Search Results for: lindelof

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/industry-software).

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** This is Episode 646 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

There are many software products aimed at the film and television industry, and more in development. But why do the bad ones persist, and why is it so hard for the better ones to succeed? Today on the show, we’ll look at the challenges and opportunities around making things that don’t suck. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages submitted by our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, magic, who needs it?

**Craig:** Are we talking the card game or prestidigitation?

**John:** We’re talking about our D&D campaign at the moment. We’re 10 installments into a campaign without magic. Let’s discuss what’s worked and what’s not worked so well, what’s been surprising about that campaign.

**Craig:** Fairly niche topic, but honestly-

**John:** It is a niche topic, but that’s why it’s a Bonus Segment.

**Craig:** It’s a Bonus Segment, and really our Premium Members should be playing D&D. They’re premium, for god’s sake. They should pursue quality in their life.

**John:** I think in a more general sense though, it’s like, what happens when you don’t uphold some genre premises. Take anything. If you took a horror movie and dropped out some of the aspects of what we expect out of that genre. We just saw the movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is an example of that, because it looks like a one-at-a-time killer thriller thing, and yet it’s not really that.

**Craig:** I like that idea. If we had an action movie, like a cop action movie, but no one ever fired a gun. It’s an interesting exercise in self-limitation to inspire some creativity and change.

**John:** We often talk about that on the show, how constraints are the writer’s best friends and that when you have constraints, it forces you to work within that. A project that I was approached by the last couple weeks, one of the problems was that it was just a world. There was no other kind of constraints to it. The first thing I had to do is like, “What constraints am I putting on myself?” because otherwise this is just an amorphous blob.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember talking to Scott Frank when he took the job to do the Wolverine movie. He said his condition was Wolverine has to be able to die, because otherwise, who gives a crap? Everyone was like, “But Wolverine doesn’t… ” He’s like, “Mm-hmm. So anyway, Wolverine has to die.”

**John:** In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll talk about constraints and death, because death is a bigger factor when there’s no magic.

**Craig:** Massively so. That’s an exciting one. What do we have going on with news? Probably nothing.

**John:** There actually is some news here today, because-

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You and I are headed out of town.

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** We are going to go to the Austin Film Festival, which we are often doing. We’re going this year. It’s October 24th through 31st. We are scheduled to attend. We’re gonna plan a live Scriptnotes show. We’ll probably do a Three Page Challenge. There’s talk of doing a 25th anniversary screening of Go.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** It should be fun. If you are inclined to go to Austin and are thinking about travel there, now might be a time to think about that.

**Craig:** We haven’t been there in a couple years. Is that right? Did we miss last time?

**John:** Yeah, probably two years.

**Craig:** Two, yeah.

**John:** Because I remember you didn’t go last year, and the year before that was the year you got really sick.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I got so sick. I think I got a stomach bug is what happened. No, let me revise that. I got a stomach bug. It happened. It was that 24-hour stay in bed clutching your stomach in pain after you’ve barfed your world out and then just try and drink a little Gatorade. It was miserable.

**John:** It was bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, so no one breathe on me.

**John:** A stomach bug is probably something you ate though, right?

**Craig:** Look, it may have been something I ate, but it felt like just that nasty gastritis.

**John:** We are so selling the Austin Film Festival. Come for the illness. It should be a good time. It’ll be Drew’s first time going.

**Craig:** Wow. Look, as long as your room has a toilet.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s like those cruises where everyone gets norovirus. No, it’s not like that, I swear. I’ve been there many, many times. The only time I got sick. It’s actually quite fun. It’s raucous. Drew, you will be somewhat of a rockstar there.

**Drew Marquardt:** Weird.

**Craig:** It is a little weird. I gotta be honest with you. That part gets weird. People will be like, “Oh my god, it’s Drew. You sound just like… I imagined you looking different from your voice.” You get a lot of that.

**John:** Megana was a rockstar when she was there, but Megana’s always a rockstar.

**Drew:** Megana’s a rockstar though.

**Craig:** I’m not saying that you’re necessarily gonna captivate people the way Megana did.

**Drew:** I don’t have that charisma.

**Craig:** You know what? You got enough rizz. You got enough rizz.

**Drew:** I’ll take it.

**Craig:** Listen. People are gonna be talking.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to it, but Google Austin Film Festival and that’s all the information you need. Let’s do some follow-up.

Back in Episode 644, we talked about new federal reporting requirements for loan-out companies like Craig and I have and like what Scriptnotes is. That is for sure happening. But since that time, there was also a bit of a freak-out about, it looked like the California Employment Development Department was going to crack down on loan-outs in a bigger, more general sense. Cast and Crew, which is this big payroll company in Hollywood, sent out this alert right before Memorial Day, saying red alert, there could be huge changes coming here. It looks like that’s been backpedaled, but I thought we might spend a few moments talking about loan-outs, why they’re important, why a change to this would be a big, disrupting deal.

**Craig:** It’s hard to tell if Cast and Crew freaked out unnecessarily or if they freaked out necessarily. The fact is that loan-out corporations function essentially to protect Hollywood workers, duly artists, from being overtaxed, essentially. Some people could argue that loan-out corporations exist to keep artists below the line of fair taxation. There’s a fair debate to be had about it.

That said, literally every single writer, actor, director, producer that is, let’s just say, succeeding is working with a loan-out corporation. It is par for the course. California already has quite a high tax rate. We are taxed twice. You do actually get taxed as a corporation. Then you get taxed as an individual. It really exists because there are a lot of deductions that you can take as a corporation that you can’t take as an individual.

I have no doubt that once this letter went out, the unions and people that donate a lot of money to California politicians called those chips in and said no, don’t do that, and somebody then yelled at the EDD, who was probably some guy there who was like, “What is this all about? [Indiscernible 00:06:59].” Then he got like 15 texts in 12 minutes, like, “You’re gonna die.” It looks like the fight is over.

**John:** The fight is over. At least it’s been stalled or it’ll change a different way of approaching it. Listen. Loan-out corporations are a weird thing. It is strange to set up a system where you have companies that basically have one employee, or sometimes two with an assistant or something. It’s a weird way to do it, and yet the way that we work is just sort of weird.

I can both understand why regulatory agencies might say, “No, listen, these are employees. You should just treat them like employees,” and it’s also strange that above a certain earning threshold it makes more sense to go through a loan company rather than me being paid directly. It is kind of weird, and yet trying to change the system now would be so, I think, disastrous. You’d have to have a real, clear plan for how you were gonna do this.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would cost so much money that you might end up losing some people to neighboring states. It would be that crazy. The name “loan-out,” you might as well say it’s a fake corporation. You might as well use the word “fake.” Yes, it’s a weird bit of paperwork dancing, but it is, what, forever, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How long have these things been going on? Long before we showed up. That’s for sure.

**John:** Oh, yeah. It’s easier for big companies to hire other big companies. For this job I’m just finishing up now, it was on a rewrite for something. It was complicated. But they chose to pay me through their payroll company rather than through just the normal way. It was a mess to do it that way. There’s reasons we do things the way we do things. It’s not just because we’re trying to save dollars. It’s because there’s a structure behind it. There’s a reason why you pay a company rather than paying an individual in some cases.

**Craig:** The system, as far as I can tell, will not be changing any time soon.

**John:** But some potentially good news for you, Craig, because we got some follow-up about your Space Cadet movie.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Yeah, because you mentioned on Episode 644 that the Space Cadet title, Lucas was sitting on it for a long time. Jose Luis in Puerto Rico says that there is a Space Cadet movie coming out this year, July 4th, 2024. It’s written and directed by Liz Garcia and will be released on Amazon Prime.

**Craig:** I guess Lucas finally got off the title there. My thing was in 1997. That’s a year that Drew doesn’t even understand as a year. I think it’s fair to say that nearly, what is it, 27 years later, that yeah, Lucas probably let it go.

**John:** Which is fair and reasonable.

**Craig:** That’s fair.

**John:** Let’s get to our marquee topic this week. Over the past couple months, I’ve had some conversations with two different startup companies who are trying to make software for film and TV productions. Here’s the problem that both of these companies were trying to solve. On a film or TV production, you have all these different departments who need to work together and need to communicate with each other. You have the ADs, you have wardrobe, props, locations, transpo, VFX, everybody working on the same project, and they need information from each other. How do they get that information to each other? What is the central source of truth?

The sources of truth would be the script, obviously, and also the schedule, the breakdown, like, this is the schedule for how to plan to shoot this thing. But there’s no obvious established way to do that, so instead, a bunch of homespun solutions have come up. Some of them work for some places, don’t work for other places. But it’s not hard to imagine that there could be a better way of doing this.

If in the script we know that Scene 15 is taking place at a roller rink, how does each department weigh in on what they’re going to do? Craig, I ask you, on The Last of Us, what is that process? What is the process by which all departments can see what each other is doing?

**Craig:** You really touched on a sore spot here.

**John:** I’m not surprised. There is a problem here. That’s why.

**Craig:** There is a problem. Basically, the way is done is through, I’m now gonna editorialize, endless, repetitive meetings. Endless, repetitive meetings. I found myself in a meeting just the other day. I love my crew. The department heads work so hard. Our show is a massive aircraft carrier. It takes so much time and effort to do everything, and everything is happening all at once, all the time. But I was in a meeting, an endless, repetitive meeting, just last week that brought up a topic that had been already met upon multiple times in prep, which is a half year ago. I started to feel like I was getting punked, like how is this possible? The fact is that there is a certain amount of human, face-to-face interaction and questioning that needs to happen, and I don’t know if there even is a software solution for that.

Beyond that, we do what every production does. The script gets broken down into a schedule by ADs using whatever Movie Magic scheduler or whatever the hell they use.

**John:** Probably that.

**Craig:** Probably that.

**John:** Probably that very old program, yeah.

**Craig:** Which is annoying, because it puts on the schedule thing in a list, the things we shoot, and then at the bottom of that it’ll say what day it was. That’s stupid. It should be at the top of it. Then everything in terms of distribution goes through Scenechronize, which I believe is owned by aforementioned Entertainment Partners, which I believe also owns my least favorite writing software, Final Draft. You start to see a little bit of a monopolization problem here.

**John:** Remind us again, what do you use Scenechronize for?

**Craig:** Scenechronize is a platform that distributes documents to the crew-

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** … electronically. Scripts can only be viewed in super watermarked ways and cannot be downloaded unless you have certain privileges. If you’re a department head, they let you download it. It also releases all communications like call sheets, schedules, preliminaries, memos, everything like that.

**John:** Most of your crew is looking at the stuff that would’ve been printed paper. Instead, they’re getting it through Scenechronize. They’re seeing it on their laptops, on their phones, on their iPads, right?

**Craig:** That is correct. We don’t have any printed stuff, except in the morning we distributed printed sides for very few people, just the ADs, the actors, producers, directors.

**John:** The decision not to use paper for very much stuff, is that because it’s more efficient or because you’re worried about stuff leaking out?

**Craig:** Both. This is Canada, where when you go to throw your garbage out, there are 400 bins. They’re very green. They’re like, before you throw your garbage out, is it soft or hard plastic? Is it a pen? Is it colored blue? There’s so many. I think probably also it’s just about not burning through… Productions used to burn through forests of paper.

**John:** Paper like crazy.

**Craig:** Insane. There is that aspect. It’s certainly cheaper. There are security measures that we can use with that stuff. It’s a little frustrating, I think, for people, because they can’t really have a script and mark it up and all the rest, but it’s just a necessary evil.

**John:** We talked about scheduling. We talked about Scenechronize. What are the other pieces of software that you or members of your team are using regularly to get the show done, both during production and then in post?

**Craig:** I write on Fade In. Then once Allie, who is both my assistant and also our script coordinator, goes through and puts it through the Scenechronize machinery to distribute, she also converts it to a Final Draft file. Why is it converted to a Final Draft file? Because Chris Roufs, our script supervisor, uses a very specific program for his job that only imports in Final Draft, of course. You start to see the problem with the closed system and the proprietary formats. It just begets just this legacy system of misery.

**John:** We have that, and then for while you guys are shooting, what is the software you guys are looking at cuts on? I know you also have the ability to look at things if you’re on another set while one set is shooting. What’s that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** There are two platforms for that. For the distribution of dailies and cuts, we use PIX, which I also do not like.

**John:** Oh my god, I’ve had to do nothing but PIX the last five weeks. I think PIX’s main job is to sign you out as frequently as possible. I’ve been on Zooms where I’m just tapping the screen and wiggling 10 seconds back just so it won’t sign me out.

**Craig:** PIX will log you out if you blink. PIX will force you to change your password if you go to the bathroom. PIX also is poorly organized and difficult to use.

**John:** Oh god, their bins are really tough.

**Craig:** Horrible.

**John:** The equivalent of folders.

**Craig:** I do not like PIX. I don’t. In fact, when I say to the editor, “Okay, everything’s great here, I just need you to change this, this, and this. Can you just send me that little section?” I make them not send it to me on PIX, even though that violates everything. I apologize to Time Warner, Discovery, HBO, AOL. The other platform we use constantly is Box. Box is our digital file management system.

**John:** It’s very much like Dropbox, but it tends to be used in the industry more for various reasons.

**Craig:** There are a few of those. We used I think Frame.io in one season. Maybe for Chernobyl we used Frame, and for this we use Box. We have somebody whose job is to oversee and manage that entire system. We use that to distribute tests, images, proposals, illustrations, previses, all that. Then you can comment, and you can also annotate, draw on it and comment to that. It’s a better system.

But I will say it only functions for me because I don’t actually get any notifications from Box. They all go through a separate account that Allie manages. Then she can compile all the things that I need. Three times a day, I get an email from her with 12 Box links, describing what they are and what I need to respond to, because if you don’t have that, basically you’re getting an email every 12 seconds saying somebody commented, somebody thought, somebody did this.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** A nightmare. That’s what happened to me in Season 1. I didn’t stop looking at it. It was a real problem.

**John:** Let’s talk about email. You are still using email to communicate with certain people, or do you believe in Signal threads? Are you using Slack? What is the way you communicate with department heads?

**Craig:** With department heads, typically I’m speaking to them directly or commenting through Box. If I really, really, really need to get them ASAP, I text. We don’t have Slack. I think that’s probably a good thing. It’s a good thing for me.

Part of this discussion is who are you and what are you doing on the production. If you are in the middle of things, you need as much communication as possible. If you’re the showrunner, you need the most curated discussion as possible, because you will drown in questions and details with three minutes, and you’re trying to do other things and stay in big picture and work on shooting and all the rest of it.

We don’t have Slack, or at least I’m not aware of one. It’s just texts if I need to, or I call somebody. But more often than not, I just say to an AD, can you have somebody come over, and I’ll talk to them.

**John:** Then you also have the ability to look at what’s happening on set. If you have to step away, but you still need to see what is that shot that’s going up or the setup. What’s that that you’re using?

**Craig:** We use QTAKE, which again I believe is the industry standard. QTAKE works quite well. QTAKE is incredibly important. There’s the whole system that Amanda Trimble, our video playback operator, uses. I don’t know what she actually has loaded on her cart there, but it is some special system. There’s a special system that the DIT uses. That’s the guy that manages the information flow from the cameras, because of course it’s all digital. I also use Evercast to edit remotely with our editors.

**John:** A lot of specialized software that’s just for the industry, but also some things like Box, which are just off-the-shelf things that you guys are using because they’re there and they work.

We’ve talked a little bit about the screenwriting side of it, which most of our listeners are involved with screenwriting software. Obviously, Final Draft, or at least the FDX format, tends to be a thing that you go back to. I guess I can understand the FDX of it all, because it is at least an organized format. It is an XML format, so there’s some logic behind using that as a basis of things.

The challenge though is, if you’re passing around files for things, will the files get out of date? It would make much more sense if there was one continuously updated file that everyone was looking at the same file. That’s very hard to do.

There’s a service called Scripto, which Stephen Colbert’s company developed, which a lot of the late-night shows use, because they are all banging together to work on one script. It’s more like a Google doc, where everyone is working on one thing simultaneously, which makes sense for those kinds of shows. You would hope that in the future at some point there could be a centrally updated script that is the source that you don’t have to then redistribute scripts out to people.

**Craig:** We don’t have anything like that. We still operate under the old system of blue revision, pink revision, goldenrod revision, but it’s all done digitally.

**John:** Then there’s the programs that you and I are actually writing in. I’m writing in Highland. You’re writing in Fade In. Those are great single-computer systems. There are some things to try to do the onliney version of that. WriterDuet did that. Celtx did that. Arc Studio does that. There’s ways to do it. It can be overkill for the single writer, but it can be useful for team situations. It’s tough to say what the right solution is. Still, the script and the schedule are at the heart of what productions need. It’s not surprising that people are trying to figure out how do we organize all these things so all these different ways we do stuff can be centralized and make life happier for showrunners, for department heads, for ADs, for everybody else.

In most of these cases, I’ve been talking to folks who are ADs who naturally have this instinct to… They want information to go to places without being repeated and for people to be able to see what the plan is. They look so good on paper. I look at the slideshows and the little mock-ups. I’m like, “Yeah, that seems great.” But what you’re actually talking about doing is you actually have to build Slack, you have to build PIX, you have to build all these things that exist that are really difficult to do.

The problem is there’s not a big enough market for it. You’re not gonna be able to get somebody to pay enough to make it actually worth developing, and much worse, worth supporting, because the expectation of your users is that this has to have basically 100 percent uptime, because if PIX goes down or if QTAKE goes down, that is a crisis. You have to have this crazy expectation for your uptime.

**Craig:** Anything that is served like that has to be bulletproof. You’re absolutely right. It’s why the hammer costs $800 instead of $5, because there’s only 12 people buying the hammer. It is incredibly specialized. A lot of these things I imagine are quite expensive. I don’t know. Things that like Fade In or Highland, that’s marketable to millions of people who want to write things. But Scenechronize, it’s just the people making stuff that use Scenechronize. I don’t know what it costs, but probably a lot.

**John:** I think as we talk about both the problems and solutions, you’re gonna need to find some way to make recurring revenue from your existing customers, because you can’t just find the next customer and the next customer after that, because there’s a hard limit on the number of customers who could potentially use your software. You need to find ways to monetize each time. That means either you are charging per user, per production, per month. There has to be some way that you’re making that sustainable, because otherwise your company’s gonna go bankrupt.

That’s also the reason why it’s very hard to attract the initial kind of money it takes to build the product in the first place, because any investor will say, “I don’t think this is a survivable business. I don’t think you can actually make enough money here, so why would I invest in it?”

**Craig:** You could see a world where let’s say Disney, as large as they are, says, “We’re gonna create our own system.”

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** They are?

**John:** They are. Disney and Netflix both apparently have their own systems they’re developing. That makes sense because they’re doing so much production and they can top-down force people to use it.

**Craig:** You can force people to use it anyway. But what you are always dealing with is the fact that, A, you are at the mercy of those companies, who charge, I can only imagine, exorbitant yearly subscription fees that scale in terms of the size of your company, and B, you’re at the mercy of their features. The way they do it is how you have to do it. But the method of organizing things per production to customize it, there is no customization really like that.

The upside for a company like Disney, which is so big and makes so much stuff, is, yeah, we can completely control it, we can manage it, and we can make sure it is bulletproof and not be held hostage. The downside is people that come into your system now have to use that, which means they have to learn it, which means they have to deal with it. They’re used to using the other thing, and everybody gets very, very cranky. Either there will be a revolt or it will work and it will spread, meaning if Disney and Netflix, in their combined might, create a system like this, everyone’s gonna use it. It’s just gonna happen.

**John:** Agreed, agreed. Everyone’s gonna use it who can afford to use it. Indie films will develop alternate systems. Maybe that’s appropriate. Maybe they can do some different stuff and it would make sense for them on that smaller level. Here’s the subtlety on that. If Disney or Netflix says you have to use this, people will use it, but I also suspect department heads will still go back to their own native ways of doing things and then just have to duplicate the effort to use the other system. They’ll still find off-channel ways to do stuff. I was talking to a British AD who says for their productions, they have WhatsApp channels for each scene or something, which is just-

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** … ongoing discussions about how stuff works.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It’s like, oh god, that seems so-

**Craig:** That’s horrible.

**John:** Yeah, it’s awful.

**Craig:** That’s just awful.

**John:** This is a person who made a giant Amazon show, and that’s how they did it.

**Craig:** “That’s how I do it,” in quotes, you’ll hear a lot. Obviously, there’s very powerful calendaring software and scheduling software. But also, when I walk into certain offices, in our production offices, I’ll see people who have calendared their wall with post-its, because that’s how they do it, and it helps them. I’m like everybody else. I have a way of doing things that I’m comfortable with. You get set in your ways. By the way, side question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** This is a “set in your ways” question. In the old days when we would print scripts, people would have a script, and then you would make revisions. The revisions would change the way the page count would be, so instead of changing the page count, you would just make A and B pages so that the following pages didn’t change. People just had to open their huge binder, pull out pages 38 and 39, and replace them with 38A, 38B, 38C, and then a new 39. But we don’t print anything anymore, and we have scene numbers. My question is, why do we still do this with pdf?

**John:** Craig, we should absolutely not be doing this.

**Craig:** We shouldn’t be doing it.

**John:** It is ridiculous that we’re doing it. I’m sure one of the showrunners who’s listened to the show says, “No, we stopped doing that.” Let’s all do this, because it’s dumb. It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** It’s stupid. It’s stupid, because what happens is, on the day, you get there to rehearse the scene and there’s a page with one effing line on it.

