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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

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

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

Craig: Let’s ruin it for everyone.

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

Craig: We’re going to spoil everything.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: So many times.

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

Craig: Chris Roofs.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Oh, boy.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Wow.

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

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

John: There’s nothing prohibiting that, no.

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

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

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

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

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

John: It’s an association.

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

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

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

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

John: Very true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: The geniuses.

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

John: Oh, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: No backsies, yes.

Craig: No backses.

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

Craig: FOMO.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: If people are paying you, brutal.

John: Yes, that can be brutal.

Craig: Brutal.

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

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

Craig: Sheesh.

Drew: My eyes are burning right now.

Craig: [laughs] You read all of them?

Drew: Basically, yes.

Craig: My God, 750 pages.

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

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

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

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

John: Describe it.

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

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

Craig: F number, M number, sure.

John: Anything else you’ve noticed, Drew?

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

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

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s not the end of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: It’s also unnecessary because we know–

John: We know what skyscrapers are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: Sure.

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

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

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

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

John: I believe it exists.

Craig: It has to.

John: It makes me curious.

Craig: Yes.

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

Craig: Yes, that’s inspiring.

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

Craig: Brilliant.

John: Brilliant.

Craig: Actually, a genius movie.

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

Craig: Slightly fanfic-ish name.

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

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

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

John: Is something else happening in there?

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

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

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

John: Do you have any experience about that?

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

John: No.

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

John: No oil drum fire pits.

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

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

Craig: I don’t know.

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

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

John: It was a metal– [crosstalk]

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

John: Yes.

Craig: What? What?

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

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

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

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

John: Agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

John: Who slammed it?

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

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

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

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

Craig: It’s the news.

John: -telling up the news.

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

John: Oh, come on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes.

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

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

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

John: I don’t know what she knows.

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

John: Yes, watch the scenes.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Not at all.

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

Craig: Because they showed us doula.

John: Doula, yes.

Craig: Not doulas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Yes, and that’s fine.

John: Fine.

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

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

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

John: It does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Craig: Then why are we starting with Wesley?

John: What, that he was the last one?

Craig: Then we go backwards?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: They don’t change.

John: Exactly. They don’t change.

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

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

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

John: Because of the underlying book.

Craig: Because of the underlying book.

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: I don’t know how you did that.

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

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

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

Craig: Everything is turned.

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

Craig: I love dumb.

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

Craig: Where would I find that?

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

Craig: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 672 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do we handle loss? Loss of a parent, loss of a relationship, loss of a home? How do we grieve both alone and collectively? To help us explore these questions, we have a very special guest.

Jesse Eisenberg is a writer of plays, short stories and screenplays, who’s also an accomplished actor and director. He’s the writer, director and star of his film A Real Pain. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Jesse Eisenberg.

Jesse Eisenberg: Thank you so much, John. It’s a real privilege to be on the show and to talk to you.

John: Excited to have you here. Congrats on your WGA nomination.

Jesse: Oh, thanks.

John: Yesterday.

Jesse: Thanks a lot.

John: I want to talk to you about your movie, about the writing of it, the journey to making it into a movie. Also, if we can, I’d like to answer two listener questions that we got in.

Jesse: Sure.

John: One about signature styles and simultaneous perspectives. Then we do a bonus segment at the end and I’d love to talk to you about the radio drama as a form. Because it’s weird, Scriptnotes, we’ve been doing this for 12 years, but we’ve never actually talked about the audio drama. You’re actually a person who has written and performed in those. I want to talk to you about that as a thing.

Jesse: Oh, great. Oh, I would love to.

John: Cool. We’re recording this on Thursday afternoon, January 16th. We’ve just gotten word that David Lynch has died today, which is the writer-director behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, which was such an important thing for me. Jesse, did you ever get to work with him? Did you ever get to meet him? Did you ever cross paths with him?

Jesse: No, I’ve never met him and would definitely have not forgotten that experience. No, I just loved him so much. I think I wrote three different college papers on Mulholland Drive because I was recycling them because I love the movie so much.

