened, perhaps more than once, which I’m sure is true, so that you understood this isn’t just about taking this picture down. It’s about taking this person down before they hurt anyone else.

John: Going back to the mother at the center of this, is thinking about her as a character, independent of this event happening, where is she starting from and where is she going to? How is this difficult process leading her to a better place or leading her to what they are, essentially? What is it that she is achieving independent of the outcome?

Craig: That’s a great point. You need there to be something wrong before this picture ever ends up on the internet.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Where I would start probably is relationship with daughter. I think if there is a flaw there, because what happens as a parent is you start to feel responsible for everything your child does, and in a story like this, you want to feel like, if only I had been a better mom, and for somebody to say no, but that there is something that is off in that relationship that her pursuit of justice exacerbates, until finally it is confronted and healed along with taking down a criminal.

John: All right, that’s the first one, and I think that feels like there is a movie to be made here.

Craig: Yes.

John: Someone’s going to write in and say like, oh, this actually did become a movie and we didn’t even know. Probably.

Craig: Oh, sure.

John: All right, next up, this is from another Slate thing, it’s in a Dear Prudence advice column. The title is, “Help. My husband’s manic pixie past has become a full-blown threat to my sanity.”

Craig: Here’s what this woman writes in. “My husband and I have been married for 10 years and generally have a happy marriage. He tells me marrying me was the best thing that ever happened to him, but there’s one thing from his past that is threatening to drive me insane, and it recently got a whole lot worse. I’m still deeply jealous of his feelings for his high school friend, Kate. For lack of a better word, she’s his manic pixie dream girl. We’re all on our 30s, but she still acts about 22,” I love the specificity of that, by the way, “and he’s utterly charmed by her. She lives a few states away, so we only see her about once a year, which is the only thing that keeps me sane. Kate is bright and charming and has about a million friends, so doesn’t have much time for my husband anymore. The second she gives him a crumb of attention, he drops everything.

We recently had a party, and she called him in the middle of it,” I love this part, “drunk and bored. He answered and then abandoned our guests to talk to her for 40 minutes. They never dated, but he had a thing for her all through high school and college. Their dynamic seems to be that he will give her money,” money?, oh, boy, “attention, whatever she wants, and she will give him attention when she feels like it.

Last year, we went on vacation together, and she got trashed and pulled me aside to tell me she was uncomfortable with how often he texts her and some of the things he says to her because she likes me so much, and I deserve better. Then the next day, she didn’t even remember having the conversation. What can I do about this?” Then I’m going to add in parentheses, (What can I do about this unbelievable, messy hurricane of a human being?)

John: What I love about this setup is that it has all the characteristics of romantic comedy, but from the Bill Pullman perspective. Basically, our letter writer is the Bill Pullman in a classic Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

Craig: The Baxter.

John: Yes, The Baxter. I think there’s a really interesting setup here. Obviously, you don’t know any of the specific people in here, but that idea of there is a woman from my husband’s past who, on the surface, is super charming, but I recognize how dangerous she is, and that is a threat. To what degree is she overreacting or underreacting? No one is being evil here. The villainy is just people behaving their own natural way.

Craig: Dangerous women have been a staple of cinema since they invented film, and there’s a good reason for that, because dangerous men have been a staple, dangerous staple. We are fascinated by people who are dangerous. Now, dangerous men tend to be violent. Dangerous women tend to be manipulative and cruel, at least that’s how we portray these things in film.
When it comes to situations like this, everyone goes immediately to being close and fatal attraction. It’s the ultimate, but we all have run into people like this.

John: Oh yes.

Craig: We all know somebody like this.

John: It’s also Jolene. It’s the Dolly Parton song, “Please don’t take my man.”

Craig: Sure.

John: The letter writer is questioning her own relationship, her own value to her husband, and the husband is giving her reason to be suspicious. If you take the sex out of it, if you take the, oh, he’s going to leave his wife for this woman, it’s like the annoying best friend who shows up and takes over everything, that’s annoying, but it’s not a threat to the marriage. It’s the, oh, this woman, if she decided to, could flick her fingers and take it over.

Craig: There’s the modern character of the simp, and the whole concept of simping. This guy’s a simp. He’s simping for this lady. Where this lady gets evil to me is when she gets “drunk,” and then says, “By the way–“ She’s going to play both sides of this marriage, because it seems to me like Kate enjoys chaos. You know like that game show they did on Saturday Night Live, What’s My Name?

John: Oh, it’s so good. Yes.

Craig: Then he goes, “Why do you do this?” He goes, “In a word, chaos.” That’s what some people, and they are fascinating people, they are bright and charming and smart. They don’t wake up in the morning deciding to do evil, this is just how they are. Figuring out how to deal with these destabilizing influences in your life is a challenge.

John: Let’s think about, [crosstalk] if it’s a movie scenario, who is the central character? Is it the letter writer, is it the husband? Is it the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, is it Kate? I can see good arguments for each of them. If it’s the husband, then it feels like, then it’s a rom-com, and he has to decide to leave his wife.

Craig: It is slightly rom-com-y. I could see a movie called The Simp. One of the things that’s interesting about situations like this is that the husband clearly has some stuff that needs fixing also, but it is almost certainly in the realm of self-esteem, some sort of damage.