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** It’s just dumb. It’s too late for me now. I’m in too deep on this season, but next season I’m not doing it. I’m not locking pages. It doesn’t make sense. People refer to everything by scene number anyway. I am infamous for not knowing what scene numbers mean. Somebody from prosthetics will walk over to me and say, “Question about 533.” I’ll say, “I do not know what that is. You have to give me some context.” But they all have scene numbers that never change, ever. So why? Why?

**John:** Hey, Craig, instead of scene numbers, should we as the writers come up with the three-word name for that scene or that sequence that we all are gonna refer to that thing as?

**Craig:** If you think about it, the scene number really is the ultimate version of that. They really do all think in terms of scene numbers. I have the program make scene numbers and I never think about them again. But what happens is they’ll say, “Oh, it’s Jane and Vanessa are arguing in the library.” “Oh, okay, that’s what Scene 533 is. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, continue with the question.” It’s easy enough to do. But the page thing, honestly, it just occurred to me how stupid it is that we still do it.

**John:** It’s ridiculous that we’re still doing it. We shouldn’t be doing it. Hey, if you’re on a show that has given up locked pages, let us know. By the way, late-night has never had locked pages. I bet there’s other things that have never locked pages. I don’t know if – did multi-cam sitcoms lock pages? [Indiscernible 00:29:02] on that too. It feels like they should’ve.

**Craig:** I don’t know. All I know is that for movies we always had them and it made sense and I understood why, because you printed things. But now, it just doesn’t… Why?

**John:** Let’s wrap this up with some takeaways here. I think one of the real problems we’ve talked about is inertia. There is that first mover advantage. People are used to Final Draft. They’re used to Movie Magic scheduling. So when a better system comes along, like Highland or like – there’s a competing scheduling software out of Germany called Fuzzlecheck, which is a terrible name, but apparently, European productions use it and it’s a lot better and it’s all online.

**Craig:** You’re saying Germans made a great scheduling software?

**John:** That is a shocker. This apparently is great. It’s all online, which makes so much more sense that you’d have multiple users touch things rather than have one person on one computer doing the thing. But I think it’s struggling to break through into the U.S. because everyone is used to the standards. It’s hard to get people to adjust from what they’re used to doing, unless you’re forcing them to or show them this is 10 times better and then they’ll switch, which is the frustration.

**Craig:** It won’t happen from the bottom up. I think your Disney revelation here – it was a revelation to me – is how it happens. It happens from the top down when a bunch of people in a room say, “Attention, all. This is what we’re doing now.” Everyone’s gonna, “What?! No!”

**John:** If you think about it from Netflix’s point of view, Netflix is essentially a software company, and so it would make sense that they would have ways to do these things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. People will complain, gripe, moan, and then they will adjust. But it will never come from the bottom up, because making television shows and movies is chaos. It’s utter chaos. Anywhere you can find some kind of comforting repetition and security, you grab it and you hold onto it forever. You will have to pull it out of their hands and give them something new. They will freak out, but then they will adjust.

**John:** Last thing I’ll say, you have to be thinking about what is a sustainable business model for this app you’re thinking about making. The problem is not that you cannot imagine a better tool or even design a better tool. It’s that you cannot afford to make it and sustain it and to actually keep it up and running. When people get frustrated about per-month fees or per-user fees or all that stuff, it’s like, that’s because that’s how this company can stay in business.

**Craig:** You’re saying that they’re not in business to go out of business?

**John:** They’re not in business to go out of business. That’s the problem with the Final Draft. Because they sell it to you once, they’re like, “Crap, we ran out of screenwriters. Okay, we need to make a new version of Final Draft that adds a useless feature that no one needs, just so we can keep the lights on.”

**Craig:** That’s not great.

**John:** Not great. Not great. That’s how you end up with Final Draft.

**Craig:** That is how you end up with the tragedy of Final Draft.

**John:** Let’s go to something we can maybe help and fix. Let’s talk about some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** For listeners who are new to the show, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their pilot, of their feature. We look through them. We give our honest feedback. These are people who asked for our feedback. We are not picking random people off the street. We are trying to give constructive feedback on what they have sent through.

**Craig:** That would be so cruel.

**John:** What happens is we put out a call for submissions to the Three Page Challenge. People go to johnaugust.com/threepage. They read the little form. They submit their pages. Drew and our intern have to go through 100? How many generally come through?

**Drew:** A little over 100 this week.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go through a bunch of these to find three or four that seem like they’re good for our show. The criteria are they have to have no obvious spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes. We don’t want to be talking about those. We want to talk about what’s working on the page, what’s not working on the page, what can our listeners benefit from. They’re not picking necessarily the best entries, but the most interesting ones, the things we’ll have stuff to talk about.

We have three really good ones here to discuss. For our listeners who have their phones or their iPads handy, there are links in the show notes that you can read through these pages. Pause this, read through the pages, and join us as we discuss them. Drew, for folks who are not reading along with us, can you talk us through what happens in Planet B by Christopher James?

**Drew:** Sure. It’s 2055. In the White House Situation Room, President Keiko Pearl is briefed by her advisors on the discovery of a new Goldilocks planet able to sustain life. The head of the EPA cautions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but he’s laughed at. We then cut to a creature smashing through terrain, only to reveal that the creature is in fact a human toddler.

**John:** Craig Mazin, talk us through your initial reactions to Planet B.

**Craig:** We have what hat appears to be possibly a comedy. I think it’s a comedy.

**John:** I think it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Science fiction comedy where Earth is in trouble, almost certainly because of climate change, and they have managed to find a mirror Earth that they can go settle.

This is a pretty common way to start these things. There are multiple problems that are inherent to this method of starting things. The way Christopher goes about it is he’s using a situation room in the White House to introduce people and concept and character. We have, I think, a bit of an over-stuffed three pages here, because it’s trying to do so much at once that it doesn’t feel like an actual scene with human beings. It feels more like a machined thing to teach us stuff about people.

We meet Sarita Arya, and we also meet Keiko Pearl, and we also meet Anne Reiss, and we also meet Brian Dale. Everyone, by the way, has some sort of race and wardrobe, hair, makeup, except for Anne Reiss, who is none of those. Does that mean she’s white? That’s a weird-

**John:** The default white problem, yeah.

**Craig:** Default white problem there. We also meet Bear “Grizz” Norris, and we meet Ryan Arya and Nowell Arya. In three pages, that’s too many people to meet. That’s too many. Everybody is a person. Everybody is a thing. Everybody has a thing, a vibe, whatever. We’re learning all of these things.

Here’s what I learned. I’m just gonna list the things that I’ve learned here. It’s Earth. It’s 2055 and Earth is in trouble. I learned that in the White House, Sarita Arya has a “steady demeanor and short, spiky hair.” I’ve also learned that Keiko Pearl, who’s Japanese American with “shoulder-length hair and youthful skin-”

**John:** She’s the President.

**Craig:** She’s the President. I’ve learned that Anne Reiss is a science advisor and is “always on defense.” I have learned that General Brian Dale is bald and from the Army and he is a stroke survivor and he uses a cane. I have also learned that Bear “Grizz” Norris is White. Oh, so he’s White. Okay, so Anne, she’s whatever. He is “shaggy haired and bearded.” I have also learned that Nowell Arya is biracial Indian/White and his father, Ryan, is Indian American and athletic. That’s all separate and apart from the plot stuff that I’m learning. It’s too much.

**John:** It’s a lot. I would say I think Christopher is doing almost the best job you could with this kind of shotgun intro problem. One of the reasons why I like this as an example is it shows how hard it is actually to do this.

I can envision a scene. Let’s say this is actually shot and there are recognizable actors maybe in some of these roles that help you distinguish who people are and remember them. But you’re trying to do so much. There’s so much table setting to do about that there is a second planet that has breathable air, who these people are, that it’s 2055, that it doesn’t feel real or legit in a way that even in a heightened comedy setting, which this is, is not going to work especially well.

I want to talk about just on the page. It’s in Courier Prime, which looks lovely. I think the breakups of scene description and dialogue, it all reads well. I’m not terrified to look through these pages. It’s pretty easy to get yourself through them. The use of underlines and single-word sentences, also really good. All these things work nicely.

I don’t mind the character descriptions. I think a lot of times I could visualize these characters better than in many samples because you’re giving me some details that I can actually click in my head. The problem is there was just too many of these things introduced back to back to back to back. Then I got confused and a little frustrated.

**Craig:** Everything has the same importance. Everyone has the same importance, because there are so many. Then there’s the tone itself. First of all, we go from the exterior of space, where we see Earth, and then we’re interior the Situation Room in the White House. The Situation Room in the White House is just a room. You might need to see the White House itself just so we know where we are. Then Sarita, who I assume is President Pearl’s chief of staff-

**John:** Chief of staff.

**Craig:** Yeah, it says chief of staff. Sorry, that was the other bit of information. See, it’s lost in the clutter. Everyone’s talking, and she whistles to make everyone stop talking. I didn’t believe that. I don’t think that’s how it works. They show this other planet, and then President Pearl immediately gets into an argument. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? What took so long to find it?” I guess she’s just dumb. Is she dumb?

**John:** It feels like a question that is being asked for the audience rather than for herself.

**Craig:** Exactly. Then everybody else has a very… Anne Reiss, the scientist, is very sciencey. General Brian Dale, he’s very military-y. Then Buzz [sic] “Grizz” Norris is very EPA administrator-y. They are their jobs. That’s the roughest part of this.

**John:** I would like to propose a line that is banned from future scripts, which is, “In English, please.” General Dale says it. That feels just the tropey-est, clammiest line.

**Craig:** That’s a clam, especially because what Anne Reiss, 64, nothing else to know, says, “The atmosphere is 19.5 percent O-2.” General Dale, “In English, please.” He’s a general. He knows what oxygen is.

**John:** The actual question is, is that good, because I don’t know if 19.5 is good. I don’t know if that’s appropriate. Then her answer makes sense. It’s, “It means humans can breathe.”

**Craig:** If someone said, “So too much or not enough?” “It’s about right.” That’s fine. Christopher, I’m gonna pitch you a different way of doing this.

**John:** Tell us.

**Craig:** Christopher, what if the entirety of this scene – and you could go to interior, you don’t even need to know it’s the White House yet – is Sarita and President Pearl, and we don’t even know who they are. We don’t even know that President Keiko Pearl, “42, Japanese American, shoulder-length hair and youthful skin,” is the President. We just have two people talking over lunch, and one of them is explaining to the other one, “This is what’s happening.” What that scene is about is not about the information, but rather, their relationship.

There is some relationship here that is the central relationship of the movie. If that’s not the central relationship of the movie, find one and make that the beginning. But if it’s just two people talking and then President Pearl goes, “Okay, got it,” walks out of the room, walks into another room and finds this scrum all arguing, tells them all to shh, then they’re like, “Oh, the President’s here,” and she’s like, “This is it. This is what we’re doing,” I’ll go, “Oh, that was the President, and this is important.” But we have to focus this scene and put it within the context of a relationship, or we just won’t care.

**John:** I think our expectation of the first scene of the movie is that we’re gonna meet characters who are the fundamental most important people. Sometimes that can be defeated, where a bomb can go off and all these people could die. That could be a choice too. My expectation is that Keiko Pearl is probably the most important character. She’s the one we’re gonna follow. We don’t really quite know at the end of the scene whose point of view this scene is from. That is the frustration, if one of these characters is going to be the central character of the story.

I want to talk about, just as we wrap up here, the scene on Page 3 which is basically this monster is smashing things and it’s revealed to be a toddler. That will never work, because we’re seeing something. You’re not gonna be able to hold that premise, that joke for very long. You could have the bom-bom-bom music of something stomping around, but the minute we see his-

**Craig:** Legs.

**John:** … cute little shoes, his legs or something, it’s not gonna really work. You can describe it metaphorically, like, he’s like a monster smashing things, but only on the page could you get away with the, “Oh, there’s a terrible monster smashing things. Oh, surprise, it’s a child.” That’s not gonna be a surprise to people with eyeballs.

**Craig:** That is correct.

**John:** I love that we now have log lines for things. Drew, tell us the log line of what the actual full movie is.

**Drew:** “In 2055, climate change is irreversible and humans live on borrowed time. When Americans discover a nearby inhabitable planet, they must consider what’s worth giving up for a future as refugees in an alien society.”

**Craig:** Just about what I thought. It doesn’t mention what the tone is, but it does feel comedic.

**John:** I think so too. I’m guessing this is a feature and not a pilot. I think something would’ve said pilot on the title page.

**Craig:** Feels featurey.

**John:** Feels featurey. Cool. Let’s go on to The Long Haul. Again, if you’re gonna read along with us, why don’t you pause and read this. But if you’re not reading along, Drew, give us a summary.

**Drew:** The Long Haul by Becca Hurd. Emmy Baxter, 24, is irritated when an Australian stranger named Angus hijacks her karaoke performance at a Chicago pub. But despite her initial annoyance, their banter turns to flirtation.

**John:** I want to start with the title page here. This is The Long Haul. The O in “Long” is a heart. Below this is an image of the country of Australia and the country of U.S. with a line between them and a heart. It’s cute, sure. I kind of get what it’s about. It feels like a lot on this cover page. I would go with either the heart or the image there.

At the bottom it says, “Sydney, Australia, February 2024,” and it has her email address. The “February 2024” generally is over on the right-hand side where she put it, but things like her email address tend to be on the left-hand side. I don’t know why Sydney, Australia is there, other than maybe to tell us she’s Australian. But I don’t know that’s useful information for a title page.

**Craig:** I’ve never actually seen the location of where the script was written on the page there. I think you’re probably right. But I enjoy the graphic quite a bit. I agree with you, the issue with putting the heart in “Long” is that you have two hearts on the page.

There’s a very clever thing. “The Long Haul, Written by Becca Hurd.” The line between Australia and the United States is the old style, when you fly, a little dotted line happens, and the dotted line does a curlicue to become a heart in between. That actually is a beautiful summary of what this is gonna be about. It’s gonna be about a long-distance relationship between somebody who lives in the U.S. and somebody who lives in Australia and flying back and forth, I suppose. But that heart is diminished by the fact that there’s another heart in the word “Long.” Make that heart special, I think, by making the O just an O in “Long.”

**John:** Agreed. Once we get into Page 1 here, it starts with a discussion between Beth and Emmy. Emmy is our central character. Beth is her friend. They are awaiting their time to do karaoke. There’s some chitchat here, which is not great. There are some lines I would love to scratch out here.

Beth says, “Thought you were off the clock.” Emmy says, “Thought you were a vegetarian. But your mouth is full of Meat Loaf?” referring to this guy she’s making out with. Meat Loaf is not a great contemporary reference. I don’t think people are gonna get the joke that you’re referring to the singer Meat Loaf here.

There’s a better joke in the next line, which is, “Where’d you find him, an episode of Stranger Things?” Great, I get that as a joke. That is the better one. If you’re going to start with these two talking, I think that is your better way in.

More trimming here. “Somehow he’s not your worst. You’re too good for these guys, Beth.” If Emmy says, “He’s not your worst,” that tells us more and it’s more efficient.

**Craig:** But they’re sisters. Why are they talking to each other like they don’t know each other? If your sister is constantly making out/dating with guys that she’s better than, you’ve had this conversation before. It feels like we’re having it for the first time.

**John:** Agreed. For a sister, it feels like a stretch. There’s a semi-friend that you could actually have these things with. Craig, I want to talk to you about Emmy’s line near the bottom of the page, “When are they gonna play my song??” question mark question mark. I kind of like the question mark question mark. I kind of hear the delivery in the line with a double question mark. What’s your take on a double question mark?

**Craig:** I’ve never used it myself. But it feels like if a drunk person is asking a question. Then two question marks does definitely indicate drunken questioning.

**John:** That’s an overall note I had on Page 2 is how drunk are these people, because once we actually get to the standoff over the karaoke song, it feels like I need a clear sense of how drunk each of these people are to believe it or get a sense of a reality check on this moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** Let’s roll back to, for a moment, where even are we? The script tells us we’re interior Chicago pub. How do I know this is Chicago? It’s important, because apparently, this is gonna be a movie about an American and an Australian. I need to know where we are. Even if you just, again, give me nice exterior of Chicago-

**John:** That helps.

**Craig:** … it would help. The beginning, Emmy “is speedily typing on her phone.” Then her sister is gonna say, “Thought you were off the clock.” I’ve now got her character down to a post-it note. Works too hard. I don’t like that. Why is Emmy there? Why is she there? If she’s there to just speedily type on her phone, why is she at the karaoke club? Beth says, “Sometimes it’s okay to just have fun and not control every little detail. Wild concept for you, I know.” Post-it note character description. Why is Emmy there?

**John:** Craig, she’s there because she wants to sing karaoke, which is established in the very next line, “When are they gonna call me?”

**Craig:** But I don’t believe that, because she’s-

**John:** I don’t believe it either.

**Craig:** … “speedily typing on her phone.” If she comes to sing karaoke, she’s gonna have a drink or whatever and have fun. But I love the idea of somebody being impatient that her song isn’t coming. That tells me more about their character-

**John:** 100 percent.

**Craig:** … than this other stuff. Also, John, we just talked about the toddler. This is another toddler moment. This is good advice here, Becca. When you’re writing, I want you to see it actually happen in your brain. Here’s what happens. Emmy is “typing on her phone while her younger sister, Beth, sucks face with an ’80s-musician-looking-dickass. Beth takes a breath and glares at Emmy.” No, she doesn’t. She’s making out with a guy. What’s happening is she’s making out with a guy, then stops making out with him to stare at her sister and then criticize her sister.

**John:** Has never happened.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, but when I’m making out with somebody, I’m making out with them. I’m not looking around to make comments. Emmy should interrupt Beth. That I’d believe.

**John:** Yeah, or the kiss breaks off and he goes off to hit the restroom or whatever, and then she can land her sniper comment there.

**Craig:** Yes, but there’s no reason for her to stop. She can’t do both things at once. Also, just a little bit of advice here, Becca. If you do want Emmy to make comments about Beth, she’s sitting there waiting for her song. The bartender or somebody is sitting next to her. The two of them are like, “What the fuck with those two?” “Yeah,” blah blah blah. Then we find out it’s her sister. There’s ways to also just reveal these relationships and who they are, because right now I don’t know that they’re sisters. There’s no way to know, other than that the script told me.

**John:** These are all real challenges. I do think if you’re gonna start with Beth making out with the rocker guy, we know the experiences of when you’re sitting there and someone’s making out right in front of you or right beside you. That is a playable moment. It’s like, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, this terrible person. Please,” willing this person to go away. That’s a thing that can also happen.

But I agree, we’re gonna need to quickly establish they’re sisters or something else there, because it’s gonna be weird if we’re a couple scenes into the movie and we don’t know that they’re sisters.

**Craig:** It is weird. It’s also a little dangerous to introduce a character who is anachronistic right off the bat, because people will just think this is in the ’80s or they won’t know what time it is, because we don’t know what year it is either. It’s in a karaoke bar. People are singing old songs from the ’90s. I think Torn is from the ’90s. We’re gonna be like, “What year is this?”

But then we get to the meat of it. Now, this is a meet-cute. It’s a good idea for a meet-cute, except there’s a logic problem. A meet-cute has to just be solid. We have to buy it. We don’t want to stop and go, “I can feel the screenwriter.”

**John:** “We requested the same song.”

**Craig:** “We requested the same song.” Then Emmy says – great point here – “He literally just said Emmy. Is your name Emmy?” Angus’s reasoning for going up there and taking the mic is, “She’s Australian.” I guess I’m Australian, which means I have the right to just sing the song? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

If his last name was Emory and then, “We have Emmy with Torn,” and he’s like, “No, he said Emory. My last name’s Emory,” and she’s like, “No, he said Emmy. That’s my first name. And we both requested the same song,” then I would be fine. I would be fine. But that’s not what happens here. I wasn’t buying this meet-cute premise.

**John:** There’s a way you can maybe set this up where the thing comes up for the next song and it shows the Natalie Imbruglia, Torn, and the emcee is fumbling a bit to find who it was, and they both go up there. Then you finally get the emcee, like, “Whose song is this?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s Emmy.” Then he refuses to stand down, because, “No, I should be singing this song. I am the Australian. This is part of my culture.” There’s a way you could do that. But I didn’t believe the setup. I agree with you.

**Craig:** I didn’t believe it, and I also really did not like this guy. When you have a meet-cute where two people are arguing, you want to be able to see both of their sides. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, they both pulled into the parking spot at the same time, and now they’re arguing because it was a tie.” But this is not a tie. He’s just a jerk-

**John:** It’s not a tie.

**Craig:** … for doing this.

**John:** He’s a jerk. Page 3, we get after their song. I thought the actual intercut of them trying to do the verses can work. I can picture that on the page. I got the sense of what was actually happening there. On Page 3 they’re talking afterwards. They have electric chemistry. I don’t understand, “I’m a 3 wing 2, because I-” “A what?” “A 3, which is an Achiever.” Do you know what that’s about?

**Craig:** I have zero idea what any of this is about.

**John:** Drew, do you know what that’s about?

**Drew:** I have no idea.

**John:** It’s okay for people to talk about things we don’t know, but we need to have a context of what kind of thing they are talking about. I didn’t get it. At a certain point you feel dumb and you start to resent that you don’t know what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Also don’t care. It’s wasted time, because I’m not learning anything. Emmy said, “You would say that. Because you’re a 4.” What? What does that mean? Anytime somebody makes fun of “neur,” that always… I do love “neur.” Neur neur neur.