John: Yes. I never got to meet him either. I think the thing about writer-directors is they just generate their own work. As a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to enter into his orbit. I was just always so impressed by the specificity of his work and that you have some filmmakers whose names become adjectives and Lynchian is just a thing. You can identify it as a signature style. It’s not even just the visuals, but just the way-

Jesse: The feeling.

John: -his worlds feel. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes.

John: He died at 78, not in the fires, but partially because of the fires. He was evacuated from the Sunset Fire, which was-

Jesse: Oh, is that right?

John: -also affected us. It was headed down our way. Apparently that was part of what set off this last series of things.

Jesse: Oh, I had no idea. Oh my goodness.

John: Emphysema, but when people are in a fragile state and then they have emergency, you’re moving them around.

Jesse: Right. Oh goodness, I didn’t realize.

John: Jesse, I associate you as a New York person. Have you been in Los Angeles much?

Jesse: I’m aware of it. The first times I would go to Los Angeles would be for screen tests for movies. I just developed this horrible Pavlovian anxiety about landing at LAX because I knew I had to go– I was trying to memorize my lines in the car over to some audition. I never got the wonderful LA experience. I shot there and I did a play there actually.

When I’m working there, it’s nice. When I’m not working there, all that old stuff, when I’m there, I have a day off or something, all that old feeling of being out there and, I don’t know, just the anxiety of being out there comes back.

John: Yes. It’s strange that in the States we have these two big cities, big iconic cities. We have many great iconic cities, but the two big ones we think of are New York and Los Angeles. New York though, everyone has a connection to New York. Los Angeles is sort of a place people drop into and out of, but they don’t have that same kind of affinity for.

Jesse: Exactly. Being in the entertainment industry, I always felt like, “Well, if I’m in LA and I’m not working, what am I doing there?” Whereas when I’m not working in New York, it feels like less of a problem because I’m a third generation New Yorker. It just feels like, “Oh, this is where I should be.”

John: This really brought me to this last week in the fire. Watching the national coverage of it, there was good coverage of it. You could see a lot of national interest in it, but it wasn’t the same visceral feeling we had after 9/11, something like that which was so devastating on a national level.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: The attack on 9/11 was an attack on a fundamental piece of America. These fires were more disparate. There wasn’t one center to it.

Jesse: Exactly. I’ve been really eager to talk to people about the fires because I was in LA a few days before. I have so many friends and colleagues there. I know several people that have lost their homes. And in New York, I’m finding it’s more difficult to connect with people about it because it’s really not on their radar as much as I would have expected.

John: Yes. Update from where we are here, as we’re recording this, the fires aren’t out, but they aren’t growing. They feel like they’re largely under control. We have thousands of homes burned, people displaced, and we’re just starting to get a handle on what we’ve lost and what happens next. I and a bunch of other writers donated to the Writers Guild Member Fund, which is through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is helping out people in the industry affected by this.

Obviously at Scriptnotes and individually, we’re going to be doing a lot of donations and fundraising for folks impacted by these fires and the work of rebuilding the city and the parts that were lost. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to resources for writers from the WGA for if you’ve been impacted, places to go first to look for some help here.

Let’s get to talking about you and what you’ve been working on. It’s just so fascinating, this intersection between you as a writer and you as an actor. I want to talk about where things started because looking back through your history, it feels like you were doing both things at the same time. You were never an actor who then decided they wanted to write or a writer who then got put into some things. They were simultaneous interests for you. That started as a kid, I’m guessing.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. I would always write. I started just writing jokes and then I would be writing scenes. When I was 16 years old, I wrote a movie about Woody Allen. That was like a young version of Woody Allen in modern society, but it was about him changing his name to Woody Allen from his real name. I got a cease-and-desist letter from his lawyers once they finally got the script.

John: I want to put you on pause there. Once they finally got the script, so that means that you hustled your way into getting him to read this script.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Because I wanted to film it on a little camera. I was just trying to do all things at all times. As you know or maybe you don’t know because you’re a very successful screenwriter, but as an actor, you always feel like you’re one job away from never working again. I felt that way even when I was 17 and auditioning for things. I always felt like, “This all feels like you have to win the lottery to get a part in something.” I was just doing anything I could in the arts, which included just writing scripts in high school and trying to send them to anybody who might read them.