John: If they’re in their mid-30s, it could be that early midlife crisis. He’s yearning for his youth where this girl was in his life more. There’s that aspect of it.

Craig: It’s possible.

John: He wants to feel handsome and attractive.

Craig: There’s something that Kate does for him that he needs to figure out, because it’s not anything real. People like Kate are drugs. They’re fentanyl. They’re not actually lack of pain. A story about a simp figuring out why he’s simping and losing the people that– That concept and that phenomenon, that’s a great title for a movie, by the way. Somebody should just make The Simp. Right? That’s a pretty good title. [laughs]
I could see people going to see that one. Who do we want in this? It’s got to be somebody younger.

John: It’s not Paul Rudd. It’s somebody younger.

Craig: Way younger, yes. Like?

John: It’s not Jesse Eisenberg.

Craig: No. He’s too old too now. We’re too old to know who it should be.

John: Yes, but it’s that guy.

Craig: It’s that guy.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s that concept.

John: It could be his story. What kind of movie is it, though? Is it a comedy or is it a drama? What does it feel like? If it’s a drama, there’s a Chekhov’s gun there, but it’s not going off yet.

Craig: It’s a comedy, and of course–

John: It’s an act of comedy that we haven’t made.

Craig: Yes, exactly. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable comedy. It’s a cringe comedy. Obviously, the poor woman who’s writing in here is listening to us, perhaps. I doubt it, but she might be going, she didn’t write it to us, she wrote it to, you know, saying like, “No, this is not a comedy, this is my life. I’m crying all the time.” We’re sorry. We’re just trying to make a movie.

I do think that the phenomenon of that will-o’-wisp leading the simp off into– It’s The Sirens, right?

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: It’s a classic. Actually, the whole male simp thing is underexplored, I think, because those are the people we cheer for. Just could you love yourself enough, so that you wouldn’t follow this ding dong? That’s where we’re going.

John: Just to raise the issue, I think it probably is a movie rather than a series because it needs to get resolved, and if it’s not resolved, it’s going to drive you crazy. I could imagine this being an episode of an ongoing series where this central guy and this woman comes back, and that becomes the source of tension within an episode, and you have to close that character off and get rid of her.

Craig: Yes, in the old days of sitcoms, there could absolutely be a character that shows up once a season and everyone’s like, “Uh-oh, here we go again.” She blows into town, makes this one-side character, in the B-story insane and he promises he won’t do it again and then next time he does. I could see that.

John: All right. Third article here. An all-fan remarked about gold bars that secretly recorded upended his life. This is Brent Efron’s boring Tinder date who wanted to hear all about his work at the Environmental Protection Agency, so Mr. Efron talked. If only he’d seen the hidden camera. This is an article by Lisa Friedman writing for the New York Times.

The summary is that this guy is 20s, Brent Efron, goes on a Tinder date with this guy named Brady, who seemed to only want to talk about his job at the EPA. At the time, Trump was on the campaign trail promising to target climate change funding, so EPA was fast-tracking grants. Brent comes up with an analogy that the EPA was a cruise ship that hit an iceberg; they need to launch its lifeboats right away. Then he says, “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

It turns out that Brady was an operative for Project Veritas and was secretly recording the conversation and posted the video online. The political right seizes upon the phrase “gold bars” and uses it to cancel EPA grants by the current administration. Brent lost his job, and as the article is being written, he’s trying to find his footing again.

Craig: I think he quit his job, because the odds of him continuing at the EPA after January 20th were pretty slim. We truly live in the stupidest timeline. This is dumb. Project Veritas, it’s funny, the opposite of Project Veritas is just everything.

[laughter]

Those people, the Trump people, don’t care. They’re like, “Yes, that’s right. I said it. Ha ha ha. LOL.” Then Project Veritas because people on the left, I guess, the concept is that they are more virtuous before they get trapped.

John: The entrapment thing is what’s so pernicious and makes me feel so gross about this.

Craig: Yes, it does.

John: Brent did nothing wrong. It’s that feeling that you cannot trust anybody in any situation. It echoes to me with the first story, in terms of just being fundamentally wrong, the violation that happens, the violation of trust that happens. Even though it is just a blind date, being secretly recorded is so invasive.

Craig: Yes, and of note, this took place in Washington, D.C., which does not have the consent law. You can do a one-party recording, which is creepy. I could see a version here that is also a romantic comedy.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: The romantic comedy here is a guy goes on a date. He’s basically been baited into this by this other guy who’s working for Project Veritas. The problem for the Project Veritas guy is he’s starting to fall in love with him. You have to have it over a couple of dates, but he’s starting to fall in love with him, but he’s already got this footage that is the Project Veritas people have and are going to release.

This gold bar thing, it’s actually the most amazing analogy, in that it’s that blue dress, gold dress thing. If you look at it one way or the other, and obviously we know what he meant. What happens if Brady actually falls in love with Brent? What do you do now, Brady?

John: Is Brady even gay? Was the whole thing I set up from the very start, we don’t even know.

Craig: Oh, in this story? No. In reality? No way, because they also go after Brent for being gay. That’s all lumped into the same. I don’t think Project Veritas employs a lot of people on the LGBTQ spectrum.

John: Open the gay folks.

Craig: Oh, yes. Good point. They don’t employ a lot of open gay folks openly.