**John:** Neur neur neur neur.

**Craig:** Neur neur neur.

**John:** I think we enjoyed the potential of the premise and this as a meet-cute, because as we have discussed on the show from nearly Episode 1, we enjoy rom-coms. We want that genre to thrive. It’s nice to see when movies can succeed in doing this. We want Becca to have the best chance possible to make a rom-com. Drew, tell us the log line that Becca submitted.

**Drew:** “Determined to win back her ex, an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**John:** I assume it’s Angus.

**Craig:** Are those two different people?

**John:** We don’t know. We don’t know from this log line.

**Craig:** Say that log line again.

**Drew:** Sure. “Determined to win back her ex-”

**Craig:** Her ex.

**Drew:** “… an audacious American woman sneaks into Australia by telling the government that she is in a continuing and loving relationship with the man who just dumped her.”

**Craig:** Who would also be the ex.

**John:** I guess so.

**Craig:** How do you sneak into Australia?

**John:** I think the idea of sneaking into Australia for love feels kind of fun.

**Craig:** If you’re talking to the officials of Australia, you’re not sneaking into Australia. In order to stay in Australia… But you can go to Australia for six months.

**John:** I don’t think so, Craig. I think Australia is a locked-down place. No, Australia is basically North Korea, Craig. You have to go through checkpoints. It’s incredibly dangerous.

**Craig:** I don’t understand.

**John:** This is a girl who’d do anything for love, like the song.

**Craig:** Like Meat Loaf. Like Meat Loaf, which Meat Loaf, referenced twice in three pages. I don’t understand. I don’t understand the log line. But there’s something very charming about the idea of this meet-cute. I’ve not seen this meet-cute before, where two people believe they each have the karaoke song, they start to sing to each other, and some little bit of magic happens. That’s a very nice way of doing things. I can see that moment. That’s encouraging.

I would say at a minimum, Becca, we’re gonna want to clean that log line up so it’s nice and sharp and doesn’t raise questions. Log lines should only raise the question you want to raise, not the questions you don’t.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s wrap it up with The Right to Party by Lucas McCutchen.

**Drew:** Captain Albert, a British officer, raises a British flag over colonial Boston. On his way home, he steps purposefully on an American child’s doll that’s fallen in a puddle. At home, his 17-year-old son, Edmund, struggles with chores, due to an injured hand, while trying to appease his stern father. Their tense interaction culminates in Captain Albert shooting at Edmund’s breakfast, inadvertently killing a passerby. Edmund and his brash friend Henry leave for school, where they discuss the dead bystander and girls they have crushes on.

**John:** This is a big swing. What I got by the end of three pages, this is a teen boy comedy but just set in this Revolutionary time, which is actually, I think, an interesting premise. A lot of stuff got in the way of the interesting premise, but I’m eager to talk about it, because I did think it was a clever idea to, again, just smash up tropes and genres and do a teen Apatow-y kind of movie but in this time period. Unfortunately, on Page 1, I have no idea what time period I’m in.

Let me read the first couple lines here. “Exterior Boston Town Square – Dawn. Sleepy merchants and townsfolk slowly begin their morning routines. Stores display their pitiful wares. Flies buzz in circles above the fruit in their baskets.” Finally, on the fourth sentence, “A prisoner locked in stocks stirs.” Until that sentence, I didn’t know that we were in the past. Boston Town Square exists now. I thought we were just in modern-day Boston. This is a problem, because I didn’t know where we were, when we were.

**Craig:** Never before has something so desperately needed “Boston, 1775.” It absolutely needs that. This is a broad comedy. Broad comedy is very, very hard to do. Take it from me. Struggled and succeeded and failed multiple times in my career.

**John:** Craig, you’re a drama writer. What would you know about broad comedy?

**Craig:** I’m a drama writer because I gave up finally. One of the most important aspects of writing broad comedy is logic. It is more of a science than an art. It’s science. Everything is about logic. Everything.

We have this very broad Monty Python-esque moment where Captain Albert, who’s this incredibly over-the-top British dickhead, fires a gun at his own breakfast, not because he’s angry at the breakfast, but rather to check if the sights are good on the pistol. They’re not good on the pistol, and a woman dies, and no one cares about the woman. The kernel of that, great. Logic problems. One, why is he firing the pistol at his breakfast? If the pistol is aligned correctly, he will ruin his breakfast. That makes no sense.

**John:** He should shoot at something in the room.

**Craig:** He could shoot at something in the room. Secondly, if you’re aiming at your breakfast on a table, I don’t care how misaligned the sights are. The most misaligned they could be is you’re off by about eight inches. You cannot be off by seven feet and then go through a window and kill a woman passing by, which by the way, is very difficult to actually film, because you have to shoot in such a way that you can see both the woman outside through the window and the man as he shoots. If this were happening outside, no problem.

**John:** I can envision a scenario in which he’s shooting at a thing on the wall and then it goes out the window and kills the woman. Do you necessarily need to see the woman in that first shot, or could you hear the scream and then that’s funny?

**Craig:** What you want to do is not see the woman at all. You want him to shoot at something on the wall, it goes through a window, and then there’s a pause, and then you hear a man go, “My wife.”

**John:** “Millicent!”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Millicent, no!” That’s what you want, and then people to start crying. Then when you go outside, there’s the guy, and he’s like, “Oh, Millicent.”

**John:** There’s the payoff.

**Craig:** Millicent, as it turns out, was actually a pig. Whatever it is. There’s all sorts of ways to do this. But the concept of being so broad that a guy is gonna kill somebody and they don’t care about somebody being killed is funny. It’s just logic.

Now, the other issue is, in broad comedy we need somebody that we can identify with, especially when you have an uber-jerk like Captain Albert. He has two sons. The problem here is both sons seem just as callous as their father. Who do I like?

**John:** I think you’re supposed to like Edmund, but he’s trying to make his father happy. That’s the journey that the character needs to get past. I think that’s the goal is to have-

**Craig:** The problem is, when they walk by the small crowd around the dead woman and Henry goes, “Jeez… a bit dramatic.” Then he goes, “Your hand alright?” Edmund’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk about my hand now. I’m not gonna have any comment about that lady whatsoever.” He doesn’t care that a woman died.

Then we’ve got a little bit of an anachronistic vibe, where there’s a cart driver who says, “Don’t hit my effing cart.” Edmund says, “Sorry. Have a nice day,” which does feel like Edmund is a bit of a nice kid. But are they afraid of the British? Are they not afraid of the British? Why is this guy yelling at them like that? Logic, logic, logic.

**John:** Logic, logic, logic.

**Craig:** That’s the key.

**John:** That’s a lot. The other thing I will say is that I was missing some uppercases that would’ve been really helpful. Generally in scripts, the first time you’re meeting a character, you’re uppercasing their name, or even if it’s just a person who’s gonna come back. I wanted those “dirty townsfolk” capitalized. I wanted “child” capitalized. We’re used to those things being uppercase the first time we’re seeing them, just to acknowledge that these are people who are gonna do something specific.

**Craig:** Yes, especially when you are creating very large bricks of action. There’s a seven-line paragraph and an eight-line paragraph. My whole thing is once I get past three lines, I start getting itchy. Seven is a lot.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Eight, people are just skimming.

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** That paragraph is the gag paragraph, where he shoots. Oh, I see. He picks the plate up and “sets it on the window sill nearby.” He did do that. I totally missed that.

**John:** You didn’t read that because you skimmed.

**Craig:** Yeah, because I skimmed, because it was an eight-line brick. Then it said, “Edmund cocks his head.” You don’t want to use that. You don’t want to say “cocks his head” when there’s a pistol that can also be cocked.

He picks the food up, places it “on the window sill nearby.” Okay, so now that does make sense, except it doesn’t, because why is he using his plate to shoot at? It’s his breakfast. It’s very odd. It says, “Edmund is in shock as Albert returns and sets the gun in front of him.” Now I’m feeling like if he’s in shock, this has never happened before. But he doesn’t be in shock. He should be more like-

**John:** His father is this guy.

**Craig:** This happens all the time. If this is the first time, then I think Edmund would be vomiting. This happens all the time. Edmund should walk over to the window, look out, and just wince. There’s ways to do this.

By the way, I will say, Lucas, don’t feel bad right now. I’m serious. This is the hardest tone to get right. It is so difficult. If you Google, David Zucker has this lovely bunch of rules that he’s set forth for this kind of work, which are really compelling and useful. Just take a look at those. It’s so difficult to get right. If you don’t, then people just turn their heads. It’s incredible how technical and precise it must be. It looks like you actually did have that logic right, except that you didn’t, and also it was in too long of a paragraph.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Two teenage best friends, an American colonist and the son of a British officer, set out to have the night of their lives before they’re drafted to opposite sides of the American Revolution.”

**Craig:** Such a great premise.

**John:** It’s a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a great premise. I don’t think these pages are setting that premise up.

**John:** I think we can do better, but I think it was a really good premise.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific premise.

**John:** Two episodes ago we had that service where you send off a sentence to describe what your script is about. If that was a sentence you sent in, they’d say, yeah, that’s a good premise. Love that.

**Craig:** That’s fun. That’s a fun premise. I really like that.

**John:** Let’s thank everybody who submitted their Three Page Challenges for us to discuss, especially these three entries. If you want to send in your pages for the next time, it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. We’ll occasionally look through that pile and pick some new ones. Thank you, everyone who did that. It’s very nice of you to do so. It really does help others learn.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What is your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a director that I’m currently working with named Stephen Williams. He’s not the One Cool Thing. It’s actually an episode of Watchmen that he directed. I’m sure Watchmen was my One Cool Thing when it was on the air back in-

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Craig:** Was it 2020? I guess something like that.

**John:** 2019, because I remember the Wash-men, which was initially during the pandemic when you had to wash your hands.

**Craig:** Stephen is a terrific director. He directed an episode of Watchmen that’s still… It’s stuck with me to this very day. Written by Damon Lindelof, Cord Jefferson, and Dave Gibbons. Damon Lindelof obviously needs no introduction. Multi-Emmy award-winning Damon Lindelof. Cord Jefferson, Oscar award winner.

**John:** Oscar, right.

**Craig:** He’s an Academy Award winner now for American Fiction. We’ve got some pretty big names there working on this, and then directed by Stephen. It is origin story of a superhero in the world of Watchmen. It uses a character that was indicated in the original graphic novel, Hooded Justice, and turns it on its ear and tells a pretty profound story of the Black American experience in, I believe it’s the ’30s or ’40s. Just an outstanding episode of television, beautifully done, moving and subtle, and directed gorgeously.

If you haven’t seen Watchmen, can you just pop that one in and watch it? No, you cannot. You have to watch up to it. I think it might be the sixth episode. Yes, it is the sixth episode of the season. You’ll have to do some watching for that. But honestly, it’s worth it. It’s such a great season of TV. It stands alone. It is the only one that exists. It’s got some so-so actors in it, like Regina King and Jean Smart and Don Johnson. It’s so stacked.

**John:** Despite that, it triumphs.

**Craig:** It’s so stacked. What a stacked lineup, as the kids say. I had watched it again, just because I’m having such a lovely time working with Stephen. He’s just such a great guy.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing is a show that people can also watch. Ripley on Netflix. This is the Steve Zaillian adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie, is one of my favorite movies, one of my top 10 movies. I absolutely love it. I was a little bit nervous watching this adaptation, because I didn’t want it to spoil my love for the original or be compared. I really like this adaptation. It’s just so different. Everywhere the movie went left, this goes right. I love that the main adversary in the series is stairs, basically. Poor Ripley is always confronted by stairs.

It’s also, I think, a really great lesson in what you can do with time, and when you have the time of a series, how you can expand these moments that in the movie would be 30 seconds. You can now spend 15 minutes on, like, how do you deal with this dead body. The comedy that Zaillian’s able to find out of that is just terrific. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, and yet it’s still funny, just because it points out the absurdity of human bodies also, which is great.

It’s black and white. It’s gorgeous. Everyone talks about that. It’s all shot in Italy. Looks terrific. Great performances. Really strange casting that works. Just check out Ripley on Netflix if you get a chance.

**Craig:** I wish you’d get Steve Zaillian on the show.

**John:** We’ll get him on the show. I’m sure we can get him on the show.

**Craig:** He’s a lovely man. He is just a towering figure in our business of what we do. There aren’t many people who have demonstrated his kind of consistent excellence for so, so long. He was excellent out of the gate and stayed excellent. Just an incredible writer and one of the best of all time.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** … with help this week by Jonathan Wigdortz.

**Craig:** Uh-uh.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on magic and the lack thereof in our D&D campaign. Craig, it’s always magic talking with you and Drew.

**Craig:** It is not.

**John:** See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, so the brief for the new D&D campaign we’re playing. We should explain to listeners that for the last four years we were playing a campaign that you were DM’ing. We finally finished that. I was gonna take over the next campaign for our group. I pitched to the crew that, what if we did a Robin Hoody kind of thing where it was a little bit more stripped down. We ultimately said let’s do the really stripped down. We’re only gonna have Humans and Halflings and maybe some Elves, but none of the other fantastical races. We would have a campaign with no magic, where it’s really grounded and you can’t cast spells, or not magic items. Everyone stepped up, and that’s what we’ve been playing.

**Craig:** It’s been kind of a delight. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are these different classes. Some classes are almost, by definition, un-magical. Wizards of the Coast-

**John:** They’re the company who runs D&D, who owns D&D.

**Craig:** They’re pretty clever in that they even will allow variants of basically every class to have some magic. Very difficult with barbarians. But you can have a Rogue, or Arcane Trickster, I think it is, and learn some spells, because spells are very powerful. There’s a spell for every circumstance. People love magic. It’s Dungeons and Dragons. But one thing that is true is that at some point, spells become so powerful and pervasive that they can make the game a little unfun for focus characters who don’t cast spells. They just at some point feel like, okay, you guys will do all this awesome stuff.

**John:** I will hit it with my sword.

**Craig:** I’m gonna hit you with a club, and then everybody else gets to do something extraordinary. Then I’m gonna run in there and, I guess, hit someone else with a club. It’s easy to play, but you can start to feel, as the characters increase in level, sort of like, I guess, the way – what’s the archer in Avengers? What’s his name again?

**John:** Oh, Hawkeye, yeah. One trick, yeah.

**Craig:** You start to feel like Hawkeye. Like, “Okay, so you’re literally a god and you can shoot lasers out of hands, and I have a bow and arrow.” “And what are you gonna do?” “Shoot my bow and arrow again.” It’s nice that we are all basically in that boat, not only us, but also the bad guys.

**John:** Talking about classes, you and I had an interesting discussion where we were talking through what is actually gonna make sense. There are Fighters. There are Barbarians. There are Rogues. There are Monks, but only certain kinds of Monks, because some of the Monks get really, really magical, and so variants that don’t have magic. And Rangers, but Rangers without the magic stuff, because Rangers have a lot of spells they would otherwise cast. But it’s a world without Wizards or Sorcerers, Clerics and Druids. You think about in a Robin Hoody kind of situation, a Bard makes a lot of sense, except the Bards in 5th Edition D&D really are Spellcasters and it doesn’t make sense to do that. Even Paladins, who you think, oh, it’s a brave knight-

**Craig:** Spells.

**John:** Yeah, but with a lot of magic there.

**Craig:** A lot of necessary magic. The thing that makes a Paladin good is that they have their various smites to add damage to their hits. We don’t have any of that, and it’s kind of a joy. When you face a bunch of bad guys, there’s no crowd control spells. There’s a lot of spells in D&D where it’s like, “I’m gonna just put you all in darkness. I’m gonna put you all in something. I’m gonna fireball you.” That’s the thing. You run up against seven guys, one person in your party can kill all of them with one spell. It’s nice to – you have to think more. There’s more strategizing. There’s more planning. The combat feels a little… I don’t know, it’s a nice gritty D&D.

Typically, everyone’s drinking a potion, or you have a Cleric or a Druid or somebody else that has healing spells that can restore all of your aches and pains – rather, alleviate your aches and pains. Here, my character took a feat which I don’t even know why anyone would take in a campaign with magic, that allows you to use an underutilized mechanic of healing kits to heal people, like a doctor would. If you’re not playing a magic-free campaign, why would anyone take the Healer feat, ever?

**John:** I don’t think they would.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** It’s been interesting to see the ripple of changes that happen through this. I think combat speed has been a lot faster, because inevitably what happens is, like, “Oh, it’s my turn. Am I gonna cast a spell? What spell am I gonna cast? Let me look up what that’s gonna do.” Here it’s like, “No, I’m going to shoot somebody. I’m going to slash somebody.” Yes, people may use their special martial abilities to some degree, but it’s just been a lot faster to get through stuff. It can take more rounds to knock down an opponent, but that’s been nice.

I would say on the DM side I’ve been struck by just how much damage you guys can do, because you have these Rogues who can, through various mechanics, get sneak attack, get advantage on things, and they can take down a creature really quickly. I’ve had to adjust the number of monsters I’m throwing at you, just because you guys can do so much damage and take them out so quickly.

**Craig:** One of my DM tricks is – there are a few DM tricks. Now I’m telling you how to hurt us more, which is fun. One is, if there’s a big bad in the party, give him more HP. If the party is just crushing, just give him more HP. Make him last another round or two.

The other one, and this is the most useful one when you really want to mess with your party and you feel like they’re cakewalking, is to give one of the main boss guys legendary actions, because now that is essentially like increasing the number of bad guys without throwing a bunch of weak-asses on the field, who often can’t do that much damage on their own and get mowed down anyway, because our party’s capable of killing a couple of guys, three guys a turn if they’re just scrubs.

**John:** A thing I hadn’t considered until we got into this section of the campaign is that you guys are now underground, and light is a real factor. Often in these campaigns you’ll have more characters who have dark vision because they are Elves or have the ability to see in darkness, but you guys don’t. People would generally have a light spell cast on something, so they have a coin or something is shedding light. Here you guys have torches, and you have to deal with the torches. You as an Archer can’t hold a torch and shoot an arrow. It’s been really interesting to see from that perspective how a lack of magic is impacting you guys.

**Craig:** Light management is fun. I like that. It’s a little scary. You can’t be as stealthy as you want to be. That was one of the things about a traditional campaign that you have to deal with as a DM is that probably everybody’s gonna be able to see in the dark and light no longer becomes a thing. The only time it becomes a thing is, okay, so typical dark vision, you can see 60 feet ahead of you. Sometimes you run into, like, Drow. They can see 120. Now you got a situation. That’s interesting. But making us deal with simple things like not being able to see, especially when we’ve now encountered some creatures that can see in the dark, very interesting.

**John:** So fun. As we said in the setup, it is interesting to apply constraints to things, because we’re all very experienced D&D players. To make something feel fresh, you need to put on some new rules, new challenges to people. Rather than adding stuff, sometimes subtracting stuff is a way to make something more interesting. Do I want to play only this no-magic way forever? Absolutely not. But I think it’s been interesting for this round to try that and see how it all works.

It’s also been challenging to – on the DM level, I’m enforcing that you guys don’t have spells or magic stuff. As I’m picking adversaries, a lot of times what’s baked into these scenarios, they are Spellcasters too. I have to find, okay, what is the equivalent of that spellcasting ability for those characters. In some cases I’ve given them grenades that can duplicate an effect, but in other cases I’ve given them things taken from the Battle Master feats or Battle Master-

**Craig:** Maneuvers?

**John:** … maneuvers, yes, or monk-y kind of things.

**Craig:** You mean monkish?

**John:** Yeah, or monk abilities, because that would be the equivalent in this world for the third level spell they would otherwise be able to cast.

**Craig:** You’re dealing with people who have been playing for a long, long time. We all know what we’re doing. We all know the rules pretty well. Some of us know the rules pretty well, and then others do not, but that’s fine. The point is we’ve been playing for a long time.

I was in one brief campaign that another guy was running with some of the Joe Manganiello crew. The restraint on that one was every character had to be a Wizard. It was the opposite of this. It was an all-Wizard party, which meant that at least when we were starting out, it was like sending children out into the world. We were like, “I can make a light come on. Also, if you touch me, I die.” But by the time you get to Level 3-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s pretty serious, but if anybody gets close to you-

**John:** You’re still fragile.

**Craig:** You’re pretty fragile. Now, that party, you get an all-Wizard party at Level 18, now everyone’s dead.

**John:** Good lord.

**Craig:** We win. You lose.

**John:** The rules of time and space have changed now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We’ll continue with our campaign and with the podcast in the next couple weeks.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Craig, good to chat with you as always.

**Craig:** Thanks, John. Thanks, Drew.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Drew:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: [PLANET B](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Planet-B-Three-Pages-Christopher-James.pdf) by Christopher James, [THE LONG HAUL](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Long-Haul-by-Becca-Hurd-Three-Pages.pdf) by Becca Hurd, and [THE RIGHT TO PARTY](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/The-Right-To-Party-3-Pages.pdf) by Lucas McCutchen
* [Submit your script for our Three Page Challenge!](https://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [David Zucker’s 15 Rules of Comedy](https://creativecreativity.com/2017/07/30/david-zuckers-15-rules-of-comedy/)
* [Space Cadet (2024)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21469794/)
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](https://www.ep.com/movie-magic-scheduling/)
* [Scenechronize](https://www.ep.com/scenechronize/)
* [PIX](https://pix.online/)
* [Qtake](https://qtakehd.com/)
* [BOX](https://www.box.com/home)
* [Frame.io](https://frame.io/)
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us/)
* [Scripto](https://www.scripto.live/)
* [Fuzzlecheck](https://www.fuzzlecheck.de/)
* [Ripley](https://www.netflix.com/title/81678765) on Netflix
* [Watchmen – “This Extraordinary Being”](https://www.hbo.com/watchmen/season-1/6-this-extraordinary-being)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/646standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/mcquarrie-on-mcquarrie).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi, folks. In today’s episode, there is some language, some salty language, so if you’re in the car with your children, go ahead and stop playing it or put the earmuffs on.