Then I started getting parts in movies when I was 18, 19, 20. I started getting good parts in movies that people actually saw. That helped me, because I got an agent, that helped me to get my screenplays that I was writing. I was writing commercial style screenplays. That helped me have an agent to get them into company’s hands. Some of them got optioned by like Depth of Field, which is the Weitz Brothers company.

I was 20, 21, and I would rewrite these scripts. I had like three or four of them at the time. I’d rewrite these scripts. I never got paid for an option. It was always just like they were at these companies. I’m not complaining, nor I should not have been paid for these, but I just mean it was not like I was a success. It was basically some companies had taken these scripts and agreed to talk with this nice kid for once every six months. That was the thing. At some point I realized these are never going to get made.

John: I want to unpack a few things there. You were talking about the difference between an actor and a writer. The writer can just go off and write a new script. You have an agency as a writer that you don’t have as an actor, because as an actor, you’re asking somebody to put you in their thing. “Let me be a part of your thing,” versus like, “Let me create the thing behind it.”

Jesse: Exactly.

John: And yet as an actor, you have a lot more access to different filmmakers and different styles of doing things. Because by the time you were 20, 21, 22, you’d been on a bunch of sets. You’d seen how a bunch of different people worked. You were also reading a ton of scripts. That’s a great education.

Jesse: It’s unbelievable. I don’t think I would be able to direct a movie had I not been on so many sets as an actor. I’m on sets as an actor, but really, as you know from being on these sets, you spend the day just watching things happen. If you’re a curious person, which I’m a curious person, you can ask the people and usually people are happy to tell you about their jobs and why they’re doing what they’re doing and why the dolly should go this way and not the other way. That was really helpful.

It also helped me as a writer too, because I’d been in so many– on the micro level, I’d been in scenes that just don’t work. You’re like, “Why does this scene not work? Why is it not playable?” is the word we would use as an actor. “This scene is not playable. My character says this thing and then two lines later says this thing and it makes no sense. There’s no psychological jump.” And so as a writer, I just don’t do that stuff. That’s not the difference between a good movie and a bad movie, really. It’s just the thing that actors like to do versus what actors don’t like to do. So that was really helpful.

Then just because I’m writing things that are character based generally, it’s like, I feel like I have a good sense of what actors like to do, because that’s always the thing I come into conflict with. I just did this movie, we just finished, it was Now You See Me 3. It’s this big Hollywood thing. It’s an ensemble movie, there’s eight characters in it. But I really do have to say my character has a consistent voice from beginning to end. It’s just great. I love doing it. Even though the movie looks like maybe this movie that wouldn’t be emphasizing character stuff too much. For me, my character has a distinct voice from beginning to end and I just love doing it. It could happen in any level of movie.

John: Let’s go back to those first scripts you were writing, the ones that the Weitz Brothers were not paying you for, but to sort of bring in. What is the first screenplay you remember reading? The thing that made you think like, “Oh, this is actually a form I understand. This is a form I want to work in.” Do you remember?

Jesse: Oh, wow. God, that’s a great question. Yes. God, it must have been something. When I was younger, I was auditioning for things, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.

John: Yes, and often you’re probably seeing sides, you’re seeing the pieces of a thing rather than the full-

Jesse: Exactly.

John: -work.

Jesse: I auditioned for the movie The Squid and the Whale when I was like I think 19, I ended up filming it when I was 21 because they got on hold for two years because of budget whatever, but I definitely remember thinking, “This is amazing.” It was amazing. It’s funny and emotional in a way that just felt original and that tone just seemed really cool.

John: And The Squid and the Whale, it’s a spare script. It’s not a play, but it’s not a big cinematic. There aren’t car chases. It’s not the camera doing wild things. It’s just characters in a situation creating their own issues.

Jesse: Right, so it’s easier to read. It’s harder to read a big action thing and understand actually what it’s going to look like and be, because there are just so many moving parts that are not able to be explicit in a script. But for a movie like Squid and the Whale, or the first movie I got to do, Roger Dodger, they were great scripts, the dialogue was great, and you could see on the page that the thing was going to be great. It didn’t require directorial or technical flourishes that you couldn’t see on the page.