John: Openly, it’s a lot of work there.

Craig: Openly.

John: This is reminding me a little bit of Michael Clayton as well, where it’s just like, okay, this is a situation that happened. A question of timeline and what is the span of time of the movie? This is probably the inciting incident, but this could actually be deeper into a thing, and is this once part of a larger crisis? This could be a beat in a larger story rather than the main thing.

Craig: Yes, and one thing about this, and it comes up in the story about revenge porn as well, is it’s hard to dramatize viral moments.

John: It is.

Craig: Because we all experience them privately in our home, looking at our phone for five seconds, laughing about it through text and moving on. These viral moments are so ephemeral, and portraying them can be really sweaty. Anytime a movie’s like, and then it goes viral, just because you said so? No one knows why things go viral.

John: It ends up being a lot of cuts to cuts to. I’m thinking of the Ben Platt musical, Dear Evan Hansen, which has a viral moment that happens, but you get a song underneath that helps show what they build and they grow, and it’s organic, too.

Craig: It works on stage much better than it works on film.

John: It does.

Craig: It’s just the nature of that, because you can use your imagination, theater of the mind from stage, and then in a movie, you’re supposed to see stuff, and suddenly it’s, what else can you do, but cut to a lot of people looking at their phones and extras, like pointing at their phones and saying, “Look, I didn’t even know about this. It couldn’t have been that viral.”

John: I think it’s one of the things that was devastating to this guy and a small space, but also just think about what’s happened in the last six months. You can’t track anything.

Craig: No, but I do feel, on a personal note, very bad for Brent. He seems like such a sweet guy.

John: He seems like a sweet guy, and also, you can’t Google his name without that’s going to come up first.

Craig: In a way, I think he’ll be okay.

John: I think he’ll be fine, too.

Craig: You know what, Brent? I think you’re going to land on your feet, because you didn’t do anything wrong, as he says. You know what? That’s how I know he’s a good guy, because he repeats this theme a few times, like, “I didn’t do anything wrong,” which tells me that he’s been thinking, did I do something wrong? It’s that, I think good people tend to overestimate their own culpability in things, and bad people underestimate it.

John: My takeaway from this is, I think what happens to Brent is potentially a good first 10 pages of something that’s actually not the story at all.

Craig: What it hacks.

John: Yes, it’s a setup, but it’s not the engine of the story.

Craig: It’s not the meat.

John: Finally, let’s talk about the unseen fury of solar storms.

Craig: Boom.

John: This is Henry Wismayer writing for Noema.

Craig: Noema.

John: Noema.

Craig: Yes, that magazine we all read all the time?

John: 100%.

Craig: Great website.

John: Great website, really well done. This is about scientists at the Met’s Space Weather Observation Center who watch sunspots, solar flares, and solar storms, and they’re speculating on what threats space weather could have on our world. Space weather.

Craig: Space weather, somewhere, Roland Emmerich just sat up and went, “Huh?”

John: Yes. I was definitely like, Geostorm. It feels like that.

Craig: That’s very Geostorm, which was Dean Devlin, by the way, not Roland Emmerich.

John: Oh, I’m sorry, but they–

Craig: Roland Emmerich’s producing partner decided, I can also direct, and then Geostorm occurred. Boom. Storm is geo.

John: Yes, in 1861, there was what was called the Carrington Event, which was sightings of the northern lights were reported as far south as El Salvador, just 13 degrees north of the equator. Then, the southern lights, which I wasn’t even sure was a thing, came up all the way to San Diego. What happens is there’s a little flash and then just giant bright lights happening and things that would normally be just in the very poles you’re seeing everywhere.

Craig: It knocked out a lot of telegraph lines, but then weirdly, there were some Morse code telegraphy lines that were powered mysteriously by nothing.

John: Yes.

Craig: The insane amount of electrons and radiation and crap that the sun can barf on us in one of these massive– it’s like a volcano on the sun going off, basically. Back then, knocking out some telegraph lines, must have been very annoying for a day or two. Unfortunately, now, unplugging the world.

John: Essentially, our satellites have very little defense against this kind of stuff. It’s very hard to defend against that stuff in space. On the ground, we can do some stuff just to protect towers and certain things, but it’s expensive. As we’ve learned recently, people, if they have the choice not to spend money to do a thing, they won’t do a thing.

Craig: Even if they do, this is the weak link syndrome. It’s just one section that isn’t working quite right and the whole thing collapses. We would be flattened by one of these things. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. You can turn everything back on, but it’s going to take a bit.

John: It’s going to take a while because stuff burns out.

Craig: Yes, and people will have to walk outside and talk to their neighbors.

John: Obviously, the supernatural or in this case, natural, but a big giant event happens, the world and everything that’s upended is a staple in our big cinematic universes and in our series where things are happening where, in the pilot episode, something big changes and fundamentally society is altered by it. What’s interesting about this is that it’s not a zombie attack. It’s not a plague, and no one is hurt directly by it. Instead, it’s just all of our stuff is messed up for a while and the systems are broken, kind of like systems were broken during the pandemic, which is just we couldn’t do the normal things. Our supply chains get messed up.

Craig: But we could talk to each other.

John: We could talk to each other, which was crucial.

