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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to episode 692 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a villains compendium. Producer Drew Marquardt has selected four segments from previous shows where we celebrate the bad guys. Drew, tell us what we’re going to hear today.

Drew Marquardt: Ooh, so we are going to start with episode 75 and get like a villains 101, how our bad guys operate in a story. Then we’re going to go to episode 590, which is anti-
villains, understanding your villain’s motivation with a dozen examples of famous villains and what makes them tick.

I will say here, when we talk about Annie Wilkes, John, you mentioned that you– you said something like, “I don’t know if she would have been a bad guy if she hadn’t found the car in the snow.” We later found out that, yes, it’s established that she murdered babies, I think, before that.

John: Yes, in her past life as a nurse.

Drew: Yes. We don’t need to do any follow-up on that.

John: Don’t write in again. Please don’t.

Drew: Then we’ll go to episode 465 about lackeys and henchmen and making sure that your evil organizations are believable. Then we’ll finish up with episode 257 with our seven tips for unforgettable villains.

John: Oh, Drew, these all sound great.

Drew: I’m excited.

John: Thank you for reaching back to the catalog, finding these segments and putting them together in a new form.

Drew: Yes, of course.

John: Then in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about monsters. Craig will be back here to talk about monsters.

Drew: Before we get into all that, we have a little bit of news because your new project was announced.

John: Yes, I’m very excited. I’m writing a new animated feature for LAIKA, the stop-motion folks who did Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. There are also folks there who I met who worked on Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie with me, so it feels like a big reunion. This new movie is directed by Pete Candleland, who is a animation genius. I’m so excited to be working on this.

Drew: I’m so excited to be able to finally talk about this [chuckles] because I’ve known about it for months. It’s a really exciting project.

John: Yes, it’s going to be great to write, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also really excited that this is the first animated movie I’ve written under a WGA contract. I have credit protections, pension and health, residuals, the whole thing, which is obviously a huge frustration with animation writing, that it’s not default covered by the WGA. LAIKA stepped up and made this a WGA deal.

Drew: You’ve been fighting for this for a long time.

John: I have. This is the fifth animated feature I’ve done, and none of those other ones, could I get WGA coverage on. I’m so excited to be writing this one under this coverage. Listen, I’m excited to be writing this movie, but it’s great to see companies stepping up and making WGA deals. It’s great that LAIKA did, and I hope other companies will follow their lead because there’s great animation writing that is not happening, I think, because many writers just won’t take this non-WGA deals.

Make WGA deals, and you’re going to get some great writers doing that. Animation writing is so valuable, so essential that it’s time that it’s treated like the hard work it is.

Drew: The doors open now.

John: Yes. Now let’s get started with our villains. Enjoy this compendium episode of our greatest villain segments.

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John: One of the things that came up in shows, and it’s also come up with this other project that I’ve been working on this last week, is the idea of who the villains are and what the villain’s goal is. I thought that would be something we could dig into this week, because many properties are going to have some villain. There’s going to be somebody else who has a different agenda than our hero, and our hero and that villain are going to come to terms with each other over the course of the story.

What happened in the discussion on this other project, they kept coming back to me with questions about the villain, what the villain’s story was, and what the villain’s motivation was. It became clear that eventually, they were really seeing this as a villain-driven story rather than a hero-driven story. I want to talk through those dynamics as well.

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: Craig, who are the villains you think of when you think of movie villains? Who are the big ones?

Craig: Immediately one’s mind goes to the broadest, most obvious black hat villains like Darth Vader and Buffalo Bill, people like that.

John: Especially if you say Buffalo Bill, it’s like Buffalo Bill versus Hannibal Lecter.

Craig: No, Hannibal Lecter’s not a villain.

John: I think that’s an important distinction I want to get into that as well. When you think about villains, you need to really talk about what kinds of genres can support a villain that is actually a driving force villain. Identity Thief has bad guys, clearly. I’ve seen them in the trailer, but do they have their own agenda that would be supported by a villain?

Craig: No, they don’t. That’s the part of the movie that I think least reflects what my initial intention was. To me, those villains really are obstacles. To me, the villain in the movie is Melissa McCarthy, but she’s an interesting villain that you overcome and find your way to love. She’s the villain.

John: Yes, she’s the villain. She’s the antagonist.

Craig: Right, thematically, she’s the villain.

John: Yes. I think I want to make that distinction that almost all movies are going to have a protagonist and antagonist structure. You have a protagonist who’s generally your hero who’s the person who changes over the course of the movie. You’re going to have an antagonist who’s the person who is standing in opposition to the protagonist and is causing the change to happen. Sometimes, just based on the trailer, you can see there’s two people in the movie. They’re going to be those two people generally.

A villain is a different situation. A villain is somebody who wants to do something specific that is generally bad for the world or bad for other people in the world. If we talk about general categories of what villains could be, there’s the villains who want to control things, who want to run things. You have your Voldemorts, your Darth Vaders, your General Zods. I’d say Hal from 2001 is that controlling villain, where it has this order that he wants to impose on things. If you don’t obey that, you’re going to suffer for it.

Craig: Right.

John: You have your revenge villains. You have Kahn, you have De Niro in Cape Fear. I’d argue the witch is basically– the witch in The Wizard of Oz is really a revenge villain. If you think about it, this outsider killed her sister and stole her shoes and she wants revenge.

Craig: She wants revenge. She also falls into the power hungry model also. Dual villain motivation.

John: She does. I think the power hungriness is something we put on the movie after the fact. If you actually looked at what she’s trying to do in the course of it, she doesn’t have this big plan for Oz that we see in the course of this movie.

Craig: Right. You’re right. No, basically, “You killed my sister and I’m going to get you. And your little dog too.

John: Your little dog too. Speaking of animal suffering, we have Glenn Close, who’s the great villain in Fatal Attraction, who wants revenge. it’s basically, “How dare you jilt me and this is what I’m going to do to show you.”

Craig: Yes.

John: Then there’s the simpler, just, this villain wants something and it’s trying to take something. You have Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Craig: Right.

John: What I love about Hans Gruber is, Hans Gruber probably sees himself as, he’s Ocean’s 11. He probably sees himself as like, “We’re pulling off this amazing heist.” It would have been an amazing heist if not for John McClane getting in the way.

Craig: Right.

John: You have Salieri in Amadeus. Salieri is like, he has envy. He wants that thing that Mozart has. You have Gollum who wants the ring. Those are really such simple motivations.

Craig: Right.

John: The last villain I would classify as insatiability. These are the really scary ones who like, they’re just going to keep going no matter what. The Terminator. Unstoppable. Anton Chigurgh from No Country for Old Men. He scares me more than probably anything else I’ve seen on screen.

Craig: Yes. They embody the same thing that attracts us to zombies as a personality-less villain. That is inevitability. They basically represent time.

John: They represent time and death.

Craig: Mortality, exactly.

John: Yes. He will not be able to escape them. Freddy Krueger is that too. Michael Myers is he’s the zombie slasher person.

Craig: Freddy Krueger actually I think is really revenge.

John: Oh yes. That’s a very good point. His underlying motivation for why he hates– why he wants to kill all the people he’s going to kill, it’s a revenge by proxy. One of the challenges with screenwriting I’ve found is that you’re trying to balance these two conflicting things. You want your hero to be driving the story and yet you also want to create a great villain, and that villain wants to control the story as well. Finding that sweet spot between the two is often really hard.

This project that I was out pitching this last week, I pitched it as very much a quest movie and like, here’s our group of heroes and this is what they’re trying to do and these are the obstacles along the way, and this is the villain, all the questions came back to the villain. The questions were natural, fair questions asked which I hadn’t done a good enough job explaining and describing was, what is the villain’s overall motivation? What is the villain trying to do?

Because we had just done the Raiders podcast, I kept coming back to like, well, in Raiders, what is the villain trying to do? Help me through that.

Craig: He’s trying to do the exact same thing that the hero’s trying to do, which is interesting. He just has far less moral compunction. I guess really the point there is that what the hero was trying to do initially wasn’t what he should be doing. You can see that change occurs. This is how I tend to think of really good villains. What they want, it’s a good topic because I think there’s a very common screenwriting mistake and it’s understandable.

You have a character, you’re a protagonist and you have perhaps his flaw and you have the way he’s going to change. Then you think, “We need a villain.” You come up with an interesting villain. The problem is, the villain’s motivation and the villain’s, villainy, has to exist specifically to fit into the space of your main character, of your protagonist. They are the villain because they represent the thing that the main character is main character is most afraid of or is most alike and needs to destroy within himself. If you don’t, if you don’t match these things together dramatically, then you just have a kooky villain in a story with your character.

John: Yes. The challenge to also keep in mind is that you want a villain who fits in the right scale for what the rest of your story is. You want somebody who feels like the things that they’re after are reasonable for what the nature of your story is. Let’s go back to Raiders. You can say Belloq is the villain and Belloq wants the same thing that Indi wants, he wants the Ark of the Covenant. Belloq is actually an employee. He’s really working for the Nazis.

What I felt, this pitch, last week, people kept asking me for like– it was also a quest movie. You could think of it like Raiders in the sense that it’s a quest, you’re after this one thing. They kept pushing me for more information about like, “Basically, who are the Nazis and what is their agenda?” You can’t really stick that onto Raiders of the Lost Ark. I guess with Raiders of the Lost Ark, we know what the Nazis are and you can shorthand them for evil. You can’t literally stick Hitler there at the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. That wouldn’t make sense. It’s the wrong thing.

Craig: It would be bizarre.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: In that movie, they very smartly said, “We’re going to have a character who is obsessed with objects and needs to become more interested in humanity. Let’s make our villain just like him. Except that guy won’t change at all.” We watch our hero begin to diverge from the villain. That’s exciting. That’s smart. I have to say that there’s a trend towards this. You can find villains like this throughout film history. However, even in broader genres, like for instance, superhero films, or even James Bond movies, there was a time when you could just put a kooky villain in because they were interesting.

There is nothing thematically relevant about Jaws, for instance, from the Spy Who Loved Me. There’s nothing particularly relevant even about Blofeld. They’re mustache twirling villains. When you, sometimes people look at This Note, this villain is too much of a mustache twirler, meaning he’s just evil because he’s evil, ‘ha, ha, ha’. If you look at Batman, the Batman villains were very typically just kooky. They were nuts. The Riddler is a villain because he’s insane.

He’s so insane that he spends all of his time crafting bizarro riddles just because he’s criminally insane. What’s happened is, for instance, take Skyfall– and whatever people’s beefs are with Skyfall, I think, honestly, one of the reasons the movie has done better than any Bond movie before it, in terms of reaching an audience, is because the villain was matched thematically to the hero. The hero was aging, and he is concerned that he is no longer capable to do his job.

Along comes a villain who is aging, who used to do his job and was thrown away. All the internal conflict and sense of divided loyalty that our hero has is brought to bear by the villain. Suddenly things begin to suggest themselves. Maybe the opening sequence should be one in which the hero’s life is tossed aside by the person he trusts. Then he meets a villain whose life was tossed aside by the same person. They just take different paths to resolution.

Look at the Nolan movies, I think very notably have taken Batman villains out of the realm of broad and silly and thematically match them specifically to Batman. The first one, you have Scarecrow, right on target. Batman is a hero born out of fear, and your villain is a master of fear.

John: Yes. Fear personified.

Craig: Yes. It’s a trend. It’s a trend to do it more and more. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. Frankly, I think it makes for better stories.

John: What I would point out the challenge is, you can go too far. I think the second Batman movie in which we have the Joker, who is phenomenal and we love it, we love every moment of it. In the third Batman movie, I became frustrated by villain soup. I didn’t feel like there was a great opportunity for a Batman story because we just basically follow the villains through a lot of our time on screen.

It’s also dangerous because it raises the expectation that, the villain has to be this big, giant, magnetic character. If that villain is driving your story, then your hero is going to have a harder time driving the story. What it comes down to is, movies can only start once. A movie can start because the hero does something that starts the engine of the film. It can start because the villain does something that starts the engine of the movie.

In many movies with a villain, the villain is really starting things. Even Jaws, the shark attacks. The shark is the problem. The shark happens first. It’s not that you can envision a scenario in which a scientist went and found the shark and tracked it down and it became the start of things. No, the shark happens first. Where I ran into this, both with the TV show and with this other project we’re pitching, is this fascination of who the villain is and what the villain’s motivation is.

It’s good to ask those questions, but in trying to dramatize those questions on screen, you’re probably going to be taking time away from your hero, and your hero should be the most interesting person on screen.

Craig: Yes. I just don’t know enough about TV to– I watch TV, but I don’t watch it the way that I watch movies. I don’t think about it the way I think about movies. Certainly, if you have a very oppositional show where it really is about one person versus another, they both, ultimately, will occupy a lot of screen time, I suppose. That’s why I think it’s pretty smart what they do in Dexter, for instance. Every season there is one new arch villain who thematically tweaks at some part of Dexter. When that season’s over, they’re gone because they’re dead

John: Yes. Did you watch Lost– you probably watched Lost.

Craig: I didn’t. My wife watched it, and I should say on behalf of our friend, Damon Lindelof, my wife loved the final episode and cried copiously, I don’t know anything about it. [chuckles] I know that there’s an island and a smoke monster, and in the end, they were in a church.

John: The point I was going to make about Lost, which I could also make about Alias or many other shows that have elaborate villain mythologies, is that while it became incredibly rewarding that you did know what the villains were and why the villains were doing the things they were doing, if you had known that information from the start of the project, if you’d known what the villain’s whole deal was at the very start, it wouldn’t have been nearly so interesting, or, you would have spent so much time at the start explaining what the villain’s motivation was that you would have been able to kickstart the hero’s story.

I guess I’m just making a pitch for there can be a good because for understanding what the whole scope of the villain is, but you have to realize in the two hours or the one hour or the amount of time that you have allotted, how are you going to get the best version of the hero’s story to happen and service the villain that needs to be serviced?

Craig: Yes. I tend to think about these things in a somewhat odd dichotomy. Forgive me if this sounds bizarre, but hero-villain relationships are either religious or atheistic in nature, meaning this, the case where there’s a villain who is doing an evil thing and there is a hero who is trying to stop them, is basically religious in nature. It’s a morality play and good tends to win, obviously, in those morality plays. In fact, the satisfaction of the morality play is that good does triumph against seemingly impossible odds.

We want to believe that about the world that we live in, that even though, oftentimes, it is the evil who are strong and the good who are weak, good still triumphs. There’s a religious nature to that struggle. There are also an atheistic type of stories, actually A-religious type of stories, because they’re not making a point about the existence of God, but rather they are saying the drama that exists between the hero and the villain is one of absurd dread, the existential nausea.

For instance, the classic PBS series, The Prisoner, where the nature of evil is Kafkaesque. It was uncaring. It was inexplicable. It would simply emerge out of the ocean like a bubble or oppress you by simply being a disembodied voice. Essentially, it was, again, that unquantifiable dread of mortality and death. That will color, if you’re trying to tell a story that is seeped in existential dread, don’t over-explain your villains, because the point is, there is no explanation. It’s absurd, as absurd as existence is, which is scary in and of itself.

John: Yes. I think the root of all slasher films, Terminator is an extension, a smarter extension of a slasher film, but it’s that wave is coming for you and you will not be able to get away from it. The zombie movies work in the same situation too. It’s not one zombie that you’re afraid of, it’s the fact that all the zombies are always going to be out there and the world is always a very dangerous place.

Craig: Yes. Zombies don’t have– zombies aren’t even evil. They’re like the shark, basically, they just eat. You can’t stop them. That’s why, by the way, so many zombie movies end on a downer note. They don’t make it, heroes just don’t make it. You can’t beat zombies.

John: What I would say, though, is if you look at, regardless of which class class of villain you’re facing, you’re going to have to make some decisions about perspective and point of view. To what degree are we sticking with the hero’s point of view and that we’re learning about the villain through the hero, and to what degree do we as the audience get to see things the hero doesn’t know from the villain’s point of view and from the villain’s perspective?

Making those decisions, it’s a very early part of the process, is how much are we going to stay in point of view of our hero and to what degree are we going to go see other stuff? In Die Hard, we stay with John McClane through a lot of it, but eventually we do get to see stuff from [unintelligible 00:20:33] point of view, and we see what he’s really trying to do. With slasher movies, we tend to stay with our hero’s point of view for most of the time because it’s actually much more frightening to not know where the bad guy is and what the bad guy’s trying to do.

If you have a villain who’s smart, if you have a Joker, at some point you will want to see them explain themselves and have that moment at which they can talk about what it is they’re trying to do. Ideally you’d love for them to be able to communicate that mission and that goal to the protagonist.
That’s often very challenging to do. In Silence of the Lambs, to the degree that Hannibal Lecter is a villain, Hannibal Lecter is a person you fear in the movie, he’s in jail, so he can talk to her through the bars and we know that she’s safe and it’s reasonable for her to be in that situation and not be killed.

When we talked about Raiders, Belloq and Indy had that conversation at the bar and he’s able to get out of this, but Belloq is at least able to explain himself. If you can find those moments to allow those two sides to confront each other without killing each other before the end of the story, you’re often better off.

Craig: Yes, you need some sense of rationality. It is discomforting to watch a villain behave randomly. Random behavior is inherently undramatic. Even if your villain’s motivation is, in fact, just mindless chaos, they need to express that is their motivation. The Joker, in the second Batman movie, they say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” and the Joker can express that, but okay, that’s a choice, you made it. Your job now is to create chaos because you love chaos, but you’ve articulated a goal.

If we don’t have that, then we’re just watching somebody blow stuff up willy-nilly and we start wondering why. You never want anyone to stop their engagement with the narrative. One of the great things about all those wonderful scenes between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter is that while they are doing this fascinating dance with each other and falling in love in a matter of speaking, what Hannibal Lecter is promising her, and in fact, the entire context of those meetings, the plot context of those meetings, is he is explaining to her why the villain of the movie is doing what he’s doing. He is grounding that villain in some rational context.

John: Yes, which is spooky. What I would recommend all writers do is, if you have a story that has a villain, especially like a bigger villain, like someone who is doing some pretty serious stuff, take a second before you begin and write the whole story from the villain’s point of view. Because remember, every villain really does see himself as the hero of the story. If you’re making Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton sees herself as a savior trying to protect this company and protect herself. She sees herself as the good person here, she’s being forced into doing murder or whatever to protect herself, she will.

Even the Queen Mother in Aliens, she is protecting her brood. From her perspective, these outsiders came in and started killing everything she’s going to protect. When you see things from their perspective, you can often find some really great moments. Write and figure out what the story is from their point of view. Remember, you’re probably not going to tell it from their point of view. You’re going to tell it from our hero’s point of view and make sure that you’re going to find those moments in which our hero is going to keep making things worse for the villain, and therefore the villain is going to be able to keep making things worse for the hero. There’s going to be a natural confrontation, but that the final confrontation won’t come until the climax that you want to have happen.

Craig: Yes, there’s a nice way of approaching certain villain stories where the movie is, in many ways, about figuring out the rational context for the villain. You’re trying to unearth a mystery, and that, in fact, if you figure out why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, you can stop them. Mama, which is out in theaters right now, I don’t know if you saw it. It’s a good horror movie. It’s very thoughtful and is very thematic. It’s about something. I thought they did a good job.
That movie’s a good case in point of if you can figure out why Mama is so violent and evil, then you might have a shot at getting rid of Mama. You build a mystery, and then the mystery is why is this bad person doing these bad things?

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John: Our main topic today, this all comes out of Chris Csont, who does The Interesting Newsletter, was putting together a bunch of links for people writing about villain motivation and how villains come to be. When you laid them all out, side by side, I realized they’re really talking about character motivation overall, whether they’re heroes or villains. Often what we think about is like, “Oh, that’s the reason why they’re the villain.” You could just turn around and say, “Oh, that’s the reason why they became the hero.” It’s basically the reaction to the events that happened or what’s driving them.

I thought we might take a look at villainy overall, look at some villains, and then, in the lens of these articles, peel apart what are the choices that characters make that because us to think of them as being heroes or villains and how we use that in our storytelling.

Craig: Great, I love this topic.

John: There’s an article by Daniel Efron here, we’ll put a link to the show notes, about why good people do bad things. He’s an ethicist, he’s really talking about– we think that people will make a logical decision about the cost and benefits of breaking some rule, transgressing in some way, but they really don’t. That’s not about the act itself, it’s really, they’re doing things or not doing things based on how they’re going to be perceived by others.

It’s that the spectator thing is a major factor. If they can do something without feeling like a bad person, they will do it. Cheating is not just about whether you can get away with it, it’s like how will you feel if you do this thing?

Craig: Which is really fascinating when you consider it in the context of a traditional existentialist point of view, which is that we are defined, solely, by our deeds, the things we do. It doesn’t matter how you feel. If you do something bad, you are a bad doer. That is true, to an extent, meaning the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care why you killed that person, as long as it wasn’t self-defense. He made you nuts and you couldn’t handle it anymore and you killed him and you have perfectly good reasons in your head. The rest of the world doesn’t care. You killed him. You’re a murderer.

John: Yes. We’ve talked many times about character motivation, villain motivation, and how every villain tends to see themselves as the hero, if they even have a sense of a moral compass at all. We’re leaving out of this conversation this supernatural alien creatures. The degree to which we apply motivation to those characters in aliens, we see that it’s a mother against a mother, that makes sense. That tracks, we could understand that.

In most of these supernatural demonic things, there’s not really a moral choice there. They are actually just true villains. Even like the slasher villains, we might throw some screen time just setting up like what their past trauma was that’s made them this way.

Craig: Yes.

John: We don’t really believe that they have any fundamental choice. They’re not choosing to do these actions.

Craig: They made a choice. The choice was made. It is now complete. Freddy Krueger was burnt by a Lynch mob. He made a choice, in his supernatural return, to come back and kill all the children of the people that killed him. He’s good. He doesn’t wake up going, “What should I do today?” He’s like, “Good, one more day to do the thing I decided to do that I will do every day.” There’s wonderful clarity to being that kind of villain, isn’t there?

John: It is. In some ways, you can say that he is cursed. basically he’s living under the thing, like he can’t escape this. He can’t choose to get out of this. A curse is like the opposite of a wish. We always talk about like what are the characters I want, what are they actually going for? The curse is the mirror opposite of that. They are bound by fate to do this thing and they can’t get away from it. There’s a freedom in that.

Craig: There is, because, as a human, you’re really more of a shark. There are no more choices to make. There’s no questioning of self. Sharks kill. When I say shark, I mean the fictional shark, not the regular sharks that probably are like, “I’m full, I’m not going to do that today.” You are a creature that is designed to kill and thus you must kill. You are more like a beast than a person. Those characters often do feel like they become part of nature.

Zombies, whether they’re slow or fast, whether it’s a virus or it’s supernatural, they ultimately are will-less. They are compelled to do what they do. They make no choices. Thus, they become a little bit like a storm, flood, lightning, fire, monsters, the devil, these things that just simply do stuff.

There’s a wonderful place for those kinds of things, but I think, ultimately, we do want villains that feel like they are reflecting something back at us. That they are dark mirrors that say, “Hey, you might feel these things, don’t end up like me.” They’re almost designed to be negative instructors, to make people identify with the villain. To make us understand why the villain’s doing what they’re doing, to make us think, “I actually have felt the same things, I’ve wanted to do the same things, but here’s what happens if I do,” because, typically, the villain will fail.

John: Let’s talk about some villains. I have a list of 20 villains here for us to go through, and let’s talk about what’s driving them and what’s interesting and what could be applied to other things. We’ll start with Hans Gruber from Die Hard, our special Die Hard episode. Of all the folks on this list, he’s maybe come closest to seem like the mustache-twisting villain because of that amazing performance, but his actual motivations are more calculating and he doesn’t seem to be just cruel for the sake of being cruel.

Craig: No, he’s a thief. He wants to steal money, as far as I remember. Is there a greater motivation than that? It just seems like he’s a very arrogant man who wants to steal a lot of money and doesn’t mind killing a bunch of people to do it.

John: Yes. He gets indignant when somebody gets in his way and he will lash out when his plans are thwarted. We think of him as being– I think it was just because that performance was being grand and theatrical, but actually, he has a purpose and a focus. He also, I think, very brilliantly in the course of the structure of the movie, as we talked about, the false idea of what the actual motivation is great. It seems like they have some noble purpose beyond the money, and of course they don’t. It’s all just a ruse.

Craig: That was a wonderful thing that happened. It was a very meta thing. For us growing up, that was a startling one, because we had become so trained to think of these villains as people who were taking hostages. Terrorists are an easy one. They’re always taking hostages and they often, in bad movies, were taking hostages because they were associated with– like they made fun of in Tropic Thunder, flaming dragons, some rebel group that was trying to, do a thing, the fact that Hans Gruber used that against us to make us think that’s what he was doing, then the big surprise was, “No, I’m simply a thief.” It was actually quite clever. Alan Rickman, I think, his performance in no small part, elevated what that character was, into something that felt a little bit more, wonderfully arch.

John: Yes. Let’s talk about the two villains in Silence of the Lambs. You have Buffalo Bill, who’s the serial killer, who’s like, kidnapping people. Then you have Hannibal Lecter, who is also a serial killer, but a very different serial killer. They’re two monsters, but with very different motivations. They’re very different villains in the course of the story. How do we place them and how do we think about what’s driving them?

Craig: Buffalo Bill, to me, because he’s portrayed as somebody with a severe mental illness that has led him to do these terrible things, is more in the shark territory. He is beyond choice. He is no longer making choices. He is simply compelled to do what he does and will continue to do it until he’s stopped. There’s nobody is going to have a sit down with Buffalo Bill and he’s going to be like, oh, we’re making a really good point and we’re going to stop killing all these people. He’s not going to do that.

John: No.

Craig: Hannibal Lecter, you get the sense, absolutely, has choices. What is presented in his character that Thomas Harris created that’s so beautiful is the notion that he might be some avenging angel, that maybe, he only does horrible things to the people that deserve it. What’s interesting about the story is they tease you with that. Then what do they tell you? They tell you that he bit a nurse’s face off. We see him killing two police officers that didn’t do anything to him. He kills a guy in an ambulance.

He will kill indiscriminately to protect himself. As Jodie Foster, as Clarise, says at the end of the movie, he doesn’t think he’s going to come and kill her because it would be rude. We get fascinated by the notion of the serial killer with a little bit of a conscience. It tempts us to think, if we were interesting and good enough and cool enough, he wouldn’t want to kill us.

John: Damien in The Omen, a terrifying little child. To me, he feels like he’s cursed at that. He’s not made a single choice. He is who he is.

Craig: Yes. He’s bad to the bone.

John: Born into it. Yes. Yes. As opposed to Amy Dunn in Gone Girl, who I think is one of the best, most recent villains. She is aware of what she’s doing. She is a sociopath. She has some sort of narcissistic– I don’t want to say narcissistic personality disorder. I wouldn’t want to diagnose her that specifically, but she has some ability that puts her at the very center of the universe and sees everyone else around her as things to be manipulated.

Craig: Yes. Why we are fascinated by Amy Dunn is because her conniving and manipulation and calculations are very well done. She’s formidable. This is something that you’ll hear often in Hollywood from executives. They want the villain to be formidable. They want us to feel like it’s really hard to win against somebody like that. I think also there’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment there because she is occupying a place in society that typically isn’t in charge, isn’t the one that comes out on top. We get to watch the underdog go a little crazy and win, to an extent. Yes. That’s always fascinating to me.

John: I think the other brilliant choice Gillian Flynn made in the structure of this is that ultimately, she becomes a victim herself in breaking free of all this stuff and executing her plan. She has become trapped by someone that she shouldn’t have trusted and that has to break herself out. We see like, “You think you’ve caught me, but I’ve actually caught you,” it’s ingenious. Smartly done.

Craig: “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me.”

John: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, a whole generation of young men thought that he was the hero of the movie Wall Street.

Craig: Oh, bros.

John: Yes, bros. I think it comes back down to his idea that greed is good. There’s more to it than that one speech, but essentially that whatever it takes is what’s worth doing. That is an American value that’s pushed to an extreme degree.