John: Yes, but the first script I read was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was one of the first things that was printed that we had to buy at a bookstore and read.

Jesse: Oh, wow.

John: It was just the realization like, “Oh, everything that’s happening in the movie that I’m watching on the VHS copy, it’s just reflected here.” Realizing that there’s a standard format that makes sense for explaining what’s going to happen in this movie, just on the page.

Jesse: And it was a good read?

John: It was a great read.

Jesse: It was accessible read, right.

John: A hundred percent. Again, it’s spare because it didn’t need a lot of flourishes, but just the sense of like, “Oh, this is how we’re going to introduce a character on the page,” which is not necessarily going to match exactly what you’re going to see on screen. It tracks well. You can hear characters’ voices being distinct even before those actors are being cast in them. That’s a crucial thing.

Jesse: Do you find that there are a lot of movies that just don’t read well, but you know are going to be great?

John: There are. Some of the cases I’ve run into are directors who’ve written things, they have a vision for what it is, but they just can’t get it on the page very well. I know this filmmaker’s going to be able to make something great, it’s just not there yet. I’ve worked a lot at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and sometimes you have these filmmakers coming in who are working on, generally, their second movie, and so the first one they just made, and the second one, they really are trying to put it all together. Sometimes they’re struggling with the form, but you know they have a great vision there.

Jesse: You know that because they’ve made that other movie or just from talking to them?

John: They’ve made another movie or in the conversation with them, you see what it is that they’re trying to do and they’re just not quite able to find the-

Jesse: Translate that?

John: Yes, they’re not able to evoke that on the page for what they’re going to try to get to at the end of it all.

Jesse: Right.

John: There are definitely times where I’ve read scripts that I thought, “That is just a really tough read,” and yet, in talking with a filmmaker, you see like, “Oh, yes, they have a vision. They’re going to be able to make something really cool out of that.” My job as an advisor is just to be– I describe it as like, “I’m your friend with a pickup truck who’s going to help you move from where you are to where you need to be. I’m not going to change anything, I’m just going to help you get there.”

Jesse: That’s a nice way to think about it. The alternative thing is scripts that read really well that don’t make good movies, and I’ve been able to figure out what those are too.

John: Tell me.

Jesse: Well you know, it’s the kind of script that has really flashy dialogue, funny dialogue and things that are like– What I find most of the movies that I’m thinking about that are fun to read, but I know they’re not going to make good movies, are ones that are really quirky, where the quirk factor is turned up, where people have odd names and everything. Stuff that is funny to look at, but doesn’t translate to when you’re watching human beings take on those things, and now you have to follow them. I’m not just saying you have to relate to everybody, but just things where they’re really cutesy and quirky on the page. Usually, those things are just not translating to 3D imagery.

John: Also, I think what you’re describing is sometimes things could be like, “Okay, that little moment was funny, but it’s not the kind of funny that’s going to continue out through two hours of a movie experience.” The difference between sketch writing and longer form writing is the ability to really go on a journey with these characters and want to see them as it continues.

Jesse: Yes, and not be too funny. Sometimes scripts are too funny, and you’re like, “Yes, I get it, this is really funny, but you’re constantly undermining the gravity of the emotions of the characters.” It’s a good sketch, but you can’t actually engage with these characters in an emotional way.

John: Speaking of sketch, you’ve hosted Saturday Night Live.

Jesse: Oh, yes.

John: What was that experience like? As a person who’s usually going in with full preparation, usually you get a chance to really think everything through, and suddenly you’re in sketches. Did you enjoy it? What was that like for you?

Jesse: Oh, it was terrible. I’m an idiot. It’s my fault entirely. What happened was, when I was 18 and I got an agent and everything, I had put together a packet for Saturday Night Live to write. I’d written tons of sketches. I loved that format. Even as an adult, I could look back and say, “Yes, they were good sketches.” It wasn’t like a teenager writing. It was like somebody who had a voice and whatever, and the concepts were funny and varied.