Craig: I’m still marveling at the fact that video conferencing sort of got figured out right when we needed I, which is amazing. There are plenty of movies where things happen and people can’t rely on the normal systems anymore. Typically, those movies portray people as horrible. This article suggests that people would be horrible and that very quickly things would descend into riots and violence.

John: Because we’re used to a very centralized media system where we just return our TV and we get the answers to things.
Craig: The centralized media system is the thing that seems to be causing problems more than ever before. Taking social media out of the equation, the question is, would it actually go well? I would argue that in a lot of places it would go well. That deprived of the ability to feed off of conspiracy theories and nonsense, no, people will not be running outside to shoot each other and take each other’s stuff. They will try and help each other.

That’s not to say that things won’t go wrong in certain places. They would. There would almost certainly be looting. That’s typical, but looting is not shooting people in the head. I guess the question is, how would this be a movie? My instinct would be very small character study of a tiny neighborhood where everybody has to suddenly meet each other for the first time, which would be interesting.

John: There was a movie that I met on over at Paramount. This is 15 years ago. It’s not an active development. It was centered around essentially peak oil, but essentially, if I’m remembering this correctly, and I don’t know if this is part of my picture or part of the underlying IP, was that basically a microbe had gotten out that had basically just ate oil and just destroyed all the oil. Basically, all the gas, all the oil just went away and society falling down around that.

Craig: Saving the planet.

John: Saving the planet, sure. Dead two sides of one coin. It’s just so interesting because 15 years ago, that was really scary. If that happened now, it’s like, yes, it would be bad, but we’re so much better. We just have the technology to deal with this, like how we had Zoom when the pandemic came.

Craig: Yes, there’s a, I wouldn’t call it anywhere like first tier Stephen King novel of his many, many novels, but I did enjoy reading The Dome. I don’t know if you-

John: Oh, Under the Dome, yes.

Craig: Was it called Under the Dome?

John: The CBS edition of it was called Under the Dome. There was a series.

Craig: Oh, they made a series of it? This is Dome-like.

John: A town that gets cut off from everybody else.

Craig: Exactly. That’s what an EMP would do to a small town. Now, in a city like ours, everybody would be talking to everybody, and we would figure stuff out. It would very quickly become who’s on your block, because that’s who you can quickly talk to. If the phones aren’t working and the computers aren’t working, you’re talking to the people you can actually see. That means people near you.

I think a lot of people would probably, like here where we live in our neighborhood, I could imagine in a situation like this, that we all decide, hey, we’re going to all stay in one person’s house for two days and then we’re going to all go to the other person’s house for two days. We just don’t want to be alone. We can be together and play games or whatever, and hope to God the food doesn’t run out. John, you could bring all of your guns.

John: Not having grown up in the South, I was not aware of hurricane parties, but friends were talking about hurricane parties.

Craig: I could see that.

John: Essentially, you know there’s a storm coming, you kind of know we’re going to lose power, but it’s not going to be so bad.

Craig: How would this be a movie? Avoiding the obvious, oh my God, and then someone like, “Well, you’ve got to get to so-and-so to turn the blah, blah.” I don’t think it’s a movie.

John: I think your approach to, this is the excuse for a hangout movie that otherwise wouldn’t happen, a snow day kind of thing, it’s a potential way in. I can see the pilot getting ordered for this as a series and what happens and the collapse of it all. I just don’t think it’s a successful ongoing thing.

Craig: No.

John: I guess wrong about things. There’s always this Netflix series that I can’t believe that anybody watches that, and it’s in its fifth season.

Craig: Who knows if anybody’s watching it, though?

John: They know somebody’s watching it.

Craig: I guess somebody must be watching it. We say this so many times. At this point now, I’ve given up even being ashamed. People are like, “Have you seen so-and-so?” I’m like, “I haven’t even heard of that.” They’re like, “What?” I haven’t heard of it.

John: I was talking to a 21-year-old woman in front of my daughters, and she’s like, “Oh, my dad loves Pretty Little Liars,” which is the most YA thing-

Craig: That’s so crazy.

John: -you obsess with.

Craig: At least I know about it. I know about that. That counts.

John: I know because it’s a good title, and that’s why I know about it.

Craig: It’s like every now and then, I’ll see something of so-and-so renewed for its 19th season. I’m like, “What? What is that?” Happens.

John: Happens. Let’s do a recap of our four movies here. I think we’re saying a Solar Storm’s, unless we want to make Geostorm 2, it’s probably not a big movie. It’s an interesting premise, at least. It’s a kickoff.

Craig: Yes, it could be used as a plot point.

John: Another thing I’ll say is, if you wanted to do a historical thing where we don’t know scientifically what’s actually happening, the fact that we suddenly have Northern Lights everywhere in a older scene would be spooky.

Craig: It would be a cool way if you’re doing– instead of the frogs raining down in Magnolia, the sky explodes.

John: The sky explodes. The Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, so Brian Efron, I think we think that is a setup to a different movie, or it’s a smaller beat in a bigger Michael Clayton-y story.

Craig: Agreed.

John: My husband’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You think there’s a simp movie?

Craig: I think there’s a simp movie. I think there’s a simp romantic comedy. That whole concept of simping, I think, is sad and true, but also funny.

John: Go back 20 years, and you put Seth Rogen as that guy.

Craig: Michael Cera.