**Chris McQuarrie:** What the [bleeps] are you talking about?

**Craig:** Wow.

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 596 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. In ancient times, our ancestors looked to the heavens and noticed unfamiliar objects moving amid the stars. Aristotle theorized these were dry exhalations of earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere. Later, the Romans observed that these objects return on a regular cycle, like small planets with eccentric orbits. Today we know these periodic visitors as comets and look forward to their appearance in the night sky.

For Scriptnotes, our comet is writer-director-producer Christopher McQuarrie, who first appeared on Episode 300, then Episode 400. On that episode, we invited him to come back on Episode 600, which is very nearly here. As we prepare to record that, I asked Drew Marquardt, our producer, to put together a compendium episode to remind us what Chris said the last two times he was on the show. Drew, what are we going to hear today?

**Drew Marquardt:** We’re going to hear Chris talk about making big movies. Obviously, he’s very good at that. He’s got these incredible insights, not just on how these movies get made but where these stories come from and where they’re going in the future on film and TV.

**John:** Great. I recalled these two episodes being recorded pretty clearly. The first one, I was living in Paris, and he came to the hotel. I went to his hotel. He had just come back from filming Mission: Impossible, which was filming in Paris at the time. We had a great conversation. Craig was, in theory, kind of on the episode. He was Skyped in a little bit.

**Drew:** He comes in at the end. There wasn’t enough [inaudible 00:01:46].

**John:** It was basically me and Chris. The other one, Chris McQuarrie was sitting right in the chair that you’re sitting in, and he was talking and theorizing about films.

**Drew:** I’ll be honest, I came out of these last two episodes with such a Chris McQuarrie crush that if he does come back, if the comet returns, I’m going to have to-

**John:** The comet will return. You had not listened to these episodes, but you had gone through the transcripts because you were working on them for the book, right?

**Drew:** Correct.

**John:** Great. That was a whole summer ago. You were an intern last year.

**Drew:** Oh my gosh, yeah. That’s been a year.

**John:** A whole year has passed.

**Drew:** What was amazing going through those two is he’s working on this massive scale, but the advice he has for young writers and directors is really careful and really thoughtful and really incredible.

**John:** I find he’s a good balance of idealistic and pragmatic. As I hear him talk about other films that he’s worked on or helped out on, it’s very much like, what do you need to do to actually make the movie happen on the day and deliver something that the audience wants to actually watch. Sometimes that can be a hard thing to be in both worlds at the same time.

**Drew:** He’s never cynical, which is great.

**John:** That’s correct. We’re going to listen to things cut together from both those first two things, so there’s going to be some sound shifts. It’s fine. We got Matthew Chilelli cutting them together. It’s going to be great. Talk to us about what’s going to happen in the bonus segment for premium members.

**Drew:** In the bonus segment, you, Craig, and Chris are going to talk about spoof movies, which Craig has a lot of experience with and Chris has a broad knowledge about.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, thank you for putting together this edited episode, and we will have the real Chris McQuarrie with us here soon.

**Drew:** I’m excited.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie, welcome back.

**Chris:** Thank you very much for having me.

**Craig:** The deal is every 100 episodes we have worked up enough tolerance to have McQuarrie back.

**Chris:** You know, Craig–

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Chris:** You weren’t here for the last one.

**Craig:** That’s why it wasn’t very good.

**Chris:** I miss that.

**Craig:** I can tell. Chris McQuarrie and I have been engaged in a, what, 15-year-long argument about everything.

**Chris:** About everything.

**Craig:** Literally everything.

**Chris:** It’s not so much an argument as it is a–

**Craig:** It’s a love story at this point.

**Chris:** It’s the duelists.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly.

**Chris:** I think that’s how you would describe our relationship.

**Craig:** Correct. You wake up in the morning, you go to work, fighting this man you must fight.

**John:** Back in Episode 300, I was talking to you, we were both living in Paris because you were directing Mission: Impossible. It hadn’t come out yet. You were in the middle of shooting it. It turned out really well, so congratulations on that.

**Chris:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**Chris:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** And two more to come.

**Chris:** Two more to come.

**Craig:** The idea is you’ll make these until they kill you? Meaning the movies are going to kill you.

**Chris:** It’s more likely that they will kill me than they will kill Tom Cruise.

**Craig:** No, nothing kills Tom Cruise. You’ve proven that. By the way, openly attempting to murder him through film. I mean, everyone knows what you’re doing.

**Chris:** I have been described as his enabler. He describes me as his enabler. I’m not actually trying to kill him, I’m just trying to–

**Craig:** Could have fooled me.

**Chris:** He would be doing most of this stuff–

**Craig:** Movie number one, let’s drown him. Movie number two, oh, hang him off a plane.

**Chris:** The drowning I don’t think he would try to do.

**Craig:** Then let’s drown him. Then let’s make him hurtle from a roof. Oh, he broke a bone. Too bad. Keep going.

**Chris:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Wow, you’re killing him in front of us.

**Chris:** I’m whittling him away.

**John:** Go back ten years ago and did you think you’d be directing big blockbuster movies?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** You were a writer of big movies, and I thought you were at the apex of writing those big blockbuster movies. I sort of assumed you’d keep doing that. I was surprised that you ended up wanting to direct them. What was the change?

**Chris:** Somebody asked me. I directed The Way of the Gun in ’99 in the hopes that The Way of the Gun would be a steppingstone. I tried to do what Rian Johnson did with his career. I was going to direct the little movie, and then a slightly bigger movie, and a slightly bigger movie until I got to direct the big movie I wanted to direct. And that first movie was not successful. You could even go so far as to call it a tremendous bomb. I guess it’s not a tremendous bomb only in that it wasn’t a big enough movie to be considered a tremendous bomb.

**John:** Absolutely. I have one of those too.

**Chris:** Boy, people really reacted quite angrily to it. No matter what I did over the next seven years to get another movie off the ground, I couldn’t. I was working on two fronts. I was working as a rewrite guy, and I was writing my own stuff, trying to get it made as a director, and was getting nowhere.

It wasn’t until Valkyrie when I let go of something that was mine to direct and opted to be the producer on that movie. As a producer, I learned so much more about both writing and directing than I ever did writing and directing my own movie.

**John:** Talk about the difference, because when you’re doing Way of the Gun, you had the responsibilities for everything. We talked about the bag of money. You’re dealing with all the department heads. You’re making those thousand choices a day, which always sort of terrified me about directing. What was it about producing a big movie like Valkyrie? It is just a fundamentally different beast from making a smaller movie like Way of the Gun? What was the change in Valkyrie?

**Chris:** Yes, the size and scope of the movie and also dealing with Tom Cruise, who at the time I did not know and couldn’t safely assume anything about him. My intention was to take a producing credit for having put the movie together, but not actually go make the movie. I really didn’t want to do it.

Paula Wagner, who was still with Tom at the time, was running United Artists, which was the studio making the movie. Paula took me out to lunch to tell me they were making the movie and said, “Now, I understand you’re producing the film.” My intention was to say yes, but-

**John:** You’re really going to do that.

**Chris:** Yeah, but no, I’m not. I sensed immediately how I answered that question would have a profound effect on my career. Instead of saying no, I said, “I am now.” She said, “Good, because I’ve been on set with Tom for the last 25 years. This is the first time I won’t be able to be on set with him. I want you to be there as Tom’s guy. I need somebody to be there day to day with Tom.”

I found myself very suddenly thrust into this position, which I had never anticipated. Tom quite graciously took me under his wing. He understood that my relationship with Bryan Singer was such that I could communicate with Bryan more effectively and probably with more force than Tom could. It allowed Tom to have a very comfortable relationship with Bryan. He never had to push Bryan. All he had to do was create with Bryan. Then he would come to me and say, “Hey, here’s what I think we should be doing.” Tom and I worked together very well on that movie, and that sort of translated into the next thing and the next thing.

The next job was we worked on a draft of The Tourist together, which is how I ended up on that movie. He dropped out of The Tourist and then called me up to do Ghost Protocol. He called me up to do Ghost Protocol after reading Jack Reacher, which was not something to which he was originally attached.

**John:** Jack Reacher was a project you adapted from the book originally?

**Chris:** Yeah. Don Granger, who was also at UA, and who had been at Cruise/Wagner before that, he’s at Skydance now. Don Granger saw the writing on the wall, saw that UA was not going to be a going concern. He said, “I’ve got this series of books at Cruise/Wagner, and I think this is the best prospect at getting a franchise made.” He offered me the movie, and I said, “I’ll do it on the condition that the studio offers me the movie to direct. I’m not going to ask for permission to direct movies anymore. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and getting nowhere,” and they did.

I handed Tom that script to read as the producer. He called me the next day and said, “Script’s great. I need you to get on a plane and come up to Vancouver right now. We’re working on Mission: Impossible, and I need your help.”

Now I was thrust into a very big movie, bigger than Valkyrie, and it was a movie that more than halfway through the show was in a critical state of confusion as to what the story was. Having worked on Valkyrie and having had that crash course in movie-making, I now understood, okay, here are the resources I have. Here are the scenes that have been shot. Here are the scenes that haven’t been shot. Here’s the sets they haven’t built. Here’s the sets they haven’t struck. Here are the roles that they haven’t cast yet.

I had to make a puzzle out of things you had and things you didn’t have yet. I could only reshoot what I still had sets for, sets they hadn’t torn down. It gave me this sort of creative puzzle to solve. My first six days of my one week on the movie… I was originally only supposed to go for a week. My first six days were just meeting with department heads and saying, “Okay, these are the sets you still have. Can I get rid of this set? Can I move these resources somewhere else? If I have this idea, is there something you can build?”

Without ever having to stop and think about how daunting the task was, it gave me this fundamental grassroots understanding of how those big movies functioned, so that when it came my time to do it, I had a better understanding of the allocation of resources. It’s very interesting that that career trajectory is the exception and not the rule.

For me to have made an $8.5 million movie, didn’t make another movie for 12 years… That was a $60 million movie with Valkyrie in the middle, which was like $70 million, but I wasn’t directing. The budgets continued to get bigger over time. Now what you have is a guy directs a $5 million movie. The studio says, “Hey, that movie cost $5 million, made $60 million. Let’s give him $100 million, and he’ll make a billion.”

That’s a very, very, very hard turn for a lot of filmmakers to make. Now I have another career, which is coming on to those movies and supporting that director and saying, “Okay, so now you’re making your big movie. Here’s what’s important,” because what happens with a lot of those guys is they haven’t gone through the trial by fire where they realize there’s only so much reinventing the wheel can take.

They’re still coming at it like an indie filmmaker, but somebody has given them $200 million and a giant franchise. They don’t really want to believe that they’re making mass entertainment, and they struggle against that. I’ve seen two kinds of filmmakers in that. There are the filmmakers who very quickly listen to reason and adapt and survive. And then there are the ones who just their movies get taken away from them.

**John:** Yeah, we can think of the ones whose movies got taken away, or the really bad scenarios there. If you are coming in to be a director whisperer on a project, at what point is there a realization that there’s going to be a problem? Are they bringing you in right when that person is hired on to say like this person is going to be a consigliere to you, or it’s like something has gone horribly awry and now let’s get Chris McQuarrie there to help?

**Chris:** There’s a sweet spot I call four in and four out. If you’re four weeks out from shooting or four weeks into shooting, you’re in this zone where you’re so freaked out, you’ll do anything the doctor says. If you’re any deeper into production, you kind of get entrenched and you get blinders on and you’re afraid to change anything. If you’re too far out, you’re afraid to change anything because you think, oh, it’s too daunting a task.

There was one movie in particular that’s coming out. I’m very interested to see it. I won’t say its name. I begged the director not to go in the direction he was going, because I really did believe in the material and I thought it was wonderful. There was one specific plot element that completely degraded the main character of the film. I said, “If you just take this thing away, your movie will become really powerful.”

There was a visual idea. There was clearly an obsession with this particular idea, and there was a refusal to recognize that this very idea that gives you one visual aspect of the movie is going to tear the movie down.

He said, “It’s just too much work.” I said, “You’ve got nine months. You don’t realize how many times you can reinvent this movie.” More importantly, because of the movies I’d worked on, I come into a movie like that and say, “I’m not going to change anything about your movie. I’m not going to change the sets. I’m not going to introduce new characters. I’m going to take the resources you have and kind of reconfigure your movie to give it a more emotional journey,” because that’s really all I care about.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was an information guy. It was what I was telling the audience. I was a writer who was all about dialogue. I’ve since learned about emotional drag. That’s my catchphrase.

**John:** That four weeks in, four weeks out thing is really interesting because you look at these filmmakers who are coming from… Like you and I on our first movies. Four weeks, you’re almost done with your movie on a $5 million movie. It’s a very different thing. We’ve both also been involved with these movies that just shoot for forever.

You and I both have helped out on those movies where you come in when the train is already running. Generally if we’re coming in as a screenwriter, we’re just there to fix the visible screenwriting problems, and so we’re not doing the thing of what you’re talking about with Mission: Impossible where you actually had to sort of talk to all the department heads and really get their buy-in.

A couple times we’ve had guests on the show, Drew Goddard, or David Lindelof recently, who talked about the big opportunity, the thing that changed everything was coming into a project that was in crisis. It was the TV show that was going down, that didn’t have any more scripts. In this case it was a movie that was swirling around. That’s also been true in my career. It’s the editing rooms where they couldn’t find the movie that I could come back in and actually really help. Those are the moments.

If you haven’t had both the courage to step up when those things happen, but also the education to sort of know what are the right questions to ask, how to push for the best thing, it can be really daunting. If I were that filmmaker that you’re coming in to help, I would be scared to ask for help, because that’s an admission of failure. That’s an admission that someone made a mistake in hiring me to do this job.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the moment in Terminator when he says, “Come with me if you want to live.” You walk in and you say to that director, “Here’s what’s happening on your movie and here’s what’s going to happen.”

There was one director in particular. His movie was in trouble. He was four weeks in. There was going to be a big change. The script was going to be gutted. There was a lot of panic. I said, “Can I just go in and talk to him for half an hour before you guys all come in, so that he doesn’t feel like I’m the studio hatchet man?” I have had that happen too. I have had studios try to manipulate that. They try to position me as being the hatchet man, and I won’t do it. I’ll go to bat for the director every time.

I walked in and I told him, “Here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to come in and they’re going to say these are the things we want in the movie. A lot of them are ideas that I have suggested for how to fix your movie. I’m going to strongly urge you to say, ‘I’ve heard everything that Chris has suggested. I don’t like any of it. I don’t think any of it works, but if you think that’s what the movie needs, I look forward to seeing how it turns out.’“

I said, “What you will then do is you will put the responsibility that has been placed on you onto the producers. The producers will feel that you are working to make their movie. The studio will feel that you’re working to serve what they ultimately need served.” He didn’t do it.

We had another meeting. Half an hour before, I went in and said, “Now remember, just say this, and the pressure will come off of you.” He didn’t do it again. Eventually, everything he was afraid would manifest itself manifested itself. I don’t even think by the time he was through the process he even recognized that his movie had been taken over. His worst nightmare happened. That was the other thing. When you’re talking about working on those movies that are falling apart, you have an emotional detachment that you wouldn’t have if it was your own story.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Chris:** You’re able to come into it and say, “There’s a clarity that I have on everybody else’s movies that I will never have on my own movie.” I’m dying right now in the middle of Mission: Impossible, trying to figure out the turn on page 70. I know what happens in Act Three. I know what’s supposed to happen, but I can’t quite figure out how to get there. If it wasn’t my movie, I would parachute in and just be like, “Oh, you just have to do this.” It’s just so much easier when it’s not your baby.

Especially when you’re writing for studios, you get to a place where you go, “I know what I should write. If I didn’t have to turn right here, and I could turn left, I’d know where this movie would go.” That’s the thing you’re always struggling-

**John:** You’re trying to find a way to finesse it so it feels like it’s a natural turn, that it’s not just now we cut to a new sequence, because we all know the directors who would just like, “On the wall here, I have all the different sequences. Find a way to connect them all together. Go.” Those are the jobs I despise and ultimately get out of, because I don’t want to just be the person who is stringing those things together.

**Chris:** Oh, it’s soul-sucking work. It really is.

**John:** It pays well, but it kills you. You’re responsible for just creating a trailer for the moments that are happening in front of you. It’s maddening.

**Chris:** It’s funny you say that, because that’s another thing that we think about now. Since just before Rogue Nation, the lesson I learned, having had fights with the studio about the marketing of Jack Reacher, my first meeting on Rogue Nation I just went to marketing and said, “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you need so that I’m not fighting with you.” That has evolved for me, so that in this movie, Tom and I have a rule, you give marketing one shot a day. Every day you get a trailer shot. It’s like, doesn’t matter what-

**John:** That’s great.

**Chris:** You look at it and go, “Yep, that could be in a trailer. Okay, send it away.” Then they’re happy. They’re invested in your movie as opposed to you’re fighting them. We also know that movies like this need lines like, “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond.” I don’t know what that means in the context of the rest of the movie. I don’t ever particularly feel that he is a kite in a hurricane in that movie. The sexiness of that line in a trailer is really effective. You develop a sense for where those lines might go in a movie. We have little placeholders.

There’s a scene between Tom Cruise and Sean Harris in this movie, and we have a blank space there, where it’s like that’s where we know the villain is going to say something that is going to communicate the story of the movie in that one soundbite. I never really thought that way until this franchise.

**John:** If you think about people who run TV shows, they have to think about this episode of television that they’re making, but they have to be thinking of the whole series. They have to be thinking of how am I going to keep this thing on the air. It sounds like part of what you’re doing is that realization that you’re responsible not only for this two hours of entertainment, but you’re responsible for this giant ship that is going to be sailing through its berth and the success of that. It’s not just these two hours of film. It’s everything around it. It’s this universe of marketing around it that you also have to be aware of, and from an early time. You can’t just make your movie, then get involved with the marketing.

**Chris:** Yes. What is Mission? It’s the life of whatever this thing is, so that your movie leaves it so that another chapter in the franchise can exist. I guess that’s where jumping the shark comes in. You worry all the time. “Am I taking this in a way that it can’t go?”

We had a big conversation about tone, because Brad Bird really changed the tone of the franchise, and Rogue Nation embraced that tone completely. At the beginning of this I said to Tom, “I don’t think we can do that three in a row. I think now it’s going to become cute. I think we need to take it another direction still.” We did, but now we find ourselves going, “Are we going where Bond went, where Bond became serious?”

**John:** Dark and serious.

**Chris:** It’s another kind of tone, which, by the way, has not hurt their bottom line at all. They’ve really found their place, but we can’t go there. We were sort of laughing because we were looking at Rogue Nation and saying, “Thanks, Bond, for not doing that anymore, so we’ll do it.” Now we’re looking at it and going, “We can’t keep doing that.” We suddenly hit that same wall and understood why Bond went the way they did. We’re at this kind of emotional crossroads with the franchise, saying how dramatic can you take Mission? It’s not going to a dark place. It’s going to a more emotionally dramatic place.

**John:** When we were making Charlie’s Angels, when we started making the second one, I talked to the team and I described it as like I really want to approach this as we made an amazing pilot and now we’re going to make that first episode of the TV show that actually – of the series that really is the series. Where we sort of learned everything from the pilot and now we’re going to make the most amazing one. And we didn’t. Spoiler. It was as much of a trouble and more so than the first one.

But that was sort of the fantasy. You want to be able to make the sort of movie series. Marvel is able to do it remarkably well. DC, we’re yet to see whether they’re going to be able to make a franchise-y series out of the things they’re trying to do, but it’s laudable. You understand why people want to do it.

**Chris:** DC has a tough road to hoe because they’ve got to do something different than Marvel. Marvel has staked a claim so strongly in a very specific tone. Marvel has Kevin Feige, who is not a traditional studio head. He’s not a traditional producer. He is a producer of the old school. That’s what producers used to be like in Hollywood. They were the guys who came in and said, “This is the movie.” I guess the closest analog in something other than comic book movies is somebody like a Scott Rudin, who really he owns the material and he is a filmmaker in his own right and has specific control.

Warner Bros has to do something to differentiate itself from that. What is that? There’s Christopher Nolan’s Batman, but that’s not a universe. That’s one character, whereas Iron Man and the Marvel universe sort of set the tone for all those other movies.

If you had told me even a year before it came out that Captain America would work as a movie, or that Thor would work as a movie, that I’d find those characters appealing, that I’d actually find Captain America one of the more appealing characters in the Marvel universe, I just would have laughed at you. We had grown up seeing so many bad attempts inn these really cheesy TV movie ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen some of those Captain Marvel movies.

**John:** They’re amazing.

**Chris:** Oh my god. Oh my god. It will be very interesting to see how DC defines themselves.

**John:** So we used to make things like St. Elmo’s Fire, The Big Chill, Breakfast Club, Big Fish, Terms of Endearment. So we used to make things that had big casts, where a bunch of folks came together, where characters did grow and change but it was an ensemble. It wasn’t sort of one character’s story. Is that a thing we’re going to be making on the big screen soon? We’ll start with what is the essence of that kind of story. What is the essence of an ensemble dramedy?