Craig: Which is the point. When you mentioned the Daniel Efron article, the average person cares a lot about feeling and appearing virtuous. If they can do bad things without feeling like a bad person, that’s when they start doing bad things.

What Gordon Gekko is doing is essentially giving himself license to commit crimes. The license is through philosophy, that in fact, he’s helping people. If you think about it, really, I’m the hero.

Somebody naturally is like, you really convinced yourself of this. We always wonder when Gordon Gekko puts his head on the pillow, does he really believe that? Is there some piece of his conscience gnawing at him? We don’t know. That is a great example of somebody articulating a value that we all have, ad absurdum, to force us to examine ourselves.

John: Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day, an amazing performance, an amazing villain, amazing centerpiece role. Here he is in a position of power with inside a structure. Of course, that’s not his true source of power and wealth is all the way, he’s subverting all that and breaking the codes to do this and is now trying to entrap Ethan Hawke’s character into what he’s doing.

Craig: Yes. An excellent film. I remember feeling, when I watched Denzel’s portrayal of Alonzo, he was managing to do two things at once that are very different and difficult to do simultaneously. He was letting us engage in a power fantasy because it’s attractive. He made it look sexy and fun and awesome; the idea that if you go through life having the upper hand and being able to get over on anyone, it’s exciting.

On the other hand, he also showed you the terrible cost of it. That in fact– he said, there’s no free lunch. That you cannot engage in power like that without it hollowing you out and gnawing at the foundations of who you are as a person until finally you’re brought low. It’s inevitable. You will come down to earth, gravity applies to you. It’s wonderful. It’s a great lesson, which is why I think Training Day is one of the great titles of all time. This is such a great lesson. It’s like we’re all getting trained about the danger of having that kind of power.

John: We should put that on the shortlist for a future Deep Dive because its [crosstalk] turn of events [unintelligible 00:39:23] two more I want to go through, Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. I think he’s unique on this list because you pity him and yet he’s also a villain, he’s also dangerous. There are other examples of that. They’re usually like sidekick characters, but here he is in this centerpiece role where he has control over this little section of what the characters need, yet he’s pathetic. It’s just such an interesting choice.

Craig: Yes. Gollum to me is not a villain. Gollum is an addict. He is somebody who is portraying an addiction and he will do bad things to feed his addiction, but where Gollum takes off and becomes somebody really interesting is when he is a split personality, when he’s slinker and stinker, and you can see him arguing with himself.

That is so human. It’s just so wonderfully– we can identify, we feel bad for him because we know that inside, there’s somebody who is good, who was a great, perfectly fine guy until he shot up heroin for the first time and then that was it. He’s essentially been enslaved to his own addiction and his own weakness.

John: Yes, and I think that’s the reason why we can relate to him so well is because we can see, “Oh, the worry that if I were to do those things, I could be trapped the same way that he is trapped.”

Craig: Yes.

John: I’ll put a link in the show notes to this article about Wile E. Coyote, but it’s arguing that essentially, Wile E. Coyote is an addict. He’s demonstrating all of the addicts, things that he’s going to keep trying to do the same thing even though it’s never going to work. It’s always going to blow up in his face, a different form of that thing. He’s always chasing that high, which is the Roadrunner. If he doesn’t get it, he won’t get it.

Craig: It’s rough, man. Yes, he needs a program.

John: He does need a program. 12 steps there. Finally, let’s talk about Annie Wilkes in Misery, who I think is just a spectacular character. You look at the setup of her in that if she did not kidnap somebody and do the things she does in the movie, she would just be an obsessive fan. She would just be someone that, you know her, you understand her, she’s annoying, but she also probably bakes really well, and you get along fine with her. It’s that worry that you push somebody, given the chance, some of these people would go too far, and it would, Annie Wilkes you.

Craig: Yes, so that’s a portrait of obsession and love gone bad. What was so fascinating about Annie Wilkes and Stephen King was so smart to make her a woman is that in society, we see men doing this all the time. Men become confused by their love for someone or they think they love someone, it becomes an obsession which turns violent and possessive and often deadly, women are very often the victims. Here, what was so fascinating was to see a woman engaging in that very same power trip and obsession.

I remember at the time thinking that the only thing that held me back from love, loving misery was that Annie Wilkes did seem like an impossible person. There was part of me that was like, but no one’s really like that. Now we have Twitter and we know that there are. Stephen King was right.

John: Yes, he’s out there.

Craig: Oh my God, she and he, there are many Annie and Andrew Wilkes’s out there who attach themselves, so strongly, to characters. When those characters– the whole thing, the whole thing kicks off when her favorite author dares to kill her favorite character. She reads it in the book and she snaps. We have seen that a lot in popular culture. That form of love that has gone sour, that has curdled into obsession is something that’s very human.

The story of that villainy is you must get away from that person because they are going to destroy you to essentially mend their own broken heart. That’s terrifying.

John: Yes, it’s fascinating to think of, would Annie Wilkes be a villain if she had not stumbled upon that car crash? Is this the only bad thing that she’s done?

Craig: I would imagine that she’s probably done a few other things, but nothing like that.

John: Yes, this transgression would not have happened if not for fate putting him right there. If the book had come out and she’d read the book, she would have been upset and she would have been angry for weeks, but she probably wouldn’t have, stalked him down in his house and done a thing. The fact that she could affect a change because she had the book before it came out was the opportunity.

Craig: Yes, the woman was definitely off to begin with. Anybody that says dirty birdie as a friend, you can imagine people are like, “Oh, here comes Annie, she’s gotten into some pretty nasty fights at the post office, but nothing like this.”

John: All right, so let’s try to wrap this up with some takeaways here. As we’re talking about these villains, I think it’s important for us to stress that we’re looking at what’s motivating these iconic villains in these stories. These iconic villains are great, but they wouldn’t exist if you didn’t find a hero to put opposite them, if you didn’t find a context for which to see them in, because they can’t just float by themselves. You can’t have Hannibal Lecter in a story or Buffalo Bill in a story without Clarice Starling to be the connective tissue, to be the person who’s letting us into their world.

I see so often people try to create like, oh, this iconic villain who has this grand motivation, terrific, who are we following into the story? How are we getting there? How are we exploring this? How are we hopefully defeating the villain at the end of this?

Craig: Yes, we need somebody to identify with. We don’t want to identify with villains, but I will suggest that if you can find moments where people are challenged to identify with the villains, that’s when things get really interesting to me. Because there is a story where we just give up on the whole hero villain thing entirely, we ask ourselves in these situations, what would you do? When people start to drift away from the hero and towards the villain, that’s when their relationship with the material becomes a little more complex.

It doesn’t mean it’s better. Sometimes I like nice, simple relationships with the things I watch and read, but sometimes I do like it messy. I like a messy relationship sometimes as well.

John: Yes, I thought Black Panther, the Killmonger character was a great messy relationship with Black Panther, because they both had strong points. While we wanted Killmonger defeated, we also said like, “Yes, you know what, he was making some logical points there.”

Craig: Yes, he’s a good example of gone too far.

[music]

John: The inspiration behind this is this book I’m reading, it’s based on a blog by Keith Almon called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It is a book that is really intended for people playing the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not a general interest book for everyone out there. It’s an interest to me and to Craig.

Craig: Yes, it’s great. Great blog, I love that blog.

John: Why I thought that this could be generalized into a topic for discussion overall is one of the things I liked so much about Keith’s book is that he talks about the monsters that you’re fighting and how they would actually think and how they would strategize in combat. One of the points he really makes very clearly is that they have a self-preservation instinct. They’re going to do things to– they will fight, but then they will run away and they will flee when it makes sense for them to run away and flee, because they exist in this world, they’ve evolved to survive. That survival instinct is very important.

It got me thinking about movies I’ve seen. I re-watched Inception recently, which is great. It holds up really well. The third section of Inception, or the fourth or the fifth, however many levels deep we are in Inception, there’s a sequence which very much feels like a James Bond movie, where there’s this mountain-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:47:24] raid on–

John: -outlying sequence. In there are a bunch of just faceless lackeys who just keep getting killed and offed. It struck me like, wait, no one is acting– why are they doing what they’re doing? You can see this in a lot of movies, a lot of action movies, but also I think a lot of comedies them in, where the people who are not the hero, not the villain, but are working for the villain, do things that don’t actually make any sense.
They will fight to the death for no good reason. They don’t seem to exist in any normal universal world. I want to talk through this. I don’t necessarily have great suggestions for this, but I think we need to point it out and maybe nudge people to be thinking more fully about the choices they’re making with these henchmen characters.

Craig: That’s probably the best we can do, is just be aware of it, because it’s more than a trope, it is bizarre. Here’s a movie that did it fairly well and for a reason. In Die Hard, there are all sorts of lackeys. There are some lackeys that are front and forward, and then there’s some lackeys that are in the back. One of the things you understand from this whole thing is that this organization is a worker-owned business. They’re all going to split the money.

Sure, maybe Hans Gruber gets a little bit extra because he masterminded it, but they’re all splitting it. They’re all the heroes of this job. If John McClane gets away with his shenanigans, they’re not going to get their money. I understand why they fight. Then if someone’s brother happens to be killed, oh, now it’s personal. When it is not a worker-owned collective, but rather a standard boss and employees, it is odd that they seemingly fight as if they were trying to protect their own dad or something.

John: Yes, and so they’ll fight and fight, and then they’ll get thrown over the edge and give the villain scream as they fall, and they’ll move on. They’re basically just cannon fodder there to be shot at, to be taken down. You see this most obviously in Bond movies. The Spy Who Loved Me has the whole crew of that tanker at the end, the [unintelligible 00:49:34] Moonraker, Drax Industries has all these people who are doing these space shuttles.

Who are they? Why are they doing this? Are they zealots? Are they science zealots? You just don’t know. This is really very well parodied, of course, in The Simpsons. There’s a whole episode with Hank Scorpio, where he recruits Homer. You see why these people are working there, because he’s a really good boss, he’s really caring and considerate. I would just say, pay special attention to those minor characters, those guards, those watchmen, and really be thinking about, why are they doing what they’re doing? You may not be able to give dialogue or even a lot more time to those characters, but do think about what their motivations are.

Sometimes, if you do that, you can come upon some surprising choices, which is, like Iron Man 3, one of the henchmen just says, “Oh, no, I’m not being paid enough,” and just, walks away, or just runs. Those can be surprises that let the audience and the reader know that you’re really paying attention, and that could be great.

Craig: There’s a really funny parody of the henchman syndrome in Austin Powers. I want to say, is it in the first one? Yes, I think it’s the first one. Everybody remembers, I think most people remember the scene where Austin Powers is driving a steamroller very slowly at a henchman who doesn’t seem to be able to get out of the way, [laughs] and then he rolls him over. There’s a deleted scene, I think you can watch it on, I think it’s on YouTube, where they actually go to that henchman’s home, and you see his wife and child mourning the loss. [laughs] It’s like, he was a person.

It’s true, one of the things that that stuff does is both limit our interest, and also in, and the capacity, or the impact of death in a movie or a television show, and it also, I think, makes the world seem less real, and therefore, the stakes less important.

John: Yes, I agree.

Craig: Because, look, if everybody’s dying that easily, it’s the stormtrooper problem, right? Who’s afraid of stormtroopers anymore? If you make a Star Wars movie now, I think just your hero being actually killed by a rando stormtrooper in scene one would be amazing. That’s it. We got to go find a new hero because, yes, one of those randos, they can’t all miss all the time.

John: No. I think one of the good choices that Force Awakens made was to have one of the heroes be a stormtrooper, who takes off his helmet, and you’re always like, “Oh, there’s an actual person there.” John Boyega is an actual person.

Craig: The only one.

John: Yes. He’s special, but I think the point is that he’s not special. Actually, all those people you’ve seen die in all these movies were actually people as well. In The Mandalorian, in a later episode, there’s just a long conversation happening between two stormtroopers, and they’re just talking, and it’s recognized, oh, they are there for not just the plot reasons. They actually were doing something before the camera turned off.

Craig: Yes, so it’s the red versus blue, the halo. It’s like, generally speaking, when we do see henchmen talking to each other, they’re talking about henchmen stuff, so it’s purposefully pointless and banal, and then they die. They die.

John: They die.

[laughter]

Craig: They don’t go on. They do not live on. Yes, just be aware of it, I guess, right?

John: Yes, so the henchmen’s problem is really a variety of the redshirt problem, which we’ll also link to there. John Scalzi’s book, Redshirts, talks about, in the Star Trek series, the tourists, the people with the red uniforms who’ve been down to the alien planet are the first ones to die. There’s actually statistics about how often they die versus people in other color uniforms. I think we’re all a lot more mindful of that now with the good guys, and I think we see a lot less redshirting happening. You still see some of it. I just rewatched Aliens, and there’s a little bit of redshirting there, but not as bad as the classic.

I would just urge us to be thinking the same way on the villain side and always ask ourselves, is there a smarter choice we can make about those people who would otherwise just be faceless to death?

Craig: Yes, and that’s why the Bill Paxton character was so great in Aliens because it was an acknowledgement that not everybody is brave in a psychotic way. Some of those characters are nuts for engaging the way they do with this incredibly scary thing. They don’t seem to have fear. They don’t seem to be thinking ahead like, “I had plans for my life, investments, [laughs] a girlfriend, a boyfriend. I got things I want to do.” They’re just like, “Screw it. If I die, I die.” That’s crazy. That’s just a dangerous way of thinking. Bill Paxton was like, “No way, man.” I feel like he was the only person that was sane, and he was correct, they should have gotten the hell out of there.

John: Nuke it from space.

Craig: Yes, “Nuke it from orbit, man.” There’s nothing wrong with being afraid and rational, because that is, in fact, how people are. Look, a lot of it’s tonal, so some things are going to have henchmen. That’s just the way it is because the show or the movie is pushed a little bit. For instance, Snowpiercer, which I love, they’re henchmen. They don’t have faces. I don’t know what the arrangement is exactly. I assume they get a slightly better car maybe, but they’re going in there and people are getting shot, and they’re like, “Oh, okay, well, I guess it’s our turn to go in there and get into a shooting.” I would be terrified.

They never look scared. That’s also a movie about everybody on the planet living on a train that’s going around a frozen Earth and they’re eating bugs. It’s sci-fi, it’s different. If you’re talking about Breaking Bad, then you’re not going to see a ton of henchmen there because people live in the world where they can get scared.

John: In television, obviously, you have more time to build out universes and scenarios, so it’d be more likely you’d be able to understand. The supporting characters on Sopranos, you have a good sense of who they are, and so that’s all built out. In feature films, it’s tough because you cannot divide focus so much. In a Robert Altman movie, you really could see everyone’s point of view, but you’re not going to encounter that in a more traditional feature. That’s just not how it works. I guess I’m just asking you to be mindful of it.

If you’re writing in a pushed universe in science fiction or fantasy or an action movie, yes, some stuff is going to be a little bit more common, but I also see this in comedies, especially high-concept comedies, where everyone just seems to be there to service this plot, this high-concept plot. I don’t see a lot of attention being paid to like, “Wait, how would a real person in the real world respond to this and is there anything useful to be taken from that?” because people just accept the premise a little too easily.

Craig: Yes, it’s amusing. They’re like, “This job is so good, I need to die.” [laughter] It’s not that great if you’re dead.

John: No. Defend your own interests first. Everyone is selfish enough and wants to survive enough that they’re going to pull back and defend themselves when they need to, instead of just be thinking about that for your characters.

Craig: Yes, probably if you’re writing Guard 3 and Next Guard and Tall Guard, and yes, there’s trouble.

[music]

John: A lot of times in features and TV as well, you’ll see functional villains like, well, that villain got the job done, basically served as a good obstacle for your hero, kept the plot moving, but a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was. I wanted to look at in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved? I boil it down to seven things. Then Chris wrote a nice long blog post that talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those villains were and how they functioned. I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and how you can implement them.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. My first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonists of their own stories, they have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve it. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

Craig: Yes, nobody does bad things just because. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. The Joker is trying to make a point. There’s always a purpose. Yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have, you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think, “How is that guy so happy about all these terrible things he’s saying?” Because he believes, in part, that he’s the right one and that his purity is, in fact, why he’s the hero. Just as a character says, I won’t kill is being pure, Luke, at the end of Return of the Jedi, is being pure, “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy. That’s my purity.”

On the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal and other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HYNOs.

John: Yes. I think it’s absolutely crucial that they are seeing all the events of the story from their own point of view, and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are, on one hand, despicable, but on the other hand, are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Daenerys could completely be the villain in that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him, theoretically, to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. Then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” He’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, “Okay. I don’t like you and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.” Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in.

You’d ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” Then as he’s being arrested, he goes, “Don’t you understand?” blah, blah, blah. [laughs]

John: Yes, it’s like, “It’s already done. It’s already over.”
Or that bit of explanation comes right before, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Craig: It’s like a weird position paper. It not felt. Whereas at the end of, speaking of Sorkin, A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

John: 100%.

Craig: I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure and they’re not.

John: Let me get to my next point, which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. Whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who just have simple aims like, “I’m going to rob this bank,” well, you’re not going to remember that one. The one who’s like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember. You have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress.

The ones that really stick, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go as far as they need to go in order to get the job done, and actually too far to get the job done.

Craig: Correct, and in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. That this person actually needs to die because they are a virus that has been released into the world, and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever until the world is consumed in their insanity. Then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We rooted for it because that person has to go.

John: Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell-bent on destruction. It doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

Craig: Yes, it could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

John: Yes, that’s a good time to leave.

Craig: Then you’re like, “Ugh,” and you just realize, “If you won’t stop, you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life, and you might do this to somebody else’s kid.” You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world. Which, as we know, realistically, it’s not.

John: Never going to happen.

Craig: No.

John: Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. Sometimes they are literally out in the forest or they’re a creepy old monster in the cave, but sometimes they are at the edges of moral society. They place themselves outside the normal rules of law or the normal rules of acceptable behavior. Even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of what the mayor of the town can do. You always have to look at them. They perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

Craig: They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

John: Yes.

Craig: There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. Frequently, they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.”

Stalin was special. He considered himself special, and special people are different than people who do bad things. When you’re thinking about your villain, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se, but special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. The albino guy in The Da Vinci Code, he’s a villain kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

John: Even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

Craig: He can go ahead and bend the rules because, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s why we’re fascinated by a good one.

John: Also, because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point, is that a good hero represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you fear you might be. It’s like all your darkest impulses, it’s like, “What if I actually did that terrible thing?” That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

Craig: Which goes to motivations, universally recognizable motivations, and this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, what do they want? Just like a hero because they are the hero of the story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy things? It’s never, “Oh, it’s just random.” For instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us.

It’s a rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us, but Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves, and in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s sexy, it’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you guiltily imagine being. Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

John: Yes, you imagine having that kind of power. Either the power to manipulate, the power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing, and I think that the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. You hit on it earlier, it’s like, sometimes you’ll get to the end of a story, and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying. The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start.

Even if it’s Jaws, you understand what is driving them, and you understand at every moment what their next aim is. They’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero, they have their own agenda.

Craig: Yes. A good villain, a good movie villain, will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to figure it out or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Seven. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey’s up to. In fact, it seems just random, so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence connected together by this interesting motif until the end when you realize, “Oh, there’s some larger purpose here.” They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise, they’re boring as hell, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices. Villains are not conflicted at all, so of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want? I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your hand-wringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.”

John: They tell us what that is. They may not tell the hero what that is, often they will, but we, as the audience, know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

Ultimately, whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. We talked about Seven, you can’t get much more personal than what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Seven. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very personal. That’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

Craig: What’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world, in the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things and they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive and interesting and charming. Part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero. We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. The only way you could have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero.

Inevitably, they are. Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke. He wants to know his son, and so ultimately, that’s what undoes him.

John: You look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it, it’s that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other, they both wouldn’t function, really. The Joker could create his chaos, he could try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at how they are and how the city functions, but without Batman, if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

Craig: Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against, and The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. There’s something at the heart of the Joker-Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero-villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. That there’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not so different” because it’s true.

John: [laughs] Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it-

Craig: That’s right, don’t say it.

John: -but it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

Craig: Just don’t say it or have them make fun of it.

John: Yes. My final point was that flaws are features, and that in general, the villains that you remember, there’s something very distinctive about them, either physically or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick or look or thing that they do. Obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming, and I think all those things are crucial, but you have to look at, what is it about your villain that a person’s going to remember a month from now, a year from now? That they can picture them, they could hear their voice.
Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

Craig: It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience because you’re exactly right. This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story, that the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is, “This is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie except our hero. Just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person because they are special.” If you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair, let’s first start with the hair, it’s perfect.

It’s not great hair, he’s a balding man, but it’s perfectly combed back. Then he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean, and he’s standing with the most incredible posture. His hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person and he does not blink. That’s great. Just from the start, you know we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by?

John: Yes.

Craig: Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

John: Sometimes it’s a very big thing. Like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in the story because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. From the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is, but you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. She seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat, and she’s phenomenal. That’s a very distinctive choice of the schoolmarm taken way too far, and you see it from the very start. I could never see that costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good–

Craig: Yes, that’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous. Like, “Oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates and loves pink and green and pastel colors”, and saying, “That lady? Now she’s a sadist.” Ooh, that’s great. Just great. Then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume. Terrific.

[music]

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew himself. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, and our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli. It’s his homage to Silence of the Lambs. Matthew is so talented.

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Thank you to all your premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to give you on monsters. Drew, thanks for putting together this compendium.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[music]

John: All right, let’s move on to our main topic today, which is monsters.

Craig: Yes.

John: I thought about this because three of the projects I’m currently working on have monsters in them to some degree.

We’ve talked on the show a lot about antagonists and villains, but I don’t recall us ever really getting into monsters per se, which means we probably need to describe what we mean by monsters. In my head, I’m thinking basically non-human characters that, while they may have some intelligence, are not villains in the sense that they have classic motivations and who can interact with other characters around them the way that human characters can.

I was grouping them into three big buckets, but I’m curious before we get into that if you have a definition of monster that might be different than that.

Craig: Monster to me is either a non-human or an altered human, a human that has been changed into something that is non-human, that has both extraordinary ability compared to a human and also presents a danger to regular humans.

John: Yes, that feels fair. The kinds of monsters I’m talking about, I have three broad categories, and I think we can think of more than that, but there’s primal monsters, which I would say are things that resemble our animals, our beasts, but just taken to a bigger extreme. Your sharks, your bears, your wolves could be monsters. Any giant version of a normal animal. They tend to be predators. Werewolves in their werewolf form feel like that primal monster. The aliens in Alien feel like that kind of primal monster.

Craig: Dinosaurs.

John: Dinosaurs, absolutely. In D&D terms, we say that they are generally neutral. You can’t even really call them evil because they’re just doing what they do. Evil requires some kind of calculation that they don’t have.

Craig: Yes, they instinctive. Even the aliens in Alien, I suppose, we’ll get some angry letters from Alien fans, but those creatures do seem like they are driven by such a pure Darwinism that it is no longer a question of morality. They are simply following their instinct to dominate.

John: We have another category I would say are the man-made monsters. These are killer robots, Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, that monster famously does have some motivation beyond any Gollum-y creature. Some zombies I would say are man-made; it depends on what causes them to become those monsters. Craig, would you say that the creatures in The Last of Us, would you call them monsters?

Craig: They are altered humans, yes, but they’re monsters. There’s no question. Part of what we try and do is, when we can elicit some, at least if not sympathy, a reminder that they are not to blame. They’re sick and they are no longer in control of their bodies and they are no longer in control of what they do, but the fact is, no matter how hard we try and do that, they’re behaving monstrously. They’re monsters. More importantly, when you look at their provenance from the video game, they look like monsters, and we want them to, and there are more monsters coming.

John: Of course. I know. I’m excited to see more monsters.

Craig: More monsters.

John: The last bucket I would throw things into would be called the supernatural. There you have all the Lovecraftian creatures. There are other kinds of zombies that are, it’s not human-made that created them, they’re shambling mounds of things. There are mummies. At least, there are mummies who are not speaking mummies, like the classic stumble-forward mummies.

Craig: Ah, mummy.

John: Muuuu. You’ve got your gargoyles. You have some demons or devils, the ones that aren’t talking. I really think it comes down to, if they have the ability to use language that our characters can understand, I’m not throwing them in the monster bucket.

Craig: I would still like, to me, a vampire is a monster.

John: To me, it’s really a question, though, of agency. It’s so driven by its need to feed that it no longer has the ability to interact with the characters around it because a lot of vampires are talky and they are doing things. They can function much more like classic villains rather than monsters. As opposed to a werewolf, who we’re used to being just fully in beast mode.

Craig: That’s why vampires are so fascinating, I think, because they present as human, and they can absolutely have a conversation with you, all the good ones do. Not only do they have conversations with you, they seduce you and they romance you. Then they also give into this hunger that is feral and savage. They sometimes turn into bats or fog or a big swarm of rats, which is my favorite. They are certainly supernatural. They are nearly immortal. What I love about vampires is that they are a presentation of the monster within.

Jekyll and Hyde, well, Dr. Jekyll is a human, and Hyde is a monster, but they are the same person. That is fascinating because then it starts getting into the whole point of monsters, I think, which is a reflection of our worst selves.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think these characters that are on the boundaries between a villain who could choose to stop and a monster who could not choose to stop are sometimes the most fascinating antagonists we can put our characters up against. In some cases, we’re centering the story around them, so they are not the villain, they are actually the main character. Once upon a time, I worked on Dark Shadows, and of course, that has a vampire at its center who does monstrous things, but I think most people would not identify as being a monster.

Craig: Yes, and so they’re all different ones. It’s funny, when you look at the traditional Dracula, the Bram Stoker original Dracula, and when you look at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, they’re both literate. In particular, Frankenstein’s monster in the novel, I think he speaks two languages. I think he speaks English and French. [chuckles] He’s remarkably literate and thoughtful. Dracula, the reason Dracula is so dangerous is because he’s so smart. He slowly and carefully manages to eat most of the people aboard a ship that’s crossing to England without anybody noticing because he’s really clever.

It’s funny how we kept that with Dracula. We said, “Okay, Dracula, you’re the ur-vampire, and all the vampires after you, most of them are going to follow this method of, ‘My darling, I want to suck your blood.’” Frankenstein, I don’t know, somebody read that novel and, “You know what? What if this monster doesn’t speak two languages? What if he speaks no languages, is 6’8”, and just groans a lot?” “That’s better. Let’s do that.”

John: Let’s do that. When we think about villains, we often talk about villain motivation. It’s worth thinking about monster motivation because there’s going to be some overlap, but I think a lot of cases, these monsters function more like animals, more like beasts, and you have to think about, what does an animal want? We talk about the four Fs, five Fs. The four Fs, those primal motivating factors: self-preservation, propagation, protection of an important asset, so they’re there to defend a thing, hunger or greed, classic, and revenge to a certain degree.

I always say that the Alien Queen in Aliens, in the end, she has a very specific focus and animus towards Ripley because of what Ripley did. It goes beyond just the need to propagate. She’s after her for a very specific reason.

Craig: That’s where it sometimes can get stupid. It doesn’t in that movie, but Jaws 3, I think, famously, “This time it’s personal,” no, it’s not. It’s a frickin’ shark. It doesn’t know you. [laughter] It’s just food. Obviously, the aliens in Aliens are quite clever. They are not merely savage and feral. You don’t expect that they’re sitting there doing math. They are the forerunners of the way we portrayed velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The idea of the smart monster, maybe not as smart as a human in their general sense, but very smart predatorially. That’s really interesting to see that, but when it starts getting personal with a dumb monster, it can get really silly.

John: Craig, what is your opinion on human monsters? I could think of like, so Jason Voorhees in a slasher film, is that a villain? Is that a monster? To what degree can we think of some of these human characters as monsters rather than classic villains?

Craig: I think they’re monsters. I think they’re monsters because they wear masks. Jason Voorhees wears a hockey mask, and Michael Myers in Halloween wears, I believe it’s a-

John: A Captain Kirk hat.