John: Yes, totally.

Craig: I’m sure Michael Cera’s like, “Thank you, guys. Thanks. Thank you for putting me right there on the top of your simp list, you jerks.”

John: Finally, Mother’s Revenge, I think we both agree, is the most movie movie in the sense of an Erin Brockovich-y story about this specific thing and what she was able to accomplish against good odds and the fact that there’s a compelling villain figure in it.

Craig: Yes, it’s going to be a Netflix-y kind of thing. It’s going to be a streaming movie. It’s not going into theaters. I can’t imagine.

John: I think you’re right. Cool. Let us go to a listener question.

Craig: All right.

John: This is Brendan, who’s asking, “Way back in Episode 30,” good Lord, “John and Craig discuss emerging technologies like Avid’s ScriptSync and then speculate about when computers can auto-assemble a film and a near future dominated by “screenwriters and teams of robots.” Craig jokingly advocates for scanning actors and making movies “like a factory.” You were joking you were saying?

Craig: I was joking.

John: “Although Craig is obviously riffing here and isn’t serious, it occurred to me how that is now the future we live in. How has your optimism regarding perspective filmmaking technology changed over the course of your careers?”

Craig: So far, so good. Meaning, let’s talk about not perspective. Let’s talk about the things that didn’t exist when we were in Episode 30 that now do exist. So many of them are so great. We’ve talked about lots of them on the show. There have been tremendous advances in all sorts of things, the fact that we don’t need to use film anymore and things still look beautiful.

John: We still have the choice to use film, but–

Craig: Some people can choose to use it. There’s great arguments as to why it’s fully unnecessary, but–

John: You don’t need to email us.

Craig: Yes, don’t email us, Christopher Nolan. We get it. We know. All those wonderful things that we can now do in editorial, things that streamline stuff. There are also things that are frustratingly still stuck in 1990s. A lot of screenwriting software. The stupid schedule we get that the ADs use is still horrible. There are a lot of funky things that we’re still dealing with.

John: I think we recognize that. We still recognize that it’s because institutionalized systems are hard to change because everyone is used to a thing. Because of the weird freelance way we work, it helps to have standards, but those standards are holding us back.

Craig: It’s not exactly a massive marketplace for people to want to innovate in because it’s for 1,000 people and not 10 million. Perspective filmmaking technology is horrifying. Here’s the thing. I choose to not be horrified. I don’t like it. I see what’s going on out there. The question is, really, is that stuff a strange dead end unto itself? Is it actually going to do these wonderful things that people say? I think it’s not. I’m just going to– if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Surely I will be assassinated by AI for this, but it feels to me like it is an increasingly elaborate dead end of stuff. It’s like every time I see, it’s like, “Look what it can do now.” I’m just like, “Yes, but I don’t like that.”

I’m not optimistic at all. I don’t think things are going well I think in part because all the attention and all the money is fixated now on AI and not on things that might actually make our lives easier as human beings.

John: Yes, I would say I’m not as optimistic as I was before. I also want to put things in context of where I think I was at in Episode 30. I went to see 28 Years Later, which I liked a lot. It took me back to 28 Days Later, which was shot on DV. It was like it looked so messy, but it was like that was the aesthetic it was going for. They had that choice to do it. It didn’t mean that all movies suddenly got shot on DV. It was a unique one-time thing. This time they were shooting on iPhones. It was a deliberate choice to do those things.

I think to where I still have optimism is that I think we as filmmakers and as companies that make films still have a choice about what it is that we want to do, and what technologies we’re going to use, and what technologies we’re not going to use. We can recognize what we’re giving up by swapping in technologies that are “good enough.”

I had a conversation this past week about a potentially very expensive tentpole movie. The producer’s like, “If we wait a year, I think some of those VFXs are going to be less expensive to do. I had to say, that’s probably true. That’s probably some of the things that would have cost $10 million, might cost $7 million or $5 million with time. That I can see. I’m torn based on what I feel because I don’t want to spend $200 million on visual effects. I just don’t think that’s a great use of money and time. We can make more movies. I’m recognizing that money spent on visual effects is largely being spent to pay people to do visual effects.

Craig: I think that depending on the visual effects you’re doing, it can really go directly to people when you’re dealing with smaller visual effects houses as opposed to some of the large ones, which overhead and all the rest of it, those are big businesses. Yes, it’s true. There are things that are happening in the visual effects space that will be invisible to us. We won’t know why some things are happening faster and better. The answer will almost certainly be AI because those things are probably quite rote.

John: We didn’t talk about it on the podcast, but maybe it was two years ago now, science fiction film, The Creator, visually gorgeous, but also cost so much less than anything it costs because the director had a sense of how to do things on a budget in ways that were smart. No one’s knocking spending less money on a movie, but it becomes a question of AT what point are we making a movie or not making a movie based on a budget, which we know is the deciding factor so much of the time.

Craig: I guess the long and short of it is, here we are at– what episode are we on?

John: This is Episode 697.

Craig: 697. We’re in Episode 697. 667 episodes later, we definitely scan actors. That’s something we do, but we do not make movies or [unintelligible 00:48:07] the show like a factory.

John: [inaudible 00:48:08] yes.