When they asked me to host the thing, I didn’t want to because I only wanted to write for the thing and I didn’t want to be an actor coming in. They put the wig on an actor and parade you around. I wanted to be a writer. I spoke to somebody there before and they said, “Yes, no, you can do that. Yes, that’s fine. You can bring your scripts in. That’d be great.” I didn’t realize that they were just being nice to me. That was not the way it works. There are writers there, they all come from the Harvard Lampoon, and they are competing with each other to get sketches on, and the celebrity actor that comes in, because they’re in a popular movie that week, doesn’t get to write the things.

But I didn’t know that, and so I spent the week trying to have my scripts infiltrate the planned sketches. There was a table read, and I think I did like two sketches at the table read, and I could tell increasingly over the course of the week, people were not happy with me. But I didn’t realize, and I was just so desperate to be a writer. If I went back on the show, I wouldn’t do that again, and I was an idiot, and I guess I must have come off really obnoxious or something. I was just so eager to write comedy since I’m young, and that felt like an opportunity for me to do it.

John: Let’s take it back to the 20-year-old Jesse Eisenberg. If I were to sit you down for an interview then, and say, “Jesse Eisenberg, what do you want to do with your life? What is your goal?” What would you have identified as your aims? What were you shooting for?

Jesse: Oh, The Onion. I would have just wanted to write for The Onion. To me, it’s the greatest thing in the world. During the pandemic, they allowed me to do six weeks on a probationary period. I did not make it past the six weeks, but I had great stuff and I just wouldn’t get it voted in at the end. I was also not one of the core writers. I was on this probationary thing. My headlines and stuff would not be prioritized. That to me still feels like the whale.

John: Oh yes.

Jesse: To me, it’s the greatest comedy writing in the world. I aspire to it and feel shamed that I didn’t get in there.

John: Yes, so instead you’re just making movies and starring in things.

Jesse: To me it’s so much easier, like the head writer from The Onion saw the movie A Real Pain and he complimented me on it and I immediately sent him back a headline because I was so desperate to just have something in The Onion. To me, if I had a non-byline Onion headline, no one knows it’s me, and it came out in one of 100 headlines that week, it’d make me happier than any movie script.

John: Incredible. I want to talk to you about your movie, A Real Pain, because this is your second feature as a director. For folks who haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to give the shortest logline, but then I want to talk to you about what the movie’s really about. It follows two cousins, David and Benji, who are on a group tour in Poland to visit important Jewish cultural sites, including a concentration camp, and to learn more about where their grandmother grew up. That’s sort of the logline version. Was that the actual movie you set out to write? What was the actual intention behind sitting down and starting to write this movie?

Jesse: Yes, thank you so much for saying that in your question, which is the first time I ever was asked it in that way, is quite spot on. Because the log line was the vehicle. The log line was the way to get them– what is the actual screenwriting term? MacGuffin? Is that the thing? What is the thing?

John: Sure. Well, MacGuffin would be sort of like a plot device. It’s just like the mechanic. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly, yes. My background as a writer, after sketch stuff didn’t work out, my background was playwriting. I’ve had four plays in New York, one of them transferred to the West End, and some play in other places. I had written one character in a play, it was named David, the play took place in Poland, the play was called Revisionist. It’s similar to my character David, who I play in this movie. My third play, which is my best play, was called The Spoils, and I played a character named Ben, who is this charming, maladaptive guy, like Kieran’s character in A Real Pain.

Then I had written a short story for a tablet magazine where I took those two characters from the two separate plays, and I put them in the same room as childhood friends who go to Mongolia. These two characters that are pretty similar to the characters in this movie. Then I thought I would adapt that to a movie. I was adapting the Mongolia script and I thought it’d be cool to shoot in Mongolia and I’d never seen it before in a movie, et cetera. It was just not going well. I didn’t have a second act. It’s okay to talk in jargon, right?

John: Oh yes, a hundred percent. Jargon is very much welcome here.

Jesse: Okay, great. Basically, I had this amazing setup of these two guys who were childhood friends and they had all this funny, fraught history together and then they got to Mongolia and this big thing happened there. The problem is it happened the first day they get there so there was no second act. Basically, it was a first act and then it jumped to this big, tragic reconciliation of their past. I didn’t have a second act.