**Craig:** Let’s make McQuarrie take a shot at that one.

**Chris:** It seems to me as I’m running through the list that you just – nostalgia is a big part of it. It’s my understanding that somebody did a breakdown of why people go to see movies and the number one reason was to have a nostalgic experience. An emotional nostalgic experience. I think that probably plays into sports as well, especially plays into why a lot of sports movies seem to go–

**Craig:** Back in time.

**Chris:** Back to that. And you look at The Big Chill. The Big Chill was very much a nostalgic movie.

**John:** It’s a reunion of friends who had separated.

**Chris:** St. Elmo’s Fire, while it wasn’t a nostalgic movie, they were at a specific turning point in their life. They were kind of looking back at—

**Craig:** See, to me that’s it. We have a group of people that represent some kind of contemporary arrangement, whether we’re catching them later or they were contemporary or we’re in their contemporariness, like for instance The Breakfast Club. But they are at a moment where things are changing, and we watch that happen. That to me is the essence of these things. But for the love of god, I cannot imagine anyone putting this on a screen anymore. It just doesn’t seem like they will. It’s a bummer.

**John:** Yeah, it’s tragic. I mean, on a big screen. I think you can absolutely make these for streaming.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But in so many ways though, the one-hour series have sort of taken, even like short series have taken the place of these, where you can see those characters grow over the course–

**Chris:** Oh, This is Us.

**Craig:** This is Us.

**John:** This is Us as a movie.

**Chris:** Modern Family.

**Craig:** Correct. And interestingly Dan Fogelman–

**John:** Yeah, he tried to do it as a movie.

**Craig:** He sort of tried to do it as a movie. He tried This is Us as a movie and it didn’t connect with audiences. But he’s obviously incredibly good at it because tens of millions of people watch This is Us and it gets all these awards. There is something, I don’t know, we used to be able to go and watch this – maybe it’s just that we used to expect less. You know, we would go to the movie theater and we weren’t asking to have our brains blown out the back of our skulls.

**Chris:** I went to see Hell or High Water.

**John:** Oh, which is fantastic.

**Chris:** Which I loved. And I was talking to Tim Talbot shortly thereafter and I said, “Did you see Hell or High Water?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “What did you think about it?” He goes, “That was a great movie. In 1987 that would have been a good movie.” But he’s right in that that sort of… I remember going to the movies every weekend. It was not an event. Now when you ask anybody under the age of 25 why they go to the movies, they will say in one form or another, “Because I have to go.” They want to be part of a discussion.

I tried to get to see Avengers, which I finally saw yesterday, as quickly as I could, because I was tired of having a self-imposed media bubble. There were things in that movie I really didn’t want ruined. Getting to that state, whereas the stories that we’re talking about, what television does so well now especially is there is a collective history.

If you tried to tune into Game of Thrones now, you don’t understand. The number of people who are saying three years into Mad Men going, “Yeah, I tried to get into that show and I just couldn’t.” It’s like, of course not. If you turn middle of Season Three, none of this makes any sense.

**Craig:** Start at the beginning. That’s true. But I do think that one of the problems for… I remember going to see St. Elmo’s Fire. And my expectation was that I was going to see a group of people that were somewhat older than me dealing with problems. And I knew at some point somebody was going to like… I think Rob Lowe was going to light a torch on fire with some hairspray or something, and Demi Moore was in a corner, super dramatic. And I thought, okay, I’m going to see some sort of human drama. That would not do it anymore. Now when people go to the movie theater it’s like, well, this is going to pin me back and it’s going to blow my mind. And I’m going to see stuff and it’s going to be an event.

**Chris:** An event.

**Craig:** An event. I just think people go to the movies for a different reason now.

**Chris:** But don’t you think also what you can get from television is very different than what we could get from television?

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** No question.

**Chris:** You could not make Game of Thrones as a feature film. Any of the content in Game of Thrones would be NC17.

**Craig:** Nor could you have made it for television prior to this kind of strange change.

**Chris:** Yes. It’s the networks. As soon as basic cable met the British model of television, which was you make a good television show and when it stops being good you – when it reaches the end you stop.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice?

**Chris:** Yes, it’s lovely.

**Craig:** You know what? This is going to be six episodes long. Great.

**Chris:** Yeah, or six episodes this season instead of 22 every season.

**Craig:** Which is why I take my hat off to people like Derek Haas who are still doing it, not just on one show, but multiple shows. I mean, the amount of story that has to be generated by those guys is bananas. But yes, the format has become not just flexible, but there is no format. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** Let’s take the jokes out of biblical epics, and/or sword and sandals movies. So things like Gladiator, Ben-Hur, Noah, Passion of the Christ. King in Heaven. Spartacus. Ten Commandments. Braveheart, to some degree. Lawrence of Arabia. Like we used to make these things. That was actually a staple of original Hollywood. We have the giant ranches here because we used to make these epics.

**Chris:** Giant movies.

**John:** Giant movies. We don’t make them anymore.

**Chris:** No, because they don’t win awards anymore.

**John:** They don’t win awards anymore.

**Craig:** Precisely.

**John:** Even though Game of Thrones is being show on smaller screens, it is that kind of sword and sandals thing.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** We’re making them, but we’re making them for smaller screen.

**Craig:** TV. No question.

**Chris:** I have a very large television. It’s not terribly expensive. I would imagine a lot of people have maxed their credit cards for a large TV.

**Craig:** You’re comparing your large TV to the TV you grew up with, which was like the TV I grew up. That 9-inch black and white thing in the kitchen, with the single antenna shooting out.

**Chris:** It was a letterbox.

**Craig:** Correct. But my kids only know those TVs. But those TVs are still not – I mean, they’re not movies.

**Chris:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not a movie screen.

**Chris:** No. But most people, the way their viewing habits are now, we’re making a Mission: Impossible. We have an IMAX segment in it. And people are saying, well why don’t you just shoot the whole thing in IMAX?

**Craig:** No one is going to watch it.

**Chris:** It’s never going to be seen again. You’re making this balance. And there are times I’ll be framing a shot, and Cruise will walk up to me and go, “You know when this is on the big screen and I pull my phone out of my pocket—”

**Craig:** Here it is.

**Chris:** This is the screen now. It’s not that it will only be watched on television, but for the life of the film.

**Craig:** For the life of it. Primarily.

**Chris:** The theatrical lifespan of a movie is 12 weeks.

**Craig:** Whoa. 12 weeks. What is this hit movie you’ve got that’s in there 12 weeks?

**Chris:** I’m talking like by the end it’s in eight theaters.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**Chris:** I’m giving a conservative—

**Craig:** Really it’s four weeks is what it is.

**Chris:** Four weeks. Yeah.

**Craig:** It used to be months.

**Chris:** Yes.

**Craig:** It is now about four weeks.

**John:** So what is the essence of these biblical epics we’re talking about? So if you’re talking about a Gladiator or a Ben-Hur, it is a character in a long ago time, typically a Roman time, who is coming up against an authority system. He is leading, it’s always a he in these movies, is leading–

**Chris:** It’s a Christ figure against Rome.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Christ figure against Rome.

**Craig:** That’s exactly what it is. Every single time. Christ figure against Rome. Doesn’t matter what you do.

**Chris:** Doesn’t matter if it’s Rome or not Rome. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christ or not Christ.

**Craig:** That’s what Braveheart is. That’s what Ten Commandments is. Even when it’s Jews it’s still a Christ figure against Rome. Some hero will rise in a kind of faded destiny way, usually out of nothing. And they have special powers, special abilities. They are spat on, tortured, hurt. Their family is killed. They are persecuted. And ultimately they do some incredibly self-sacrificial thing and the world is saved. And the last scene is people sitting around going, “God, he was awesome.”

**Chris:** He was a great man.

**Craig:** He was a great man.

**Chris:** And it’s always a man.

**Craig:** And it’s always a man.

**Chris:** Yes. A lot of this conversation seems to be about how technology has disrupted what we imagined the plane of cinema to be. There seems to be a really clear shift.

**Craig:** And just wait.

**Chris:** From no home video, to home video, to no home video again. Now it’s home theater. Now it’s home – it’s content. That’s where I think the line is blurring. It’s big screen/small screen.

**Craig:** And the amount that’s available now is – and the resources that are being poured into it. I mean, better or worse, however you want to chop up the money, there was just way less money. I mean, there were five studios and they gave you some studio. And there were three networks and they gave you some money.

But now we’ve got just billions and billions rushing in to make more and more stuff. It is transforming things. But there aren’t that many more screens. In fact, I’d probably argue there are fewer screens than there used to be.

**John:** Well, there’s not more time. There’s not more time for people to view things. And so even though we have new people coming in and new distribution outlets, we have new money chasing new things–

**Craig:** Time is a flat circle.

**John:** Yes. And so we don’t have the ability to watch more things. And so we have to choose how we’re going to do this.

**Chris:** I’m looking at the–

**John:** So I skipped over some things. Is there a genre there you want to tackle?

**Chris:** Westerns.

**John:** Let’s talk about westerns.

**Craig:** Hmm, westerns.

**John:** On this show we’ve talked about Unforgiven. We’ve talked about 3:10 to Yuma. We’ve talked about sort of westerns. But what is it about westerns that you think can be suited towards the big screen. Because also we had Scott Frank on who talked about his great Netflix show.

**Craig:** Godless.

**John:** Godless. Which was sort of exploding what a normal western—

**Craig:** Meant to be a movie. Written as a script.

**Chris:** He struggled with it for years, right? He was trying to get it down to something movie size.

**Craig:** Well, and he does it with all of his movies. But, I mean, look, it was movie size. It’s just that what he was struggling was to get somebody to pay for it as a movie. Because essentially people kept saying well the western is dead, the western is dead, the western is dead.

**Chris:** And that which is the WWII movie is dead. You hear about this all the time. And then the number of times I’ve seen a dead genre—

**Craig:** Everything is dead until it’s not.

**Chris:** Yeah. Dunkirk was a really great example of a dead genre that people don’t go to see anymore.

**Craig:** My favorite example is nothing could have been a deader genre than pirate movies.

**John:** Oh yeah, of course.

**Craig:** Pirate movies. Not only dead—

**Chris:** Do you remember Pirates with Walter Matthau?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Chris:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** But before they made Pirates of the Caribbean we had Cutthroat Island which had sank an entire, like a hedge fund disappeared.

**Chris:** It killed Carolco.

**Craig:** Yeah, Carolco. An entire company was dead. And before that–

**Chris:** Killed careers.

**Craig:** Careers. Renny Harlin. And then – and the thought of making a pirates movie was considered almost obscene.

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** Yes.

**Craig:** And…

**John:** Pirates of the Caribbean. Just takes one.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** It didn’t start a new genre. There weren’t like other pirates movies coming after that. It was only the one pirate movie.

**Craig:** Exactly. Everybody else was like you know what, let’s let them have it. We’re still not making pirate movies.

**Chris:** We’re still not making pirate movies. And it so specifically hinges around a kind of storytelling and a character. Johnny Depp.

**Craig:** And a brand.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, just built in.

**John:** It was also supernatural. So you had a supernatural vibe to it which is different than other stuff.

**Chris:** But the western, Unforgiven represented a shift towards deconstructionist from which the genre never seemed to – 3:10 to Yuma was its own darker western. Godless was its own. What I miss – what I’d love to see is—

**Craig:** Shane.

**Chris:** The Magnificent 7. And Shane. Silverado. The Big Country. Movies that are more of an adventure and more a morality tale as opposed to – watch slow west.

**Craig:** It’s never going to happen. It’s gone. It’s over.

**Chris:** I will fight you on that.

**Craig:** Well, look, I think as a country and a culture we have lost the ability to go back to the kind of idealized west. We just know too much.

**Chris:** No, I don’t think it’s idealized. I think – you look at The Big Country, it’s not idealized. The country is rough, but a man walks into it who refuses to play by those rules. And I think that’s – if you take westerns there are two kinds. There are kind of westerns noirs where the west just chews you up and spits you out. And there’s the place where one can prove one’s self.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Chris:** And it’s this rough and lawless place where somebody, you know.

**Craig:** Maybe a book would do it.

**John:** A book might do it. I mean, I think it comes back to the discussion we had with the ensemble dramedies which is that we used to go to see those movies that didn’t have a lot of high stakes in them because that was fine. We needed to go see a movie.

**Craig:** What the hell else were you going to do on a Saturday afternoon?

**John:** And so I just wonder that this non-deconstructed western that is just truly a western whether it’s actually going to get people to go out to see it on a screen.

**Chris:** Hell or High Water.

**John:** Hell or High Water—

**Chris:** It was contemporary but it’s a western.

**John:** It totally is.

**Chris:** It’s a bank-robbing—

**John:** It’s a pickup truck western and I loved it for what it was able to do. But that was not a breakout smash hit. It was a good performer, but it was not—

**Chris:** I think it did OK financially and it got nominated for Best Picture.

**John:** It did, absolutely.

**Chris:** Which for movies of that size is kind of the – that’s your life blood to keep in the theaters for another—

**Craig:** John Lee Hancock has kind of made a western in a sense with The Highwaymen.

**Chris:** The Highwaymen. Sure.

**Craig:** But, again, Netflix. I mean, and that’s where John Lee lives now. You know, those are the movies he’s going to be making now because – and here’s a guy who made, I don’t know, $14 billion for Warner Bros and Alcon with The Blind Side. And today I don’t think they make The Blind Side for theatrical. That’s what’s happened. I fear that we have lost something kind of permanently in the economics of making these movies. And it may have literally just come down to the cost of marketing. Because—

**Chris:** That’s everything.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, Netflix, the way they market their movie is they don’t. It’s just there.

**Chris:** When you turn on Netflix they’re like, hey, do you want to watch this?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Absolutely. And they bought every billboard in Los Angeles but that’s just for us.

**Chris:** But here’s the upside to that. Here’s the less than dystopian way of looking at that. In the current culture where the business is suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to diversify, this is something I experience a lot on the movies that I get called in to come in and do fixes on. The business was predicated on a male director makes a $5 million movie that makes $50 million. Let’s give him $200 million in hopes it makes $1 billion. Women were not afforded those same undeserved opportunities.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** Which they are now.

**Craig:** And were punished—

**Chris:** And were punished – exactly.

**Craig:** If they didn’t do the impossible.

**Chris:** Whereas the way to look at Netflix is Netflix could be the farm system. Now there’s many more movies being made for lower budgets creating – and I see lots of women directing television now.

**Craig:** Way more opportunity.

**Chris:** The director lists that I’m now being handed for the TV shows I’m working on are 50/50 and you’re actually looking at, oh, that person is being hired for the quality of their work, which is very encouraging. Is it possible that what we end up with is – you know how the Oscars have sort of divided into—?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** You know, there’s Oscar movies and there’s money-making movies. Now could there be there’s Netflix movies and there’s feature films? And that the feature films because of marketing requirements need to be bigger movies that make more money. And then Netflix becomes the farm system that teaches people how to do stuff. You could live within the Netflix bubble and make a 14, a 25, and a $60 million movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we’re there. I mean, I think that’s where we are. The real question is, is there any kind – well, question number one. Is there mobility from Netflix type of movies or other TV movies to the big ones? Or do people even want to go? Because here’s the thing. I think a lot of filmmakers don’t – you know, we were talking to Mari Heller about this.

Mari Heller made this incredible movie, Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was amazing. And people came to her and they’re like here’s this huge superhero movie, you want to do it? And she was like I feel like I’m supposed to, because we’re trying to advance the cause of female directors and we’re trying to get into those big seats, but I don’t want to. I want to do this.

**Chris:** Well, there’s no point in making it if – you look at her and that dilemma knowing that – having nothing to do with who is directing a movie how those movies get made. The script is not ready.

**Craig:** Yep. [laughs]

**Chris:** The movie is going in three weeks.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** You’ve never done anything like this.

**Craig:** The actor is kind of in charge.

**Chris:** The producer, whose name is on a bunch of giant movies, will not be there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Chris:** And this is all going to be your fault. Do you still want to do it?

**Craig:** It is really terrifying.

**Chris:** Correct. And again, it takes a special kind of director to get into that kind of trouble and then accept the help when they bring it in. Because you are essentially now, it’s very embarrassing. You’re at a point where you’re in way over your head. And not because – this is not hubris. They’re promised support, and then it’s just not there. So now suddenly you lose control of your movie. It takes a lot having never been through the process to know that it’s all going to be OK in the end. When the movie works you’ll still get credit.

**Craig:** That’s a lot to have faith in.

**Chris:** It’s very wounding. So I can see somebody looking at that and saying—

**Craig:** Nah.

**Chris:** But there’s the other side of that is the grass is always greener. You’re going to have people making big giant movies. Michael Bay made Pain & Gain because he really wanted to make it. Michael Bay, some part of Michael Bay – I don’t care, any filmmaker you can name at that level – some part of them wants to make their little movie about—

**Craig:** Their podium movie.

**Chris:** [laughs] They want to make their podium movie.

**Craig:** They want to make their podium movie.

**Chris:** Yes, and the same thing I would imagine is just – the Duffer Brothers have some big feature they want to do.

**Craig:** Big ass dumb movie they want to do.

**Chris:** Yes, they’ve got some big ass-

**John:** Comparing that to your life as a screenwriter, there are definitely days where you or I, we don’t want to sit down and write that thing. It’s almost always torture to actually get me at the computer.

**Chris:** Yes.

**John:** But at least with the director, you have a call time on the sheet. Like someone is going to pick you up and take you there. And then you’re going to be responsible for those decisions. And that’s terrifying and there are definitely days I don’t want to get in the van, but once you’re there, there’s a whole bunch of people there who are there to help you. And there’s at least some plan for what you are supposed to do. There was some assignment you were given. Like this is the thing that is theoretically on the call sheet. So, we got this location, we got these people, it should be something like this. And you can figure it out.

And, you know, some of my favorite days in directing were things had gone horribly wrong, or there’s a rainstorm and it won’t match cut into anything else, but we have to shoot this. It’s the only day on this location. And you just make it work. It’s going back to remembering like, OK, what is this actually supposed to be about. What is here that we can use to do this and how can we sort of make this problem seem like a solution?

**Chris:** Screenwriting is pushing a rock up a hill. And directing is running downhill with the rock behind you. [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s going, and it’s going to crush you if you don’t run. But, also, the other night we were – I think this was in our first or second week of shooting. We were at the Grand Palais. We had this big sequence at the Grand Palais. We had all these extras. And extras in France get paid quite a bit of money. So, you had to pick and choose what nights you had a lot of extras. And finally we were shooting outside the Grand Palais. There’s a scene where Tom and Vanessa Kirby and another character come – and Henry Cavill all come running out of the Grand Palais.

And there’s a big event inside. And that night there’s 150 extras. And we put the camera in front of the building and Tom and Vanessa and Henry come walking out and they’re just like three people and 150 extras barely – it’s just deserted. And you came from this big event inside to suddenly – it’s so big. There was nothing you can do.

And the cinematographer loved the building. And he said, “But this is great. This is a great shot of the Grand Palais.” And I said, “But it’s deserted. How do we make 150 people look like a thousand people?” And instead of shooting the outside of the building looking in, we went inside the building and put a long lens on the camera and created a narrow funnel of people and had the actors rushing through the door with all the extras coming towards you. And it turned into this…

The fun of it was we were shooting Mission: Impossible, but we were making an independent film. We were like I only have 150 people. What do I do to make this shot big? And we had the best time that night. That was like really one of the more fun attacks we had. It was great.

**John:** So, switching just for our last topic here, if a strike had occurred while you were making this movie, like what do you do?

**Chris:** Well, we had an emergency plan in place, assuming that if there was going to be a strike, on the day that the contract ran out, we were hedging our bets and saying there will probably be a 10-day extension. There wasn’t the feeling that it was acrimonious and that a strike was just going to happen that moment.

I had a friend who is a writer friend of mine who I have worked with on other movies and he was on deck. And if there was an extension, he was ready to get on a plane, fly out, and during that 10 days we were going to generate as many pages as we possibly could. And then we figured the lights were going to go out.

**John:** So you get past your page 70 thing. You just have something you can shoot at page 70.

**Chris:** You had to have something you could shoot.

**John:** Our friend Aline Brosh McKenna calls that the rocky shoals. It’s that point where the movie is transitioning from sort of one thing before it becomes that third act. It’s often a challenge in scripts, but it’s often a challenge in cuts. So I sympathize.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s funny, on the last one, that wasn’t the problem. On the last one it was how does this movie end. I know the ending of the movie quite vividly. I don’t know – there’s this weird middle bit that’s happening in London. And I know what the last five pages of it are. I know there’s a confrontation that Ethan has at the end of that, which is this scene that I really love. And what happened was when we sensed that the strike was coming, I had all of these action scenes that had been storyboarded and worked out and in many cases prevised, but no one had ever written a page of those sequences.

There was something like 30 pages of material that existed in concept. We were building sets and rigs and all sorts of things. I just didn’t have them in script form. So I had this friend – the storyboard artist called him and said here’s everything we’re doing. And he took that 30 pages off of my docket. He wasn’t creating anything, but he was writing it in script form so that I could more quickly rewrite it. And he wrote this one scene, but not in any way, shape, or form the way I would have shot it, but inspired this idea where I was like, oh my god, I’ve got this really fun idea. So we know what that sequence is now. Or at least we know how that sequence ends. I just don’t know how it begins.