Craig: In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is as painstaking and laborious as it has ever been. Maybe even more so because the audience has come to expect a certain scale for so many things. If you’re aiming for that quality segment, oh man, it’s expensive. It is exhausting. We’re not quite– yes, I’m not very optimistic that it’s going to get easier.

John: One of the things that has changed if you talk about scanning actors is, yes, we started scanning actors, and the actors unions pushed back against it. There are now more rules about what you can scan, when you can scan, and how you can use it, which feels appropriate.

Craig: The way we have scanned actors was already in line with what SAG wanted and got, which is we scan an actor for this show. We don’t use it for anything else. We really just use it if we need like, “Okay, in this shot, we’re going to change your face because you’re on fire.” Then we have it, but we don’t scan actors so that we can replace actors. I don’t know anybody that is.

John: I think the times we have heard those issues being raised where an actor will argue like, “I was not in that episode, but my face, it has me saying something.”

Craig: That would be bad.

John: It would be bad. I think we need to raise a stink when that happens.

Craig: I do acknowledge that Hollywood is full of jerks. Then there’s para-Hollywood, which is the worst place of off-Hollywood Hollywood where there are no scruples. There are absolutely people right now who are the same schlockmeisters that always existed, who used to say, “You don’t have to worry about safety. Just throw them in the car and light it on fire.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Right? Those guys are like, “We don’t need to get it. Just get me an AI thing that sounds like them, and it’s good enough.” We’re going to have to be dealing with cockroaches forever. We always have, we always will.

John: To the degree I’m optimistic, I feel like we will acknowledge and wrestle with these situations as they come up and we’ll set some standards or practices around them. Sometimes it’ll be comfortable, sometimes it’s really, really uncomfortable, but we can’t pretend they’re just not going to happen.

Craig: No. Ultimately, there will become some sort of understanding of how to ethically employ AI within the human artistic pursuit. Right now, no one knows what the hell that would be. No one. Everyone is either guessing, or is terrified, or is way too excited.

John: That’s why I think we need to have smart people who are actually working in those fields right now having the conversations about what it is because otherwise, it’s going to be made by businessmen.

Craig: It’s ultimately businessmen that will– if we have a prayer, it’s going to be because the businessmen align themselves with us because AI is attempting to eat everyone’s lunch. I don’t know why Hollywood continues to miss this simple fact. The technology industry despises ownership of information. They hate it. They hate ownership of information. They hate ownership of content. It disgusts them. What they love is being the people you pay to go get everything. They don’t want you as a– you write a song, they don’t want you to own that song. They want somebody to pay them to play that song for them. That’s what technology wants, and they will forever undermine the basis of what makes Hollywood tick, which is ownership of artistic expression.

John: All right. Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a piece of technology that is in front of Craig right now. It is called TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL?

John: It is this very minimalist e-ink display. You buy it off of usetrmnl.com, and you can set up for what things you want it to display. It’s just a simple website, and you can have it display the weather. I have right now displaying how many days until the Scriptnotes book comes out.

Craig: 136.

John: As we’re recording this. You can set up your little dashboards. It’s fun for nerdy gadgeteers like me. It’s just like a very good version of something that I just wanted and the fact that someone made it was great.

Craig: It can display anything?

John: Anything.

Craig: It looks like it’s a nice little side thing for D&D.

John: Totally. It switches between screens, but it updates itself once every 15 minutes. The reason why it does it so slowly is because it goes for six months on a charge.

Craig: I’m thinking, you know how for some players, their action economy, how they’re supposed to do and the things that they can do, they forget. Especially as you level up, it gets more and more– to have a flowchart-

John: Oh, totally.

Craig: -would be very cool to have. I just want everything to be about D&D, but it’s like this thing’s adorable. I love that it’s called TRMNL with no vowels. It’s TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL.

John: If you are curious about a little device, so it has a stand, but you can also hang it on a wall.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: Let’s take a look. I think that was–

Craig: TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: It looks like the kind of device that wants to make you happy like in the Toy Story world. It’s really sweet.

John: The version you’re seeing, it’s $139. They come in different colors. There’s a limited edition, which is $154. I got the developer one, which is a little bit more expensive, so I can program my own dashboards.

Craig: Developers. Developers.

John: Developers. Developers. I like it. It’s not going to change my world, but I do like it.

Craig: I love that. We should throw on a link to Steve Ballmer doing the developers, developers, developers speech just because–

John: It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s the greatest thing of all time.

John: It’s an early nerdy meme. I just love it.

Craig: It’s just insane. It’s wonderful. My one cool thing this week, you want to talk about nerdiness?

John: Please.

Craig: John, I’ve gone back in time approximately almost 20 years back in time with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

John: I remember playing Elder Scrolls way back in the day. Talk me through which one this is so that I don’t get confused.

Craig: Elder Scrolls IV is the one before Skyrim.

John: Okay.

Craig: This is back when they made these games not once every 30 years. Skyrim came out in 2011.

John: I think that was maybe, actually, the first Elder Scrolls I played.

Craig: Okay, yes. That was the first a lot of people played. That’s 14 years ago. We still haven’t seen six. They’ve said maybe there will be one and no one knows what’s going on with it. I think maybe I want to say four years prior to that Elder Scrolls IV came out. If you didn’t play it, it was excellent.