I was sitting there, I was so frustrated because I knew there was potential with these two characters. I loved them so much and I loved their banter. I knew there was potential in a road trip of these guys. I was banging my head against the computer when an ad popped up for Auschwitz Tours, and then in parentheses, with lunch. Auschwitz Tours (with lunch). I clicked on the ad, even though I already knew what it was, which is that, it takes you to a site for advertising English speaking tours of Holocaust sites. I thought, “That’s the movie.” That gave me the vehicle.

I can set these two guys who both have their own internal pain against the backdrop of objective, horrifying pain. Suddenly I could just implicitly make this bigger commentary on what pain is valid? Is my OCD character’s pain valid? Is Kieran’s pain, who has much darker demons than my character’s pain valid? Or are we just individual grains of irrelevant sand on the beach of Polish trauma, in Holocaust history? Once I came up with this Holocaust tour, it just seemed like this is a great vehicle to have a movie with these two characters.

John: The choice to make them cousins makes a lot more sense now that you talked through the history of this. Originally they were best friends, but that really wouldn’t make sense for why they’re going on this tour together. If they were siblings, you’re dealing with all the sibling stuff of it all. Cousins is the in between place.

Jesse: Exactly. Originally when I thought about the Holocaust tour, I thought they have to be family. I thought they’d be siblings. Then I realized, no, it’d be so much more interesting to make them cousins who just lost a grandma because what that would do is allow them to basically not have a relationship anymore.

If you’re siblings, you’re always connected by your parents. There’s just expectations that you should always be in each other’s lives. Cousins who lose a grandparent, which is their only link, really have to make a decision in some ways, unconscious, implicit decision on if they’re going to remain really close. That’s what’s going on with these characters in this movie.

John: Jesse, as you sat down to start writing this script, did that you were going to star in it? Did that you were going to direct it? Was that always an intention from when you started writing the script?

Jesse: No, not really. I write all the time. This was just the next thing I was writing. I wasn’t exactly thinking that I would act in it. I guess I wanted to direct it because I want to direct because I feel like the film industry is so fickle with actors that I feel like I need to have some control. I don’t have your skill set to write the way you do these really big, wonderful movies. I can write my small personal things. And if I direct them, it gives me a little more agency in this industry that I find is really unstable. I thought, “Okay, I could direct this. This could be something. It’s a character driven movie. It doesn’t require a technical mastery.” Then in terms of acting in it, I didn’t really think about it.

John: Because it sounds like you’ve actually played both characters.

Jesse: Yes. I did. I did play both of those characters. I always think of my acting as quite separate, in terms of movies, because I’m in other movies and other people’s movies. I wasn’t exactly thinking of being in it. The weird thing happens, and God, you could probably relate to this in a roundabout or maybe the other side way, which is that, when I send people a script, it’s just much easier to get something made that has an actor attached to it, even if it’s an actor they don’t really like. Even if producers don’t really like me, just the fact that an actor seems to have, theoretically– you’re at a higher level in this, but at my level, with writing, there’s an actor engaged on a $3 million movie, it already seems like it’s possibly real.

John: No, Jesse, I assure you that at my level, and it’s sort of at every level, having an actor attached to something is really helpful. I think it anchors in people’s minds like, “Oh, I can picture the movie, I can sort of picture Oscar Isaac in that thing.” It just makes life easier if there’s somebody attached.

Jesse: Exactly. And it also seems like validated by a non-writer, that seems helpful too. “Okay, this is not just a literary thing. This is validated by somebody attractive.” Once I started sending it out to financiers, independent investors, whatever, I just put my name on it, basically just as a shorthand that it’s going to hopefully be made soon.

John: As folks started to read this, they were reading this as like, “Okay, this is something that Jesse wrote, he’s going to be starring and directing in it.” They’ve seen that you can direct a movie. They know you as an actor. It must make it easier because there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I get what this is and it’s not going to be a crazy expensive movie.” What was the process of going out and finding the money? Was it all independent investors? Did you have a plan? Because you ended up selling it at, was it Sundance or where did you sell it?