Craig: -a Captain Kirk mask, a William Shatner death mask, even though William Shatner is still alive. Those masks are what make them monsters. Their humanity is gone. When you look at how they move, and obviously, look, let’s just say it, Jason Voorhees was just a rip-off of Michael Myers. That’s pretty obvious. They are a large, shambling, seemingly feelingless, numb creature that has way more strength than a normal human ever would. They don’t really run. They don’t need to. They represent your own mortality. It’s coming. There’s nothing you can do. That is a nightmarish feeling. In their way, they are large zombies. They don’t speak. They just kill.

We don’t even really understand why they’re killing. Somebody eventually will explain it, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not like you can have a conversation with Jason Voorhees and say, “With some therapy, I think you’ll stop killing.” No, Jason will keep killing. I think of them as monsters for sure.

John: One of the projects I’m working on, I’m grappling with issues of what this monstrous character actually wants, what the endgame is, and I keep coming back to the Lovecraftian, there is no answer, there’s only the void. There’s that sense of sometimes the most terrifying thing is actually that there is no answer, that the universe is unfeeling and they just want to smash it and destroy it. It’s challenging because without a character who can actually say that, without a way to put that out there, that the monster themselves can’t communicate that.

As I’m outlining this, I’m recognizing that that’s going to be a thing that everyone needs to be able to expose to the audience in a way that the creature themselves can’t.

Craig: That is a challenge. It is certainly easy enough for the pursued characters to ruminate and speculate as to why this thing is doing what it wants to do, but that will just remain what it is, which is speculation. The whole point of speculation is we’ll never know. Yes, it is hard to figure out how to get that motivation across when it’s non-verbal and non-planning. In the case of aliens, you can just tell they’re predators, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: They are doing what the apex predator’s supposed to do, win. They just want to win.

John: Of course, as we look at Predator, the question of whether you call that a monster or a villain, the motivation behind a Predator, what we learn very early on is they are trophy hunters. Literally, they are just too bad to some other creatures because that’s what they do. It’s not entirely clear whether it’s just rich people of that species doing that thing, or if it’s an important rite of passage. Are they on safari?

Craig: [laughs] You know what I love? The idea is like on Predator planet, they have social media, everybody has normal jobs. Like some people are accountants or whatever, some people work at the Predator McDonald’s, but jerk Predators [laughs] go to other planets to bag trophies. They then put a picture up of like, “Look at Jesse Ventura’s head.” Then other people online are like, “You’re sick. There’s something wrong with you. You feel the need to go to these places and kill these beautiful animals.”

John: For all we know, it’s like Donald Trump Jr.-

Craig: Exactly.

John: -is the equivalent of the food we’ve actually seen in these Predator movies. Someone who actually has a familiarity with the whole canon, and I’m not sure how established the canon really is, can maybe tell us what the true answer is here. My feeling has always been that this wasn’t a necessary cultural function, that they were doing this thing because they wanted to.

Craig: It was hunting. It was pointless hunting, and in that case, they really are villains. That’s like a mute villain because the Predator is very much calculating, thinking, planning, prioritizing. He doesn’t speak because he doesn’t speak our language, not because he doesn’t speak. If we understood the clicky bits, then we would know that he was saying stuff.

John: I’ll wrap this up with just it’s important sometimes to think about how we must seem to other creatures in our world right now. Think if you’re an ant or an ant colony and an eight-year-old boy comes along, that is a monster. It has no understanding of you, it has no feeling for you. That eight-year-old boy is just a T-Rex and you have to run from it. You’re not looking at that as a villain. That is truly, fully a monster. Sometimes reversing that can give you some insight into what it must feel like to be encountering these creatures.

Craig: There’s a certain godlike quality to them. When they are that much more powerful than we are, it’s a bit why superhero movies have escalated their own internal arms race to intergalactic proportions. Because it’s not enough for people to be beset by godlike monster humans. At some point, you need them to be fought with by good monster humans, and then it just goes from there. When you’re creating some grounded thing, you’re absolutely right. The notion that what’s pursuing, and Predator actually did this very well. It’s a good movie.

John: It’s a good movie, I agree. I realized Prey as well, the most recent [unintelligible 01:30:30].

Craig: Yes. You get the sense that the people in it are impressed. They start to realize that this guy is better than them in every way. The only way you’re going to beat it is if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger, AKA better than all of us. [laughter] It’s a pretty apt comparison.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 75 – Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 590 – Anti-Villains
• Scriptnotes Episode 465 – The Lackeys Know What They’re Doing
• Scriptnotes Episode 257 – Flaws are Features
• Every Villain is a Hero
• Writing Better Bad Guys
• Screenwriting and the Problem of Evil
• Mama
• The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote by T.B.D.
• Why do good people do bad things? by Daniel Effron
• Why some people are willing to challenge behavior they see as wrong despite personal risk by Catherine A. Sanderson
• The Monsters Know What They’re Doing blog and book
• Austin Powers deleted scene, “Henchman’s Wife”
• Redshirt
• 7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains
• How Christopher Nolan writes a movie on our YouTube!
• 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 Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Megana Rao, and Drew Marquardt.
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even a little bit more swearing than usual, so standard warning about that.

[music]

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

Today on the show, how do you plan for a multi-season TV series, and how do you wrap it up at the end? Our guest today is the creator and showrunner of shows such as Supernatural, Revolution, Timeless, Gen V, and of course, The Boys, which is back for its final season. Welcome, Eric Kripke.

Eric Kripke: Hey, thanks, John. Thrilled to be here.

John: Now, the fourth season of The Boys premiered last June, but you are now working on the fifth and final season, so I want to talk to you about that, but I’d also love to get more granular on the process of developing a show, breaking scripts, and seasons. We also have listener questions on bottle episodes, and using the conventions of comic books.

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about blood, because you use an astonishing amount of blood on The Boys and Gen V. I’d love to discuss what you’ve learned about blood on the page, and blood in practice.

Eric: Amazing, I’m in for all of that.

John: Before we get into the details on how shows work on the inside, can we talk a little bit about your background here? Because how early in your development did you know that you wanted to do television versus features? What’s the backstory? Pitch us, Eric Kripke.

Eric: [chuckles] I was raised in Toledo, Ohio. I was one of those kids, I think it was E.T. in ’83. I was nine, and I came home from E.T. and told my mom, “Did somebody make that?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, then that’s what I want to do.” I was like the very prototypical ‘80s Spielberg obsessed, that particular subspecies of kid.

John: There’s a lot of us in that age range who are like, those were the important movies. The Spielberg movies were the ones like, “Oh my gosh, that is the vision I have,” or that’s how you get the J.J. Abrams emulating that model.

Eric: Yes, and it’s so funny looking back how few of them he actually wrote, or directed. You look back, and you’re like, “Well, that was actually Richard Donner, and that was actually Joe Dante, and that was actually Tobe Hooper,” with apparently, a very heavy assist from Spielberg, according to legend. It’s funny when you’re like– Oh, he was just– I mean, producing is a big job, obviously, but those weren’t actually his movies.

Anyway, it was just fascinating to me. I was that kid. I’d say by the time I was 11, I wanted to go to the USC Film School, because it was the only film school whose name makes its way back to Toledo, Ohio. I found the short story that I wanted my senior thesis movie to be when I was 13 in a Twilight Zone magazine written by Richard Matheson, and I carried it around with me in wrapped plastic.

I took it with me to camp and college, and anyway, and cut forward, and I went to USC, and I made that movie my senior year, and my goal was to be a director for features, and feature comedies. I made short films, and was unemployed, the usual thing. Then, my shorts were in Sundance and Slamdance at the same year, and then we won Slamdance, and okay, now I have an agent, and now I’m able to pick up bad open writing assignments, which they were giving away a lot more candy back then than they are today.

John: Let me pause you for one second, because we have a link here to Battle of the Sexes, which was a short film that you got into Sundance. Was that also at Slamdance?

Eric: Another one, Truly Committed, was at Slamdance, but Battle of the Sexes was at Sundance, yes.

John: I look at the short, it’s like, “Oh, well, I can see this is a person who wants to be a director, and wants to make a certain kind of movie,” because it’s a very well-executed, single-premise conceit just like–

Eric: Oh, I’m thrilled and stunned that you watched it, but, yes.

John: It’s six minutes, so it’s not a huge burden on anyone’s time, but it was a very good calling card for that specific kind of director who wants to do a thing. Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant, he also made a short film coming out of the USC program, but then a second short film, which was Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, which kicked him off in his career. It’s a good way to announce yourself to the town, and was that the intention behind these short films is to land yourself representation?

Eric: Yes, the main thing, and I know Rawson, he’s a great guy. The main thing at the time was make a short film, and have the feature-length version of that film as a script ready to go, and that’s the best way to get yourself into the director’s chair at a young age while you’re in your 20s. That was sort of the– That’s what you do.

John: Was the intention for Battle of the Sexes, here’s the short, and did you have a screenplay that went along with it?

Eric: I did. There’s a Battle of the Sexes feature-length screenplay that is only moderately successful, and I took it out. I got an agent, I had a good short film, people wanted to have meetings. I took out that script, and every single person who read it was like, “Yeah, no, what other scripts do you have?” I had nothing, [chuckles] so I totally blew my moment.

I had that month where I was taking eight meetings a week, and nobody liked the script, because it is a very sloppy script. I had to really learn writing from doing it. I don’t feel like I was an innately gifted writer. I always felt I was better at filmmaking.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between, so something like Battle of the Sexes is essentially a sketch. It’s something that, it’s a long version of what could be a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Eric: Yes.

John: We’ve had a couple of writers on the show to talk about the difference between sketch writing and writing the longer projects, pilot writing, a feature for sure, is that there’s a sense of ongoing development. It’s not just a complication upon the premise, it’s really a journey that the characters go on, and that’s not a natural progression sometimes from the sketch forward. It’s a very different thing.

We had Simon Rich on, and we were talking about, he writes short stories and sketches that are short and tight, and deliver the payload that they’re expecting for that small form, but it’s not what a feature script does. It’s not what a pilot does. It’s not setting up a whole world, which you end up having to learn how to do. How did you learn how to go from this, and the script that wasn’t working, to Supernatural, or other shows you were writing?

Eric: Through failure. I really feel that I learned what to do through process of elimination. I failed every other way until I figured out, “Oh, this actually works. This gets a response.” Everyone has their own process, but for me, what really landed was two things. Everyone says character-driven, but almost nobody means it, and because you have to walk the walk, and what I learned was, the stories were hanging together better when I started with, “Okay, who’s this person, and what do they want? Where do they start, and where do they end?

Then, okay, what are the steps that get them there? Psychologically, why do they feel that way? Then, okay, now, at least for TV, and okay, now what’s the plot that illuminates those beats?” It wasn’t until I landed there that things started to cook. Then, the second one was, which I think is a mistake a lot of young writers make, and you know maybe better than anybody with the stuff you’ve written, but you just have to be so brutal with your internal logic, and you have to be air-fucking-tight.

The Battle of the Sexes script, for example, failed because it was sloppy world-building. I set up rules in the beginning that were not consistent through the end, and you really have to look at it as, does this particular beat, does this particular line, does this particular reference fit in the rules of the world you’ve created? If they do not, you have to get rid of them. I don’t care how good that line, or character, or moment is. It’s a cancer to the credibility of the world you’re trying to create.

John: Let’s pull this back. Battle of the Sexes, for people who haven’t watched the little short film yet, the premise is that, when women go off to the restroom, they’re actually entering into a secret lab where they can do deep forensics on the man that they’re talking with, and figure out whether they should continue the conversation, or pull away from the conversation. It’s incredibly heightened.

It’s incredibly, a Mission Impossible level of stuff happens inside that space. In a sketch, it’s funny that we buy it because, the world expectations are not so high. I can imagine in the course of a feature-length film, or if this was the premise to a TV show, building that up, so the rest of the world actually made sense would be challenging.

Eric: Yes. It might be doomed from the beginning, and the first 20, 25 pages of that script are the best, and then it falls apart. It’s like, this idea of a guy who’s chasing a girl, and the obstacle is this secret network of women that are all in communication with each other to secretly run the world. By the way, not wildly different than Angelina Jolie’s agency in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Not that different, but by the end, it became every woman on the planet, and it was just too big. It should have just been a woman spy, spying for her– It should have been Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

That’s the best version of this idea. In the way that Brad Pitt has Vince Vaughn, and he’s riding around in a dune buggy, and she’s very fastidious and neat. Those are the right energies, but it was contained. I didn’t understand containment, and I didn’t understand the logic exercise, where you have to take everything to its nth degree and say, “If that exists, then that means this, this, this, and this, and is that okay for your story?”

Obviously, every woman involved in a conspiracy, [chuckles] raises way too many problems. The entire thing, look, I was 25 when I wrote it, but everything just melted by the end of that. Everyone who read it was like, “It really started promising, and then it went off the rails, and never went back on.” [chuckles]

John: Just very honest with you.

Eric: [chuckles] Yes.

John: Talking about the steps of learning between that, and something like a Supernatural, were you staffed on other TV shows, were you getting other deals to do stuff, what was happening?

Eric: I mostly blew my moment of getting any sort of feature directing going. Then, I took a couple open writing assignments for comedies, because I thought I was going to be a comedy filmmaker. They were all horrible scripts. They never got made, and I was banging around for three years, just being one of those guys who never gets anything made, and just that Twilight Zone.

I read one of the scripts, and it’s like, you can see someone’s struggling to learn something, but it’s terrible. They were terrible. It turns out, I wanted to be a comedy writer, but turns out I sucked at it, plus, the tyranny of multiple jokes per page, just was something that I just couldn’t do. I just was really bad at– The people that are good at it, are so good and every other line is a killer. I couldn’t do that. I needed more build up. I just didn’t have that muscle.

Then, my agent was like, “Why don’t you take a TV meeting?” This was 2002. TV then is not what TV is now. TV then, my film school friends were like, “Oh, you’re going to go do TV. Good luck, good luck. I always saw you as a TV person,” and I’m like, “Fuck you.”
[laughter]

That was the vibe. I went to take a TV meeting. They liked Battle of the Sexes. Here’s something that’ll also tell you how different the time was. I was a 27-year-old kid. I walked into that meeting based on Battle of the Sexes alone, they offered me the Wonder Woman series-

John: Oh, my.

Eric: -and I passed.

John: Incredible.

Eric: I said, “Yes, Wonder Woman’s not really my thing. No, pass.” Just shows you how different IP was then, but then they said, “Would you be interested in writing a pilot?” I tried, and I wrote a pilot, and it didn’t go anywhere, but they liked it. Then, my break was, they were trying– Smallville was a big deal on the WB.

John: Friends of mine who’ve been on the show, Al and Miles, they created Smallville. They were also out of USC, and I felt like, “Oh, is it sad that you’re doing TV?” No, it was a giant hit.

Eric: Exactly. Anyway, but at the time, and this show was– The story I’m about to tell is about a huge failure, is they were trying to recreate it with Tarzan, and they couldn’t break Tarzan. They couldn’t figure it out. They had big writers, and it’s a big title. I said, “Let me take a crack at it.” I had the winning pitch, and then I wrote a script and they loved the script. Then, I have David Nutter shooting my pilot, all of this–[crosstalk]

John: David Nutter is a giant TV director. He’s who you want to do your pilot.

Eric: The winningest pilot director in TV history in terms of more pilots picked up, and such a lovely guy. He makes the show, the show’s good. They pick it up to series, and suddenly, they partnered me with somebody, but suddenly, I’m a co-showrunner of a TV show at 28-years-old, having never stepped into a writers’ room before.

John: Eric Kripke, I was in the same situation as a 28-year-old creator of a TV show for the WB Network, and I had a nervous breakdown. I completely melted down. I’m seeing here your show lasted eight episodes, mine last was six.

Eric: Wait, what was your show?

John: I did the show D.C. I was partnering up with Dick Wolf.

Eric: Oh, right. Yes, young people in D.C. and making it happen. I totally remember that.

John: Yes. It was a post-Felicity show. It was a good premise. It sold well, and I was excited to be doing it, and I just was completely out of my depth in the process. Were you partnered up with somebody who actually knew what they were doing? What was that situation?

Eric: Yes. This writer named P.K. Simonds who had ran Party of Five. We’re still friends to this day. He’s such a lovely, lovely dude. I was partnered with him. He encouraged me to try to make it creatively my own. He wasn’t interested in taking it over. He wanted me to realize whatever my vision was. I proceeded to make so many mistakes, every mistake. I worked with, and I’m sure you did too. I worked with John Levesque. Did you work with John?

John: The whole thing is a blur to me. Literally, I can picture myself serving as third person going through a situation that I wasn’t actually present for.

Eric: [chuckles] He was this infamously hard executive at the WB. To just give you one quick example of him. You’re just a kid and they don’t teach you politics. He calls me on day one, or he takes me to lunch on day one of the job, and he’s like, “Look, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to slip me outlines and scripts before you show them to the studio. I’m going to give you the notes. You’re going to revise them, and then you’re going to show it to the studio, who’s then going to show it to me, and I’m going to pretend to love it. That’s how this is going to fucking go. Do you understand me?” I was like, “Yes, sir?”

I was immediately immersed in espionage, and slipping scripts. Then, Laura Ziskin, who was the producer of it, found out, and she was angry at me, but I didn’t understand. It was just a disaster. By the way, Tarzan shouldn’t be a TV show. [chuckles] It was doomed from the start.

John: I want to time travel back to you and tell you that, because also I did the Tarzan movie for Warners.

Eric: Oh, my.

John: It’s a very difficult character to center a story around in a feature, but as a TV show, dear Lord, you have a central character who we want to see shirtless, but can’t be shirtless all the time, obviously. Someone who’s by definition, low verbal, which makes things really challenging. It’s just–

Eric: It’s a mess. What I got handed was, “We want Tarzan in New York. You have to make Tarzan in New York work. Okay?”

John: It’s a jungle out there.

Eric: Right. [chuckles] Exactly. I think that was literally the tagline.

John: I’m sure it was, yes.

Eric: My take was, make the show about Jane. She’s a cop and whatever, but I’m like, “There’s a character you can relate to.” It’s like, Beauty and the Beast. It’s like, this guy comes in then he saves her–

John: Sleepy Hollow is a similar dynamic.

Eric: Then, we cast Travis Fimmel, who went on to be pretty big in Vikings. It was just nothing, but raw charisma. We cast him as Tarzan. He was a Calvin Klein model at the time, it was his first job. He’s just got that thing, and so all the dials went to the right whenever he showed up on screen, the testing dials. So all the executives were like, “He’s the show.” I’m like, “No, he’s a monkey. There’s nothing. He doesn’t know– Maybe he gets a job. How about one episode where he gets a job?”

I’m like, “He doesn’t know what currency is. There’s just nothing you can do, except that he loves this girl, and he wants to protect her.” Anyway, it was a disaster.

John: It was a mess. Let’s fast forward up to Supernatural, which was not a mess, which was a tremendous success. Tell us about the process of figuring out how to do Supernatural, not just what the premise was, but it feels like you approached that show with an idea of what that was going to be week-to-week in a very smart way.

It wasn’t just like, “Here’s the pilot, then we’ll see what happens.” You very much knew this is how the show wants to tell itself week-after-week. This is a central relationship. This is the kind of thing that happens in an episode. Was that clear from the very first pitch?

Eric: No. Here’s what was clear, which was one of the many lessons I walked out of Tarzan from, was, if you’re going to make a network show, and do 22 of them, spend most of your time thinking about the engine, and what’s going to give you story every week that you can always go back to that well if you need to. I happen to have been obsessed with Urban Legend. I still am.

I like to collect them, and study them and did in college. For me, the engine was, “Okay, characters are investigating urban legends that all turn out to be real.” That was the premise. I pitched a journalist. I pitched a bad rip-off of Kolchak, where he worked for a tabloid, and he was investigating. I had a whole pitch, and Warner Brothers, I pitched it to them, Susan Rovner. She said, “I really liked the urban legend idea, but the reporter thing’s really boring. What else have you got?”

John: Yes.

Eric: I had written in my notebook, literally the day before, only two lines. I wrote, “One way you could do this story would be Route 66.” I said, “Well, I have a whole other version of this idea.” I’m like, “It’s Route 66 and it’s these two guys, and they’re in a cool car, and they’re driving around the country.” Then, on the spot said, “They’re brothers.” I don’t– Still don’t know why. Where it came from.

She started leaning forward. She’s like, “Ooh, a sibling relationship, and a show about family. Oh, I’m really interested.” I’m like, “Great. I have all those notes at home. Give me a week to just go home and get them. Then, I’ll come back.” I went back and I furiously wrote what ultimately became the pilot pitch of Supernatural. The way I really– It’s funny. It’s like, thank God for those urban legends, because that’s how I learned structure.

They’re such tight little jokes, really. To take these two characters, and put them into those stories, provided a structure that I really learned a lot about. A beginning, a middle, a twist, and an end, because I always had that to go back to. I very much learned how to write on the fly.

John: Can we talk about Supernatural? Because it was a classic broadcast WB Network show with commercial breaks. I’m assuming that, as you’re writing the pilot, at every given episode, you’re really writing towards those act breaks. Those are the key moments of reversal that you’re hanging your story on those points, and then figuring out how to get to those points in between.

That probably starts in the blue sky of the episode. Then, those are the moments you’re listing on the whiteboard. Is that a five-act show? Is it a six-act show? I don’t know what it was at that point.

Eric: We started at four plus a teaser, and then they added another commercial break. Then, after season two or three, it was five plus a teaser. Six acts, yes. In a 45-page script.

John: Yes, so it’s really, you’re racing between those moments. Once you accept that, and you can build off that, and crucially, once you have a show that can actually fit that structure, it’s liberating. It’s got to go be just so nice.

Eric: I loved it, and I have to tell you, I miss it in this new streaming, freeform thing. The discipline of having something awesome happen every eight pages, is a really smart discipline. It’s very, I think, instructive because you just– To this day, I live in absolute terror of being boring, because I hate the idea of going more than 10 minutes in anything without someone saying, “Oh shit, that’s crazy,” because I had to do that, because I needed you to come back after the deodorant commercial.

Having too much structure was really great training ground, that then you can pull back a little bit. I’d say for The Boys now, we write three-act structure, but we are still really interested in structure. Structure saved my life. It’s how I learned to do this. Once you realized, “Oh, this is all just math.” It’s all plant, pay off, three or four character beats, set up, twist, action, wrap up.

Once you realize it’s all just beats that then you just blend together, and then hide under dialogue, and action, and emotion, and sex, and love, but the mechanics of it, the erector set, infrastructure of it is really predictable. That saved my life, because I was like, “Oh, okay.” To this day, I care more about structure than anything, because I think it’s like a life preserver for me.

The people who write independent shit, that they’re just like, “Oh, no, I hate structure. I just want– It’s a day in New York.” That terrifies me. I don’t know how to do that. I only know how to do, here are the four beats, and here’s how we’re going to get from A to B.

John: Structure classically being, when things happen. This is, as you’re moving through forward in time, these are the things we’re going to encounter. The structure of television also necessarily implies a structure of where things are going to happen. Supernatural is a road show, but they happen to be just driving around the same places all the time. It’s convenient that way.

With The Boys, it’s been interesting to notice season-by-season, figuring out like, “Oh, what are your standing sets? What are the places we’re going to come back to?” Because for financial reasons, but also for narrative reasons, we need to have home bases from which people can move out. There’s this last season, or maybe the season before, we have this office building with windows all around it, that it’s like, that’s a central set.

We know we’re going to come back to this place. It’s a home base for the production, but also for the viewer to say like, “Okay, I understand where we’re at. We’ve come back around, and these things have changed since the last time we were in this space.”

Eric: Yes. No, The Boys is actually the first show that I’ve ever done that isn’t some version of a roadshow. Standing sets were actually pretty new to me, and they’re very useful. Look, I have to say, I find them more useful logistically, budgetarily as a producer, than I find them necessarily narratively useful. Just today, we’re trying to bring down a budget of one of our episodes, and we’re like, “Well, let’s move these three scenes onto our home sets, and then we don’t have to drive out, or build them or whatever.” To me, that’s the value of home sets.

I don’t find myself watching something, and wishing that character went to that home set. I’d rather they didn’t. I like the variety life, that cinematic thing where everything is different and beautiful, and there’s a variety, is my own personal taste. You do need them, and they have saved my ass on numerous occasions.

John: You’ve mentioned that Boys, you think of it as being three acts, four acts. As you’re breaking an episode, what is the process? How many people do you have in the room? You probably started the season with a sketch of an idea of where things were headed. That came down into, these are the episodes. When you’re actually focusing on an episode, how many beats are you looking for? When do you have enough and not too much for an episode, and that someone can go off and start working on script?

Eric: We start– There’s about seven of us, seven plus me. Everybody gets an episode. We spend about a month at the top of the year talking about season-wide mythology, and where we want the characters to go, whatever. Then, when we start actually breaking the episode, we usually know, or at least are aiming for, here’s where we have to build to this character moment, or this plot turn, or this step in the mythology.

We have that guide to start with. Then, we spend, it takes about, for us, three, three and a half weeks to break an episode. We probably spend two of those weeks just talking through character psychology. What’s the character thinking? Where do we want them to grow in this episode? What’s the thing they want most in the world? What’s the thing they’re afraid of most in the world? How do we make the thing they’re most afraid of, stand in the way of the thing that they want?

How does that relate to their childhood, whether it’s on camera or not? We’re just talking, talking, talking trying to dig as deep as we can into the psychology. Eventually, it coalesces around, I’d say per character, like three or four beats. They start here, they grow here, this throws something in their path, and then they end up there.

John: As this is within an episode, each character will have three or four beats. That’s assuming all characters are in all episodes. There may be, obviously, places where people are off, but you’re also going to need to find ways, like people are just not in their own scenes, they’re in scenes with other people. You want to make sure that the scenes they’re in with other people are progressing both of their storylines.

Eric: Right. One thing I learned as the show went on, because we have 14 main characters, right? Though we spend our time thinking emotionally about those characters, I learned very quickly that you need to double and triple people up into the same story, because there’s just not enough– You can’t have 14 separate stories in a one-hour show, and already we have too many storylines.

The biggest challenge of The Boys is there’s too many stories. It’s like Game of Thrones in a way, where sometimes you want to just sit with a story longer than you can, but you have all of these other stories to service to keep the machine going.

John: With this new season, at the end of last season, it’s pretty common now to burn down everything at the end of a season, so that you can come back to the new season and start things over. You did a very big burn down of everything at the end of this last season, and including our expectations about what is supposed to be happening. In that first episode of the new season, which I’ve not seen yet, as we’re recording this, how much are you thinking about getting the audience back up to speed? Are you expecting them to just start in the middle, and figure out what’s happening behind it? Those blue sky discussions must be a really important part of thinking about your season.

Eric: Mileage varies and taste varies. I prefer throwing people into the middle of it, and then slowly revealing the information that got them there. We like to play, we’ve done it a couple seasons now, where we almost play a game of, how do we reintroduce the character in the craziest place, or the most unexpected place we can put them, and then explain how they ended up there. In season 3, like Hughie is in a suit, and he’s Butcher’s boss.

John: That’s right.

Eric: You’re just like, “What? Wait. I don’t understand.” Then you realize, “Oh, he’s working with Victoria Newman, and he’s the head of this– He’s one of the co-heads of this agency.” You tease it out, so that by the end of the episode, they understand everything, but that you don’t front load the exposition. If anything, you back load it. I think that’s more fun. That’s what we try to do for the– That’s how season 5 opens.

Look, it was really helpful that I had pre-negotiated with Sony and Amazon that they were going to allow me to end the show on my terms, and that the fifth season was going to be the final season, because that allows you to blow the doors off it, like you said, in the season 4 climax, because you know you’re not holding on any chips anymore. You can go all in. That freedom allowed me to do the size of the finale that we were able to do that I don’t think I could have done otherwise.

John: Also, you don’t have to hold back any beats for characters that you were like, at some point, we would want to talk about this aspect of Hughie, we want to do this thing. At some point, Jim and Pam from The Office, you want to see them get married, but when are you going to do that? It is very liberating to know the end of a thing.