It was the first Elder Scrolls I played. I didn’t play Morrowind. I hadn’t played the prior ones. I didn’t know anything about that world. I think it was the first Bethesda game I played. It’s outstanding.

They’ve done that remaster thing, which they’re remastering stuff from 2013 now. I’m like, go back to the 2000 and aughts. What I love about the way they did it is they didn’t remaster it so it doesn’t look like– it’s still those janky faces. It’s like that weird– but it just still looks really good. I’m playing it on the Steam Deck, and I’m having a blast. Because it’s been– what year did Oblivion come out? 2006. Just shy of 20 years. I don’t remember anything from 20 years ago. This is awesome, but–

John: The fact that you can play it on a handheld device now too is great.

Craig: It’s so cool.My daughter was just four, and she would sit on the couch and watch me play Oblivion. We have these great memories of her getting so excited when there would be trouble. I’d say, “Oh, the music’s changing. There’s going to be trouble.” Then she was like, “Find trouble, find trouble.” It was just a great game. John, do you play the Bethesda games?

John: I played Skyrim and Fallout a lot, yes. Most of them have a very similar mechanic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’ve complained about that that they’re a little too similar.

Craig: Starfield is where you start to feel, A, it’s really getting old. No people when you talk to them should not look directly into the lens of the camera. That’s insane. B, compared to Oblivion, which is essentially 20 years old, Starfield is empty. It is devoid. Oblivion is packed with so many people, and so many stories, and so many places to go and things to see. When you go into a town, there’s, I don’t know, 18 houses in one district that you can knock on a door and talk to people. Starfield is like five people live in this city. I don’t know what’s going on, but I would urge Bethesda, look back, look back to your roots. I’m having an absolute blast.

John: That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. On top of your games. Birdigo, which is the game that I made with Corey Martin, which is a cross between Wordle and Balatro, is going to be out this week. If you are listening to this episode as it comes out, take a look for that on Steam as well. You can put that on your Steam deck.

Craig: You guys are pumping stuff out left and right.

John: Yes, more stuff coming.

Craig: Factory.

John: Nothing could top the Scriptnotes book, which is available for pre-order.

Craig: Nothing today? Today.

John: Today.

Craig: It’s happening right now. People, it’s happening.

John: Adam– I’m going through the– Boilerplate, people can just pull up on their phone right now scriptnotesbook.com and pre-order the book.

Craig: Just-

John: You can pre-order it from-

Craig: -pre-order?

John: -your local bookstore through bookshop.org or through one of the big services, whatever you want to do.

Craig: We’re not going to judge you.

John: Do what you want to do.

Craig: Do what you want to do.

John: Do you. If you live in the Los Angeles region, we are planning to do live shows for the book on the week it comes out. Just still pre-order it. If there’s an extra book you get there, you can give away one of your copies of your book.

Craig: Listen, if you get eight or nine of these, then just think of everywhere you go, just hand a book out to someone.

John: Do you have more than one bathroom?

Craig: Yes. It’s a great way to tip people.

John: Absolutely. Not to replace– give them money– Then, also–

Craig: -then also be [unintelligible 00:58:08] here.

John: Yes, absolutely. Listen, I know you are a waiter. I know you are a valet, but you’re also probably a screenwriter. Here’s a book for you.

Craig: Great job.

John: Great job.

Craig: It’s a great way to get punched in the face.

[laughter]

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where we 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’ll 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 us at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes with all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes all the way back to Episode 6. What did I reference?

Craig: 30.

John: 30, yes. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on kindness, scriptnotesbook.com. Order your book and send Drew at ask@johnaugust.com the receipt from that, and we’re going to send you something. I don’t know what that’s going to be yet, but it’s going to be fun.

Craig: Amazing.

John: Craig, thanks for a good show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, I want to talk about kindness.

Craig: Shut up, John.

John: It could have been from, Into the Woods. I think I may have heard that [unintelligible 00:59:34] recently like, “You’re so nice. You’re not good. You’re not bad. You’re just nice.”

Craig: “You’re not bad. You’re just nice.” It’s one of my favorite lyrics.

John: It’s so good. He’s a very nice prince, and he’s nice.

Craig: It’s the last midnight.

John: Yes, so good. Kindness is not niceness, and it’s also not politeness. I just wanted to separate that out both in terms of the real world, but also how we’re thinking about our characters. I think so often we have characters who we think about as being good, but what is it that they’re doing good? Do they have a good nature? Are they friendly? Are they helpful? Is their niceness transactional? I think kindness has a non-transactional quality to it that I think is a crucial distinction.

Craig: Yes, nice almost implies not nice. It’s absence of trouble. “Oh, you’re nice.” Kind does imply deeds.

John: It implies action for sure. It’s not just a good spirit. It’s not pity, because pity can make you feel condescending. Kindness is not pity. It can be related to love, but you can be kind to somebody you don’t love. You can be kind to somebody you despise.

Craig: Nice is seeing somebody crying and saying, “Hey, are you all right?” and they’re like, “Yes, no, I’m fine. I’m fine.” You’re like, “Okay, just checking on you.” Kind is sitting down with them and going, “How can I help? Is there a way for me to help?”

John: Exactly. Compassion would also be recognizing someone else’s pain, but not doing anything about it.

Craig: Kindness implies an attempt to connection, going out of your way. Nice people can ignore trouble. That doesn’t make them not nice. It just means that they’re not bad.