**John:** One of the things that was a big topic of the WGA negotiations was the move to shorter seasons and sort of how writers were being held for a very long time on these shorter seasons. And their writing fees was being applied against producing fees. But we see also a change happening in features where there are these mini rooms where they are bringing together a bunch of screenwriters, some really high levels, some newbies, and they’re working through a giant property. So they’ll take–

**Chris:** Transformers.

**John:** Transformers was an early example of that, where they’ll say, OK, we’re going to spend four weeks and figure out Transformers and generate, you know, a TV series and three movies and we’re going to figure out what this all is. Where do you see yourself fitting into that universe?

**Chris:** I believe you can create all of the Transformers stuff you want. You can build out the whole universe. You can finish all the screenplays. It goes back to the very beginning of the conversation we were having. When the rubber hits the road, that’s all going to change. They’re going to call you. They’re going to call me. They’re going to call Drew. They’re going to call somebody in at some point and go, “None of this works. It was all great in theory, but we just suddenly…”

An actor drops out. Or the budget changes. And things happen. What I try to impress upon writers going into it now, I believe the future belongs to the writer-producer. That is not to say you have to be named a producer on the movie. But that you need to be able to function on a level where you are – you need to understand editing. You need to understand elements of physical production. The more you understand that, the more valuable you will be to those people. The more you’re selling yourself and not your writing.

Writers right now – and I did it for a long, long time – tend to believe I’m going to write this script and the script is the commodity. It’s not. It’s your ability to write a script that is the commodity. The truth of the matter is, if everybody could write they’d do it. They wouldn’t call us. The fact that the strike was going to happen and had people nervous, if we went on strike, movies just – nobody would write it. It’s a lonely, miserable, very difficult particular skill. And everybody thinks they can do it. I think the same way everybody feels like playing guitar looks like it would be easy.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Yeah, just pick it up. Just strumming.

**Chris:** Well, yeah, you teach me the basics. You teach me a couple of chords and I’m like, oh, this is very easy. Then show me Van Halen and say do that. And, by the way, do it with two weeks before you’re going on stage. In those writer’s rooms and things like that, this thing with the television seasons that they’re dealing with now. The nature of television is changing and it created a really prickly situation in this atmosphere with the strike.

I can see the studios looking at it and saying, “Well, yeah, now there are only 10 episodes. There used to be 22 and now there’s 10. Why should we pay you more if there’s only 10?” And we’re saying, “But wait, you’re taking us off the market for this much time.”

The studio’s argument is going to be, “Go and create your own show.” It’s going to thin the herd out. It’s going to define who those writer-producers are. And I think what it’s going to do is it’s going to shape writers’ opinions of themselves. Writers have been trained to believe that they are simultaneously necessary and totally dependent, that you can’t make a movie without a screenplay, but I can’t get my screenplay made unless you buy it and validate me. And now you’re at a place where you can be more a part of the process.

Here’s the dirty little secret, and it’s something you know better than anybody. A lot of directors don’t know how to direct. They simply don’t know how to do it. They have some specific skill or some specific vision, or a team around them that helped them, but a great many of them don’t really understand the fundamentals of storytelling as much as they understand some specific visual style.

As a writer who understands editing, you will be invaluable to that director. You may not get the glory. You may not get the credit, but if those things aren’t important to you, if being valuable is what’s important to you, you will always work. And that was really the big change for me in my career. I wanted very much to be in control of my own destiny. And by letting go of that control, my destiny has become that much more in my control.

You were asking me at the beginning, you know, how did you – did you ever expect that you would be directing these blockbusters. I very distinctly remember when I was trying to get Valkyrie made, and I thought Valkyrie was going to be a little movie, no one would read it. It didn’t matter who I was or where I came from. They’d hear it’s about the German generals who, and they were done. They didn’t care.

When Bryan Singer attached himself, people were then offering to make it without having to read it. And I had a very painful realization which was I’ll never be at the level to direct the things that I really want to do. Booth and Valkyrie and The Last Mission and things like that. All my history stuff. Because I’m never going to direct X-Men. And X-Men gets you to a level where you can step down to do a Valkyrie. I’m just never going to get there. So I let go of that dream. And in doing that I became a producer on Valkyrie, which led to rewriting Mission: Impossible, which led to Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow. And on Edge of Tomorrow, Tom said, “You should direct the next Mission.”

So I never aimed for that target. I just showed up at work saying how can I help you make your film. How can I help you make your movie better? And not worrying about where the path was taking me.

**John:** That’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Our earlier segments were produced by Megana Rao and Godwin Jabangwe. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Since it’s a throwback episode, let’s do a Matthew Chilelli throwback outro.

If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to feature with Chris McQuarrie and Craig talking about spoof movies. Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Drew:** My pleasure.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, can we skip ahead to something that you know especially well? Spoofs and parodies.

**Craig:** Spoofs and parodies.

**Chris:** Spoofs and parodies.

**John:** So movies like Airplane, Spaceballs, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie series, MacGruber, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Superhero Movie. Tropic Thunder. Shaun of the Dead. Vampires Suck. Austin Powers. Blazing Saddles. We’re not making many of these movies now. And I have a theory why, but I’m curious what your theory is why we don’t make these movies.

**Craig:** As David Zucker would repeatedly say, “Spoof is dead.” And his thing is that he would say spoof is dead, he said it before spoof came back. Spoof was dead. I remember Jim Abrahams saying that he was mixing Mafia, a Jane Austen movie, Jane Austen’s Mafia.

**Chris:** Jane Austen’s Mafia.

**Craig:** And he walked down the hall where they were mixing and on another mixing stage they were mixing There’s Something About Mary. And he just sort of watched a few minutes of it and then went back and said, “Yeah, we’re fucked. Our time is over.”

And it was over. And then the Wayans Brothers brought it back with Scary Movie. But following the success of Scary Movie, and 2, and 3, and 4, there was this sudden – suddenly they were everywhere. And the marketplace was flooded with a lot of cheap stuff. And honestly as one of the people that wrote Scary Movie 3 and 4, I mean, the pressure that we were under from the Weinsteins to make those movies as quickly as possible was brutal. And we couldn’t do them as well as we wanted to do them. And we did them with David Zucker and Pat Proft and Jim Abrahams.

So by the time all that unraveled it was mostly I think killed at the moment by just the marketplace being flooded. But also you got the sense pretty quickly that the Internet was essentially mooting the entire point of this.

**John:** Yes. That was my instinct.

**Craig:** Because every joke, I mean, we used to be like, OK, you want to make fun of this movie. Well, four or five nights from now Leno is going to do the joke. Well, now they’re doing the jokes while they’re watching things. There’s no more time. It’s over.

**Chris:** That’s very true.

**Craig:** It’s over.

**Chris:** Everything is – yeah, the Internet is a spoof.

**Craig:** The Internet is essentially a spoof machine.

**John:** There’s no way to make the movie quick enough to do it. And even like on YouTube they can do the crappy effects version of that joke anyway.

**Chris:** Blazing Saddles is on this list. It is a spoof but it is a spoof with a higher purpose.

**John:** So it’s not a spoof of any one movie, it’s taking genre conventions–

**Craig:** Of a genre.

**Chris:** Of a genre.

**John:** And Shaun of the Dead is a great example of like taking the genre conventions and upending them in a way that’s—

**Chris:** Well that’s a mashup.

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And a great one.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s still I would say really hard now. I mean, Airplane was a direct spoof of a movie called Zero Hour from 1956 or something, or 1955, which no one had seen. That was sort of the oddity of Airplane that they just did this random thing. But somewhere along the line spoofs became connected to either genres as a whole or when it got really bad pop culture. And that’s when it just all to me absolutely fell apart. There’s probably room for somebody to make a spoof of some weird movie that has been forgotten.

**Chris:** Well, but and Austin Powers is taking shots at movies along with Bond. Matt Helm. And some really–

**Craig:** In Like Flint.

**Chris:** Yeah, In Like Flint. When the phone rings, that’s directly taken from In Like Flint.

**John:** But you look at the ones of these that we feel like you could still make is that these films actually have individualized characters who sort of have an arc and have a point of view. And the movie doesn’t exist just to make fun of the movie that came before it. The character is existing within a world and is consistent within a world. So Austin Powers is a spoof of another kind of character, but is also a character himself. And Dr. Evil is a character himself.

**Chris:** Yes. And it’s a time travel comedy in a way. They both are, at least two of the three are.

**Craig:** I mean, the people that kind of come the closest now to doing spoof and parody in their own way is Chris and Phil.

**John:** Lord and Miller. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Lord and Miller in a weird way do. I mean, Lego has certain spoof aspects to it.

**John:** Their Spider Man also has aspects of like it’s an awareness of where this is fitting inside the culture.

**Chris:** Meta.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s meta. Their Jump Street movies are kind of spoofing Jump Street.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Like it’s a self-spoof. But it’s different. It’s not like, I mean, thank god, by the way. Because honestly nothing is harder than writing those things. I will never work harder in my life than I did writing Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4. It was just—

**Chris:** It’s one of the reasons Chernobyl is not as funny.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. It took the jokes out.

**John:** It took all the comedy out.

**Chris:** You didn’t make the effort. I know.

Links:

* Original Chris McQuarrie episodes [300](https://johnaugust.com/2017/from-writer-to-writer-director) and [400](https://johnaugust.com/2019/movies-they-dont-make-anymore)
* [Chris McQuarrie](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/) on IMDb
* [Chris McQuarrie]([https://twitter.com/chrismcquarrie](https://www.instagram.com/christophermcquarrie)) on Instagram
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt (from episodes originally produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and Godwin Jabangwe), and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](https://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/596standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/adapting-your-own-novel).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 584 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, let’s imagine you wrote a bestselling novel. Everyone wants to turn your book into a movie or TV series, but you decide no, you really want to do it yourself. How would you even begin? On the show today, we have someone who faced that exact scenario and absolutely killed it. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is the writer of Fleishman Is in Trouble, both the book and the limited series, and now she’s here with us. Welcome, Taffy.

**Taffy Brodesser-Akner:** Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.

**John:** I watched your show and I immediately knew that I wanted you on. You’ve done so much press and publicity for this. I’m sure you’re absolutely exhausted, but we’ll talk about some different things than I think you probably talked about on any of your other 19 podcasts, interviews, articles, I hope.

**Taffy:** This week, and it’s Monday.

**John:** This week. It’s only Monday. I want to get into how this became a book and then became a series, but I also want to look at characters and really dig into what characters are trying to conceal and protect, which I think is a really interesting lens to dig into for Fleishman, how you tackled making a series and running a series when you’ve never done it before. Plus, Megana has picked some questions that are going to be really good for you to answer, just because you know special new things.

Let’s get into it. Taffy, talk to us about Fleishman Is in Trouble. I had not read the book. I had just started watching the series on Hulu, loved it, caught up all of it so I could watch the finale in real time as it was happening. My husband and I set aside time to make sure we watched it live and real. What is the genesis for Fleishman? Where did the notion first come to tell the story?

**Taffy:** That is a great question. Thank you. I am a journalist first. I was working at GQ and the New York Times. I have contracts with both of the magazines. One day, around the time when I was 40 or 41, suddenly all of my friends started coming to me and telling me that they were getting divorced. It got to the point where I knew that if I hadn’t heard from somebody in a few months or in a year, they were going to tell me that they were getting divorced. Nobody ever comes to you and tells you they’re divorced in a weepy way. They tell you when they’re ready to tell you. I would sit down with each of them.

I was so interested in this, mostly because I come from a family of colossal divorce. We’re the greatest divorcers in I want to say the East Coast, but I’ve also lived in California, so I’m going to say we’re the greatest. We’re number one.

**John:** Absolutely. Any coast, you’re number one. Would you say you’re a family that’s very likely to end up in divorce? Is that why you’re the greatest?

**Taffy:** Statistically. I have three sisters. Two of them are divorced, one of them for a second time. My parents are divorced. My mother divorced the man she remarried. I have a sister who is ultra-Orthodox, and she is married. We all work hard.

We all work hard, the fact of marriage, because we have all observed the same thing, and this is what I was observing then, which is that all these people, they were as happy as I was on my wedding day. What happens with marriage is that it’s two people, and therefore it’s a kind of sedition to ever talk about your marriage. Therefore, when there are problems, you don’t know if your problems are bigger than other people’s. You read between tea leaves. How many metaphors is that?

**John:** You were reading tea leaves.

**Taffy:** That was several. You’re welcome.

**John:** You read between the lines or you read tea leaves.

**Taffy:** That’s how bad it was. I was reading between the tea leaves and trying to figure out how can I escape this fate and what is new about divorce, how did I get to the age where people were getting divorced, what is new about it.

Also, they would show me their phones, and their phones were wild. They had apps where they were… My gift is efficiency, like an economy of motion. I could walk through my apartment and everything is where it needs to be. It’s my only economic skill. I looked at these phones, how you were allowed to date now without going somewhere, without showing up, without getting dressed, and all I wanted was to hear stories about it. The thing I thought was, I will go to GQ, and I will tell this story, because that’s what I do. I tell the story at GQ.

**John:** That was my question, is because you were hearing these tales, and you’re a journalist, so naturally, this is a great story to report.

**Taffy:** I called my editor one day after seeing the most recent friend’s phone. I was like, “We have to do this story about how people are dating on their phones now.” He said to me, “You don’t always sound like a middle-aged housewife, but right now you do. Our readers wouldn’t even… They’ve never dated other than that. They wouldn’t even understand it.”

I had a first-generation Jdate account. My handle was matzahbride. We had advanced so far to the point where now I have these amazingly beautiful friends who can’t even get eye contact at a restaurant, because it’s not protocol. It’s almost like Edith Wharton’s New York, where you’re not allowed to go over to someone anymore.

I called up my editor, and he was like, “This is not a good idea.” I was about to call my editor at the New York Times Magazine, because that’s how my contract went, that if GQ didn’t want a story, the New York Times could have it. Right before I did, I thought about what a New York Times Magazine story was going to look like with this. It was following some guy for a year, implicating his ex-wife and his poor children, him pulling out right at the end, and it being a sad story, when it’s not sad. It’s really wonderful when people free themselves from something that isn’t working for them.

I sat down at a Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan and I started writing. I can’t remember if I had 10 or 30 pages. I’m a very fast writer. I can’t remember if I had 10 or 30 pages by that first day, but I had them. They didn’t change once. I wrote this as a novel.

**John:** You have all this experience of your own family, all of your friends. You’re describing this as this new world of dating, divorced people, apps and stuff. That’s in Fleishman Is in Trouble, but that’s not the bulk of Fleishman Is in Trouble. Fleishman Is in Trouble ultimately is a… There’s a mystery to it, what actually happened. There’s the contrasting notions of whose story it even really is. Did you know that as you started to do these first 10 or 30 pages? Were you discovering it as you wrote it?

**Taffy:** I thought I was going to write something that was a meditation on marriage, but what it turned out to be was… In journalism, I write mainly profiles.

**John:** I’d actually like to get into that for the Bonus Segment. I really want to talk about the celebrity profile. Let’s dig into that in the Bonus.

**Taffy:** Gotta be a Premium Member to hear all about the profiles. I’m a Premium Member by the way. I’ll be able to listen.

**John:** Thank you.

**Taffy:** I know that novels are hard to write. The way I kept this in my head as a manageable project that I was doing while I was also still writing for GQ and the New York Times, was to think of it as a profile. Then the same thing happened while I was writing it that happened in every profile I wrote, which was that I started to wonder what the other people in the story would say, which is a crisis of journalism.

It’s 2016. One of the places I work, the New York Times in particular, is being crucified and berated for not having covered the country well enough. Then once they start, people are angry that they’re covering the country well enough. You can’t do a profile on a Nazi.

I thought about profiles in general. My personal crisis in profiles is that there is no way to tell a story about somebody without creating sympathy for them. The minute somebody takes up the mantle of telling somebody’s story, there is no way around sympathy. Sometimes when you make people feel sympathy for people they don’t want to feel sympathy for, they hate you for it.

I don’t do a lot of politics, so my personal crisis around this was, I’m listening to a celebrity, he’s talking about his ex-wife, for example, and everyone knows who his ex-wife is. He’s talking about his new wife and how happy he is. He’s implicating the ex-wife. You start to think, should I call the first wife? I don’t know. Some people say yes, but I say anyway.

**John:** Let’s talk about the characters you chose to embody these different points of view. We have Toby. He is newly-ish divorced as the story started. He’s a dad with two kids that he shares with Rachel, his ex-wife.

At what point in writing the novel did you know that these two central characters were actually going to be narrated, their story of what’s actually happened was going to be narrated by a third person? Was that third person always you? Because she seems like a placeholder for you in that she is also a journalist working at a men’s magazine. When did you know those three characters were going to be the people we would follow through the story?

**Taffy:** I always knew that the Libby character was narrating the book. In the first place, I had done it as a third-person book. Then at the end you would realize that one of the characters had narrated the book or had written this book. Everyone I gave it to, all these smart readers, did not realize that, so I had to go through and change it and make her into a first-person character. I always knew that. I always knew this was going to be written.

There’s a famous thing of journalists and their first novels. Usually, it is so close to the thing that they do. Whereas you would think it might be about celebrity that I would do this, actually it was about profile writing, because the reason I write about celebrities is mostly because that’s what people are interested in. I think I’m a partisan of the profile but not necessarily the celebrities.

**John:** When you’re writing a profile though of a person, you are reporting facts. Basically, you’re seeing stuff. You’re getting the interviews. You’re figuring that stuff out. With the case of Toby Fleishman, he is a hepatologist. He’s a liver doctor.

**Taffy:** He’s a liver doctor.

**John:** He’s a liver doctor. He’s not a real person. Were you interviewing real liver doctors to figure out what they need to do? What was the decision to make him this medical specialty?

**Taffy:** I’m a Jewish woman in New York. I have all sorts of specialists at my fingertips. I called up a few doctors and asked, “What is a disease you could have where if somebody had looked at you more closely, they could’ve seen it, if someone were paying attention, they would’ve seen your disease?”

There were two of them. One of them was an osteo disease where you have blue sclera. Bone doctors are not so interesting. Personally, I’m sure they’re fine. The liver is a very romantic organ. It regenerates once it’s injured. It forgives you. I just fell in love with this disease.

**John:** Metaphorically, it works really well.

**Taffy:** It just worked very well. I have a friend who’s a nephrologist, which is close enough, because there are very few hepatologists. It’s literally close enough. Abdominally, it’s close enough. He guided me through this. I read all about it. I’ve since gotten a lot of letters from liver doctors who… You talk about representation. All seven of them feel very seen.

**John:** You knew who Toby was. When did you decide Rachel’s arc? We’re going to go in very light on spoilers for this episode, because we want people to watch this.

**Taffy:** Do it. Good. Thank you.

**John:** When did you know that Rachel was going to be missing and what had actually happened? It very much feels like in the early portions of the story that this could be like she’s dead in a ditch someplace.

**Taffy:** I had to work so hard to signal to the… I always picture the reader or the viewer as someone who’s about to be disappointed, who could cut and run at any moment. I was so worried about a Gone Girl, like, “Oh, am I reading Gone Girl?” and the marketing of the book and all of that. It was so important that we not convey any sort of thriller aspect of it, which is why…

I’ll tell you, in the book, the reason I did that, the reason she’s missing is because I could write forever. I have a million words in my fingers. If I didn’t have a plot… At a newspaper, I have a limit on the amount of space I’m given. I go for twice that much. Then in this, it could’ve gone on forever. I needed a plot.

The plot is, what if this inconsiderate ex-wife… Because all of the wives from all of the ex-husbands I was hearing from, they were all so inconsiderate. The husbands were angry, and the wives were inconsiderate. If you’re a journalist and you’re looking for the common theme of everything, it was the husbands were angry but also wanted to know why their wives were so angry all the time. Anyway, [inaudible 00:14:29].

**John:** Early on, you knew that was going to be the plot. You knew that ultimately the story was going to be told by Libby, and so you had to go back through and make sure the reader understood that Libby was telling the story. Ultimately, and this may be different for the series than for the book, you realize the whole reason we’re actually hearing this story is because Libby is going through her own crisis.

**Taffy:** It’s exactly the same. You have not seen a book and TV experience that are redundant like they are. You have read the book, John. The reveal is, you’ve read the book.

**John:** You’ve read the book. That’s a very natural segue into really this process of adaptation. You’ve written the book. You’ve found the right publishing house for it. It goes out. It becomes a huge success. People in Hollywood immediately start wanting to say, “Oh, let’s adapt this into a book or into a movie.” What were those sorts of calls like? What were you thinking about early on? I’m sure even when you first turned in the manuscript and you got the initial reaction from editors, publishers, you knew that somebody was going to want to make this into something. What were your instincts, and what were those first calls like?

**Taffy:** I didn’t think anybody would want… I thought it was too internal a story. I have friends who have written novels. I saw the kind of thing that was getting optioned. Rachel is a theater agent. This story is, in the end, so much about middle age. I don’t want the listener here to be cynical, but if you are looking to reach the Hollywood optioning segment-

**John:** Put an agent there, yeah.

**Taffy:** Middle-age, wealthy people, also an agent. That’s what I think happened, because I can never say to myself, “Hey, maybe you wrote a good book.” I’m just incapable of that. Probably I had quadrants. It’s a three-quadrant book.

**John:** You have Craig Mazin Disease, where you don’t believe that anything you did was actually good in and of itself. That was just some sort of dumb luck or-

**Taffy:** I was looking forward to talking to Craig about that.

**John:** Craig is off doing press for his show now [crosstalk 00:16:32].

**Taffy:** He’s off telling people that nothing he did was good.

**John:** Yeah, that’s what it is.

**Taffy:** I understand that. Here’s what happened. In the interim, when I wrote the book… The thing you didn’t ask… You’re asking very dignified questions about plot, but you’re not asking the undignified questions about financial desperation.