Eric: Beyond just the simple ones of, you can kill people off, which is fun, but you can also have them have conflict that is irreparable, because you don’t have to worry about bringing them back next season. You don’t have to say, “Well, that’s character assassination, you guys. We still have to live with that character.” You don’t have to do any of that. It’s very freeing.

It’s also super intimidating, because you can count on one hand the amount of truly great series finales. The landscape is just littered with corpses of shows that did not stick the landing. That’s a really intimidating– This is the first time I’ve been able to end a show. This is my first stab at it. I’m appropriately terrified of, are we sticking the landing? What do we need to do? Is it happening? Is it emotionally satisfying? Is it unexpected? I lose a lot of sleep over trying to land this plane.

John: I’m not asking for any spoilers, but looking back to your decision process about the season, did that mean you really came into the room thinking about, “Hey, what are the questions we want the series to answer? What are the payoffs that, we as creators, and as an audience are hoping to find in that, and then working towards that?” Is it just, you really are reverse engineering a bit?

Eric: Yes, that’s exactly right. Again, structure is so important to me, and I’m a little OCD, and I just hate the idea of moving forward into a horizon that I don’t know, or understand. I want to know where I’m going. In the beginning of the season, we talked about– The way I phrased it was like, “Okay, let’s say all the action is over, and now it’s like the 10 pages of wrap up, set to like the slow part of Laila. What do we want to see? Who’s alive, who’s dead, the ones who are alive, what are they doing? Where do we want everyone to end up? We figured that out. We figured out that final montage is one of the very early things. Then, it was like, “Okay, so how do we get there?”

John: What are your favorite series endings? What shows do you feel like actually really stuck the landing?

Eric: Breaking Bad is an annoyingly good ending.

John: Absolute monster that Vince Gilligan, yes.

Eric: He’s so annoying, like he’s delivered two different shows that have never had a bad episode, and both stuck the landing, and it’s annoying how good he is. Those are the two that really come to mind, Saul and Breaking Bad.

John: Your description of the resolution, and the song playing over it makes me think of Six Feet Under and which just–

Eric: Yes, that’s a great one. Yes, really good. One of the best actually.

John: Absolutely. Where it’s just thematically like, “Oh, we’re all going to die. This has been a show about death. We’re all going to die. Let’s look at how these characters die.”

Eric: Yes. No, for sure. Six Feet Under is a great one. Again, there’s not many. [chuckles] I can’t think of that many.

John: Yes, and it shows that we absolutely loved, where you look at the last episodes like, “Yeah, okay.”

Eric: Yeah, okay. You’re sending people out into the parking lot with a bad taste in their mouth.

John: Yes, exactly.

Eric: It colors all the good work you did before it.

John: Yes, people’s frustration with both the ending of Lost, and the ending of Game of Thrones. It is weird how it retroactively makes people like decide they didn’t like the series. It’s like, “No, I can show you evidence that you’ve loved this show.”

Eric: When you think of the unbelievable undertaking to make those shows, how hard those showrunners worked, and the pages and pages of just top tier quality, and because they didn’t stick the landing, everyone’s like, “Yes, I don’t know about Lost.” You’re like, “Oh my God, that show changed television.” Poor Damon Lindelof who has to write essays about defending the ending. You’re like, “Dude, you made one of the great shows.” Anyway, I’m really nervous.

John: Here’s hoping you won’t have to write essays defending the ending and The Boys.

Eric: Oh my God. Cut to my Hollywood Reporter op-ed piece of why The Boys made sense.

John: Yes. Let’s get to some listener questions. Drew, help us out. We have one here from Scott.

Drew Marquardt: Scott writes, while a bottle episode is always locked to a particular location, is there a term for an episode that exclusively follows a particular character? Recent examples include the Severance episode that only featured Cobel and Salt’s Neck, or The Bear that was just all a Tina backstory. I can’t think of a phrase I’ve ever heard used to describe this. Is there one you can think of, or suggest?

John: Eric, I was a little stumped for a term here too. It feels like a thing you actually just maybe describe, because we know what that is, but I haven’t heard a common industry term for that.

Eric: No, I haven’t either. Funny enough, I’ve heard it about two people, a two-hander.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Obviously, I’ve heard bottle episode. The closest term I can think of that we actively use is, it’s a change-up, because it’s more about what’s your structural change-up from what normal structure of the episode is. We’re doing not particularly that, but we’re doing a change-up this season, where we just blow out our old structure, and do a totally new one. Change-up, I guess. We did them a lot on Supernatural.

John: Yes, a change-up makes sense. Side quest is also a thing. Just that sense of like, you’re taking one character outside of the main story space, and letting them do a whole separate thing. There’s a series I’m pitching that, where one of the episodes definitely does do that, and actually tracks a bunch of things we’ve seen, but from a completely new perspective, and point of view. It’s almost a convention at this point, but I have not heard one common.

Eric: No.

John: Especially with that.

Eric: Whoever wrote that should pick the phrase.

John: Pick the phrase.

Eric: Make it happen. They can give birth to it.

John: All right, we got a question here from Ethan.

Drew: Ethan writes, I’m working on a live action script that pulls a lot from the visual language of comic books. I’m trying to do this in a nuanced way, not like Scott Pilgrim or Spider-Verse. I’ve cracked the formatting on some visual elements like multiple panels in one shot, but something’s stumping me. How would you write a quick change in color, or background to emphasize an impact? What about silhouette? I’m sure just saying that is the simplest way, but I’m looking to streamline it. I don’t like to break flow, but I want to sell the style.

John: All right, so the images that we’re looking at here, I’m not sure what this is from, but the protagonist here is on a purple background, and then this woman shows up and slaps him, and it’s a yellow background. Then, the slaps are always on a different color background. It’s visually striking. Eric Kripke, you are a person who has adapted a graphic novel series, comic books, into another form. What do you think about this?

Eric: I’m going to say something like annoying and ice watery, which is, they’re different mediums. Comics, because I wrote a comic for Vertigo, and so I really got inside it. Comics, it’s a medium of space, and TV and film is a medium of time. They do not connect one-to-one. I actually think you’re risking something in your story to try to make it to keep the fidelity to the comic too high, because they just don’t have the same rhythms.

I would suggest, don’t focus on any of it. Leave it to the director, and just worry about making the characters nuanced, and complicated, and great, and a tight story that keeps turning.

John: Yes, thinking about The Boys, you’re clearly in a heightened universe. You’re looking at the pilot script for that. We can see that we’re in a heightened universe that feels comic-adjacent, but you’re not trying to emulate the specific styles of what it would look like on the page. There’s none of that stuff. Unlike, Scott Pilgrim, or Spider-Verse where you feel the intrusion of those elements onto the form, we’re not seeing that in your show. We know it’s in a comic space without having the conventions of comics.

Eric: Right. I think, look, I think Scott Pilgrim is one of the very few exceptions with a lot of fidelity to the original material, and it worked. I’d say much more often, they don’t. Damon’s Watchmen was so much more interesting than the movie, because he went his own direction with it. Yes, I would say, it’s about finding what’s unique about your story. The Boys, for instance, what defined a lot of the visual language that Dan Trachtenberg directed the pilot, and said a lot of that language is our gimmick, or our original little bauble was, what if superheroes existed in the real world?

You take this absurd concept, which is these magic flying people, but then how does that really work in the world we’re living in? In that tension, that’s where the show lives. Once we knew that, we knew how to make, someone-ism comes down to earth, and they seem like a God, but then they have to take a shit. It really finding the thing that is your, for lack of a better term, whatever your concept is, letting your visuals flow from that is good, because that’s a– We keep saying, “Well, what can we do that no other show can do?” That always brings us back to presenting something that stems from our concept.

John: Also, this brings us right, all the way back to the challenge you had going from the short film of Battle of the Sexes to a feature film. It’s like the world building didn’t make sense. The world fundamentally didn’t fit together right with those things you were trying to put together. In The Boys, it’s a heightened place, but within the rules of The Boys, things do actually make sense. There’s a consistency, there’s an internal consistency behind the different elements.

Eric: Right. Of course, yes, exactly. I take a lot of pride in maintaining that consistency. I drive my production designer nuts with– The posters in the background, I make him do 12 versions of, because I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t quite fit.” That character wouldn’t have been in that movie at that time. I got really obsessive with it, because it’s just fun. The point is, the rules don’t have to actually be logical, but they do have to be consistent. I think once people can do that, you can feel the internal logic of a piece.

John: A thing that I’ve always wondered about with The Boys, is that why Hughie, or some of the other person doesn’t point out like, “We must be living in a simulation.” There’s no way that these physics could possibly make sense. We have scientists, but then scientists could not possibly explain the things that are actually happening here. This must be a simulation. Is that an idea that ever came up in your thinking, and your development? That Hughie or some other character’s like, “No, this is impossible.”

Eric: No, never did. We always said, the show only has one slippery banana, which is compound V. You buy it, because the fact that it was born out of concentration camp testing. It’s like just this side of believable that you could make something like that, if you had thousands of people you could torture Mengele style. We always say, that’s the only magical thing. People just believe that this chemical can do this thing.

John: Because it’s a central premise. Without that central premise, the whole show doesn’t exist. People are willing to buy it, because you’re asking them to buy one thing versus a bunch of little small things.

Eric: Right, exactly. every time someone pitches me some James Bondian set piece, or some super high-tech, “Oh, he’s flying in on a flying green goblin thing.” I’m like, “Who invented that? Where did that magic come from?” We only get one magical thing, and it’s this vial of blue shit. That’s it.

John: Yes, so if aliens showed up in The Boys, it wouldn’t make sense.

Eric: Wouldn’t make any sense because we get one magic thing.

John: I loved the show, True Blood. One of the frustrations I have with the show is, I did feel like they kept adding layers onto it that didn’t all feel consistent with the premise that we’d had established in the early seasons.

Eric: Yes, but a beautiful metaphor, though, that show, yes.

John: Oh, so, so good. We’ll talk more about blood in the bonus segment. First, let’s go to our one cool thing. My one cool thing for people to check out this week is a video, so this was during the Olympics– Well, the Olympics that were in Paris, during those opening ceremonies along the Seine, which went on really too long for my taste, but there was a moment where there’s the Minions do this little segment, where the Minions are in the Seine, and they’re in a submarine.

I love the Minions, and I was hoping that I could find just that segment, and it was actually as good as I remember, and I’m happy to report, it is just as delightful as I remember. It’s two minutes of the Minions having hijinks in a submarine. I think it’s absolutely delightful. It’s on YouTube, on the official Olympics little channel there. I’m going to put a link in the show notes too. Two minutes of the Minions doing the Olympics. I recommend that.

Eric: One of my good friends and that we went to film school together co-directed the last Minions movie.

John: Oh, fantastic, who’s this?

Eric: Brad Ableson.

John: All right.

Eric: Yes, Minions.

John: The Minions are a fantastic creation, and they are so smartly done. They’re just these little creatures of pure instinct, and I just love them so much.

Eric: Yes. No, that’s a good one. That’s a good one.

John: Eric, what do you have to share with us?

Eric: Two things pop in my head. Can I say both of them?

John: Please. Absolutely.

Eric: One, and they might not be that obscure, so I don’t know, but the last movie I saw that really blew me away was Strange Darling.

John: I’ve recommended Strange Darling. I think it is so fantastic. I’m telling everyone to see it, and was so frustrated that more people are not seeing it, or that it’s not getting the award attention it should get.

Eric: It’s so good.

John: So good.

Eric: Brilliantly directed, but that script is so tight, and it’s such a perfect example of how to reveal information, and when to. I was blown away by it, and I would just recommend the less about that movie, the better.

John: Exactly.

Eric: If you’re listening to this, go on Amazon or whatever and watch Strange Darling.

John: There is blood, and so we’ll say that, if you cannot watch any blood, don’t watch the movie, but it’s just so smart.

Eric: It’s so, so smart. Then, the second one, is it okay if I say a podcast? Because it’s a podcast I’ve been listening to.

John: A hundred percent.

Eric: It’s fairly mainstream, but like The Lonely Island Seth Meyers podcast, where every week they talk about a short film that Lonely Island made during SNL. More than that, it’s a very nitty-gritty take of what it was like behind the scenes at SNL. If you’re a comedy nerd, which I am, they get so granular about how brutal it was, and the chaos that led to these sketches. Anyway, I find it both fascinating, and very funny.

John: Absolutely. It’s always great when you see like, oh, this thing that you love, they love it too, but their experience of it was so different, because they actually had to make it and it was exhausting, and they didn’t know if it was going to be good while they were doing it. They were surprised too.

Eric: I have a question for you actually, because I find that. My mom always used to say, “Cake never tastes as good when you bake it yourself.” I find that’s really true. Do you find, like so many other people like The Boys and Gen V more than me.

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: Because for me, it’s like a painful process, because all I’m thinking about is the mistakes, and what I wish I could have done better. Do you find that on your work?

John: I do some. People love the second Charlie’s Angels movie, and it was such a really painful experience for me, that I have a hard time experiencing the same joy they have for it. The flip side of that is, Big Fish was a largely good experience for me, and I’ve gotten to do the Big Fish musical again and again and again and again. It’s been just so much work in so many years of my life, but I can also get to watch it now, and actually just enjoy it as its own thing. I’ve crossed through that Rubicon of, it being painful too, appreciating that the pain is part of why I love it so much.

Eric: Yes. No, I get that. There’s certain episodes of Supernatural now that I can watch and enjoy, but I needed 10 to 15 years of separation to really enjoy it.

John: I don’t think either one of us is going to go back, and you will watch your Tarzan, or me watch my D.C. show. It’s like, there’s too much pain there. There’s not a lot of joy left in there.

Eric: Yes, I think that’s true.

John: Cool. That is Scriptnotes for this week. 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@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the shownotes with links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the backup episodes, and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on blood.

Eric Kripke, it’s an absolute pleasure talking with you. Congratulations on The Boys. I’m so excited to see how it ends.

Eric: Oh, thank you, this was so fun.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Eric Kripke, from the pilot episode of The Boys, Hughie is standing there with his girlfriend, she gets run through by a speedster, and blood spatters everywhere. Hughie ends up wearing his girlfriend in blood, and that is the signal to us, like this is going to be an incredibly gory show. Did you know that from day one, from the moment of approaching this adaptation?

Eric: Yes, the gore is a really big part of the comic, and so we wanted to capture that. That was one of the things that I think made the comic unique from other superhero stuff. Again, if by putting superheroes in the real world with real fleshy people, the idea that they would just desecrate the human body over and over and over again, is a probably true fact that, just like the comic separated it from other superhero comics, it separated us from other superhero media.

John: Yes, so in Smallville, you’re not going to see blood, you’re definitely not going to see penises, you’re not going to see boobs.

Eric: Yes, and like what Seth Rogen always says, he’s one of our producers, is, “Shooting lasers from your eyes is not going to make someone shoot back into a door. They’re going to melt in the most horrific way possible.” We wanted to show that in a way that Smallville, or Superman never could.

John: Yes, let’s start with like the actual process of filming some of the goriness of the things, and how often your characters end up covered in blood, and how much they hate you for it? Talk to us about blood on set, and there’s probably a bunch of different ways you’re doing blood.

Eric: Yes, it depends on, there’s multiple departments that all have blood depending on where the blood goes. The three primary departments are makeup, wardrobe, and special effects. To hit them one at a time, wardrobe, they will pre-dress all of the blood all over the clothes. Makeup, if it’s on your face, and you’re playing with the character’s eyes, or whatever, you have to really carefully land all that stuff, so makeup carefully applies it.

In the hair, hair and makeup. Then, special effects is the coolest, most fun one because– For people who don’t necessarily know, there’s a difference between special effects and visual effects. Visual effects are the CG, and the computer, and all the stuff that happens afterwards. Special effects are the things that happen on the day, the explosions, the snow, the rain, the blood.

John: The squibs, yes.

Eric: Squibs, yes. What they’ll do is, use the example of when Hughie’s girlfriend Robin gets run through by A-Train. It’s so fun to do, because the special effects guys literally have like a blood cannon. It’s like a shotgun, and it’s loaded with blood. One thing we learned is, it can’t just be blood. It’s blood and all of these little gummy silicone bits. Someone is off camera pointing it directly in Jack Quaid’s face, and they’re going to pull a trigger, and all of this goo is going to launch at high velocity in his face, and he needs to not blink.

John: Yes.

Eric: God love that guy. He’s amazing at it. It’s like you’re literally– He’s there in front, cameras rolling, special effects guys take over the call. They’re like, “Everybody ready, three, two, one.” Then, someone shoots a shotgun at point blank range into Jack’s face with blood. That’s how we would do that. They also– If a character explodes, which we’ve done a lot of, a lot of times, it’s just CG, and it goes to visual effects, because it’s quicker on the day. Other times, they’ll create like a huge blood bag just loaded with blood, and bits, and organs. Then, they’ll put an explosive in the middle of it, and detonate it. Then, visual effects will replace the person who’s standing there with the explosion.

John: That’s how you get the blood on the environment, and on the other characters who are standing around, which makes sense.

Eric: Yes. The fun fact about blood is, it’s a corn syrup based, which means it’s sugary. Which means it’s insanely sticky and horrible. It attracts bees. My actors are always pissed at me, because it’s awful.

John: Obviously, we’ve been doing corn syrup since the beginning. There’s some reason why it works really well, but it does seem surprising to me that a show like you that uses so much of it, there’s been no innovation. There’s no alternative substance that–

Eric: We’ve never done– No, we stuck to what works. In season 2, we put the guys inside of a whale.

John: I remember that, yes.

Eric: The whale is doused with barrels of corn syrup. There were bees everywhere. They were living inside it. It takes the guys days to shower all of this goo off, but it just– It looks good. It flings in the right way. It feels like what it’s supposed to. Now, you raised an interesting question. It was like, “Does it feel real? Does it feel like the way the audience has been programmed over the last 50 years to think that that’s what blood looks like?” It’s probably that.

One thing they do, because all of it takes time. A lot of times, when you’re seeing the blood puddles on the floor, those are actually plastic decals they’ll lay down on the floor, and they can just peel right off, because you’re looking for anything you can do to save time on the day.

John: Backing up to make sure I’m understanding properly. Blood I see on a character’s face, hair, that’s one department. Anything that’s on their wardrobe, that’s pre-dressed there. You’re not taking a clean shirt and putting stuff on it. It’s a specially made shirt that has something on it. You might have to adjust that over the course of progression of a day, because it’s not going to look the same right when it first happens, and five scenes later.

Eric: Unless you want the moment of the blood hitting it for the first time, at which point someone wears a clean outfit, and someone from special effects has that blood cannon, and are waiting to just douse the character.

John: Has working around so much blood, changed your relationship about physical trauma, and your blood itself? Has there been an impact for you?

Eric: It’s funny, in Supernatural, even though it had much more stringent broadcast standards, it had a pretty solid amount of blood. This show is way over the top. I am so squeamish with the real thing. My wife likes to watch this, like these pimple popper shows-

John: Oh, yes.

Eric: -and these surgery shows. I cannot watch. I cover my eyes. I squeal. I leave. I literally leave the room. I cannot watch the real stuff. But the pretend stuff, I could watch all day. Peter Jackson, early Peter Jackson movies, I find that stuff so fun, because it’s basically like just a different version of Muppets. It’s just puppets. It’s puppets, and ingenuity, and magic. It’s so fun. The real stuff is horrible.

John: Yes. It is interesting how different, the context matters for these things. On your show, which is over the top and cartoony, we come to accept that. Then, if you’re watching a medical show, where they need to cut into somebody like, “Oh my God, that’s so horrifying.” It just feels so different. Where you’re priming the audience for one set of expectations.

Eric: Yes, it’s actually hard, because in our first season, and at least a good chunk of our second season, we still retained the ability to shock, where you could have something happen that would make the audience go, “Oh, shit.” It’s been very hard, because what you don’t want to do is try to keep topping it, and you become this big overinflated piece of bullshit. You want to be really driven about it. It’s hard on our show when you are so extreme to still surprise people.

John: Yes. Well, once you’ve had someone like a miniature person inside when someone’s urethra, it’s sort of– You can’t.

Eric: Yes, it’s hard.

John: You start to stop trying to top yourself there.

Eric: Yes, it’s true.

John: Eric, an absolute pleasure talking with you about blood.

Eric: Hey, thanks, John. That was fun.

Links:

• Eric Kripke on IMDb and Instagram
• The Boys
• Battle of the Sexes short film
• Minions on the Seine!
• Strange Darling
• The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A 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: Biddy, biddy, biddy, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 678 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how does a series maintain its look and feel when directors change each week? We’ll talk about one solution, which is the on-set producer responsible for upholding a showrunner’s vision on set. We’ll also talk about TV development and answer listener questions on pitching, shipping an app, and writing by hand, plus the scourge of directors’ chairs. What can be done about these implements of torture?

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about officiating weddings, because me and Craig and our guests have all been officiants officially at weddings. We’ve married people. We’ll talk about the process of marrying people.

Craig: We marry people and we’ve married people.

John: We have, yes. Both as a transitive and as an intransitive verb.

Craig: No. They’re both transitive.

John: They’re both transitive, but different.

Craig: Just different verb meanings.

John: Yes. We’ll dig deep into the verb meanings behind–

Craig: Welcome to nerd corner. Do you know what I did when I introduced my– do you recognize that sound?

John: No. Tell me.

Craig: Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: I don’t know what it is.

Craig: Do you have any idea? That is from the Buck Rogers television show way back [crosstalk]

John: Oh my God. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and I remember it. [crosstalk]

Craig: The little robot. Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: So good.

Craig: Was it? [laughs]

John: Well, I enjoyed it, but I also kind of enjoyed Gil

Gerard. I think that may have been why I was watching the show.

Craig: Erin Moran.

John: Erin Moran.

Craig: There we go.

John: Everyone has a thing to–

Craig: Everyone’s got–

John: What’s the robot?

Craig: By the way, early network executives were like, “I don’t care what happens in space. I want a guy that everyone who likes guys would like. I want a girl that everyone who likes girls would like. Put them in the spacesuits. Go.”

John: Go.

Craig: They were right.

John: They were absolutely correct.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Our guest this week is a guy that all guys will like and that all girls will like. Helping us figure all this out is Dan Etheridge.

Craig: That’s so much pressure.

Dan Etheridge: Wow.

John: He is a producer whose credits include Veronica Mars, iZombie, High Potential, The Carrie Diaries, and Cupid. He co-created Party Down and on the feature side, he produced seven movies, more than seven?

Dan: Yes, I think that sounds right.

Craig: For a moment there I thought you meant Seven the movie and I was like, “What?”

Dan: It’s pretty incredible.

Craig: What a weird outlier in that resume.

Dan: You’re welcome.

John: There’s a bunch of movies including my film, The Nines.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Dan Etheridge, welcome to the show.

Dan: Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here.

John: Dan Etheridge, in addition to being an incredible producer, you are also one of my dearest friends on earth. It’s so great to finally have you on the podcast.

Dan: Back at you.

John: All right.

Dan: What’s it been, like 30 years as of this year?

John: That we’ve been friends?

Dan: Yes.

John: I guess our friendiversary is probably coming up pretty soon, because it would have been– What year did we meet? That would have been– I’m going to call it in ’95.

Dan: ’94. ’95.

John: ’95. Yes. Right in there. Great.

Dan: Right in there. That’s the time. Then what year was God?

John: God the short was 1998.

Dan: Okay.

John: Yes. Shortly after.

Dan: A few years later. Right on.

John: God, a short film with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Yes. The great Melissa McCarthy.

John: So good. So much fun. We have actual news. In addition to everything else, my company makes the app Highland for the Macintosh. Today we are coming out with the new version, Highland Pro, which is a new app from the ground up. It is made for the Mac, of course, but also iPhone and iPad. Today, as you’re listening to this episode, it is available in all of the app stores. On the podcast, we talk about Nima, the helpful elf. This is a work done by Nima and Dustin, if you’ve heard of the show. It’s mostly what they work on, but also Drew, Chris. Drew is just cutting a video for the launch of it.

Drew: I thought you were giving me credit for making this app, and that was not true.

John: No. Drew uses the app regularly.

Drew: All the time.

Craig: That’s almost the same thing as making it.

John: Yes. Drew and I have been using the app for the last two years. We’ve gotten to see all the beta development things. It’s so nice to actually have the rest of the world be able to use it.

My goal with this new version of Highland Pro is to get rid of all the stuff that can distract you in the world as you’re writing. A couple of examples is we have a new thing called the shelf. Sometimes when you are writing something, you need to cut a scene and then you will just cut it and paste it into an extra document, sort of a scratch file. Craig, I see you nodding. It’s a thing you do.

Craig: I do that.

John: You do that.

Craig: I do that.

John: Then it’s work and you’re breaking your flow from doing it. In Highland Pro, you just grab it, you drag it to the side, to the shelf, and it just stays there.

Craig: Yes, that’s a really smart idea.

John: It’s always there. Nice.

Craig: It stays within the file.

John: Yes. Craig, you probably leave notes for yourself in a script to go back and do some stuff. Do you boldface them?

Craig: Rarely, I do an all caps, boldface, fix this, or make this go better.

John: In Highland, you can just put double brackets around things to make a note or just put an equal sign in front of it as a note. It’ll always stand out. It’ll always show up in the navigator on the side for like, oh, these are the things, the work list you leave for yourself on stuff.

Craig: I wish I used a navigator on the side. It’s there. I never look at it. I just scroll like an idiot.

John: You don’t need to. You can just do this. The coolest new thing that we introduced in this version of Highland is what we call lookup. So often when I’m writing something, I’ll need to switch to Safari to find something. It could be a rhyme for something, it could be, what year was Madison president? It could be some small little thing. I’ll find myself just getting sucked into a hole because I switched over to the browser because I left my typing environment to do it. Now in Highland, you just type slash and then whatever you’re looking for. If it’s a rhyme for green, if it’s a distance from Denver to Houston, it gives you the answer right there in the documents.

Craig: Does it connect up with Google or something?

John: It does. For things like rhymes and for dictionary, for definitions, it’s using an outside service, an API that’s called WordNet something. Those answers are blazingly fast. If it’s something it doesn’t know how to do, it reaches out to one of the services, reaches out first to our server and then to one of those services, and gives you an answer as quickly as it can. It’s basically Googling it. I just want to give you the shortest possible answer.

Craig: You don’t have to leave.

John: You don’t have to leave.

Craig: You’re forcing me to write more. Stop it.

John: I’m hopefully making your writing process smoother and more enjoyable.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I love the distractions.

John: You love the distractions sometimes.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait for Final Draft to steal all of your ideas, John.

John: It’s going to happen here soon. What question– Drew has it open here. What question do you want Drew to ask? Let’s pretend you’re writing something. It’s something you need to know.

Craig: Got it. When was the first locomotive in operation in the United States?

John: He’s typing.

Craig: I hear him.

Drew: It says the first locomotive introduced in the United States was the Tom Thumb, which was built in 1829.

Craig: Oh [crosstalk]

John: Wow. Did you know that already? Was that–

Craig: New. Nor do I know if that’s true.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Seems made up.

Drew: Tom Thumb.

Craig: Tom Thumb. Sus.

John: What I tend to use it for is, I don’t need the absolute verifiable fact. What I need is, what is that? What am I thinking of? Sort of the reverse. There’s a word I’m thinking of that starts with an L that means this thing. It’s so good for that.

Craig: Confirmation.

John: Yes. The kind of stuff that could stop you for 2 minutes and just break that pattern. Just getting you out of there really quickly. Also, you don’t have to go open a menu. You don’t have to do anything. You just type slash and then what you want, it’s there, and it goes away.

Craig: Great.

John: Highland is out today. It’s on the Mac App Store, the iPhone App Store, the iPad App Store. You can try it there.

Dan: I think that my blurb, I believe it was from Bronson Watermarker or either Weekend Read, probably Weekend Read.

John: Probably Weekend Read, yes.

Dan: “Staggeringly useful,” and that applies very much here as well. Very nice.