John: There is a CS Lewis quote talking about how your goal is not just that someone is happy, but they’re better on a deeper level. There’s comforting, but that comforting isn’t necessarily kindness. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. There is an aspect of that that is actually a little bit true that you have to speak to the actual truth of things and not just paper stuff over.

Craig: Then think of the great Tennessee Williams line, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” meaning the things they give me, the way they take care of me. It’s an interesting thing to think about is, characters who are kind oftentimes feel they don’t have main character energy-

John: Yes, I think you’re right.

Craig: -because they’re mentors, they’re the neighbor, they’re grandma, priest, buddy.

John: To some degree is that because I think of kind people as having completed an arc or being a little self-actualized. I think there’s something about that feels a little complete about a kind character and they have to learn to do that. There’s situations where I’m thinking of Cinderella who is kind, but she’s also— she starts the story just really weak and disempowered.

Craig: Cinderella is not a good character. Cinderella’s character is victim. That’s it. She’s a perfect person who is kind to the animals. She is a victim of mean people. Then a fairy godmother just goes, “Boop, boop. Have a great night.” She’s like, “Okay.” Then the prince is like, “Love you.” Then she wins.

John: There’s no great arc. There’s no–

Craig: No, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a fairy tale designed to punish the wicked as many of them are. There are morality plays as and apparently stepmothers were a huge problem in like 1500s Germany.

John: I’m not trying to steel-man stepmothers [unintelligible 01:03:24] some other issue, but I think they were actually much more common back in the day of when women died in childbirth all the time.

Craig: Sure, but why were they so mean?

John: On some genetic level, isn’t it the right choice to push aside your husband’s previous children so that he will spend his time and energy on your children? That’s a Hansel and Gretel.

Craig: It must’ve happened quite frequently, or it just happened to the Brothers Grimm.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: They just had a horrible stepmom and they were like, “Well, what should the villain be this time? Can we do stepmom again?”

John: Yes. I think we can do a little twist on it.

Craig: I don’t think we’re done with that.

John: Take her to a witch at a candy house.

Craig: Yes, let’s do that. That’ll be great. What about in this situation? Also stepmom. The problem with the archetype characters like Cinderella is they’re pointlessly kind to the extent that we don’t really care. We’re looking for main characters who are kind, who are almost punished for it in a way. Not that they started victims. They help someone. I’ve seen this in comedies. You help somebody and then you can’t get rid of them. Now what do you do? It’s that kind of thing.

John: Yes, it is. It is that kind of thing. I wonder how kind end up being both-

Craig: Sort.

John: Sort-

Craig: Type and-

John: -and characteristic. The etymology of that, that’s probably fascinating, but–

Craig: Yes, let’s look it up.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go. There’s only one way to find out. Before the 12th century, it just all comes from middle English kinda from old English kind, akin to old English kin. Oh, okay.

John: Oh, so it’s coming from kin. Okay, great.

Craig: It’s like how you would treat kin in this kind way. You would treat them like family and also it’s family. It’s of a sort. That actually makes a ton of sense.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I like the idea of kindness as treating someone not family-

John: As family.

Craig: -as family, as kin.

John: Absolutely. It’s recognizing the shared experience of this and being able to put yourself— It’s beyond empathy, because empathy, again, is just compassion, seeing a thing but actually not doing a thing.

Craig: This is more like I’m forging a connection with you that I don’t need to, but I will.

John: Altruism, I think, is just more of a platonic idea. It’s a general approach to things, but it’s not specific to it.

Craig: This is why etymology is great.

John: I think it is actually a good example. It’s like, “Oh yes, that’s right.”

Craig: This is why you look things up.

John: Yes, look things up. That’s a lesson we’ve learned after–

Craig: Way to go, [unintelligible 01:05:57]?

John: After 679 episodes. We could just wonder about it, or we could just look them up.

Craig: We’re at 697. What happens at 700?

John: We haven’t–

Craig: Does the ball drop? What happens?

John: We haven’t discussed what should happen. I don’t know. It’s three weeks away.

Craig: Oh my God, this is a lot of pressure.

John: It’s a lot of pressure.

Craig: Although it’s a weird. 750 is a number, right?

John: 750 is a bigger number than 700.

Craig: 750 is insane.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s a real number.

John: We’ve got a year to worry about that.

Craig: That’s DCCL. That’s exciting.

John: I’m impressed that you were able to pull that off in your head, Roman numerals.

Craig: Standard puzzling thing. Oh, that’s right. You’ve got to know Roman numerals. Got to know them.

John: All right.

Craig: John, I’d like to thank you for being kind.

John: Craig, I’d like to thank you for being kind as well.

Link:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes book!
• Send your pre-order receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com
• A Mother’s Revenge as told to Christina Cauterucci for SLATE
• Charlotte Laws’ fight with Hunter Moore, the internet’s revenge porn king by Carole Cadwalladr for The Guardian
• Help! My Husband’s Manic Pixie Past Has Become a Full-Blown Threat to My Sanity, Dear Prudence column for SLATE
• SNL’s What’s That Name
• An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life by Lisa Friedman for NYTimes
• The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms by Henry Wismayer for Noema
• TRMNL
• Steve Ballmer: Developers
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky 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.