I was a very good freelancer. I made my year every year. Then April would come, and I’d realize, “Oh my god, I have to pay for camp.” Camp always blindsided me. Always 17 times more than you think it should be. Sometimes I would teach a class. This year I decided I’m finishing this novel. I knew for sure that I was a journalist that enough people were interested in, because I was having meetings with publishing houses about nonfiction books that I didn’t want to write. I knew that I could sell a book for camp tuition. I was just going to do that. I sell this book.

In the interim, the New York Times hires me full-time. I get hired. I start doing more interviews. I put the book, even though the revisions are due, on the side, because I have this new job, this new, big job. One day, I interview Jimmy Buffett, not Warren Buffett, but Jimmy Buffett.

**John:** I know Jimmy Buffett.

**Taffy:** Of course, but the story I’m going to tell you, you’re going to be like, “Did she mean Warren Buffett?” because I started talking to him about money.

**John:** Jimmy Buffett is also a theater producer. He was one of the producers on Big Fish, and so I know him through that context.

**Taffy:** Was he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Taffy:** That’s amazing.

**John:** It’s a weird, small world.

**Taffy:** I loved the Big Fish musical. When they’re running at the end… Anyway, I talked to him about money, because it seems to me that he has created this laid-back lifestyle that he now has to support with constant work. I say to him, “I’m having this struggle myself, Jimmy Buffett, where I feel that I’m successful, but I’m broke. Why am I broke all the time?” He said, “Margaritaville, when I wrote that song, I saw the reaction to it and I knew it was going to be a child that supported me in my old age.”

**John:** Wow.

**Taffy:** I cartoon-like ran out of the room. There’s dust there. I go to do my revisions, because I realize Fleishman is going to be a child that supports me in my old age, no matter what it does. If it sells three copies, it could become something. If you’re wondering if I remember the question, I do not.

I go and I do and I hand in my revisions. I’m still at the Times. People start calling. So many people start calling. That I had never pictured. People are telling me what it means to them. I call my husband, and I say, “Claud, I had a child that’s going to support us in our old age.” People start talking about what they would like to do with it. I think I’ve had enough magazine stories optioned that I have a real zen about it. Once you sell it, it is no longer yours. You just have to deal with that.

All of these great writers are talking to me. They have such good intentions. All I could think of is, A, I’m jealous, and B, that’s not how you do this. You like this for the wrong reasons. I don’t ever say that out loud, and I hope none of them are listening, though I’m now thinking about the logic of that. Whoever’s listening, it wasn’t you.

**John:** All of them had fantastic ideas that were great.

**Taffy:** They were fine ideas. Their ideas were great. Then I get a call from my agent. I said, “I’m in the middle of a Marianne Williamson story.” Then I’m in the middle of a Tom Hanks story. I go to Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks tries to option Fleishman. I said, “I can’t even listen to you.” It’s crazy. I’m like in a movie about someone who wrote a book.

Then I get a call from Sarah Timberman and Susannah Grant. Of course, those two are absolute legends. I took the call just to have the call and tell them how much I love them. The first thing they said was, “How are you thinking about this as a screenplay or a TV show?” I said, “No one had asked me what I think, but it can’t be a screenplay, because you need a certain amount of time with Toby, so that you could really become partisan to his side. That is time. I can’t think of a narrative trick that would do that, other than pure here’s six episodes. You need to commit to the bit.” They said to me, “You would have to write it.” I cannot tell you how low the threshold was to me believing. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you’re right. I do have to write it. I do have to write it.”

I said, “If it’s going to be a TV show… “ I write alone. I’m very concerned with people liking me. I know that if I’m in a writers’ room and people have ideas, I’ll be more concerned with not putting down their ideas. I hear stories about how people feel bad all the time in writers’ rooms, and feel good, but I’m so worried about the feeling bad. I said, “I could write it by myself.” They said, “It’s a lot to do.” I said, “I’m a newspaper reporter,” which is not true. I’m a leisurely magazine writer, but I pull out, “I’m a newspaper reporter,” when it’s convenient.

**John:** You wrote 30 pages in a sitting.

**Taffy:** I am a very fast typer. I can write as quickly as I talk, but I can’t read as quickly as I talk. What is that? Another bonus segment for another time.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Taffy:** Everyone else fell away. Everyone was so wonderful. The people who made it to the end, I said to my agent, “Tell everyone that I’m writing it myself,” because there were still all of these bidders. Immediately, half of them were like, “No, thank you. We’re out.” Sarah and Susannah just… I now know the kinds of conversations that must have gone on.

In fact, I will tell you that when it came down to shooting it, Sarah Timberman left her home in California and moved to New York for the year to be on set with me every day, which I had first thought was wonderful fun and now realize must have been a negotiation with the network and the studio who were like, “Are you crazy?”

**John:** She was the [crosstalk 00:23:36].

**Taffy:** She’s like, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” There are a lot of promises that are made in that stage of optioning, and they kept every single one to me. That’s what happened.

**John:** Susannah Grant, former fill-in cohost of Scriptnotes. She’s went out to Austin Film Festival. Good person, screenwriter. For folks who don’t know her credits, she did the Julia Roberts movie, Erin Brokovich, but she’s also done-

**Taffy:** It’s the Steven Soderbergh movie. Back then, the idea of a woman writing a muscular movie like that was mind-blowing.

**John:** She also had a really great series that at that time would’ve just come out on Netflix, which was terrific.

**Taffy:** Unbelievable. It was both of them. It was Sarah and Susannah. This was what they were going to do next. Unbelievable, you couldn’t stop clicking to the next thing. Even though my husband and I do not love a sexual assault show right before bed, we couldn’t stop.

**John:** Not the ideal time. You had never written a novel before. It turned out great. You had never written a TV show before. How was that process? How did you learn about the actual mechanics of a TV script? You’d read a thousand novels. Had you read the teleplay form before?

**Taffy:** John, I learned it by watching you. I’m not even kidding. I’ll tell you. I went to NYU for dramatic writing, and I learned how to write spec scripts for sitcoms. Then I was so quickly unsuccessful at it that I went into… I saw an ad for a soap opera magazine in the New York Times, and I went and worked there. Everything changed. I would read screenplays a lot. I love reading screenplays. Also, I have a little group of film critics that I hang out with. We table read screenplays sometimes.

**John:** Wow. That’s really nerdy. No one does that.

**Taffy:** It’s the nerdiest. Just throw us in a locker. We just sit there. We started with Michael Clayton during the pandemic. I would read these things. I think that my journalism was successful because I paid attention to storytelling. First of all, you can in a profile, because it doesn’t have the same news imperative that everything else does. The idea of a beginning and a middle and an end and suspense and callbacks, those were things that I knew were successful through journalism, that I had learned through screenwriting. Also, I have listened to every episode of this podcast.

**John:** Oh my gosh.

**Megana Rao:** Wow.

**Taffy:** I even listened to the compendium ones that are collections of the thing I just heard.

**John:** The Megana specials.

**Taffy:** I love those. I love those. I loved seeing Megana’s rise to on-air personality. I love all of it. I read a lot. Then I had Sarah and Susannah. I don’t know what other producers are like, but I know that there’s a variation in editors. They read everything. There was no feeling bad about getting it wrong. The first script had 20 pages of VoiceOver in what I now see as a hilarious way but at first was like, “What do you mean? I thought we said we were doing VoiceOver.”

It was not easy for me. It was not an easy adaptation for me. The book was already written. When it came down to it, I knew what the moments in the book were where you would maybe end an episode, although the question I had before is how do you make this not suspenseful? I was going to have three episodes before Rachel was spotted. Sarah and Susannah launched a real campaign to talk me down to two. They were correct to do that.

**John:** Let’s talk about the breaking down of what was going to happen when. Was that a process that was entirely you? Was that with Sarah and Susannah, the three of you together at the whiteboard, figuring out how things split up?

**Taffy:** First of all, it very much follows the book. Second, we were supposed to get I guess green-lit is the word, which I literally thought someone was going to call up and scream, “You’re green-lit!” or something or a light would show up. It does not happen that way. You just have your lawyer and your agent check in 20 times.

The pandemic happened. I thought, “I’ll go back to the New York Times, because New York Times probably needs/wants me or tolerates me or is obligated to me or can’t fire me because I’m union.” FX, which was very enthusiastic about Fleishman, all of their blood cells will go to the shows that are already in production. It was such a crisis. I also knew that if I went back to the Times and I was on a story, this pandemic was only going to last six or seven weeks.

**John:** Totally.

**Taffy:** I was asked, “What if we assemble a mini room?” I had listened to all of the Scriptnotes episodes. I said, “I don’t know if that’s okay. Is it okay to have all of these writers do this?” The answer was, sometimes writers like to do a thing like this in between projects or maybe just for… Everyone in there was far more experienced than I was. That’s first of all. It’s a few weeks. It’s a pandemic. You don’t know who needs health insurance. Also, what we decided was that whatever happened, they would get credit on the show. We would negotiate for their credit so that they would not be this anonymous group.

**John:** Great.

**Taffy:** I’ve heard this on Scriptnotes. Susannah and Sarah were like, “Whatever happens… “

**John:** Those folks would get some sort of producer credit on the show, even if they [crosstalk 00:29:31].

**Taffy:** We couldn’t give them a producer credit unless they came and rendered-

**John:** Actually produced, yeah.

**Taffy:** We made them into consultants, although one of them, the Cindy Chupack, came and was a co-executive producer. I have minders on the set for the fact that I’d never done this before. We talked and talked. It was such a beautiful experience. It was like my book had all of these best friends. We talked about what we could change and what could be different. Ultimately, I left it with, no, the book is enough.

The book is written in such a way… By the way, you didn’t read the book, though you did because you watched the show. It really does follow. Everything happens in the same order. There is no trick that’s different. In the show, there’s a deepening of one of the tricks, but I don’t want to spoil it. In the Bonus Segment, I’ll spoil it. You can opt in or out at the very end.

**John:** Is it Toby’s daughter that was [inaudible 00:30:29] changed?

**Taffy:** The only thing that’s changed, you’re right, is that while I was doing this, I was in this mini room for 10 weeks, I was planning my son’s bar mitzvah. We would talk about it. I would cry in the mini room, which I guess is de rigueur for someone in a mini room.

**John:** Very common, yeah.

**Taffy:** Then I ended up inviting them all to the Zoom bar mitzvah. I didn’t know that this bar mitzvah would be such a big deal for me. I wrote it in. You’re right. That’s the only thing that’s different in the show.

**John:** Great. I only know that because I listened to you on the Slate Working podcast, which I listen to all the time.

**Taffy:** I love that Working podcast.

**John:** I actually TED Talked about doing some Working podcasts. There was a transition point, because remember [inaudible 00:31:14] he created the Working podcast and would interview waiters and such. I just loved it back when it was still just like… People’s jobs weren’t even creative or fancy jobs, just normal people jobs. I had a few conversations about maybe doing some Working episodes, but that never came to be.

**Taffy:** You mean on that podcast?

**John:** On that podcast. I would just be like David Plotz. I would be the interviewer, because I love interviewing people about what they do.

**Taffy:** You’re great at it. I think we should talk to them.

**John:** We should talk more about that.

**Taffy:** Let’s have a call after this.

**John:** Just because I’m curious about how things work with other people, what was it like for you to be on set? I remember my first time on set was on the movie Go. I remember walking up, being like, “Man, there’s a lot of trucks around. I wonder what’s going on.” It’s like, “Oh, crap, these are here to make my movie,” and just feeling like, “Oh, am I allowed to eat this craft service?” It was crazy. By the next day, I was shooting second unit, because we were already four days behind somehow.

**Taffy:** “By the second day, I was firing the craft services people, and I was like, ‘How dare you?’”

**John:** How did you navigate suddenly you’re in production? I recognize the directors on the show. You had really very smart directors working on the show.

**Taffy:** The greatest. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were our first block directors. Alice Wu was our second episode director. Then Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman did four episodes. John and Val did three. They all knew that they were with somebody who was an authority on the material and yet would not know half the words they were using.

It’s funny. Being a completist of your podcast, I used to think it was so gracious when you would say “our movie.” I thought, “That’s so nice. I would be saying ‘my movie.’” No, it really is our thing. I had this authority on the material. I was always there. I was there for every minute of shooting, except I attended one parent-teacher conference.

Everyone was extraordinarily kind to me. The minute I walked onto set, the one thing I understood immediately was that there was not even pretending I knew what I was doing, that it would be an insult. The PAs were more experienced than I was. It would be an insult to everybody if I… I’ve never even been anyone’s boss.

It’s pretty profound to suddenly be in charge of making decisions about material, because I didn’t realize that once you’re in production, so many of the decisions are about people’s welfare, not just their safety. Everyone’s concerned with safety. The first AD is always concerned with safety. I had these great first ADs, Adam Escott and Vanessa Hoffman, who also understood that I didn’t know anything and would explain things to me. No one had to explain anything quietly in a corner, because I was not embarrassed to not be an authority on this. I was apologetic. I didn’t want to slow us down more than I had to.

You’re looked at with so much authority for the first time. I’m used to being the scrappy person in the middle of the night, closing a story at the New York Times, saying, “What if we make the picture smaller, then I get some more words in there?” The answer to the nature of that ridiculous question is, “Yes, we’ll do whatever we can to help you.” Then you realize, that means that that guy who lives in New Jersey won’t get home, and that even though there are those rules, there are not really that many rules.

Right before, there was talk of an IATSE strike. Then when I got on set, I was shocked to see what a set is. I’m a newspaper reporter for this conversation. I couldn’t believe how long the hours were and how efficient it’s made for the sake of cost-effectiveness and time and getting people out and getting actors to their next projects and making sure that you have room in case someone gets COVID or everyone gets COVID. I found it so shocking and scary.

I was very lucky that Sarah Timberman was there with me every day. I was very lucky that she made sure that Cindy Chupack and also our consultant producer Becky Mode were there, because I instantly went to, “Let’s just send everyone home. I’ll cut this all into a dream sequence, and you send everyone home.”

I had to also learn to create efficiency. I want to tell you, on a craft level, what that meant was that… The first few episodes I had written had a lot of scenes. People would say, “These are big scripts.” I’d say, “Thank you,” not really knowing what that meant.

**John:** A ton of scenes, or was the script itself long?

**Taffy:** No, it was not long. It was not long.

**John:** It wasn’t long. It was a lot of short scenes.

**Taffy:** It was a lot of short scenes. Once I saw, wait, so that’s how long it takes for these hardworking people, there are nine of them, to set the lighting up and to change an outfit, and wait, you need a new outfit, the mechanics, the absolute physics of it were so shocking to me in a way that I don’t… I guess I never really thought it would happen, and I didn’t think about the practicalities of it. Starting in Episode 4, which we’re on set by then, the scenes start getting longer, because also, I start to see what actors are capable of.

**John:** I suppose you were trying to control everything from the page originally and just making sure that everything was exactly how you envisioned it, and you realized when you actually had people doing things that you don’t necessarily need to have all of the little short scenes and obviously all of the VoiceOver, because I know that the VoiceOver, you’ve said it before, drops down dramatically once we get to Episode 4.

**Taffy:** By the way, then I see these actors who are so amazing at talking to each other. I start putting in these eight-minute scenes that then they kindly make fun of me for, because that’s a lot. I have to say, I’ve seen the show, and I feel like each one of them works. These actors are really good at being watchable.

**John:** Now, Taffy, as a longtime listener to this show, you know that something that Craig and I both enjoy doing is playing Dungeons and Dragons. We talk about Dungeons and Dragons repeatedly on this.

**Taffy:** Yes, I do. I have questions about it, because I cannot believe that you have room for hobbies. I cannot believe it.

**John:** We have new next-door neighbors who moved in during the pandemic. They had us over for dinner one time. They said, “Can we ask you a question? Why on Thursday nights is that upstairs office light on until midnight every Thursday night?” It’s like, “That’s because that’s when John plays D and D, every Thursday night from 8 p.m. to midnight. That’s D and D, of course,” which we play on Zoom. Even when Craig is gone for recording a podcast, like today, the Thursday game is probably going to happen.

**Taffy:** Wow.

**John:** We do prioritize that.

**Taffy:** Good for him.

**John:** It’s important. I was reading a new D and D book over the weekend called How to Defend Your Lair. It’s the third book in a series called The Monsters Know What They’re Doing by Keith Ammann. What’s fascinating about his book is he’s talking about all characters, whether they are little monsters or bandits or kings, they all are trying to protect something. In the case of D and D, they’re trying to protect their life, they’re trying to protect their loot, they’re trying to protect some lore.

I was thinking about this interview I was going to have with you. It feels like the characters in Fleishman are desperately trying to protect things. In trying to protect things, they end up making some bad choices. I look at Toby. Toby’s trying to protect his kids, obviously. He’s trying to protect his career. He’s juggling how to protect both his career and this. He wants to protect his ex-wife to some degree. Also, he wants to protect his own identity and sense of self-worth, of self-identity. Can we take a look at the characters in Fleishman from what they’re trying to protect? Is that a useful way to think about the choices and the motivations characters make?

**Taffy:** That’s so interesting. Yes, because so much of Fleishman is about protecting your point of view. The thing that Fleishman ultimately is about, and I have 20 answers for that, but in this case the thing that Fleishman is ultimately about is the fact that everybody has a point of view about what happened, and everyone deserves for it to be heard. The consumer of the story is not fully informed unless she knows all of those points of view.

This goes back to magazine interviewing. If you don’t ask too many questions of somebody, if you don’t just bombard them with all the questions, and you just let talk, you see that people form the thing they’re saying to you as a case that they’re making. Everyone is making a case to their righteousness even when they know they’re wrong. They’re not lying. They’re saying, “Here’s why I’m a defensible person.” Everyone in Fleishman just wants to protect the idea that their crisis is legitimate, that their point of view is valid. That’s all.

**John:** With the case of Rachel, who makes the decision to drop off her kids and disappears, she is trying to protect her career, obviously. She’s trying to protect her trauma to some degree. She’s trying to protect that the reason she ended up this way was because of something that somebody else had done and it wasn’t entirely her fault.

**Taffy:** I would go even further and say that what Rachel is trying to say and how Libby builds her story when she speaks on her behalf, is not that the thing that happens to her is her trauma. I’ve never spoken about this before. I feel like her trauma is a lifetime of abandonment, the apex of which was the thing that happened to her.

We are not led to believe that the divorce is as big a crisis for Rachel as it is for Toby. Then we find out that, no, all the more so, not only is she divorced, but she’s abandoned. She’s been abandoned since her mother died. She’s been abandoned since she was in the hospital room trying to give birth. The thing I guess she’s trying to protect is that she wasn’t as bad as she’s being made out to be. I guess we all are.

**John:** She’s trying to protect this little flicker that’s still inside her that she identifies as herself. Her primal scream is about trying to rekindle that or at least protect that little thing.

**Taffy:** In the last episode, Toby says to Libby, “You were supposed to be my friend.” That is like what is the essence of friendship. It’s that I have decided that your version of things is that version. That’s friendship, right?

**John:** Aw. We could obviously go on for another hour here, but we have some questions from listeners that we thought would be really good for you to answer with us, because you’ve listened to [crosstalk 00:42:30].

**Taffy:** I know. I’ll make sure I’m not even redundant.

**John:** Let’s start with Martin from Australia. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Martin asks, “I was reflecting on iconic character names such as Ellen Ripley, Hans Gruber, and Travis Bickle, and I’m interested in your thoughts about how to choose an apt character name in a screenplay. Is a name something that organically occurs to you? How far can you take creative license in the choice of a name without it feeling like an artifice? Is there anything specific to think about when choosing a name?”

**John:** Taffy, talk to us about the names that you chose for these characters, because in journalism, you’re stuck with the names people have in real life. For this you had free reign. Were these the original names for all these characters?

**Taffy:** These were the original names for all these characters. There was some push back to changing Toby Fleishman’s name because it was too New Yorky. Does anyone know what that’s code for?

**John:** I think we all know what that’s code for.

**Taffy:** I’m very interested in a real name and not a forgettable name. John Ryan is a very strong guy, but he was born to be strong. Toby Fleishman was born to lose.

**John:** Born to be overlooked there. Character names we talked about on the show before. When I was picking the names for Arlo Finch, I couldn’t start writing until I knew the names for each of those characters and made sure that they were each distinctive, that you weren’t going to get any of them confused or conflated between the two of them. I think you were doing the thing where none of the central characters have the same first letter of their name. You’re not going to blur them and forget them because of that. It’s very confusing that Libby is played by Lizzy Caplan. How often on set did you say Libby versus Lizzy and mean the wrong thing?

**Taffy:** Always, and nobody cared, because we were talking about the same person.

**John:** In the edit, did you ever find moments where they referred to her as Lizzy rather than Libby? Did that ever happen?

**Taffy:** Never. Never once. Never once.

**John:** Professionals you hired.

**Taffy:** I had all professionals.

**John:** That’s the trick.

**Megana:** Wait, so was Toby the name that you initially had during that time you were writing at Le Pain Quotidien?

**Taffy:** Yes. It was the first thing I put down was the messiness of names and the way Jews in general are named after people. Rachel is Rachel because you end up with a biblical name. Libby is the most Jewish form of Elizabeth. Toby is just a name that someone was like, “I guess we have to name this person after this person.” Then Fleishman, I liked something that couldn’t have been conceived as a character name, like Lipschitz. I would’ve done Lipschitz in a minute, but I was given good advice that you need people to be able to search it.