Do you remember that you asked me to write something up? I happily did because I really did love the app and I’m not really a writer, but I wrote up like a three, four sentence paragraph that I really spent some real time on. It had the phrase staggeringly useful in it when the blurb appeared, “staggeringly useful”. I appreciated your editing, ever the great writer/producer.

John: You’ve got to be concise. You’ve got to be short.

Craig: It’s a blurb. [crosstalk] It’s a blurb.

John: Blurb. I overdid it. It was my fault.

Craig: You over-blurbed. Very common mistake.

John: Yes, I know. I do it all the time. Let’s do some follow-up. What do you got for us?

Drew: Yes. In the last episode, Craig, you said that there is no way around Google AI summaries.

Craig: Yes. Not at least other than what I’d read was forcing Google to only return answers prior to a year.

Drew: Right. Tom, listener Tom wrote in that you can get around Google’s AI results by including profanity in your search, and it works.

Craig: Yeah. Weird work around. So if I just want to search something, I just got to throw an F-bomb at the end of it?

Drew: Yes, or get creative. Put it in the middle.

Craig: When was the first fucking locomotive invented in the– oh, warning, language warning.

John: Yes. Sorry.

Craig: Okay. Interesting. Also, weird choice by Google to just be like, “Oh, yes. Oh, we can’t let the AI hear those dirty words.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I bet that will work for about the next two weeks and then–

Craig: I switched my search engine to a start page.

John: Oh, very nice. I’m using DuckDuckGo. Dan shaking his head.

Dan: Google.

John: He’s Google. I’ve heard of Google.

Craig: Start pages seem nice. Work great.

John: Good.

Craig: No stupid AI results.

John: We have some follow-up from episode 536.

Drew: Tony in LA writes, “In episode 536, you read my story that my best friend and writing partner had unexpectedly died. Thank you both for your sympathy and advice. It was very much appreciated. You asked me to provide an update after a year. I obviously missed that deadline by quite a bit, but in all honesty, I didn’t have much to update after a year. Writing solo continued to be a struggle. It didn’t matter if I was working on a short or a feature, editing something old or creating something new. I found myself constantly second-guessing my ideas. I felt rudderless. I missed my friend. I missed his voice, his opinions, his humor. I no longer felt joy when writing.

I was still able to keep busy creatively, however, editing a micro-budget feature that he and I had shot before he died. That film is now finished and out on the festival circuit. I’m sad that he’ll never get to see it, but I think he’ll be proud of the work that we did. Since his death, I also started playing D&D.

Craig: Nice.

Drew: We have a weekly Saturday night game. I knew none of these people before, but we’ve become an incredible group of friends. I’ve gotten very close with one in particular, and she and I have started writing together. I wasn’t looking for a new partner, but it just organically grew out of other creative work we were doing together, and writing with her is, dare I say, easy, and I feel joy again. The strangest thing, I can now hear my friend’s voice much clearer in my head.”

Craig: Well, Jeez Louise.

John: No, I’m so happy that it pulled out a happy ending there.

Craig: That has everything. That story’s got it all.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s got D&D.

John: It’s got loss. It’s got a love connection, but it’s a creative love connection.

Craig: A creative love connection, which is great. His email here reminded me a lot of the lyrics from I Miss the Music from the musical Curtains, in which someone has a songwriting partner who dies. He talks about, I miss the music. I miss my friend. I miss the wisdom and somebody to tell me I’m not doing it well enough, but then makes it better. It’s nice that he found– Some people should be working in a partnership.

John: Yes.

Craig: There are partner people and he’s a partner person. I’m glad he found a new one.

John: All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic today, which is the role of the on-set producer. All this actually stemmed out of a gripe I had about directors’ chairs that I vented to Dan and Craig both about, but then I realized like, “Oh, I’ve actually never talked about what Dan does on TV series productions,” which I think is incredible.

Can you describe the function you’ve fulfilled on the last couple of TV shows that you’ve been doing and what your job is, which is different from what Craig is doing as a showrunner. It’s different from what a line producer does. Tell us about what you’re doing on these shows.

Dan: I feel like you all already know this intuitively. I’m speaking to folks out there in the million foot view. There are two pillars of it. One, the creative. You’re there to help effect the showrunner’s vision for the show. Particularly, not just in the short-term, but the medium or long-term.

Then there’s the production pillar. In the on-set producer version of this, which is what I tend to do, you be on set every day. Ideally, you’re bringing a wealth of set experience to that job. What you are doing is every day accruing the experience of that set and the nuances and intricacies of that particular set.

Then I perhaps unglamorously, what I describe the job as, is a transaxle between those two pillars, because as we know, those are intricately linked, but it’s not always possible for the showrunner to be the person who links them or the writer/producer, if you have a strong one, or if you have a junior writer/producer on set that you are helping to educate on how to produce a show.

When I do it, and I think when a lot of folks do on-set producer, is that’s what they’re doing. They’re there every day so that the cast and crew and folks who are there every day know that there is one person that they can always come to who, if they don’t know the answer, knows how to get the answer.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Similarly, with the showrunner, ideally, you have a relationship with them and they know that you have their creative back. All of this, I should say, is, in television particularly, you are supporting the episodic director.

Obviously, there’s no infringing on the DGA prerogatives of the episodic director, but ideally, you’re supporting them in their mission and keeping an eye on the longer-term goals of the season of the series. Again, you all, I think, already know that, but the great thing is that every show operates as it wants to operate.

Many shows will not need an on-set producer. For instance, if the showrunner values being on-set every day and is able to construct the shows so that they can be, obviously, that would mutate or even negate the need for an on-set producer. Again, if you have a strong writer/producer there for their episode, as you should, but then there’s a lot of shows where the showrunner either doesn’t want to be on-set or can’t, or where there’s a junior writer/producer episode who needs to learn how to produce and needs a colleague and a partner in that. That’s when an on-set producer could be valuable.

Craig: Yes. There are times, I have a producing partner who’s usually on-set, but I’m also there, I’m an everyday showrunner. I call myself an activist showrunner. There are times where something happens where neither one of us know how to fix it. We do need a producee-producer. I call them producee-producers. Okay, so we’re supposed to be here. The problem is the people that are supposed to be not doing construction across the street are. Locations is on it, but when are we going to find out and who, talk to whom, and what are the actual– so you have to dial back to the mothership and a lot of texting goes on. Having somebody there to producee-produce, yes, I can see, especially if there’s not a showrunner there. I don’t know how you would not. I don’t know how a show would function without you.

John: Dan, so many of the shows I’m thinking about that you have been the person on-set because the writing was happening in Los Angeles and you were in Vancouver, you were in New York City, you were someplace different than where that was. You were functioning as the will of the showrunner, making sure that things were actually happening the way that Rob Thomas, in many cases, really wanted things to happen.

Dan: Yes, geography has certainly helped the career of the on-set producer by necessity. There have been a few shows in Los Angeles. For instance, and I don’t think Rob would mind me saying this, Rob finds great value in writing and being in the writer’s room and post. That is where he likes to spend his time. He and I know each other so well and have worked together for so long that he understands that I have a pretty good shot at knowing what he was looking for out of a scene or to answer a question. There’s value in that relationship.

You and I have been on set together throughout the years and I understand, I believe, the John August aesthetic and I believe in it and I’m excited to effect it. I did land this job once by just interviewing and it worked out great. Amy Harris, who’s a terrific showrunner and I love working for her, but you don’t usually do that. I think it’s someone that you’ve come to develop a trust with.

Craig: Yes. Wow. Because I’m not– I guess I’m a much more scared person. I don’t want to say paranoid or less trusting, but on the one hand, when you said, okay, there for the writing and then there in post, I went, “Oh, that sounds like a dream.” Then immediately, my adrenal glands fired.

John: That’s Damon Lindelof on Lost. Damon Lindelof was never in Hawaii.

Craig: Right. I think that’s most people. It’s just like, I immediately go, “Oh my God.”

John: That’s how people are built.

Craig: It’s how people are built, exactly.

John: Let’s walk through the process because as I understand it, you get involved, on a classic show, as the room is figuring stuff out, you get a sense of what the season is going to be like and helping the showrunner figure out what are the sets we’re going to need? Where are the issues? Then it transitions into production and you have a much stronger role there. Talk us through from pre-production into production and what your day might look like while you’re working in production.

Dan: Just to tee that up, to each showrunner his own or her own, in the case of Rob, who I’ve done many shows with, I will tend to be in the writer’s room. That is an exercise in listening, for the most part, and exercises in learning and listening, seeing how they’re developing the aesthetic of the show so that I can best help to affect it when we get there.

Obviously, one hopes that you have a great line producer-producer on the show. If you do, they’re also going to be absorbing that aesthetic. As pre-production starts, obviously they’re beginning to do the mechanical work. I will start to help out. If you have a producer-director, they might be doing this, but we often just go with an on-set producer and I’ll be doing it, so you’ll be starting again.

It’s that transaxle quality. You start to help to oversee sets, make sure they’re being developed in the right way, not just on the brutal level of construction, where you’re going to put the camera ports, but does it live up to what I’ve been hearing in the writer’s room?

John: And not just for the episode, the first episode [unintelligible 00:17:14] but where it’s going down the road.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Which is something that you can provide, not just to go back to sets again, but if you have a new set in the middle of the season, the episodic director obviously will have a lot invested in that set because it’s their episode, but you know what it needs to do five episodes down the line. That’s the value you can bring ultimately.

I do think, to answer your question, day by day, once we start shooting, I’m on set every day. I might step away for the tone meeting, which we can talk about what that is, or maybe you all touched on that before.

Craig: I think we’ve probably talked about tone meetings.

John: We’ve talked about it, but let’s recap the tone meeting. The tone meeting is the discussion where the director for that episode gets up to speed with what the showrunner and what the creative team wants to do for this episode, and gets the conversation that happens here. It feels like your function is to really know what that is and be able to remind the director of, this is what the goal is of this scene, of this episode.

Dan: You have done many tone meetings. Showrunners will do tone meetings in different ways. I always think of it as a conversation between the showrunner and the director that I get to eavesdrop on. Sometimes other folks will be invited to eavesdrop as well the first day, depending on how the showrunner wants to have that done. But I think it’s invaluable for me to be there for exactly that reason.

It’s really a support thing. The director is taking all this in, but they’re taking in a lot. When they’re on set, sometimes they turn to you for the support of, is this in keeping with the flow of the show? It’s good to be able to be there for them when they need that.

John: That’s great. You’re on set from basically call to wrap to make sure that everything is working okay. Who are your conversations with? Obviously the director is an important conversation. It’s making sure the director feels supported, but also understands what the goal is-

Dan: Exactly.

John: -of certain scenes. You also have ongoing relationships with the talent because you are the person who sees them every day, whereas directors will drop in and drop out.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Talk to us about that.

Dan: First of all, and again, I’m not just saying this as lip service. I have absolute respect to the prerogatives of the episodic director and speaking to the actors. I would never speak to the actors in terms of directing the actors. That is verboten and wouldn’t do it. It’s not good for the show, even if it wasn’t a policy. They need to hear from one creative voice.

But there are questions that they will have about things that are going on during the series. Look, different actors have different idiosyncrasies, different strengths and weaknesses, different fears and turn off. Over time, as you get to know them, you can help address them, assuage them to mitigate them so that then the director and the actor can do their best work on set.

John: Absolutely. Because you have all the intel on the actor and know what the actor needs and how things tend to work, you can have the private conversation with the director to get them up to speed. These are things to be thinking about with this. Here’s how you might want to organize your work.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Let’s talk about, you know what the season is supposed to be. You have some sense of where things are going, but a lot of the series you’ve been working on, they’re still writing episodes as things are going along. To what degree is there a feedback mechanism from you to this is what’s happening here in production and this is what you’re doing there? How helpful are you in terms of being able to communicate back to the writing room and the writing process and to the showrunner, these are the issues we’re running into and let’s be thinking about that as you’re putting together stuff?

Dan: Not to sound like a broken record, but it is showrunner dependent and the relationship you have with the showrunner. Obviously with someone like Rob, we talk all the time, and just by nature, it comes up, how are things working, how are things doing? I’ve worked with other showrunners who are terrific, but they don’t need that kind of support and also they can get that feedback a little bit from the line producer if it’s a little more mechanical. You are there to offer it and should be there ready to offer it, but it’s not always a part of the job description to be honest.

John: You’re tending to address the problems that are coming up in the day’s work, that is, to make sure that you get the best episode shot as was written.

Dan: Yes.

John: If it’s helpful to communicate back, great, but that’s not your main function.

Dan: Yes, and there are bigger picture just in terms of, like you said, in tone and certain things, you want the consistency that you want to help bring to it. Otherwise, you hope, and often the showrunner has got the vision for the season and you’re just trying to help execute it.

John: Now, the other people who are obviously stakeholders in this are the studio and the network who may have opinions too. Hopefully they’re communicating–

Dan: Oh, they do.

[laughter]

John: They’re obviously communicating opinions to the showrunner, but I can imagine they could also be showing up on your sets.

Dan: Yes, that is true.

John: That is true.

Dan: That is true.

John: Talk to us about how to manage that, because I think even as, hopefully our listeners are writers and they’re on set, but they’re also going to encounter suits who are going to show up and want to do things. What are some things you’ve found to be helpful? What are some things to really avoid when it comes to you have visitors on set who are decision makers?

Dan: I am not saying this to be politic, though I probably would be politic as one, but my more recent experiences, I’ve actually had some pretty capable and lovely executives come down the set. That doesn’t mean that everybody gives a great note every time somebody gives a note, but it does mean that there is a collegial respect for you. You do need to take in what they are saying, and you do need to try to see if that fits within what you’re doing, or in certain cases, to figure out a way to do it, because sometimes they’re just your bosses flat out. I know this is different for different showrunners and-

Craig: Different networks.

Dan: -different power hierarchies, but I would say, generally speaking, if you’re in my job, your job is not to put up any sort of fight or a wall, but to try to form a relationship with them where you can understand the heart of notes that they’re offering and giving, and if you do feel like there needs to be some pushback, you can either hopefully have that dialogue with them, or get the showrunner down there to do it, if it’s going to be something that you know to be invasive, again, where your relationship comes to bear, because you then have to sense, is this something where if we do this, it’s going to really hurt the show in a way they’re not going to like?

Craig: I could see a scenario where an executive who isn’t getting anywhere with the showrunner might try and backdoor something in with you.

Dan: I would like to think that I can balance those, but look, I’ll be honest, when certain folks are on set, the studio is the boss of the show, and if they have certain things they want to see done, I would never do anything without roping in the showrunner if I felt like it was pushing against it, because then you would never do that.

Craig: They are paying for it?

Dan: Yes, but you do need to consider what they are saying-

Craig: Always. Yes.

Dan: -and at the very least, bump it up if it needs to be.

John: A couple years ago, Craig and I did an episode where we sat down with a bunch of development executives and talked to them about, here’s how we are hearing the notes that you’re giving us. It was really a session for development executives to really learn about what it’s like to get notes as a writer.

I wonder if you could do a short version of this for if you are an executive who’s visiting a set, what are some best practices, what are some things to think about as you’re arriving on that set to help the process and not throw giant wrenches in there? Are there some best practices?

Dan: Here I want to– and I will stress this again, not to be politic, this is something that happened 15 years ago. This is not anybody I worked with recently, but with a junior executive on set, I think eager to make their voice known, offered some notes about blocking that were not sensical. They simply did not speak to–

Craig: They were bad.

Dan: Thank you.

Craig: They were dumb.

Dan: I over-blurbed. I over-blurbed.

John: They were bad.

Dan: It really was opaque how to grapple with that because it simply was, they didn’t understand how editing might accomplish what they– and were going to cost us an hour. In that moment, one does have to make a snap decision to not do a note, which is a very difficult decision to make.

I guess I would say long-windedly, is that for the folks who don’t yet understand set, there is not a need to give notes to pretend like you do understand set. Happily, over the last couple of shows I’ve worked on, we’ve had executives who are very experienced on set, so they’re not worried about that and they’re not trying to give notes on things that they know, “Oh, we can deal with that in a different way.”

John: Craig, what advice would you have for, not your HBO execs, but just things you’ve noticed as people come to set?

Craig: I want the HBO folks to come more to set. They’re so, in a wonderful way, hands-off, but then sometimes I’m like, “Don’t you want to come?”

John: Your first season in Calgary, nobody wanted to come to Calgary.

Craig: Calgary is awesome. I’m a big Calgary fan, but no, in the middle of COVID, nobody wanted to get on a plane, sorry, WestJet specifically, and go to Calgary.

My advice would be to at least have a basic understanding of the protocol of the set, and to ask questions rather than make statements. If you do think, “Hey, you know what, this scene might be better if that guy walked over to the ladder instead of not,” it’s probably better to pull someone aside and say, “I have a question. It’s probably dumb, I’m probably wrong. Would it be better if that person did this?”

Because as a question, you might get, “If we weren’t shooting this other angle in about an hour, you’d be absolutely right, but we are, because here’s a plan.” I will walk onto my set in the morning, someone else is directing, I will see the blocking, and I’ll be like, “I feel like we’re missing a thing.” Then I’ll check with the director, and they’re like, “Oh, no, no, totally. It’s just that we’re going to do this after because of–” blah, blah, blah. I’m like, “Great, I didn’t know.” Better to ask as a question.

Just enjoy it, and then leave because it’s boring if you don’t have something to do. When I say something, I mean really, minute to minute, if you are not occupied with a task on set, it turns into a very boring experience.

Dan: It’s such a great point in life generally, but don’t pretend that you know. Ask, and sometimes, in fact, they’ll say, “Yes, we’re planning on doing it,” or sometimes it can lay bare something that you’re missing.

Craig: Absolutely. You know what, that’s a great question. “Hey, Jane, come over here.” It’s a great question. “Why aren’t we doing it that way?” “Oh, yes, well, maybe we should. Absolutely.” There’s a humility to it, which is nice.

John: Yes, the most frustrating kinds of notes I’ve seen on sets from development executives are clearly, oh, this is a casting issue. We are now four days into shooting with this person, and you don’t like the person. It’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve almost shot out this actor. This is what we have, and so this is not an addressable concern in this moment. I don’t know what to tell you. What can be useful is, really, again, if the executive is asking a question, or stating the concern, like, “I’m worried we’re missing the point of the scene.” There’s probably a more gentle way to say that, but like, “I’m worried that I’m watching this, and I’m not actually getting out of this what I’m supposed to get out of it.”

That’s valid. We might take a moment to actually consider, “Okay, is there something here that we’re missing because we got so caught up in the choreography of the scene that we’re actually missing the point of something?” That’s where a set of fresh eyes could be really helpful.

Craig: Yes, there is something that happens early on in a television series, and we’re talking about the pilot, the first three episodes, where everybody has a panicked feeling that if they don’t get their point of view in the door now, then forever hold your peace, because everything is cemented into place, which then means, as the people who are making something, you start getting panicked by all these people telling you to do stuff that you’re not really sure you’re able to do. You can get a note that says, “Hey, could the lead character, she’s playing an elderly mom. We don’t think she’s funny enough.” You’re like, “Funny.” I’m like–

If you go, “What? It’s too late. We cast her, we’re making it, we wrote it, and we’re shooting.” Then people are going to feel shut out and shut down, particularly in that beginning part. You’ve got to go take deep breaths, take it all in, and then come back and say, “Here’s the thing. We’ve got to go work with what– we’ve got to go dance with the date we brought. We can nudge her, and we’re going to nudge. We’ll get her there. She’s finding her legs under her, but it’s going to be a little awkward, but we’re working on it.” That’s often enough for people to at least feel heard.

Dan: Having that dialogue, being able to have a nuanced dialogue, that’s when I think we know you’re working with a great executive, is when you can have a really nuanced dialogue like that, and they don’t immediately grab the most melodramatic version of, that’s going to be horrible, or that’s going to be great, but we’re working through this problem, and here’s how, and they can hear that.

John: Back in the day when we shot pilots, if something didn’t work, we could re-shoot them.

Craig: It was almost like we’re the dog that caught the car. Everybody hated, “I’m waiting on pins and needles to see if my pilot got picked up, and they’re going to shoot 20 pilots, and green light 6, and the rest of us are all–” Then they were like, “All right, what if we just green light stuff?” We’re like, “Great. Oh, no.”

[laughter]

Craig: Oh no. What do– It’s a horse of a different color.

Dan: Brave new world.

John: Brave new world. A thing that a visiting executive will get to sit in is a director’s chair on set, and so I want to have a little sidebar about directors’ chairs.

This came up because last week I shot two different EPK things, and shooting an electronic press kit, I was seated in a director’s chair, and for, I don’t know, about an hour for each of them, and my legs fell asleep, because directors’ chairs are terrible.

Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. A director’s chair is a folding chair that has a canvas seat and a canvas back. It is taller than a camp chair. It’s like about 2 feet higher up, so that if you’re sitting in it, you’re at standing height to people, which I think is by design. Your legs fall asleep, they kill your back. Dan, you specifically had an issue with directors’ chairs.

Dan: First I do want to say, I held this in my pocket till now, but also on lookup: The history of the director’s chair.

John: Oh, what did it say?

Dan: Now, there’s a word I don’t know how to pronounce, but it is C-U-R-U-L-E. It is the Roman, it’s that Ottoman style chair.

Craig: C-U-R-U-L-E?

Dan: Yes. I believe that is the–

Craig: A curule.

John: A curule.

Dan: Let’s go with that.

Craig: Curule.

Dan: You can see why it was scary for me-

Craig: It’s a tough one.

Dan: -so I avoided it. I believe I got the spelling of that correct.

Drew: You got it correct.

Dan: That’s where the magistrate would sit. It was a seat of power.

Drew: Absolutely.

Dan: I think there was actually a company also on look up. It was like 1868, that date’s wrong, but it’s close. A company that started manufacturing the director’s chair and it still exists to this day. I think it parked it as sort of a hierarchical chair position hearkening back to the curule.

Craig: The curule. They also managed to make the noisiest possible chair ever for a position that needs to be absolutely silent. I have talked about this a number– We use the director chairs, and by the way, they’re director’s chair and everybody sits in one.

Dan: Oh, yes.

Craig: All the producers sit in them and the cinematographer and the key grip, everybody is sitting in those chairs.

John: Basically at Video Village, it’s a bunch of those chairs gathered together looking at the monitor.

Craig: There are multiple Video Villages because there’s your producer tent, your director tent, your cinematography tent. We use the aluminum frame ones that aren’t the classic wooden X style, but more of a– They’re quieter and they’re better.

Dan: Do you do the lower ones? There’s medium ones and–

Craig: I’m just used to the up one.

Dan: You want the position of power.

Craig: I think it might be a medium one because I don’t feel like I’m a kid at a table. The wooden ones, the footrest is also foldy. After, I don’t know, 4 minutes of use of a new director’s chair, that footrest just starts–

John: Swingin’.

Craig: It just doesn’t catch the little peg anymore. I’ve talked about this with prop guys because the props department handles the chairs. No one knows why. No one.

Dan: No one.

Craig: No one knows.

Dan: They resent it.

Craig: Yes. They totally, they’re like, “So our job is to make all these creative objects for this show and keep track of continuity and make sure that the guns are safe. Also we lug in your chair.” This is, we’re shooting on the side of a mountain and they’re lugging chairs up. Of course, from their point of view, they’re like, whatever it is, it’s got to go be foldable and it’s got to go be light.

Dan: May I rope in another, this is a tangential issue, and it’s an issue of Video Village, but that’s sort of my workspace and it’s other people’s workspaces as well. Here’s a gripe that I have about set that will never be fixed, is that there’s this Venn diagram overlap of the people responsible for assembling Village, obviously the camera and the DP do this, props does the chairs, then you’ve got sound that’s got–

Craig: Location does the tent.

Dan: Exactly. If you do not have a show–

Craig: They’re all yelling at each other.

Dan: If you’re not a show where, let’s say that, fortunately, I work with DPs who very much value getting Village set up. If you don’t have a DP who values that, then suddenly trying to coordinate those departments when they actually have other things to do, very difficult, very angering.

Craig: One of the things that happens during the day when you’re shooting, usually when you’re shooting on location, is they have to move Video Village.

Dan: All the time.

Craig: Because you’re turning the camera around and pointing towards all that other stuff. Sometimes the AD is like, yes, we’re going to have to move actually all those trucks, that Condor, those two tents. They have to do this fast because on set, time is money. The chairs at that point, it’s good that they’re light, I guess. You can see the prop people are like, “We’re also trying to get the props ready for the scene. Then we have to move chairs. It’s insane.”

Dan: Then if you have visitors, let’s say you’re in the desert, you’ll have a tent, you’ll have the air conditioning unit, and you’ll have everything set up because they need to be– I can rough it. I can rough it.

Craig: You need a luxury tent for your executive.

Dan: Exactly.

Craig: It’s only fair.

Dan: I do have a solution to offer for directors’ chairs.

Craig: Please.

John: This is a podcast about not just whining about things, but actually fixing– Doing things about it.

Craig: Yes, we like to fix things. What’s the solution?

Dan: After I stupidly sat in those chairs in around 2014, had three years of miserable back pain and two surgeons said, you’re going to have to have surgery. Instead, because I did not want to do that, I just had the grips make me a board, a hardboard, the shape of the chair. Then I got a little cushion on Amazon and I put that board down and do the cushion and I have not had to have those surgeries and it has cured it.

Craig: It’s that curve in the seat that just collapses everything.

John: If you think about it, your buttocks, everything is being wedged into the wrong shape.

Craig: There’s no support. It’s like–

John: There’s no support. There’s no lumbar support either.

Dan: I would say it’s antagonistic to the notion of support.

Craig: It’s undermining you, literally.

Dan: Yes. That’s right.

Craig: It is undermining you by giving you–

John: It’s a terrible hammock for your [crosstalk]

Craig: It’s a hammock. It’s a butt hammock.

John: Yes.

Craig: No, it is– You know what? Yes, they’ve got to fix this because I spend a lot of time on that thing. I’m not getting younger. My back, I got problems.

John: Craig, I’m saying season three, you’re going to stop blocking pages. You’re going to stop doing colored revisions.

Craig: That’s out.

John: You’re going to end up like, find a better seat situation.

Dan: Make pals with construction, get that board. It’s done.

Craig: Are you kidding me? My construction team and I-

John: Are like that.

Craig: -me and Dino, we are tight.

Dan: Then you’re in.

John: In my head, it should be pretty simple because the canvas seat just slides in. There’s little dowels that slide into the edges. It feels like you should be able to make a hard thing that slides in that place

Craig: Yes. The props people will not want to be responsible for it.

Dan: Unless you have befriended them and then if you’ve got a good relationship, they’ll take that board.

Craig: Here’s what I worry about. This is a showrunner thing. It’s different. What I worry about is, if I say, “Hey guys, I’ve come up with this. The guy recommended this. It’s great. Now this is part of our routine is putting this wedge in the chair.” They’re going to go, “Got it.” Because I’m the showrunner. Then they’ll walk away like, “You dick.” Now we’ve got to lug this around for little Lord Fauntleroy’s butt. I worry about that all the time.

Dan: In a show I did called iZombie, fantastic crew up in Vancouver. It was a five year show. I was up there for quite a bit.

Craig: We probably have a lot of overlapping crew, I suspect.

Dan: Yes. Great folks up there to a person. Over time, when they knew that I was having back problems, the board for the chair, then there actually came a sturdier chair made out of wood and with the board. Then the gaffer started to rig an electric cord on the side-

Craig: Oh, nice.

Dan: -and then they gave me lamps. By the time it was done, it was like working the con in a Star Trek episode.

Craig: It’s so funny that you mentioned the– if there’s one spot on a set where more departments intersect, I think it’s the tent. You can’t have light without the electricians. You can’t have tent without locations. You can’t have the monitors without the video playback person. You can’t have the chairs without the prop folks. You can’t have the food without the caterers. Every single thing. Oh, and then the lighting, you’re like, okay, the electricians put a light in, it’s glaring.

Dan: Yes, it’s awful.

Craig: Here come the grips to put a little duvetyne or a little crinkle paper around it. Everyone works on the tent.

Dan: Yes, they sure do. It worried me considerably that this overdone chair on iZombie, was I– did I have a– I was assured that [crosstalk]

Craig: Well, that’s the thing, they always assure you, and then they walk away. [crosstalk] They walk away like, “Can you believe this? This guy.”

Dan: Son of a bitch.

John: Is there any bigger solution to this? Because when you just described, okay, the whole tent situation is crazy because of the split of departments.

Craig: Of course there is. The solution is money. Here’s the problem. I don’t know who owns those chairs. I don’t know if the props people actually own the chairs. That may-

John: Be a rental.

Craig: -then be part of it. Often they do. What happens is, and this is very similar to a key grip. Key grips obviously earn that job by experience and time, but also they’re renting stuff to you. They are a grip equipment company that comes with a guy that understands how to do the job of the grip.

If the props folks, part of their money is renting you the chairs, they don’t want to spend their own money to get new chairs and then turn around and go, “Hey, by the way, our chairs cost five times as much as everybody else. I can get my money back on these,” because no one’s going to pay that to them.

Dan: On lower budget shows, I’ve had the props people say, “These are the chairs I got.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: There’s been some higher budget shows where the props people said, “Well, I’ll just buy some new chairs and the show will buy some new chairs and there’ll be mine.”

Craig: I feel like we qualify. We do. We have the nice, the aluminum frame ones. They are definitely nicer. I can’t remember the name. The manufacturers right now are screaming, “Say our name.” I just can’t remember it. It still could be because it’s still a butt hammock. It could be better. Some sort of space age polymer, a nice titanium.

John: Carbon fiber.

Craig: It’s expensive.

John: I will say, you and I had kids 20 years ago, baby stuff now is so much lighter because of carbon fiber.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: The car seats weigh nothing.

Craig: The lugging.

John: The lugging.

Craig: The lugging. Also, we were in that horrible middle spot because now they got carbon fiber, which is great. When we were kids, they just had crap. The strollers that you and I were in was like two sticks and a diaper.

John: Yes. It’s a wheelbarrow for a child.

Craig: We were in that middle zone of like, here’s just an apartment full of plastic to ensconce your kid and roll down the street and press 20 levers to fold-

John: Absolutely. Super heavy, everything.

Craig: -to get your finger caught in it, and they were heavy. Woe is us.

John: Woe is us.

Dan: That’s why I didn’t have kids.

John: Well done.

Craig: Well done. Isn’t that horrible? Our kids, if our kids listen to this, so our youngest, well, you’re only my youngest, they’ve been wanting to do the daughter version of our show, together just an episode. If they hear this, you’re like, “That’s why I didn’t have kids” and the two of us instantly, “Well done. You’ve solved the answer to how to live a good life.”

Dan: Hey, look, when I die alone, just remember that.

Craig: I think you can pay for somebody.

John: That’s true.

Craig: What about all those people making you these chairs?

John: That’s right, definitely.

Craig: That’s when you get the props guy in.

John: That’s when we find out if the assurances were real. Yes. All right, let’s do some more questions. We have one here from Adam.

Drew: Adam writes, I work in post-production as a picture editor. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a post-production software tool for a few years and finally got a working demo or prototype developed this year. After the initial excitement of getting a demo in hand had passed, my first thought was, “Shit, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing next.” My second thought was, “John did something like this. That seems so great. Wonder what he did.”

When you were getting Highland off the ground, I’d imagined there’s plenty you did, didn’t do, or wish you had known that informed and shaped how you pitched, developed, and finally launched the product. I would love any insights, pitfalls, considerations, or tips you’d be willing to share.

John: We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. We’ve had people who have come in with production software, or production scheduling software, or other things like that, and trying to knock off entrenched, bad systems that are there. It’s tough because they’re the entrenched systems for a reason.

Even people who recognize the way we’re doing stuff is dumb, but there’s inertia to it. Adam, it’s great that you’ve got this prototype. You need to get it in front of as many people who actually do the job as possible, and get their feedback, see what it is that would stop them from switching to this right now, and incorporate that as quickly as possible. For Highland, it was really easy because I was just using it every day. I was dogfooding it every day, so I could see what was there, what I wanted to be there. I’d get friends to use it, and we could iterate really quickly for that.

The most important thing for you right now is just to make sure that other people are trying it, using it, and getting their feedback, and incorporating it as quickly as possible. It’s probably not enough of a market that you could have a Discord or any sort of message board or forum for it, but just reaching out personally to get people to try it is how you’re going to make it the next best thing. You’re not going to find a big publisher for it. You don’t need a big publisher for it.

Craig: Don’t need one.

John: No.

Craig: This reminds me a little bit of Evercast which didn’t exist, and then now it’s essential. I feel like winning over post-production supervisors is the key because editors if they like it, will be like, “Great.” Then post-production supervisors who have to pay for it are like, “What if it breaks?”

John: Yes, and figuring out what your-

Craig: That’s my impression of them.

John: -figuring out what your business model is for it, because Highland was a consumer app that could be just a thing you buy on an app store. This would not be. This would be something you’d be really selling as a service. There’s a tool called Scripto, which is designed for multicam shows, for late-night writing shows. There, they’re charging the show versus charging the individual user. Maybe that makes sense for it. As much as you’re figuring out the technical aspects of figuring out your app, you really need to figure out what is the model for the app? What is the business model for the app?

Craig: I bet if he just called up the folks at Evercast, because they’ve specifically done this three, four years ago. Evercast is the remote editing platform and it didn’t exist. Then about five years ago, it suddenly did. Now it’s–

John: They got it.

Craig: Yes. Right on time. Right on time. We use it all the time anyway, because we have people all around. They would probably be able to, because it’s such a specific thing, this industry-specific post-production tool. Who do I get it in front of? How do I commit some– Those guys may be willing to sort of tell their tale?

John: Yes. The fact that he was already working in post-production as a pitch writer, he knows what some of the other systems are out there. Get a sense of what is it that you like about them? What they hate about them? What other companies are doing the right stuff?

It’s possible that if your tool is really solving a need, that one of the other companies might be able to recognize it and take in your product. You don’t have to be the entrepreneur behind everything, which is honestly what sucks about doing Highland. I’ve gone through 10 years where I wish I had a marketing person, so I finally hired a marketing person. It’s just all the drudgery of running a business you get when you start making software. Next up.

Drew: Mike writes, after hearing you talk about how you like to break the back of a script, writing scenes out in longhand before working on the computer, I got into writing first drafts of scenes longhand, and I love it. Alas, I don’t have an assistant to transcribe them, so retyping them is a long process. However, there’s tablets like the Remarkable 2 that allow you to transfer handwriting into text. Do you guys know any screenwriters who write longhand on tablets, and do tablets convert the text well into screenplays?

John: I don’t know anybody who’s using it for writing that kind of stuff. The only time I’ve seen a Remarkable tablet in person was I had a meeting over at Amazon, and the executive there, she was writing on a Remarkable tablet, and they are really cool looking. It’s like e-ink, and it just feels really thin and nice, but also you can write on an iPad, and you can try it. I’ve never liked writing on screens.

Craig: I don’t write with my hands at all. I just type. I guess that is with my hands, but I don’t. Yes, if I have to make letters with a pencil or a pen, it’s like, what am I doing?

John: I don’t handwrite scenes that much anymore, but I will say that when I was doing that for my assistant to type up, I would write a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more neatly, and so that when the faxes went through, it could work. I do suspect fax machines, so I go down to the hotel lobby and say, “Hey, could you fax these 16 pages through to Rawson?”

Craig: Can I get into your business center?

John: Yes, absolutely. I know it’s late. I still need to fax something through.

I’ve been to bed and breakfasts and had to use their fax machine to send stuff through, but I’m thinking back to the pretty nice handwriting I did on those things. I have to feel there’s probably really good OCR now for handwriting that could get you pretty close. Mike, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s going to spit it out. It’ll be a little bit jumbly, but at least it gets you partway there.

Craig: Yes, and I think GoodNotes has a thing where you can train it. You write a bunch of stuff, and then you type it, and it compares and starts to figure it out.

John: It just feels like as good as AI stuff has gotten for this is a good use of AI is to read your chicken scratch and enter it into.

Craig: This is good. This is acceptable AI.

John: Yes.

Craig: A-A-I.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s A-A-I.

John: A-A-I. Acceptable AI. Last one here from Tim.

Drew: I have a pitch meeting scheduled with a major production company. Initially, they were drawn in by one of my scripts, praising the writing but finding the film’s tone too dark for their brand. However, they invited me to a pitch meeting to hear my other ideas, particularly for TV shows. I prepared six TV show concepts, each with strong premises that my manager has approved but I’ve never formally pitched before.

Beyond confidence and enthusiasm, any specific tips? Should I present each premise individually and gauge their reactions? Should I talk more generally about them while they peruse log lines to themselves? Or have a full-on show, Bible, and deck for each of them? I want them to be hooked but not bogged down by overdoing it either.

John: I’ve pitched some TV. You’ve obviously pitched some TV. Dan, you’ve developed a bunch of stuff with Rob. What kinds of things can you think about for Tim here in terms of going into pitch stuff? Let’s go back to Party Down, for example.

Dan: Sure.

John: Party Down is a show you co-created. What was the pitch for it? What was written before you went in to talk to stars about the show?

Dan: We’ve tended to have fully thought out and pitches down to the quip and that sort of thing. However, I do think all of that seemed to me, and you would know better than I, under the category of read the room when you’re in the pitch.

Craig: Yes, and I think there are certain things that you can pre-read any room. I can’t imagine any pitch meeting where they would be like, “Well, we didn’t like your first five ideas but we can’t wait to hear the sixth.” If you come in, you’re like, “Listen, I have six ideas but I’m not going to kill you with that. There are two that I really love. See if you respond. If not, I can always shoot an email with the other ones and see if they grab you. These are the two that I really love. I’ll just give you real fast five minutes on each.”

A lot of writers forget, you need to make space for them to talk and they have to then ask their questions and turn it into a conversation rather than, I’m here to sell you on this new nonstick cookware.

Dan: Right. You have to improvise in there. You have to come in with a plan but improvise, which is not profound but that’s nice.

Craig: Plan, improvise.

John: Yes. Generally, if they’re setting up this pitch meeting, it’d be great if you knew going in, from your manager’s job is to do this, to get a sense of what thing they’re actually looking for. You don’t come in there with this rom-com but they’re not doing a romantic comedy series. If you get a sense of what space they’re interested in, then you’re going in there and pitching them, having a conversation about one or two ideas that fit this. In that initial conversation, as you’re feeling them out, you can ask, what things are you looking for? What’s appealing to you?

Get a sense of what their taste is and then decide, this is the first thing I’m going to, this is the second thing and be ready to telescope the pitch. You give them the very short idea of this is a thing set in this world, blah, blah, blah. Is there interest?

Craig: Yes. I’ll go deeper.

John: Great. Let me talk you through what happens in the pilot and where it’s going.

Craig: That’s exactly what happened in my first television pitch, which was Chernobyl where I was like, “I think I got five minutes to figure out how to not have this guy be like, ‘Get out of here with this.’” I’m leaning forward. I’m like, “Let me give you a little bit more on that. Just a touch.” Then it’s like, you’re a crack salesman.

Here’s a little, here’s a little, now you’re a Chernobyl addict. Isn’t that a weird torture analogy?

Dan: You said telescoping, and the converse is also true. If you feel the eyes starting to glaze, then you can get out and get to the next one, get out and get to the next one.

Craig: Pull the ripcord and go.

John: It’s helpful when you’re there in person because you can read the body language and read the room. Unfortunately, so many of these are on Zoom. I will say that the instinct on Zoom is to keep talking as you’re trying to keep the ball up in the air. What can be helpful is once you establish what it is you’re looking for, if you have a deck you can show that shows like the three images of the thing, that can be really useful. Some of the series that I’ve been able to find homes for, I was able to show images that let people feel like, this is what it feels like inside the show, which is just really helpful because it gives them something to look at.

Craig: Yes, without you walking in with like these big posters, which makes you look like a dork.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Another thing is to check in with them to make sure that, any questions?

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Just so I don’t monologue and steamroll you on a Zoom.

John: Absolutely. I think I’ll often say is that as I’m sharing a screen to show images, you are going to get really small in my screen. Speak up if you need anything, because I won’t be able to see you if you’re waving your hand on things. That tends to work. It tends to be helpful. Good luck, Tim.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. Dan, what’s your one cool things to share with us?

Dan: I almost switched this morning when we got the news of Gene Hackman and wanted to proselytize about Night Moves, which is one of my favorite movies. There’s some B-side 70s Hackman films, like Crime Cut and Scarecrow, great. Yes, there’s that. I don’t know if I just cheated because I mentioned that, but really what I want to take a risk because I’m not a gamer at all, but every 10 years, some puzzle game comes out. I did Zork in the ‘80s.

Craig: Yes, classic Invocom.

Dan: Fool’s Errand, I think.

Craig: Oh yes, I remember about that. Cliff Johnson.

Dan: Yes. It’s been a while, but last year, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. It’s basically a puzzle game. It’s got a little bit of Zork in it, but it’s an art house puzzle game. It’s got a vibe to it that is a little bit German expressionist cinema, maybe Lynchian fever dream. It’s an exquisite puzzle game and it’s geared for the cinephile. I just, as a non-gamer or one who touches base every decade, that is the real deal. I just heard your Puzzle Box podcast. I need to recommend this to you.

Craig: I love stuff like this.

John: Craig is obsessed with puzzle games.

Craig: This’ll go right on the Steam Deck, it looks like.

John: Fantastic. Craig, what do you got for us?

Craig: I also have a game. I was talking last week about a game that I have not played in, I think, possibly 40 years.

John: Jesus.

Craig: I still think about it and I want to try and see if I can get another round of it going because I loved it so much. That game is Diplomacy.

John: Yes, so I love Diplomacy too, but I value our friendship too much.

Craig: That’s the thing. It’s important to know who you can and cannot play Diplomacy with. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, it’s a little bit like Risk, except there’s no dice. There’s no chance involved at all. There’s nothing random about it. It’s a World War I style map of Europe and you control territories and your job is to try and take over Europe. The only way you can do that is by creating alliances with other players to gang up on other players. Then, of course, the question is, when will you or your ally turn on each other? Are they even your ally at all?

The beautiful part of this game is the movement phase takes about 10 minutes. Then in between, there’s an hour of sidebars, whispers, winks, lying, not lying, mind changing. It is so awesome. It takes eight hours. Yes, it’s totally worth it.

John: I have so much PTSD from my one time playing Diplomacy with friends and some strangers. I was in high school and I hated it. I could never trust anyone ever again.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Mafia, except Mafia is fun and it ends within an hour or so because people are dying. You can see what’s happening after once you die. This is getting hurt or hurting all day long. The movement round, everybody finally writes their moves on the little secret slips and you’re hoping to God that the person who told you they’re going to do what they’re going to do isn’t screwing you over. The slips are collected and then they open up together. That’s when you find out just how boned you are or how–

John: Yes, I feel like with the rise of Survivor and the reality competition shows and Traitors, we get some of that on our screens all the time, but I’ve never wanted to do it.

Dan: It seems like there’s a purity to this.

Craig: It’s so pure because it’s basically like you got an army and you’re trying to go there, but you need somebody to support you from an adjacent territory. Will they or won’t they? What do they want from you? Then the person you’re attacking is like, I know, this makes sense, but think about this two turns from now.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s always like promises, like I promise I won’t attack you for the next three turns or something.

Craig: Exactly, which you can’t, nobody can promise anything in the game, but it is so pure because there’s no chance. It is all strategy.

Drew: Are you doing it all around a table or can you be like, “Oh, I’m going to go get some dessert in the other room.”

Craig: Oh no, you got to split up. You got to go find corners in the house and then you come back and someone’s waiting and they’re like, “My turn, I need to talk to you.” Then you just sit there waiting, like please don’t fold. Please don’t fold. Come on.

Dan: I got to go get this right away.

Craig: It’s awesome. The rules are not complicated.

John: Oh no. They’re really not. They’re not, it’s just all the social aspect of it, the social psychological.

Craig: You need to be on firm ground with the people with whom you’re playing.

John: Or complete strangers who don’t care that you’ll never see again.

Craig: Even they might pull a knife on you. It is brutal.

John: While you’re decompressing from the stressful game of Diplomacy, let me recommend Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace is the guy who wrote Big Fish. He’s a phenomenal author. I really love this new book.

It’s flash fiction, so they’re very short stories, almost sketches, but refined and distilled like poems are distilled. Flipping through it, it’s like, you read the first three or four pages of a great novel and you’re like, “Oh, I want to read more,” and then it’s gone. It’s just like, no, enjoy the moment that you had in the little scene that you were in.

It comes out in May, but you should pre-order it wherever you pre-order your books. If you have the power to get galleys, which I think a lot of people listening to this show who work on the Hollywood connect with galleys of things, get the galleys for this, because it’s really good and you’ll enjoy it, and it’s quick, and you can read it in an hour or two and get the whole thing done. Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace.

That is our show for this week. It is produced, as always, by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our episode this week is by Richard Barrett. I just love that after 672 episodes, we still have folks doing completely new things.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: Yes, a sound that we’ve never had before on the show.

Craig: Who would have thought?

John: Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at JohnAugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at JohnAugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a cotton bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to everybody who clicked through the link and moved to annual subscription to save themselves money, because people were overpaying us, and they shouldn’t.

Craig: We hate that.

John: We hate that. We hate that. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, officiating weddings. Reminder to download Highland. It’s free. Get that on the app stores.

Dan Etheridge, thank you for coming on the show. It’s so good to talk to you with a microphone.

Dan: Yes, it was great to be here. Thanks. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so as we set up in the intro, you can marry a person, which means that you’re bound together with them for life, or you can marry a person, which you are getting that person married to another person. They’re just different forms of the verb to marry.

Craig: God bless our weird language and the poor people who have to learn it.

Dan: How many weddings have you officiated?

John: I’ve only officiated one.

John: I think I’ve only done one. I’ve done one.

Dan: Boom.

Craig: Whoa, five.

John: Five. Including my wedding. Dan was our officiator.

Craig: Did you catch a gay wedding boom when it was legalized?

Dan: Most of them, I think you’re my only gay wedding.

Craig: You’re just getting–

Dan: Just got my credentials from the universalchurch.org.

Craig: Same. Oh my God, you’re also?

Dan: That’s right, yes.

Craig: We’re all practitioners at the universal precepts of that church, which are to pay $10 to officiate a wedding.

John: I go to services every Sunday, I don’t know about you guys.

Craig: There’s a place to go? Oh no.

Dan: Unlike California, I did a wedding in, I think it was Oregon. It was a different state. They actually did require you to file your credentials and to sign different things that they had to do. I think California is very, very loose.

Craig: I did one in Ohio and I had to file a certificate, yes.

John: We just had to send through our marriage certificate for some form or something that we had to do. I was able to pull the thing and see your little signature there on the day.

Dan: It was a great wedding. I’m not complimenting myself. It was a great wedding.

Craig: Crushed it.

Dan: By the way, I don’t think– You can cut this out if you want to. Sometimes folks, they want you to take everything off their plate and construct the wedding. Sometimes people want to know what’s going to be said. John, I really appreciated this. John handed me a word for word script for what was going to be said.

Craig: That is so John August.

Dan: I think I delivered it like it was mine.

John: Oh, 100%. You owned it.
Craig: That’s right.

John: Dan’s also an actor. We should have stressed that you’re an actor first and foremost.

Dan: Previous life.

Craig: Yes.

Dan: Previous life.

John: Let’s talk about best practices for being the officiant. Like you, I’ve seen situations where the officiant was clearly following a plan given by the couple being married. Other times where like, they were just doing their own thing and the couple had no stake in this. I tried to hit a middle ground with the one wedding I did, which was during the pandemic. I was there in person, but everybody else was on Zoom. I sat down with the couple and really talked about what things do you want in what I’m going to say?

Craig: What do you not want?

John: Exactly. How do we emphasize this?

Craig: What you’re getting at is, your job as the officiant of a wedding is to get the hell out of the way of the people that matter. No one is there to see you. The good news is the expectations are zero, which means you actually can kill. Meaning you can get laughs, people can really be impressed by what you do. They can be moved, they can cry because their expectation is nothing but get out of the way and make sure you don’t because a problem. Make sure that you do touch on the things that they want to be touched on. Keep it short and get the hell out of there.

John: Now, Drew, you are the most recently married. I thought your officiant did a really nice job.

Drew: She was great.

John: Talk to us about the conversation you had with her.

Drew: I remember she was a justice of the peace who knew what she was doing. I remember us giving her our initial outline for it. She was like, “You’re missing five minutes. This isn’t going to be enough for people,” which I was surprised by. I was expecting-

Craig: There’s no such thing as a too short wedding.

Drew: That’s how I felt.

John: I can’t be fast enough.

Drew: I agree.

Craig: 10 seconds, best wedding ever.

Drew: Her argument was that like, if people come there and show up and are dressed up, that they’re expecting a little bit more of a full ceremony as opposed to, and we just wanted to–

Craig: They just want the food. Just get to the food.
Drew: Agreed, yes. It’s the party.

Craig: Nobody wants to sit there.

Dan: We had a nascent stage party down idea that never made it to camera. One of the actors abused the officiant role to test out a monologue.

Craig: That’s awesome. With the note cards like, no. Anyway. Won’t be including that one on the road. For our premium members, I guess you could tell the story of the part of the episode that was inspired in part by our wedding. Do you remember this?

Dan: Oh, yes. The gay wedding episode, the season finale of season one. That’s right.

John: Absolutely, Adonis Catering?

Dan: Yes, Adonis. We did, a rival catering company came in to cater that particular wedding, and it was Adonis Catering filled with just the most beautiful men of all time. I did have a template for that.

Craig: That should be a thing.

John: Yes, it was a thing.

Craig: Oh, it was a thing.

John: We did not intentionally hire them because of their beauty, but we were always like, “Oh, these are all models.”

Craig: It just worked out.

John: They’re all incredibly attractive people who are our waiters.

Craig: That is a thing in LA. When you go to parties and behind the bar and the people passing hors d’oeuvres around, many of them are here in town to be actors or models, and they’re working these jobs at night because they get the auditions in the day, they do these jobs at night. You can feel like an absolute troll. I’m asking, “Can I have a drink?” Oh my God. This is weird. I’m sorry.

Dan: I think there was, I think, I might be misremembering, I think there was a character prototype at your wedding of the person in charge of it all. Kristen Bell came in and played that very officious–

Craig: That’s good casting. That’s always good casting. It’s Kristen Bell. Yes, you’re just the greatest.

John: Pretty much the one when you decide on Kristen Bell.

Craig: The greatest.

John: Some bad officiating I’ve seen at weddings includes anything about Webster’s Defines.

Craig: Oh, god.

John: Or quotes.

Craig: Mawage.

John: Mawage, yes.

Craig: That, oh, you.

John: Yes, one of the worst weddings I’ve ever been to was just a series of quotes about love being read by a person who had no idea who the couple was. It went on for 20 minutes.

Craig: No.

Dan: That’s the corollary to, because I agree with everything you said about brevity. You’re also there because you ideally know them. Make it personal in the brief time that you have.

Craig: It’s actually rife with potential disaster. You want to make sure that both sides of the family are acknowledged, even though they might not like each other. There may be exes in the crowd. You don’t want to talk about, oh, after a lifetime of struggle, they found each other. Then people sit and they’re like, “Wahh? We- Come on…” We thought we were still friends. There’s just so many ways to go wrong. Then jokes. If you’re not funny, don’t. Do not because the problem with being not funny isn’t that people won’t laugh because the joke isn’t great. The problem is you won’t know what will upset people. That’s the problem that unfunny people have. You will upset grandma because she’s going to be there.

Dan: You make a good point about vetting. I do try to give them a look at the script or what have you, because of all, you don’t know there might be some minefields in there.

Craig: No question.

Dan: Or you forgot to mention so-and-so because it’s politics.

Craig: No question.

John: I’m a strong believer in the couple themselves exchanging vows and saying things and not being silent witnesses to it. I think you both said things during your vows.

Drew: We did, but we went basic. Like, do you? I do.

Craig: Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded–

Drew: I feel like they’ve just been, those have– we’ve iterated them enough that they’re perfect. They’re just simple. We don’t need to say, we don’t need to write our own vows to each other.

Craig: That’s what we did because I don’t want anyone to hear what I have to say to my wife at all. That’s private.

Dan: I think this is the reason I’m not married yet because I don’t want to have to say anything overly private in front of a bunch of people.

Craig: You don’t have to.

Dan: I don’t want to.

Craig: You can just do the Nicene Creed or whatever the term is for that. Ridiculous, it’s not that.

John: The counterpoint I’ll make is Megan McDonnell, our previous script producer, her wedding, it came time for the bride and groom to speak. Megan did a great job. Her groom, her now husband, knocked it out of the park. It was definitely, the thing was, everyone for the rest of the night was like–

Craig: Low expectations. No one expects the guy to be good at that. Everyone expects the girl to be just naturally expressive and emotional and she’s going to tear up at the right moment, and you’re going to tear up because, they have access to their emotions and this guy’s just going to be dirt to dirt. When I met you were good and I thought we were good. Then he, yes. See, as the guy, you come in and dunk.

Drew: My favorite is when people go, “You look so beautiful today,” looking down at their paper.

Craig: You mean last week when you wrote that?

Drew: When you wrote that.

Craig: Or possibly last night when you wrote this in a fever sweat?

Dan: I made a rookie mistake I just thought of in my second one, which is, I do think I can land a joke, but this one I didn’t land and it was right out of the gate. Hot out of the gate. I did a look down to pick up the names of the bride and groom, whom obviously I’ve known for decades and I don’t need to look and get their names. Assuming that that would elicit a little bit of a warm chuckle as people understood that. I soon realized, no, most of the people in the wedding don’t know me. They think that I don’t know the bride.

Craig: They literally don’t get it.

Dan: The crickets there was like, this is going to be rough and I got to hold a climb out of home right away.

Craig: You know what? That’s where you do appreciate the studio executives showing up and being like, “I do have a note.” I know you’re going to say the audience isn’t this dumb, but.

John: Takeaways from this. Officiants should not overshadow the couple getting married. We like short, we think short is great.

Craig: Short’s great.

John: It’s an important part of the night. Obviously, you want it to go really well, but it’s actually a pretty small part of the night. People are there to celebrate you together.

Craig: If someone’s aunt comes up to you in the middle of the party and says, “I thought what you said was so funny and so sweet,” you’ve done a great job. Then that’s that. Two minutes, two minutes.

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Two. You go past two minutes, you’re in so much trouble.

Dan: Be sure to end it with the line by the authority vested in me by the great state of California and the universallifechurch.org.

Craig: Exactly. I pronounce you, .org.

Dan: Get the last joke right in there.

Craig: Then you have to say copyrightuniversalchurch.life.org.

Dan: Yes.

John: All right. Lessons for everybody. Thank you, Dan.

Craig: Thank you.

Dan: That was fun.

Links:

• Highland Pro | Download on the App Store
• Dan Etheridge on IMDb
• Buck Rodgers’ robot sidekick
• [The Tom Thumb locomotive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_(locomotive)
• Statpage and DuckDuckGo
• I Miss the Music from Curtains
• Curule
• Evercast
• Scripto
• Night Moves, Prime Cut, and Scarecrow
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on Steam
• Diplomacy
• Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Richard Barrett (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: Today’s episode has no bad language, but it does have some mild spoilers for Severance. If you’re trying to go into that show clean, without any spoilers, about midway through the show when Craig starts spouting wild theories, just skip ahead 30 seconds or a minute, and you’ll miss all of Craig’s wild speculations. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh. Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 677 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what the hell is going on? We’ll discuss mystery box shows where the premise and audience experience involve solving the puzzle of what’s really happening. Then, we’ll talk about revisiting old projects. I am just back from two weeks in New York, working on the Broadway version of Big Fish, which I’ve been working on for now 20 years. We’ll talk about how writers should approach their earlier work when they need to.