**John:** Also, I think Chicago has claimed Lipschitz forever. (singing)

**Taffy:** Lipschitz.

**John:** Lipschitz. It’s important. What is Taffy short for?

**Taffy:** Stephanie.

**John:** Stephanie. How long have you been a Taffy versus a Stephanie?

**Taffy:** I was named after a Taffy whose name was Stephanie but had been called Taffy from the time she was young, because her brother couldn’t pronounce her name. I was named after her, so I was named Stephanie but always called Taffy. However, what Taffy is to Stephanie, other than me, everyone’s who’s a Taffy from Stephanie, that’s their story. I know this because I’m in a Facebook group for people whose name is Taffy. I was added to it. We all just give testimony.

**John:** Love it.

**Megana:** Aldo asks, “While watching Deep Impact, in the scene in which Oren begins to go into the recently bored hole, we hear Andrea say, ‘Suit pressure 3.5.’ I imagine the dialog is not there necessarily to drive the story, but rather just to embellish the technical aspect of the scene. We always hear you say the dialog should drive the story. With that in mind, how do we strike a balance between dialog that drives a story and dialog that only dresses up the scene?”

**John:** That’s actually a really nice question from Aldo, because yeah, screenplays are also full of stuff that is there because it’s real and because the characters would actually say it in the moment. Taffy, in your show, there’s a medical aspect to it, but it’s not ER. It’s not full of a lot of doctor jargon. There’d have to be some moments that just feel… How did you think about that? How did you balance this is what they would actually need to say in the moment, even if it’s not on character?

**Taffy:** I had a medical consultant who helped us. We were so concerned with what this isn’t. It isn’t Gone Girl, but it also isn’t a medical procedural. Once we got on set, Rob and Shari, John and Val, they expressed concern in the first day we were shooting hospital scenes, that this seemed too much like a hospital show and that it would be misleading in the pilot, or a medical mystery. Right then, we inserted the idea that they speak in hospital drama cliches. They say back and forth to each other, “Don’t you die on me,” or, “I’m not here to play God.” That was born on the set out of that crisis.

**John:** Great, so just actually to put a hat on it so that everyone sees they’re aware of these things would be.

**Taffy:** We get it. We’re sorry. We get it, and we’re sorry.

**John:** Let’s see if we can get one more question in here.

**Megana:** Chris asks, “I loved watching The Bear and thought it worked really well as a series of mostly half-hour shows. In the UK we’ve also recently had Mammals by Jez Butterworth, another half-hour show. I’d be really interested in why these writers chose this length, even when free from the constraints of a linear TV schedule. What do they feel it gave them? What are the challenges? Half-hours are the traditional length for comedies, which often feel baggy when they’re longer. It’s also the classic length for soap operas, but most UK and US dramas tend to be an hour or more. Does it also say something about the way that we consume shows these days that people are looking at the half-hour again?”

**John:** Taffy, for Fleishman Is in Trouble, how long are the episodes? Did you have to hit a certain length?

**Taffy:** I was told to stay in the 40s to 50s mark, although Episode 7, I think it’s 70 minutes. We couldn’t find anything to cut from it. I think that the answer to this… By the way, I’m watching with a newly critical eye about, in awards season, how things are classified. Transparent was a comedy, a devastating, devastating comedy.

I think it actually has to do with money. It is less expensive to shoot half the amount of stuff, but you have to have enough episodes to make it worth it. I wonder if 30 minutes is a hedge. I think that people really do begin with wondering what the story needs. If you look at The Bear, I do wonder one of the many reasons it landed so electrically is that it was I this one claustrophobic location. I wonder if that would’ve felt too much one place, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** From early discussions with Sarah and Susannah, did you always know it was about 40 minutes? Did FX tell you that you don’t have to do classic act-outs, but there will have to be moments where commercials could be inserted?

**Taffy:** No. They told us there would not have to be that. Then when Hulu came in, they were like, “We have some news.” We didn’t have to write toward. We just had to find the places. We had great editors who found the most painless places for that. I will say that I don’t know anyone who has ever heard one of my 80-word sentences… I don’t think anyone looked at me and said, “That’s going to be a pithy half-hour.”

**John:** When you’re talking about the length of things, we tend to think of comedies being a half-hour.

**Taffy:** You know what? We’ve thrown out so many rules.

**John:** We have.

**Taffy:** Now we’re hostage to these awards categories. That’s what it really is. I’ll let you finish, because it’s your podcast.

**John:** Fleishman could be seen as a comedy. There are episodes like, “Oh, that’s funny.” You have people who are talented at being funny, at yet also it does not feel like a comedy. I could see the argument for choosing to enter it as a comedy, the same way Transparent was technically a comedy.

**Taffy:** That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll call someone after this and ask about that. I think it’s just entered as limited series, which eradicates all of that.

**John:** Nice.

**Taffy:** I don’t know, because I also think that it’s a very specific thing. It has a precedent. It has a Woody Allen, Erica Jong, the New York, divorced sex, Jewish comedy that’s also devastating and hopeless and sad has a precedent. I did not pave this ground myself. I guess the word sometimes is dramedy. I always feel dramedies are lighter. I feel Fleishman is a little devastating. I don’t know. All these rules are being thrown out. Why are there still any remaining?

**John:** Get rid of everything.

**Taffy:** Burn it down.

**John:** The first dramedy I remember was Thirtysomething, which I can see the argument for-

**Taffy:** I love Thirtysomething.

**John:** Love it too. So good. God, when that one character dies completely unexpectedly-

**Taffy:** Are you not spoiling Gary’s death? Isn’t that what you’re doing?

**John:** I’m not spoiling it. I’m trying to remember it.

**Taffy:** You can’t even find it. It’s not even streaming. Tell the world. Remember Gary’s name. His name was Gary Shepherd, John. John, his name was Gary Shepherd.

**John:** His name was Gary Shepherd. He rode off on a bicycle on a snowy day, and [crosstalk 00:52:27] oh, don’t slip.

**Taffy:** By the way, do you remember that episode?

**John:** Oh yeah, I remember it.

**Taffy:** Everything you need to know about dramatic storytelling is that they’re waiting for Nancy’s cancer determination, but Michael, his best friend, says, “You really should not be on a bike anymore.” He’s in a car. Oh my god, I’m so upset.

**John:** It’s so upsetting. I’ll say that had a huge impact on Big Fish ultimately, that death moment. I remember afterwards, one character has to call somebody else to tell him what’s happened. That became the phone call moment in Big Fish.

**Taffy:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Taffy:** We’re not spoiling Big Fish either.

**John:** No. I would hope that a lot of listeners have seen Big Fish, but I’m always surprised people have not seen Big Fish.

**Taffy:** How dare they, first of all?

**John:** How dare they listen to the podcast?

**Taffy:** It’s the greatest. Also, wait, I was raised in a Hasidic household. My mother became Hasidic when I was 12. I used to sneak into the basement. We still hid a TV. I used to sneak into it and watch Thirtysomething so that I would know how to talk when I was an adult, because all I was hearing was Yiddish and Hebrew.

**John:** Amazing. Wow. How much that could’ve shaped you. Fleishman Is in Trouble would not have existed if it had not been for this secret TV hidden in the Hasidic household.

**Taffy:** I know. I know. Thirtysomething really walked so that I could stumble.

**John:** This could go on forever, but we need to get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this on Jodorowsky’s Tron. There was a movie out a couple years ago called Jodorowsky’s Dune, which is basically… Alejandro Jodorowsky was this director who had dreamed of making a version of Dune. He had all this artwork that he had done for it and had hired all this people to do it. He never ended up shooting it. It was gorgeous. There’s a really good movie people can see about it.

Frank Pavich, who directed that movie… This New York Times story is looking at all this artwork that was generated for Tron. I’m going to show this to you right now. This is all artwork for a movie that does not exist. It’s gorgeous. It was all generated by Midjourney, the AI thing.

**Taffy:** Wow.

**John:** People just typing in and saying “Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron,” and this is a computer thinking about what his version of Tron would look like. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

**Taffy:** It’s magnificent. Wow.

**John:** As we talk about AI frequently on the podcast, yes, there’s a degree to which it is jeopardizing the lives of production designers and artists and stuff like that, and you could say it’s zapping creativity. Sometimes, you can enter some stuff in and get something that’s actually really inspiring and makes you think about like, oh, wow, that’s such a very different way to do stuff. I remember when we first had Dall-E in the office, we would do things like Wes Anderson’s Spider-Man, and so you’d have [inaudible 00:55:21] Wes Anderson-looking Spider-Man.

**Taffy:** It’s everyone in a bow tie.

**John:** This is just way beyond what I’ve seen this stuff happening. It’s exciting, and people should check it out. I guess for listeners at home, Taffy, can you help us describe what we’re actually seeing here, because it’s not actually-

**Taffy:** It’s in the opinion section. It’s an interactive I guess testimonial of what the art is. The art, it looks like Tron. It’s really interesting, because talk about adaptation. You would think that Tron would look a little bit more out there, but this holds the Tron brand intact. I’m looking at lot of sci-fi references here and the light-up suit. How do you describe this? It took this guy 20,000 words.

**John:** We’re used to the stripey suit aesthetic of Tron, the light suits and the ribbons of things, but here, they almost get bigger and bigger and bigger. The color seems very different. It goes into these oranges that are not Tron-like at all. It’s just spectacular.

**Taffy:** So beautiful. Everyone should go look at it. Everyone go look at it.

**John:** Everyone go look at this. Taffy, do you have something to share with our listeners?

**Taffy:** Sure. My One Cool Thing is this book that is coming out, that will already be out by the time people listen to this. It’s called Vintage Contemporaries by a Slate journalist and podcaster named Dan Kois. He wrote the Angels in America book. He co-wrote it with Isaac Butler, who does the Working podcast. He wrote this great nonfiction book called How To Be a Family a few years ago, where he took his family around to different countries to try to figure out if we are raising our children and doing childhood correctly.

This is his first novel. It is so squarely and unapologetically about a coming of age. He wrote from the point of view of a woman a coming of age as a literary assistant in New York. The timeline goes from 2003 to 1996. It does something so beautiful and so magical that it really had me clutching my heart at the end. I can’t believe how good this is.

**John:** Oh my gosh, I’m excited to read it. Dan Kois also was original host of Mom and Dad Are Fighting [inaudible 00:57:56]. A good Slate family reunion of things there.

**Taffy:** He’s pretty great.

**John:** Vintage Contemporaries?

**Taffy:** Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois.

**John:** K-O-I-S.

**Taffy:** Yeah, K-O-I-S, being published by Harper Collins. We support their strike. You should buy this book, because we also support authors. It was a privilege to read it in galleys.

**John:** Speaking of galleys, you have another book. What’s next for you?

**Taffy:** My next book is called Long Island Compromise. It’s about a family on Long Island, a wealthy family that loses its money 30 years after its patriarch is kidnapped. He gives the money away. He gives all of his money away, the money which is supposed to symbolize both safety and danger. It asks these two questions. It asks is money safety or is money danger. It also asks does a certain amount of wealth and success doom your children to an idle life, and is it better to come from something meeker and therefore your children can thrive. The immediate answer is everyone should be rich.

**John:** Everyone should be rich at all times. Socialism for all. This being your second book, what were the pressures to compare it to the first book? Immediately, did everyone say, “Gotta get the rights now.” How did that feel different with the second?

**Taffy:** There have been some preemptive bids. There is nothing that could hang over your head and force your failure like a preemptive bid. In fact, I thought about scrapping the… Do you know the Book Thief? You know the guy?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Taffy:** He claimed to have my book, which was insane. I remember saying, “I want to find him and ask him how does it end.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Taffy:** “If you have it, is there a version that you have? Is it good? Does it turn out good?”

**John:** “Give me the first sentence of Chapter 13.” That would be great.

**Taffy:** “How did I resolve the mother character? Does she seem like a real person in the end?” There were a lot of pressures. I always bet on failure. I made sure to sell this book on the eve of Fleishman coming out. It has been written for a while, but its revisions have been waiting out. It should be out by now. Then I made a TV show, which was the most consuming thing I’ve ever done. It’s going to come out. I don’t know.

It’s very funny, because the one outstanding question I had about it was should I have Libby, that narrator who’s kind of me, should I have her narrate this. Philip Roth did it. He had Nathan Zuckerman. It was torture. The worst thing about the torture was that I was so decisive about everything else. The one good thing you could say about me is that I’m so decisive.

Then the show finished on December 29th. My family, we went skiing so that I could not be wandering the streets of New York, asking people if they’d seen it. They took me off the streets. On December 30th, I was on a ski lift, and suddenly, I was like, “Of course she shouldn’t narrate it,” and I was free. I was freed from Fleishman. Your projects really have a hold on you.

**John:** Then we drag you right back into it.

**Taffy:** I know. I know. Now I’m reconsidering everything. Thank you for asking about it.

**John:** An absolute pleasure having you here on the show. Thank you for talking with us.

**Taffy:** This was so fun. This was a dream come true.

**John:** People should either or both read the book Fleishman Is in Trouble, watch the show, which is FX and Hulu.

**Taffy:** Then read it again, watch it again.

**John:** Then read it again.

**Taffy:** Then re-subscribe to Hulu. Then write your Congressman.

**John:** All these things will happen.

**Taffy:** Thank you for having me.

**John:** If you could stick around for the Bonus Segment, because I want to talk to you about celebrity journalism.

**Taffy:** Sure, because you’re a journalist too.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Ryan Gerberding. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. We’ve finally figured out what happened to Episodes 500 through 515. We got that sorted out. If you missed those, they’re back. Thank you again, Taffy.

**Taffy:** Thanks for having me. This is great.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Taffy, you have interviewed all sorts of famous people. We mentioned a couple of them along the way. Nicki Minaj.

**Taffy:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** Andy Cohen. How do you get started in this? You mentioned Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly? You were doing that.

**Taffy:** Thank you for asking about that. My first job was at a magazine called Soaps In Depth.

**John:** We gotta go deep.

**Taffy:** The reason I can enunciate it like that is because you’d call people up and say, “I’m calling from Soaps In Depth,” and they’d say, “Soaps and Death?” You’d say, “No, Soaps In Depth.”

**John:** The Ps are important.

**Taffy:** I worked there for a year, and I wrote profiles. Then I was poached by a larger soap opera magazine. I do mean larger.

**John:** Physically larger.

**Taffy:** Physically larger, called Soap Opera Weekly. Ultimately I was fired from there on June 5th, 2001. Later, I would pretend it was a post-9/11 layoff for my dignity. I started writing personal essays as soon as my son was born, because I didn’t want to leave the house, and I wanted a writing career on my own terms. One day I was just done writing personal essays. I pitched a profile at the New York Times Magazine, and I got a yes. It was Zosia Mamet.

**John:** She was starring in Girls at this point?

**Taffy:** She was starring in Girls. It was the second season of Girls. It was my first profile. I just loved doing it. I had a great editor named Adam Sternbergh at the New York Times Magazine who, I handed in one that was terrible and he just very deftly said to me, “Oh no, here. There’s a scene, and then there is the bio section.” Then from then on, I just… He taught me how to fish.

**John:** What is the structure of a really good one of these?

**Taffy:** Thematically it is, “Here’s something I saw. Here’s why it matters. Here’s why this person matters.” What he told me was, it’s a scene and then it is an evaluation of what is newsworthy about this person right now, and then it’s their bio section, and then it’s the return to the examination and what you decided about it. I took that and went with it. I had very kind editors. I was sent to Nicki Minaj, who fell asleep while we were talking. I wrote a story about what I would’ve asked her if she had been awake and what I think she would’ve said. I spent a few days on a tour bus with Billy Bob Thornton on his band. I spent five years asking Val Kilmer for an interview. I spent some time with Bradley Cooper in the run-up to-

**John:** A Star is Born?

**Taffy:** Star is Born, and Tom Hanks. Really, I feel like I don’t know who I haven’t interviewed. I would write long interviews.

**John:** You are a character in the interviews to some degree too. You have to expose-

**Taffy:** I’m a character the way Libby’s a character.

**John:** Exactly.

**Taffy:** Libby, by the way, to tell this story, in the novel and in the show is someone who quit her job and stayed home. I didn’t do that. It worked thematically. Journalism is always true. The I character in those profiles is the aspects of me that are like the reader, that would help the reader, because I hate chummy profiles. I hate profiles where they’re clearly friends and going to hang out after this. The profile is, here, reader, is what you would think if you were sitting here with me, which is I think what journalism is supposed to do.

**John:** Also screenwriting though is putting you in the place that you actually believe that you are in that room with this conversation happening around you. It is scene setting in the same way, which is different than other classic journalism could be, where it’s [inaudible 01:07:02] I’m going to tell you a story rather than let you know what I saw, what I heard, what it’s like to be in the presence of this person.

**Taffy:** It’s what it’s like to be in the presence of the person and why the person matters. By the way, the more famous they are, the more it’s not even about the person, but the person that the person has become in light of all this fame.

**John:** In agreeing to be a member of this partnership to do this celebrity profile, they are also aware of the game too. They are choosing what parts to show to you. It’s gotta be complicated.

**Taffy:** It’s hard to ask factual questions, because you have to ask yourself, why would this person even tell me this? In fact, if you’re quiet, what you’ll find is that by the time someone is famous, they have some sort of gripe or understanding of who they are in the world that they would like to correct. If you listen carefully, that is what they are trying to tell you. You have to listen very carefully for it, or else you are just bombarding them with questions about their divorce or about their scandal. There’s always one thing they’re afraid you’re going to talk about.

**John:** Craig will never listen to this Bonus Segment, because he doesn’t listen. If he were to listen and two years down the road somebody wants to do a profile of him, what advice would you give to a Craig who is going to be profiled by somebody, who won’t be your equal, obviously, but-

**Taffy:** Thank you.

**John:** … is going to attempt to do Libby’s job, Taffy’s job. What would your advice-

**Taffy:** That’s a great question, or you. Have you had a profile?

**John:** Years ago, but it was written by a magazine. It was just the WGA [inaudible 01:08:41].

**Taffy:** The thing I would say to him, interesting, advice for Craig on doing that. Craig is such an interesting talker. To deal plainly and openly with the person as a fellow writer is the best move. What’s very interesting to me is that, especially over these last years where we had a president who had this open, warlike contempt for journalists, it was shocking to see that contempt reflected in actors. There are people who have told me they don’t trust anything a journalist said. It was like, “What, journalists? What?” That’s shocking to me.

I think that the conversation you can have, if you’re with someone who does not seem like they’re manipulating you… Because also journalism isn’t a monolith. There are people who are looking for something ugly, but most people aren’t. Most people just want to hear what it’s been like for you. That said, I always prided myself on getting people to open up to me.

Disney, because of their COVID protocols, wouldn’t let us have any rehearsals for the show. I tricked everyone by taking them out to dinner so that they could meet before they had to play best friends. We would have these outdoor dinners. Disney, they were outdoors. They would talk to each other. Within 10 minutes, they were telling each other their deepest secrets. I was quietly devastated. I didn’t do anything. Nobody told me anything. That’s the thing. A journalist should never think that anyone’s telling them anything, really should just wonder why they’re saying what they’re saying.

Craig, who is headed for this, should just deal openly and kindly. Damon Lindelof was very, very nice to me and answered every single question I had. It was during a complicated timeframe. It was the first time he was doing interviews following Lost. It was for The Leftovers.

**John:** I knew Damon well. Particularly during that time, it was tough grappling with what he even wanted or what his relationship was like with the fandom.

**Taffy:** The thing that I take away from my experience on set of Fleishman is that it seems to me an exquisite kind of ironic punishment that in success you should want to spend all day being someone else, and your reward for that is that you have to sit down with an asshole like me and tell me things that you don’t know how I’m going to use. It’s very impossible to keep in your head. I found this in my interviews, because you just want to answer the question, because you want to be polite. It’s very impossible to keep in your head the breadths of people who could hear something.

**John:** I want to just close up by just turning this back on you. We gave advice for Craig. Now there are profiles on you. That’s gotta be strange too. Do you sit them down and tell them, “Here’s how you interview me.”

**Taffy:** I did that once. It’s a findable story for Cosmo that’s called Taffy Brodesser-Akner Really, Really, Really Wanted to Write This Profile. I have been chastened and I don’t do that anymore.

**John:** That’s great. Taffy, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

**Taffy:** This was so fun.

**John:** Thank you so much.

**Taffy:** Thank you.

**John:** Please come back whenever.

**Taffy:** Sure, I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Next week.

**Taffy:** Bye-bye.

Links:

* [Fleishman Is in Trouble](https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/fleishman-is-in-trouble) on Hulu, and the [book](https://www.amazon.com/Fleishman-Trouble-Novel-Taffy-Brodesser-Akner/dp/0525510877)
* [Taffy’s GQ Celebrity Profiles](https://www.gq.com/contributor/taffy-brodesser-akner)
* [This Film Does Not Exist](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/13/opinion/jodorowsky-dune-ai-tron.html) By Frank Pavich for NYT, Tron reimagined by AI in the style of [Jodorowsky’s Dune](https://www.jodorowskysdune.com/), images by Midjourney
* [This Voice Doesn’t Exist – Generative Voice AI](https://blog.elevenlabs.io/enter-the-new-year-with-a-bang/)
* [VALL-E Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://valle-demo.github.io/)
* [Vintage Contemporaries](https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/dan-kois-202210285022860) by Dan Kois
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Taffy Brodesser-Akner](https://twitter.com/taffyakner) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ryan Gerberding ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/584standard.mp3).