We’ll also follow up on home automation and locked pages, plus answers to some of our listeners’ questions, and Craig and our bonus for premium members. Let’s talk about taking some time off. You just took some time off. You took the weekend off. Your weekend off feels like time off.

Craig: [laughs] I had to negotiate it, too.

John: Yes, let’s talk about being more deliberate about working on certain days, not working on certain days, and refilling our supplies after a lot of work sessions. We’ll talk about ways to do that.

But Craig, first, we have a little housekeeping. We want to thank all of our premium subscribers. You want to keep the lights on here.

Craig: When you say you, you’re talking to me. I am a premium subscriber.

John: You are.

Craig: I pay the $5 a month.

John: See, that’s what we’re here to talk to you about, Craig. Because right now, you’re paying $5 a month. We’re going to be raising that price.

Craig: What?

John: Moving up to $7.99 per month.

Craig: 7–? [sighs]

John: Because people should really be on the annual plan. Here’s what’s happening. Our annual plan is staying put at $49 a year.

Craig: Oh, so that’s even less than $5 a month.

John: It is. We really want people to stay on the annual plan because it’s just less tedious for everybody involved to stay on the annual plan.

Craig: We’re really incentivizing this?

John: Apparently, because we initially rolled out with this price, and it was really parity between the two things, people stayed on the monthly plan. People should move to the annual plan.

Craig: How do you do that?

John: It’s so simple. You click on your account settings. There’s a link in the show notes to this. You got an email if you’re a premium subscriber, just please move over to the annual plan.

Craig: It’s good for you, and apparently, it’s good for us.

John: It would save a listener $48 per year.

Craig: We’re asking you to give us less money.

John: Please give us less money.

Craig: Please give us less money. We should make the monthly $14,000.

John: Yes. [laughs]

Craig: Then watch how quickly they go to that annual subscription. You know what I’m saying?

John: We debated. If we went up like $1, would that be enough of a factor? Would it be enough of a friction that people would actually do it?

Craig: No. Can I just say, is there a point in our humanity, in our civilization, where we will just move on past the 99-cent gimmick?

John: Some stuff, yes, it doesn’t make sense.

Craig: It’s just everybody does it in every way, shape, or form. We’re all on to the trick, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: We all know what’s going on.

Drew Marquardt: They’re supposed to be doing away with the penny soon.

John: The actual physical penny.

Craig: Typical.

John: The idea of 99 cents doesn’t go away.

Craig: I could argue that all prices at this point should be rounded to a dollar.

John: Yes, they should be.

Craig: Rounded up or down, but then taxes back–

John: Let’s say an issue with like, if something costs $99, it’s really $100, too.

Craig: This is my point, so what are we doing?

John: What we are doing is raising the price to $7.99 in the hopes that people will get to the annual plan, which is $49.

Craig: I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s lovely.

John: We should talk about, Craig, how much money do you make from Scriptnotes?

Craig: Oh, I have seen $0.

John: I see $0 as well. Craig and I don’t take any salary for this.

Craig: No.

John: The money pays for our incredible editor, our producer, Drew.

Craig: We’ve gotten cars out of it, obviously. We got the cars and the houses.

John: Absolutely. All that big podcast money. We’re not the Pod Save America people who actually like to buy houses with stuff.

Craig: The Pod Save America guy lives across the street from me.

John: They’re doing well.

Craig: That’s a really nice house. They’re lovely people. I was in Vegas for a couple of days.

John: Gambling the Scriptnotes money?

Craig: Gambling my Scriptnotes money away at the penny slot machine. They project ads for all their acts everywhere. On the side of a casino that was facing my room, they were advertising a true crime podcast. I don’t remember the name of it, but apparently, they’re on tour. They’re on tour in Vegas? A podcast?

John: Many questions are raised by this. First off, when are we going to do a live show in Vegas on the strip? That’s crucial.

Craig: Right. Can we have dancers?

John: Yes, we’re going to have dancers. The question is topless, not topless? Or maybe there’s two shows. The later show is topless. I don’t know.

Craig: I would be fine with a kid’s show, a family show.

John: A family show, yes, for sure.

Craig: Then, at night, an adult show. This would be amazing.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, of course. We could get the ladies, but we could also get the Thunder from Down Under guys.

John: Oh, 100%. I would definitely have to be on a mixed show.

Craig: We need a mixed show but not at the same time. I think they would confuse each other with their choreography.

John: Different acts, different segments.

Craig: You bring on one group, then we do the first half of the show. Second group comes on, gyrates. We come back. What a weird thing to come back after, for you and me. It would just like, we’re the worst people to follow any kind of hot strip show. Then it’s just like, “Back to these two podcasters.”

John: It really does make a hard transition into, let’s talk about transitions, or let’s talk about–

Craig: Back to slug lines.

John: Yes, or I was going to say the Scriptnotes slot machine. The Scriptnotes is like a video poker machine, like those branded things.

Craig: Ooh. That’s fun.

John: That’s good stuff.

Craig: You know what the jackpot is, right?

John: What is the jackpot?

Craig: Sexy Craig.

John: Oh, yes. I always think if you get the jackpot, you get to be on a three-page challenge. It’s like a live show.

Craig: No.

John: I guess now it’s better than that.

Craig: No. If you get five sexy Craigs in a row–

John: Oh, lining up. Oh, gosh. We don’t take a salary. This pays for everything else, but the money that’s left over at the end of the year, we donate it away. We donated this year to Hollywood Heart, which is a beneficiary of our great live show. We also support the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps writers and others in the Hollywood industry.

Craig: Isn’t that also targeting some funds for the fire relief?

John: Exactly. Yes. That’s what we do with the money. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it all possible. On the topic of games, though, we actually have a game shipping this week. Way back in Episode 655– actually, not that way back, 655 is 22 episodes ago.

Drew: That‘s like half a year.

John: Half a year ago, I put out the call that I was looking for an indie game developer to partner up with on a game that I wanted to make. Drew, we got 10 people writing about that.

Drew: That sounds right.

John: I zoomed with a bunch of them. They were all fantastic and great. I ended up picking this Canadian developer named Kory Martin, who has been toiling away. Now, just a few months later, we have a game for you to try out right now. It’s called Birdigo. Birdigo, like the thing that flies. It is a roguelike deck builder where you’re trying to make words. Craig, you just played it. Tell us about the game. Your experience so far.

Craig: Oh, I just played a little tiny bit, but as far as I can tell, what’s going on is you get some letters from a constrained letter bank, a little bit like a Scrabble tile distribution. You have to make some words from your letters. As you make words, you get some new tiles. You have some discards, and you’re trying to hit a point number to move on to the next thing. But when you do, you’re going to get some sort of power-up, some kind of Belatro-style card that makes the next rounds better, because I presume it just gets harder and harder and harder.

John: It gets harder and harder. It’s a roguelike in that it’s really difficult to complete a level, what we call a migration, but eventually, you’re able to do it, and then it unlocks more things down the road. If you would like to play it, you can play it right now. It is on Steam as part of the Next Fest event this week. You can follow the link in the show notes or just go to birdigogame.com, click through and see the game that’s there. The first 50 levels are up for everyone to go and play this week as part of this special event.

Craig: And John?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s called Birdigo. Like vertigo but with a bird?

John: Yes.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: Birdigo.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: We don’t know yet, so it’s free. The demo is free. We don’t know what the final pricing is going to be.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll ship it sometime this spring, probably.

Craig: Right, but right now, it’s free.

John: It’s free.

Craig: It costs nothing.

John: Yes, so you should try it. If you like it, put it in your wish list. Originally, we were going to call it AlphaBirds. It’s really a spin-off of the physical game we made called AlphaBirds, but Birdigo was a better name for what this game is.

Craig: Yes, I think so. Plus, also, people love the stuff on there. Are you going to bring it to iOS at some point?

John: We’ll do Steam first, and then we’ll see where we’re at for it. Because the nice thing about doing it on Steam first is we can then transition to Xbox or Switch or all the other stuff. Eventually, iOS would be great, too.

Craig: All right.

John: It’s fun.

Craig: Great.

John: All right. More follow-up. Drew, help us out on locked pages and unlocked pages.

Drew: Michael wrote in and says, “I’m a script coordinator on a large TV series where our security is super intense, and everything is distributed digitally. Since we’re forbidden from printing scripts, I thought our show would be a great case study to implement keeping the script pages unlocked throughout production and using the locked scene numbers as our linchpin for revisions.

My stipulation was that I would only do it if it didn’t mess with the workflow of any of our departments. However, in reaching out to the departments, I found that not having locked pages would cause issues with the work of our script supervisor and our post-production team, mainly the editors and assistant editors.

Our script supervisor told me that they use a software to do their job that relies on the pages being locked. One of our scripties uses MovieSlate and the other uses ScriptE, which seems almost final draftian in its arbitrary rigidity. The software organizes their notes by scene number, take, timing of take, notes, cameras, and other things, but each page of their notes corresponds with a facing page, and that refers to the page number of the locked script.

John: Let’s pause for a second here. What I think I’m hearing is that in a physically printed script, you have on the right, if you’re printing on one side of the page, on the right in your notebook, you would have the printed page of page 46, but there’d be a blank page on the left. I think that is the facing page where they’re typically taking notes or doing other things on that page?

Craig: Okay.

Drew: Since the notes are not connected to a specific facing page, if that page were to change with the new content during the shoot, the notes wouldn’t line up anymore. At the end of the shoot, all the notes and their facing pages are exported as a continuous document to send to the editors. The assistant editors use the daily reports from the scripties to assemble binders for their editors with all the notes and their corresponding facing pages. Those binders are organized based on the locked script and messing with the locked pages would mean it was difficult for the AEs to match the scripties notes with the facing pages.

It appears that until the software the script supervisors use can find a way to connect their notes with just the scene number and not the locked script pages, I think locking script has to remain. I will say, even though I can’t figure out how to make it work and not interfere with certain departments, everyone I pitched this concept to was down for a change. For my showrunner to the script supervisors and post-production, people would love to bring things into the digital era and leave some of these old methods behind. Also, no one cares about keeping color names for revisions.

Craig: In talking with my script supervisor, he did bring this issue up, but even he seemed quite flexible about it. I believe there’s a way in the output to just say, okay, just bring me to the notes for scene, whatever. The idea that the assistant editors and the editors are using this massive binder of notes is a pretty old school, I think. I have not seen the binder in a long time.

Also, the idea of editors routinely consulting the notes, while lovely is something I’ve seen every now and again, like a four-leaf clover. It’s actually quite frustrating how editors just don’t look through that stuff. In a way, I like that. The editors get their fresh take on things. They don’t necessarily want to be bound by whatever opinions were written down on the day.

But I do believe that document would still function unless you were literally using it like a printed bound thing, which I don’t think anybody does anymore, or most people don’t. I’m sure the ones who do will write it and insist everyone does. The companies that make the software really need to just make this very simple change. It should just be organized by scene number. I don’t care. I’m doing it on Season 3. I’m doing it. I’m just getting rid of the page breaks. I don’t care. [sings] I love it. I don’t care. That song was originally written about this very topic. Page breaks.

John: I’m happy that Michael, who is a script coordinator, the person who is responsible for this, was writing it and was really trying to make this change happen and was consulting with the people who he knew it could affect early on in the process. It really does sound like people have entrenched ways of doing things that don’t necessarily make sense, but it’s what they’re used to, and it would be an adjustment.

Craig: Movie productions, television productions are rife with this-is-how-I’ve-always-done-it-ness, and sometimes getting people into the new way, you got to drag them kicking and screaming a little bit. Once they’re there, they’re thrilled. It does take a moment or two where they’re like, uhhhh. I’m doing it.

John: It’s good news on colored pages as well because the concept of colored pages is good.

Craig: At this point now on revision levels, it’s just so that you know which– is it draft one, two, three? I might change them to numbers.

John: In the part we cut out here, it says they started using version plus number for our drafts.

Craig: I might do that. Drafts V1, V2, V3, Rev1, Rev2, Rev3.

John: Put a date on it.

Craig: The thing is I put a date on them anyway.

John: Colored revisions have dates.

Craig: Maybe I’ll just do date revision. That’s it. The revision is this date.

John: How do you like doing dates? Actually, I have a question about this and then about Oxford commas, but we’ll talk about both.

Craig: Sure.

John: My preferred way of doing dates is I love periods between dates.

Craig: Very European.

John: I love the year first and then the month and then the day works really well for me.

Craig: If you did year, then day, then month, you’d be fully European, I think.

John: Yes, exactly. Doing date then month, things increase the right way. When you do date before–

Craig: Oh, I completely agree. This is one area where I think we’re right. I go day, month, year, which is more standard, I think. Just because of my old, old, old computer days, my convention is to go underscores in between because periods were reserved for file extensions and dashes right out.

John: Absolutely no colons on the Macintosh.

Craig: Oh, good Lord, no. Something, underscore, something, underscore, something.

John: Related question. I have a similar related question in terms of what your preferences are. For the Scriptnotes book, we’re now starting copy edits. Oxford commas. My personal take is I believe that Oxford commas can be useful for disambiguating situations. Obviously, we can bring up situations where without the extra comma there, you’ve changed the meaning of it. I find oftentimes commas are wedged in there in a superfluous way that makes me annoyed. How do you feel?

Craig: Oxford commas, from an informational point of view, are objectively superior because they give you more information than less. That’s always a good thing. From an aesthetic point of view, they are inferior to the American style. American style is cleaner. In the 94% of cases where there is no ambiguity, the American style just simply reads better.

My thing is I don’t think you need to be consistent. I think if you feel like, “Oh, this requires an Oxford to disambiguate,” put it in.

John: Great. I think we are aligned and agreed. That will be the notes back to the copy editor. That was what I did on Arlo Finch. To me, part of the reason is that even though this is text that is not meant to be read aloud, I’m still reading aloud in my head. I perceive a comma as being a small pause, and it’s an unnecessary pause in a series of things. When it’s not needed, it’s weird.

Craig: It’s a funny thing that in our language, when we do list things, we group the last two things together, and I don’t know why. A, B, C, D, E and F. We just do that. It’s weird. I don’t know. It’s a strange mental thing.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up here.

Drew: In the bonus segment of 671, we talked about home automation. We had a lot of smart people write in. Apparently, Lutron HomeWorks is the top-of-the-line lighting system, including shades and curtains.

John: That’s actually what we use. I forgot the name of it, but that’s what we use. That’s the app I have on my phone that lets me turn on any light in the house.

Craig: I had Lutron in my old house. I hated it. So annoying.

John: I think if it’s not set up properly, it can be just an absolute monster.

Craig: It is set up properly. I’m just like, I got to go to my phone. The switch is right there on the wall.

John: You should be able to do either one. It wasn’t set up properly.

Craig: No. It was set up properly. It’s just a pain in the ass.

John: I can tell our system. I can just verbally say, set the lights to 20%, and it’s a blessing.

Craig: Everywhere. Oh, because it’s linked into your Alexa or whatever?

John: Yes. In the TV room, I can just say, set the lights to 20% as I’m watching a movie, and it’s just great.

Drew: There’s also, apparently, an open-source software called Home Assistant, and that can pretty much connect everything, but it’s very DIY. You have to set it up yourself. It’s not plug-and-play.

John: Mike also uses Home Assistant for other stuff, which also works with Lutron. We can do things that are clever, but it relies on Mike figuring out how to do stuff and then teaching me what the commands are.

Craig: I’m quite good with these things. I did also try to explain to Melissa how the Lutron worked, and that didn’t go well. That’s also my future. I have to explain it to Melissa, and I just know it’s not going to go well because here’s what I’m going to get. I’m going to get a text that says the lights aren’t working, or Lutron is broken. I’m going to say, no, it’s not broken. Is there smoke coming out of it? No, it’s not broken.

John: The Wi-Fi is down, which could mean anything.

Craig: Yes. I actually get the wife’s Wi-Fi is down quite a bit.

John: It happens. All right. Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which is Puzzle Boxes. This comes from a listener question. Drew, read us a question here.

Drew: Christian writes, “I love both Severance and From, but I’m worried that they’ll both be Lost all over again.

Craig: Oh, jeez.

Drew: I’m worried my own novella is in the same trap. I feel really cheated by the end of Lost, but love the middle of the journey. When mysteries don’t deepen the focus, but just get wider and wider, it can temporarily create momentum that feels like a recipe for a disaster ending. How can you keep the pleasures of a puzzle box without falling into the trap of an unsatisfying ending?

Craig: I love when people say, I’m just worried that it’s going to become like that thing that was one of the most beloved television shows of all time and a massive hit. [sighs] Can we just stop with that? Can we just stop with beating up on Lost like it was a failure or something?

John: It was a great success.

Craig: It was.

John: Let’s broaden our scope. There’s a lot of series that do things like this, obviously talk about Lost. Severance is a current series.

Craig: Severance, Watchmen, but Watchmen had a built-in ending, so it was different.

John: Westworld, Twin Peaks, Silo right now. The new show, Paradise. Yellowjackets are just still going on. Heroes, Leftovers, Alias, The Man in the High Castle.

Craig: Good Lord.

John: They’re a really common thing. What’s uniting about all these kinds of shows is there’s a question of what’s really going on that is central to the story engine. It’s who killed Laura Palmer? Where are we really? What is this place? What the hell is Lumon? In Man in the High Castle, why is there this footage of an alternate reality? What strikes me as different about some of these series, though, is what the characters inside the series’ relationship is to the central mystery, is whether the characters are actively trying to figure out what’s going on.

Like in Lost, where the hell are we? What is this island? What’s happening? You as the audience are on the same level as the protagonists, or situations where the heroes inside the story know exactly what’s happening, and you as the audience are just behind where they are. Yellowjackets is an example of that, where we’re getting these flashbacks and everyone in the present day knows what happens there, but we’re just getting exposed to it bit by bit.

Craig: Yes, there’s probably a good distinction to draw between mystery and puzzle box, because puzzle boxes are constantly putting forth things that are surreal. That’s key to the genre, is surrealism. The granddaddy of all of these is Prisoner. The Prisoner? With Patrick McGowan, so this is in the ‘60s. I just remember my dad showing it to me when it was being rerun on PBS, which when my dad would come say, “Hey, Craig, sit down, we’re going to watch something on PBS,” I knew I was in for boredom. As a small child, I was like, “Prisoner, just– what?”

John: I just remember there’s this giant, white, floating ball-

Craig: The bubble.

John: -the bubble that is after him, but it’s great. You have no sense of what’s really happening there. Æon Flux was an MTV series that also had it. It seems like I have no idea how this all connects.

Craig: The surrealism is crucial. The idea that things are emerging that are very specifically puzzling as opposed to– why somebody did something, to me, is a mystery. I remember in Watchmen, they opened a door, and there’s an elephant in a room with tubes coming out of it. What? Severance, particularly this season. Last season, because it was somewhat limited in its scope, it wasn’t quite a puzzle box. It was closer to a mystery. This season, so far, has been a puzzle box.

John: Yes, absolutely. This season is leaning much more into the mythology, and who are the Eagans, what is this town, and the gradual reveal that the outside world is not normal, either. In the first season, it felt like a little stylized normal world, and it’s clear that the outside world is not a normal world either in this. I think it’s really important that you’re distinguishing between most shows. Many shows have mysteries at the heart of them. It’s like, who did this thing? You were trying to solve this puzzle.

You have either detectives or somebody who is investigating, is trying to solve this thing. It is the building up of mythology and impossible connections that is so tantalizing about a puzzle box show, and also can be really frustrating at times. One of the things that our listener was pointing to, Christian, is that sometimes it feels like they’re just spinning new plates.

Craig: This is the gift and the curse of puzzle boxing. As a writer, you and I know that if you have a scene and you want something exciting to happen, throwing something in that makes everybody go, “Wait, what?” People are in a house, and they think there might be a ghost, but they’re not sure, and one of their friends has gone missing, and then they open a door, and there’s a dragon in it. Wait, what? Black. Credits. They’re coming back next week. Everyone’s talking about the dragon. What the hell’s going on?

This is cheat coding your way to grabbing people’s interest. Each time you do it, it’s a little bit like heroin. Drew, I’m going to talk to you because you obviously know quite a bit. Drew, you remember the first time, right? You’re chasing that dragon the rest of your life. That first hit of puzzle boxing, you’re like, wow. Once you hit the fourth or fifth, you start to go, okay, anything can happen at any point. The value per puzzle starts to go down a little bit, particularly as the puzzles accrue in an unsolved way.

What Christian’s concerned about, and I think rightly so, is all of the puzzles have to have an answer. At best, they are interrelated. At best, there are one or two ahas that make all of them make sense all at once. In the case of Watchmen, I thought that was about as good as it gets. Maybe because it was one season, I went aha for all of it. When you have an ongoing series, the challenge is to figure out how to make these connected ahas that resolve everything without ending your show. That’s the trickiest part of all.

John: That’s the thing, when Damon Lindelof came on the show, we were talking about that, and at a certain point, he had to come to ABC and say like, “How many seasons do we have left? Because I need to pace out what we’re doing here because otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.” He got the answer of, at that point, two more seasons or three more seasons. Like, “Great. We can plan for this overall we’re getting to.”

That also ties into, how often are you introducing new clues or new mysteries? If it’s every episode, then you’re setting an expectation that this is this kind of show. If it’s once or twice per season where you’re doing that stuff or addressing the underlying mystery, then it’s not so foregrounded. It’s obviously always going to be there as an open, unresolved thread, but it’s not pressing. Those are fundamental decisions you make as a showrunner.

Craig: There is that give and take where, like you say, you get to dole these things out because how powerful they are. The things you have to watch out for, in addition to over-puzzling people to the point where they just go, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” is making sure that the characters themselves maintain a reasonable level of curiosity and a realistic interest in trying to solve the problems themselves. Because there are times where the characters just seem to go along with puzzles sometimes, go along with weirdness and then say, what is this all about? The other one is like, I don’t know. Let’s see where it goes.

After a while, you get the feeling that no one’s trying hard enough to solve the puzzles, which can also be a little frustrating. They’re fun. Look, the worst part of solving a puzzle is the finish, unless it’s wonderful. It’s high-risk, high-reward. To refer back to Lost, I think a lot of people just presume that the ending of Lost was “bad”, that it’s legendarily been discussed to death. Damon himself seems to write an editorial about it every few months, God bless him. It was good, I think, and millions of people thought so. People are always going to disagree about these things, but when you look at a show like Lost, the degree of difficulty to do– how many episodes did they do?

John: 20 to 22 episodes per season.

Craig: It was like 100 episodes or something. To do that is astonishing. What we ask now is maybe to do 20 for a puzzle box. For instance, Severance is in Season 2. I think they’re doing 9 or 10 episodes a season. I don’t know how many seasons they go for, but I can only presume that if we’re on Severance Season 8, something’s gone terribly wrong.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: Which is a weird thing to say because, theoretically, you want shows to go forever.

John: One of the points you made there is how the characters in the world are related to the central mystery. We’re talking about shows where the characters don’t have all the information. It’s not just that the audience is behind. The characters themselves are curious. It’s really a question of how do you make the mystery integral to the show but not overwhelming so that you can actually just do other stuff that a series needs to do in terms of how are the characters in relationships driving plot and story? It’s not all about the franchise mystery of it all.

Example, the far end would be The Leftovers, which is premised on this idea that 3% of the world’s population suddenly disappears. We see the effects of that, but no one is trying to answer the question, what really happened? At least the characters that we are seeing and following don’t have the capacity, the agency to try to solve that. It’s only in the final season that they actually really address what happened, resolve this great loss and make a change that addresses this fundamental mystery. Instead, it’s dealing with the repercussions of the premise, rather than trying to solve the premise.

Craig: More Lindelof. I guess Damon, he’s the king of the puzzle box. I think you’re right. I think that a good puzzle box story makes sure that part of the puzzle impacts the identity and central crisis of the characters, and the way their relationships function. So Severance is very good at this. In the end, do I want to know what is going on at Lumon? Do I want to know what Cold Harbor is and the data refinement process? Sure. Do I want to know why there are goats in that room? Yes, I do. Do I want to know more where Ms. Casey is/Mark S’s wife? Absolutely.

John: 100%.

Craig: Do I want to see how that is going to function within the matrix of Mark’s interest in Helly R? Now we’re just down to good old soap opera, and I love a good old soap opera. That’s where my heart is. Your brain is teased and entertained by the puzzles, but your brain will only get you so far. For what we do, the heart has to be there. And ideally, the stakes of the brain solving the problem are fed directly into the stakes of whether or not the heart gets what it wants.

John: The other thing I would point out to Christian is that as you’re trying to figure out your story and how it all fits together, when you have scenes with characters that know more about what’s going on, be really careful about those shifts in POV. That’s the thing that you’re seeing Season 2 of Severance grapple with, is that you have characters who work for Lumon who are just having conversations among themselves outside of the Severed Floor. They know so much more than we know. Those conversations are very carefully tailored, so that reveals stuff to us that they would know. That becomes a really difficult balancing act.

Craig: It is very hard to do this kind of show — Again, I tip my hat to Severance because they’re doing it — In a world where we have the internet and entire subreddits dedicated to parsing every single thing. My youngest daughter is currently now into Severance. She binged Season 1 with my wife, and now she’s watching Season 2 along with us. She was all over the theory because TikTok was all over the theory that Helly was actually real Helly and not– spoiler alert, if you’re now watching the show, you know it’s going to happen. She was ahead of that. I have a crazy Severance– it’s not a theory. I just had this idea. I’m sure it’s all over Reddit, too. I’m not original about this, I’m sure. Should I say it?

John: Say it.

Craig: I’ve been wondering lately if it’s all backwards, that the people on the outside are the ones that have been “severed,” that the outside is, in fact, the experiment, and the inside is very much what is real.

John: Sure. As we learn more in the second season, the outside world is not what we think it is. It’s not just that the cars are old. It’s that they’re in a non-existent state. The license plates don’t match. The two-letter state abbreviation is not a US state. It’s always winter. There’s something that’s really strange about the outside world.

Craig: One thing that’s really strange about the outside world, the fact that Ms. Cobel almost got to the edge of something and then turned back. It’s a lot easier to say, create a false reality where someone’s wife is dead than it is to kill someone’s wife in reality and then bring her back to life in a false reality. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s just stuff going on that makes me think it’s flipped around. Because I keep thinking, what are they doing in data refinement? Perhaps what they’re doing is refining somehow the way the outside world functions.

That said, it may not be that at all. Also, I don’t care. Here’s the truth, I don’t care. What I really want is for people in the end to be happy or to be resolved, to fulfill their destinies by sacrificing or doing something for the greater good. We have villains. The villains have become much more sharp this season. Corporation has become much more of a villain now. Mr. Milchick, you can feel his– oh my God, this storyline, can I just side note for a second? I don’t want to turn this into the 400,000th Severance podcast, but I was so delighted with this little mini storyline of Mr. Milchick being presented with those paintings, those incredibly, what do we call them, corporate racist? There’s like a corporate racism is its own thing where it’s like, we recognize your contributions, and look, we made a picture.

John: We want you to be able to see yourself in a story.

Craig: We just made our leader Black for you but in a bad painting. That little tiny, tiny story between him and– I can’t remember her character’s name, the woman who speaks for the board. I guess the two Black characters that are working for the company. Oh, it was just handled in the most delicious way. Really, really well done.

John: It was an interesting moment because not knowing what the real world of the show really is, oh so, race is still a thing. Based on the evidence of the rest of the show we’ve seen so far, does it have the racial history of America? It clearly has some racial history there. The fact that their Black is actually specific and acknowledged within the world of the show.

Craig: Right, which a lot of times in shows like this, they do the old colorblind thing where nobody has any comment on race whatsoever. You’re right. It was like an interesting break in the reality bubble of everything.

Anyway, to, I guess, wrap up the question here for advice, if you are thinking about writing one of these things, obviously, plan everything out, be meticulous, study your great mysteries, read Agatha Christie, read Arthur Conan Doyle, read as many things as you can that function like this clockwork machinery, watch all of the great puzzle box shows, go through the whole Lindelof catalog, basically, the Lindelog, and learn, and then figure out how to both begin middle and end it all, and create the characters that fit into it and are informed by it that we will actually follow and care about because when all is said and done, if you’re the kind of person who is only interested in how the puzzle box resolves, you’ll probably be disappointed all the time, but most of us care about the characters and the relationships.

John: One last observation I just need to make is that the fact that we can have this conversation about Severance is because it is a weekly release schedule. Had they dumped all these at once, there’s no conversation because you don’t know where people are at in their watching.

Craig: How are we still talking about this like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world? I wouldn’t even make my show if it were dumped all at once. I just wouldn’t do it. The thought of it, the thought of working that hard for that long for everybody to watch something over one day or a three-day thing and then occasionally nibble on it, oh my, why? Why does Netflix do this?

John: There’s a project that I would love to be able to make, but if we end up at Netflix and we’re released all at once versus someplace else, we would fundamentally have to change how we’re doing some things because you just can’t count on the–

Craig: I literally don’t understand. I’m sure there are a lot of people at Netflix, or a number of algorithms who would be happy to explain it to me. It seems so patently obvious that the shows that people talk about, the shows that grip people and get them excited are indeed released once a week.

John: So, second topic. I was in New York City for two weeks working on a new version of Big Fish, the Broadway musical that I did 12 years ago. This process resulted in a 29-hour reading where we had actors in for one week. You get to rehearse and perform it once for investors and theater owners and other friends. It was great. It was so, so much fun. We had Patrick Wilson starring and Jerry Zaks directing, a great experience. Then also when I got back from New York, I went in and did an EPK interview for Corpse Bride, which is the 20th anniversary of Corpse Bride that I wrote with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler.

Craig: Twenty.

John: Twenty years. The experience of those things back to back made me think about when do you go back and revisit old projects? In the case of Big Fish, this is a thing that I was working on, first, the movie and then the Broadway show. Andrew Lippa and I had this giant catalog of like, here’s all the songs we wrote for the show. And as we’re reshaping and moving stuff around, it’s like, oh, I remember this little bit from this little bit. The bag of scraps you have can be really, really useful. Remembering what was the intention behind some of those things.

But for Corpse Bride, it was a chance for me to go back and watch the movie again, which I had not seen in 20 years. I remember like, “Wait, what did I actually do on this?” I watched the movie, then I read the script before I came on board. There were so many lines. I was like, “Oh, I remember writing that line.” Nope, I didn’t write that line. That was Caroline Thompson or Pamela Pettler. It was already in the draft. But then there were things that I did change and did add. It’s like, oh, I had no idea. That moment, which worked really well, like, oh, that was so great. The chance to reconnect with those things.

It also made me really wish that I’d kept a journal, that I’d kept some record of what the experience was like. Because in the conversation with the co-director and the producer, I had some ability to just remember why things were the way that they are, but it’s mostly just like, yes, that thing exists. I’m not quite sure how we got to that moment.

Craig: I’ve talked about this before. I’m not a big reflector. I don’t spend a lot of time in my brain in the past. I spend almost no time in my brain in the past.

John: I’m not much of one either.

Craig: It’s a watercolor mush. I remember the strangest things and not things that would be relevant but also, in general, not too motivated to go back and watch things.

What does sometimes happen is I get a chance to see something that I did through someone else’s eyes. When my youngest daughter was home from college, she and Melissa also watched The Hangover trilogy. That was exciting and fun. I didn’t sit there and watch it with them, but every now and then, I’d wander by and hear something and be like, “Oh, I remember that day.” It is fun to see people who grew up with something come to talk to you about it.

It reminds you why you did it in the first place. If you write things particularly for kids or for the broadest segment of the audience, you’re probably not in line to get Portrait of a Lady on Fire-type reviews. Not to say that some things like that aren’t wonderfully reviewed, but in the end, all that fades away. Then you see like, is there something there that lasted for people? That is interesting to see. But the thought of keeping a journal, oh my God.

John: It’s made me think back all the way to how I got interested in screenwriting in the first place, was Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The first script I ever read was his script because it came in a bound book with his script and his production journal. I got to see how he made it and what the whole process was. It was so incredibly illuminating to me. It made me want to become a screenwriter. I don’t have that for much of my stuff. I do for the Arlo Finch books because I had that separate podcast series I did, called Launch, which people could still listen to.

That really charts the whole process from I have this idea to write this book to the book is now out in French. It charted the whole process. That’s such an exception, and there’s no time machine that I wish I could go back and do that. I really wish I had records of more of what the conversations were.

Because even on Corpse Bride, now we can go back and search emails, and emails are so helpful to find out that stuff, but that was back in the time of faxes and phone calls. Now the stuff would be Zooms or Slack messages that are not as searchable. I feel like there’s a lack of a record of some of what’s really happening in the projects I’m working on right now.

Craig: Other than the insane digital paper trail, to me, the product of the work is the most important. I know that people are fascinated by the process. We do give them this very curated look at– “Stay tuned after the episode to watch behind the scenes.”

John: We are filming those. You’re doing all those in one day, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: You’re having to reflect upon, this is this episode, this is–

Craig: They just go, let’s talk Episode 3, let’s talk Episode 4. Though it’s interesting, what I don’t do is say things like, “It looks like so-and-so is in real trouble.”

John: A lot of people do.

Craig: I don’t do that. If there’s a cliffhanger, I’ll let the show do the cliffhanger. I just try and provide as much thematic context as possible. I’ve never been the person to pick up a book like Stanley Kubrick discusses how he made 2001. Weirdly, I don’t care. I’ve never had interest in that. I’ve always had interest in just the result. It may be because of my deep-seated belief that process is personal. I don’t want to follow someone else’s process. I don’t want to feel like I’m emulating anybody. I just want to try and follow my own natural instinct, which, hopefully, will get me to the best thing.

If I did write a diary called The Making of The Last of Us, it would contain quite a lot of whoa stuff. Not all good, but just like, wow, you guys had to do that? You went there? It took how much to build that thing? Yes. But people at HBO will tell you– I just say I’m so allergic to behind-the-scenes because I don’t want to– I want them to believe. If we keep showing people backstage– and that thing is an interest, I just try and avoid that if I can.

John: A case where I have had to go back through a project and reconstruct a narrative of things is in an arbitration. There’ve been times where I wrote something five years ago, and I have to go back through my drafts and figure out which drafts do I submit? What actually changed? What am I actually saying happened here? I did a little bit of that for a Corpse Bride where I was trying to figure out what changed draft to draft. I wonder if I might be willing to put this in a small box of things I feel like could be a good use for AI in a sense of like, compare this draft, compare it to this draft, and tell me what changed. Because it’s such a tedious task for a human being to do but actually is so well suited for something that is just looking for patterns.

Craig: Although change is difficult to judge if it’s judged quantitatively.

John: I would never do it for something. I would never do it in an arbitration situation, but for me, talking on the EPK, what changed over the course of between when you started, and really, it’s like, what were the big shifts? That’s hard for me to reconstruct if an AI or some other system could point out this is the character who’s different. This is how Barkus was in this draft, and this is where Barkus got to. That would be useful for me.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I’ve become one of those people. Anytime someone says AI, I go, boo.

John: I totally get it.

Craig: I was watching the Super Bowl, and some ad came on, and we were like, “What is this for?” Then finally, they got to AI and we all went, “Boo.” I guess it’s inevitable.

John: I want to totally validate that experience, that feeling. Also, by saying, “Boo,” make sure you’re not dismissing that it actually is real and that it’s there. Because sometimes people will just say, “Boo,” in a disbelieving way.

Craig: No. I say, “Boo,” like, “I don’t want it.” I just wish it weren’t there. I do. I love technology. Just this one, I wish it weren’t there. I so resent the fact that Google gives me that garbage AI result at the top of the page, and you can’t turn it off.

John: I’m sure there’s some workaround that.

Craig: There isn’t. The workaround is to query Google for results that only occur prior to the date the AI existed. It’s not useful.

John: I switched to DuckDuckGo for searches on mobile, which has been fine. What I want to underline is I wish it weren’t there is a valid expression, but that’s not going to help us get any policy or regulation or any controls over it. That’s my worry.

Craig: I can’t get any policy or controls over anything. I’m not a senator.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions.

Drew: Keanu writes, “I’m a high school student at Heritage Academy Maricopa, and my class had a question about screenwriting. If a person is in a cave, is it interior or exterior?”

Craig: I love this question.

Drew: What about Godzilla vs. Kong? Would the middle of the earth be interior or exterior and where do we draw the line?

Craig: Wherever you want.

John: Wherever you want. It’s just a philosophical question.

Craig: I know. I love it.

John: Am I inside or outside?

Craig: Right. It’s great. Interior and exterior are mostly useful for productions to figure out if they are actually going to be physically outside or inside so that they can decide if maybe they’re going to build a set or if they’re going to have to worry about the weather. When it comes to something like a cave, personally, I would say interior because you are getting out of the rain. It really comes down to rain in my mind. If it were raining outside, would my actors be getting wet?

John: Which is the cover side.

Craig: Exterior. Now, if you’re under a bus shelter or something, if you’re hiding from the rain, sure. The center of the earth, you mean in the molten core of the center?

John: No. In the Godzilla vs. Kong movies, there’s this giant underground, it’s really an outdoor space that happens to have a roof on it.

Craig: In that case, I probably would say exterior because there are probably sub-interiors within that. If there’s a cave inside of that world where there’s the dome sky, then– Truman Show, exterior street, interior house. All of it, spoiler alert, under a dome, interior.

John: 100% agree. It’s the other classic things like interior space, exterior space, exactly. If it feels like you’re outside, it’s great. It’s not going to affect anything. We get it.

Craig: It’s not going to affect anything, but I do like the philosophy. Here’s maybe a useful way of thinking about it: If where you are could be separated from another interior, it’s probably exterior, if you’re going to go inside from where you are.

John: I would just go to inside, outside. If you enter a place, then you’re interior. If you exit a place, you’re likely going into an exterior.

Craig: Feels about right.

Drew: Steve writes, “I’m working on a script that features actors who play in a cover band. I’d like to show them performing live on stage in small venues. I’ve read about some of the challenges David Simon faced while filming bands live in the show Treme, but can you go into specifics as to why? Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Also, am I mistaken in assuming that the songs that I choose will be cheaper since I won’t be using the actual recordings?

Craig: Here’s why shooting live songs is hard. It comes down to editing. When a band is playing live, it’s never going to be exactly the same each time. Their movements, the notes, the tempo, everything will always be a little bit different from show to show. Any tiny difference will make a jump happen if you’re going to edit from one camera to the other unless you’re filming eight cameras. Even then, most of the cameras will be seeing the cameras.

Now you’ve got some painting out to do and you don’t get that fluid feeling of going through. So typically, what we do is we ask the musicians to play to a fixed track. The fixed track will be in their ears, and they mime play along with it, essentially. They can live play along with it too, but they have to be locked in for editing purposes. It is a challenge.

John: Either a pre-record or a click track, basically something to keep them on exactly the same metronome for things. For Steve, if it’s looking to do maybe a smaller indie project, in some ways, that might argue towards doing some live recording because maybe it has a feel where it’s just you’re just going to record the entire thing, or it’s in a one-er, or there are reasons why you’re there and you’re experiencing it live. I think back to the movie Once, which is about the folk singer you fall in love, that feels like a thing that was probably recorded live and made sense to record live. It felt like the right vibe for it.

Craig: If you’re going to do, for instance, that wonderful song Falling and it’s two people, one playing guitar, one singing, three, four cameras going at once, that’ll get you what you want. No problem. We face these challenges from time to time, and we figure them out with the sound department. But fun, chaotic, proper live with a club, and everybody dancing and everything. The sound is the biggest issue, is figuring out what we’re going to hear and how we’re going to hear it.

The other thing about playing live is the music is coming out through big speakers. Now, you can record the individual tracks, but you still have to mic the drums. You’re getting bleed through those drum mics from everything else that’s playing. What are you going to play for people when they’re watching? Because recording live is its own thing, plus you have the crowd dancing. It may all look great, but now it sounds like mush, or it doesn’t connect to what we’re seeing. Challenges.

John: It’s challenges. Answering two more little things, Steve asked, “Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene?” Not really. The dinner table scene is its own unique problem just because of eye lines that are getting people to match around a dinner table scene. Here, you have a bunch of people who, yes, they might be looking at each other, and that’s just a thing. It’s going to be the same problem whether you’re recording it live or they’re lip-syncing to a thing. “Will it be cheaper than using the actual recordings?” No, because if you’re going to do your own recording of the thing, you’re making your own recording, period. Recording it live doesn’t change that.

Craig: It could be cheaper only in the sense that if you’re going to use the recorded version, you have to pay for both the licensing and the mechanical, the master.

John: I’m presuming that if we see a band performing on stage, you’re going to record a band, that band, or another band recording on stage.

Craig: That recording you’re making, it won’t cost you anything. You’re just paying the licensing at that point and, of course, the performance fees for the band, or if they’re actors, that’s the acting. Yes, it could be a little bit more, but then you have a lot of other challenges you’re going to have to deal with, and you have to weigh those two things side by side. It’s a tricky one.

The good news is, post-production people, production people, sound people, they’ve all been here. They will all give you advice on the various ways you can go, but it is a bit of an interesting puzzle. When you’re trying to figure out how to, for instance, then shoot a conversation between two people who are off to the side with the band playing in the background continuously from their live performance, how are you going to do that? It’s all very tricky.

John: There are reasons why you want that band to be looking like they’re performing and not actually performing.

Drew: We’ve got one last question. Todd in Maryland writes, “I love when you guys talk about D&D. I’ve played tabletop role-playing games since I was a kid and think they’re great for storytelling and socializing. The strange thing, however, is that very few campaigns stick in my head as being memorable stories. Usually, there are one or two standout moments, a funny interaction, a clever situation to a puzzle, critical success or failure, but the personal goals and growth of the characters and the overarching plots are lost in the wash of time. Have you ever used a role-playing campaign as the basis of a screenplay, or are these two fundamentally different mediums?”

John: I think they’re really different mediums.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Two issues there. One is the campaigns that he’s in aren’t memorable. That may be chalked up to the DM. Partly, that’s the job of the DM is to tell a great story, to make more than one or two memorable moments, to provide a lot of great NPCs that you can remember, and to make it all make sense in the end like it was all meant to be purposeful. That’s an entirely different question than from– also, let’s say you got that, should you base this? No, you should not.

John: We’re about to resolve a campaign that I’ve been DMing for the last year or so. Listen, I went in with some story points, but I really let the players dictate what was going to be happening. They are the storytellers of a lot of this. Those characters making those choices, their bad roles a lot of times are the iconic moments from it.

Craig: Like any good DM, you edit as you go. As long as you don’t make a change that undoes something that we all saw happen or somehow invalidate things, you’re fine. It’s a little bit like the puzzle box thing. You just want to make sure that when you get to the end, people are like, “Oh, this is, so nothing mattered. You just randomly did this, even though all these other things happened.” Yes, the puzzle has to make sense in the end.

John: What is I think consistent with good cinematic storytelling is the players, the protagonists should be the most memorable characters and the one who are driving things. While I set up a villain and sub-villains who I thought were useful and good and interesting, your heroes should be driving the story, and they have.

Craig: You hope that you have a group of players that create relationships with each other or key relationships with an NPC, but the point is relationships and how they interact with each other, that’s the fun. When I’m a player, I’m so much more interested in how I deal with the other party members than I am with how I deal with the rest of the world.

John: Absolutely. One thing that I did in this campaign, which we tried out, mixed success, but I said, in our session zero, as we were getting stuff ready, every character had to have relationships with two other characters around the table. It didn’t have to be like brother and sister, but they had to have some other connection with them so that they came into this small community with a sense of some shared history and purpose and relationship. It’s an idea I would continue through to the future, even as we’re looking at our next campaign, is I would love to come in with my player being connected at least to one other player.

Craig: I think it’s a good icebreaker moment. What happens is the players, as they play-

John: They make choices.

Craig: -they begin to figure out who they are and then they just create new relationships. Some of them are good running jokes. I had a good one with Phil Hay’s character based on the session zero, but then a lot of them just emerge because somebody’s character may irk your character by what they do. Then that’s the thing now by the choice they made. As long as you give people room to find their own bonds and flaws, as D&D says, you’re doing great.

John: Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show/experience I had while I was in New York City called Life And Trust. Now, Craig, when you were in New York ever, did you go to Sleep No More?

Craig: I sure did.

John: Did you like Sleep No More?

Craig: I definitely went to Sleep No More.

John: Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More.

Craig: I attended it.

John: Let me talk about Sleep No More, and I’ll tell you about the differences between this and Life And Trust. Sleep No More, you go to this space and you drop off your coat and put on a mask, and then you’re wandering through this space, and you start to realize were there actors? Basically, anyone who’s not wearing a mask is an actor, is a performer in this world. You start to realize like, “Oh, Macbeth is happening around me.” As you’re wandering through the space, there’s really very little structure to it. You’re seeing scenes and moments, but it’s cool and also has a feeling of a little bit of an escape room in the sense of you could just spend all the time looking at the very cool set direction and such.

While I was in New York this last time, I went to see Life And Trust, which is by the same folks who did that. It is done in a bank in the financial district, an incredible space, and just gorgeous and much more ambitious than Sleep No More was. As you’re entering it, there’s a little bit of dialogue at the start as you’re sent off. Then like Sleep No More, you’re wearing a mask. You’re exploring the space, and you could just look at all the incredible set decorations throughout the whole thing. You realize that what’s actually happening is probably Faust or a version of Faust.

I thought the structural elements on it worked really nicely. We’ve just had a really good time. If you’re going with a group, you end up getting separated by default, and you’re having your own experience. Then really part of the fun of it is when it’s all done, which is about three hours, getting back together and like, “Did you make it to that space? I had no idea that thing was there.” I saw this scene happen, and you’re trying to piece together what all happened. I really dug it.

Craig: I remember that I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and watching people. Whatever a voyeur is, I’m the opposite of that. I felt very uncomfortable. No reflection on what they did, their performance, the quality, it was all clearly working at a very high level, and people do love it. I just thought like, “Oh, if somebody were to be looking at me, I’m the bad guy.” I’m just scrolling around, Eyes Wide Shut style, just basking in the performance.

I kept thinking to myself, a lot of these people are the classic starving artists in New York, working this gig for probably not a lot of money, and then waitering during the day. Then I show up at night, and I just casually watch them. I’m not going to watch them. I’m going to turn away and watch something else. I’d rather walk down that hallway than look at you and appreciate what you’re doing. I just felt so icky. I don’t know if anybody else had that.

John: I think that is a valid experience. I will say that this show was much more dance-driven than the other one was. The other one was like–

Craig: You know me. I love dance.

John: You love some dance. At times you realize like, “Oh, there’s choreography happening. Oh my God, I need to move really quickly because they’re about to slam into me.” You have to be so ready to do things on the fly, which is fun and impressive that they could do. Here’s the moment we had at the end, though, that made me– this is true for all Broadway actors, but I really felt it for this is, so we’re down in the financial district, and I have to take the train to get back uptown. We get on the train, and two of the performers are in there too, along with all these young Chinese girls who were there who had just seen the show and were fawning over them. It’s like, man, you just did this thing and you want to be done. Suddenly, there are people there who saw you do it.

Craig: Some actors really enjoy it.

John: Some actors love it.

Craig: Some fans, are you kidding? Who doesn’t like a few fans?

John: All right. Life And Trust is my one cool thing.

Craig: My one cool thing– let’s see. Yes, we’re getting close. This is a sad one cool thing, but it’s a wonderful one cool thing. So in about a week, my intrepid assistant, Ali Chang, will be graduating out of assistant university, and we’ll talk about what she’s doing next. It’s quite exciting. For another time, that’s really up to her. I just wanted to make her my one cool thing because for two years, she has just been the best.

I’d never really had assistants, but if you’re going to be a showrunner, you need not just an assistant. You need a super assistant. You need somebody who is operating like your auxiliary brain and, most importantly, is filtering everything that goes in and out to make sure that the showrunner doesn’t drown in information, so organization and anticipation but then also all the good nurturing stuff.

Then like, “Hey, I want to try something fun for dinner. What’s the best blank?” She knows everything about everything everywhere. I must have spent probably 1,000 driving hours with her because we just drive places because you got to go scout. You got to go to your sets. You got to here and there. It’s just like an incredible wingman and such a super person. I won’t have to miss her because she’s still going to be around, but she just did a fantastic job. She is my absolute one coolest thing this week. The great Ali Chang.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Never heard of him.

John: Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers who really need to switch over to the annual plan and not the weekly plan. Save money.

Craig: It’s going to $7.99, but soon, it’ll be $799.

John: That’d be crazy.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Oy. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about taking time off. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, one of the real challenges of being a writer is that because we’re not on the clock, we’re never off the clock. One of the things I really missed about a 9-to-5 job is when I was not on the job, I was just off, and I had no responsibility to that place of work. That just doesn’t happen as a writer.
Craig: No, and there’s this whole new world of people that don’t go to the office. They Zoom commute, which means, a lot of their time during the day, they’re probably also off.

John: It’s unstructured.

Craig: Yes, but if you Zoom commute as a writer, you’re just being a writer. We’ve always just been somebody that occasionally would go to a meeting. It doesn’t matter. You wake up. Theoretically, you could be writing. You should be writing. That’s what your brain tells you at least until you are fully unconscious. You can always possibly be writing. It is difficult to draw the line, and then if you are in the middle of a production–

John: My daughter is in her second semester of her sophomore year. I was FaceTiming with her, and she’s like, “I’m so overwhelmed. I have this paper to do and this stuff, and it feels like all I do is I wake up. I go to class. I go to work. I do homework, and then I go to bed.” It’s like, “Yes, we validate that. Yes, that’s what the experience is. Are you taking time off?” She’s like, “I’m sleeping okay.” It’s like, “No, I don’t mean sleep. I think you actually need to have some time that is just not that time. You have to replenish and refill.” It’s a hard thing to hear or to try to do because you’re just like, “If I’m doing that, then I’m falling further behind on other stuff.” It’s hard to internalize that idea.

Craig: It is, and it’s probably a sign that you either are trying to do too much, or you need to learn how to do the things you do more efficiently. That’s our greatest hope. The first thing we want if we’re an ambitious person is to say, “I’ve been asked to do 100 things. I feel like I could do 10.” Either I need to tell them I can’t do those other 90, or I need to learn how to do 100 things. Now, it turns out that we can do more than we think.

The dangerous thing is if you keep doing that and succeeding, where does it end? Where it ends probably is a nervous breakdown. College is an excellent time to find out just how much you can do. Sometimes the feeling of being overwhelmed is really just the fear that you are going to have to expand your appetite and your output because it’s hard, but you can, until you hit a point where it definitely feels wrong. I’ve had a few of those.

John: I’ve definitely had a few, too. The nervous breakdown I had at the end of D.C., it was my first TV show, was that just trying to do too much and not recognizing or not being honest with myself that I was overtaxed. It just was impossible to do it. I remember very distinctly feeling like I was just a vessel for making the show. If I was listening to the radio in the car, it’s like, “Is that a song that could be in the show?”
I was basically just a sorting mechanism for things that could be in the show and things that were not going to be in the show. Healthier now, I don’t do that.

One of the things I’m trying to be more deliberate about doing is, today is a day off. I’m just not actually doing any work. I’m not thinking about work. I’m going to do whatever feels good and not out of a sense of obligation, but I’m just going to chill and not stress out about stuff. It’s hard for me to do that because I recognize that there are always 10 more things I could be doing with that time.

Craig: I don’t have a guilt about those times. What I struggle with is finding out ways to actively do nothing. When I say do nothing, actively not work. Today I’m not working. Instead, I’m going to clean out this. I’m going to go do here. I’m going to meet up with these people. I’m going to walk around a museum. Mostly what I want to do, I find when I’m not working is dissociate. That’s what I want to do. I want to dissociate. I want to sit down with a video game or a puzzle and go bye-bye.

I think that’s fine. It’s probably not on the top of the list of psychological recommendations for people, and maybe people might think that’s a sign actually you’re doing too much because you need to dissociate, but I actually find it wonderful. I like going bye-bye because my brain is working all the time. I need to sometime just send it to bye-bye town.

John: That will give you Birdigo, and you’re playing some Birdigo.

Craig: Dissociate.

John: Dissociate. The other thing I’m trying to do more of is just allowing myself to be bored. It’s because I find that I’m trying to fill every moment. I would find myself pulling out my phone as I walked upstairs. That’s 20 seconds. I didn’t need to pull out my phone during those times. Literally just putting the phone down and just being in a place and just letting myself be bored. Just stare at my dog for five minutes. It is good for just bringing everything down a little bit for me.

Craig: I think that in time, our ever-increasing age will force us to do these things more and more. I do think sometimes I better get all this stuff in that I want to do now. What I want to do is we call it work. I don’t think of it as work. This is what I want to do. I’m lucky enough that what I want to do is the thing people pay me to do. Fantastic. I will do it now as much as I can until my– I smell burnt toast, and that’s the end of that.

John: We met up with friends of ours from Los Angeles but now have a place in New York. We went to the Met, and it was great, and they had a great exhibit there, and loved it. He’s kind ofd retired. He’s a writer, and he’s just like, “I’m just done. I’m just done working for other people. I stopped enjoying it. I have the ability to be done and I’m just done.” That’s a hard thing to admit. I can’t imagine myself getting there, but I’m really happy that he’s happy doing that.

Craig: That was the goal, I think, for most people for the longest time. I’m thinking of a friend that we have in common who keeps telling me, “Once this is done, I’m ready to finish.”

John: I know who you’re talking about. It’s been 20 years he’s been saying that.

Craig: Right, and I’m like, “Okay, but you’re not. It’s not going to happen.”
John: He’ll describe the plan, “Oh, we’re going to move to Upstate New York. We’re got this place and all this stuff.” It’s like, “Yes, you’re going upstate, but you’re going back.”

Craig: You’re not going to.

John: Your kids are in college. They’re out of college now.

Craig: Because you like the life, man. You like the life.

John: Growing up, did you have any concept of a Sabbath or a day off? Did your family do any of that?

Craig: No. Weekends were for homework and essays and stuff. I was always nervous when I got to the weekend, mostly because I had to spend all day with my parents instead of just a little bit. That was when, I guess, they imposed this running around on your weekend is bad. I did get to play. Don’t get me wrong. I got to go outside, but I had to do all my work first and had to do it great. Homework is the worst. Have we ever talked about how dumb homework is?

John: Homework is generally terrible.

Craig: It’s just the stupidest concept.

John: Study after study shows that it’s not productive.

Craig: It doesn’t do a goddamn thing. What is the point? If you can add two numbers together, why do you have to add more two numbers together all weekend long? It’s stupid. It’s not learning.

John: It also contributes to the Sunday scareies, that sense of this is all the work I have to do to get done, so I’d be ready for my new week. It’s bad.

Craig: It just gives teachers something to grade. It just gives them something to grade. It’s stupid.

John: I think our advice is let yourself rest. Don’t do your homework.

Craig: Don’t do your homework, kids.

John: Don’t do your homework.

[laughter]

John: Don’t do homework that other people have assigned you. If there’s homework that you feel like you want to do to make yourself ready, great.

Craig: If you work at a job and someone’s giving you homework, listen, you got to figure out your boundaries there and make choices.

John: As we record this on President’s Day. It’s on the calendar, is a day that should not have been a workday for Drew, certainly.

Craig: You know what? Drew made a choice. I think he made what I would call a coerced choice.

Drew: I could have not come in.

Craig: It’s a little bit like when a magician tells you to pick a card, any card, you’re picking the one they want you to pick.

Drew: It’s the one that’s popping up.

Craig: Yes, but thank you for picking this day. It was so nice of you. That’s it.

Links:

• Birdigo on Steam
• Lutron HomeWorks and Home Assistant
• The Prisoner (1967)
• Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof
• Patrick Wilson, Jordan Donica Leading Industry Reading of Revised, Broadway-Aimed Big Fish on Playbill.com
• Falling Slowly scene in Once
• Life and Trust
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (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.