Jesse: We sold it at Sundance. Yes. No, it was really hard. Really hard. We were passed up by everybody in the first round of who we went to. It was ultimately produced by this great company, Topic. They’re certainly not a second-round company, but the people we had gone to for a higher budget essentially, all passed on it. A24, who did my first movie, didn’t do this one.

It did feel a little bit like a really uphill battle to the point where I was writing to German reparations funds who give some money to Holocaust themed movies. I was able to get a little grant from them that I thought could be seed money to make this. I didn’t know how I was going to fund it. I know that must seem strange to maybe some listeners who know me as like a Hollywood actor and it seems like, “Well, why don’t we just go make it?” The way these independent movies are made, it’s difficult. A lot of people want to make movies at this level. It’s competitive.

John: Yes. You were able to find producers and financiers. How early on in the process did you list some sort of line producer, somebody who could come up with a budget, come up with a schedule? How early did like how expensive it was to make the movie?

Jesse: Oh God, that’s a great question. Pretty early we did that because, okay, so I should also say, because I don’t want to seem like I’m asking for pity that it was a real struggle. It was a real struggle to find investors, but my producers are great. They’re Emma Stone’s company called Fruit Tree. It’s Em, her husband Dave McCary and their partner, Ali Herting. They were great. When we were looking for actual investors, that was the struggle.

We had a budget done, I think pretty early, but it was a bit amorphous because the budget is partly dependent on getting money from the Polish Film Institute and you don’t know if you’re going to get it. In our case, actually, we lost, I think it was like– we were a three and a half million-dollar movie. I think we lost $850,000 two months before because we were expecting it from the PFI. Then for a set of technical reasons, we didn’t get it. We thought it would cost five and a half. We ended up having to make it for three and a half, which meant cutting out days, which meant cutting locations. It was scrappy. It was quick. Every day felt like something would go wrong.

John: Yes. That’s really challenging. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the screenplay that’s being published, the For Your Consideration script. How close is the script that we’ll be seeing to what you went into production with? Because it’s always hard to tell with For Your Consideration scripts, how much they’re just conforming to the final movie versus what the original shooting script was. What changed?

Jesse: Oh, wow. What a nice question. I haven’t even thought about this stuff. We cut two scenes from the movie, which are not reflected in the For Your Consideration script. We cut the two scenes. Otherwise, maybe it’s word for word. It’s that close. The two scenes, one of the scenes, I put in at the very last minute. It was a scenelet. The big scene we cut was just the beginning of the movie. You see my character at home with his wife and kid. The actress was great, Ellora Torchia, she’s a brilliant British actress. She played my wife. My child played my child. Wasn’t happy to be cut out. The scene felt too formulaic and just standard issue for the pace of the rest of the movie.

John: Absolutely. The way you’re starting now makes a lot of sense because we see we’re in New York, we know we’re headed to the airport. I suspect what you found in the edit was that seeing the wife and family made you want to see them more over the course of it. That really wasn’t the movie you were making.

Jesse: Exactly. It was not helpful. Actually, you just want to– God, you probably know this better than anybody. Audiences pick up on shortcuts to characterizations really quickly. You see me in a taxi cab now in the beginning and I’m calling my cousin. It’s a funny little scene, but it just says everything you want to know about who I am, who that character is, the cousin who I’m calling. It’s a funnier scene and it’s more original. Audiences are so aware, they just know, “Oh, that’s this person. Let’s see how this person unfolds now.”

John: Yes. I want to talk about a showcase scene in the script right now. It’s eight pages long. It’s pages 64 to 72, which is the restaurant scene. This is where we’re at a restaurant, Benji’s being very prickly. He leaves the table. David apologizes for him, explains what sounds like bipolar disorder.

Two of your lines here, basically, “I know he’s in pain, but isn’t everybody in pain in some way? I know my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” Sort of central thesis that you’re getting out there.

Jesse: Right.

John: It’s also the revelation to this group that Benji had attempted suicide six months ago, which is new information for us as the audience. Can you talk about the writing of that scene? Did you always know it was going to be a turning point in the movie that would be a showcase scene? What were your feelings going into it, not just as a writer, but also then as the actor and the director?

Jesse: I hope it’s okay to admit this, but I didn’t have that line in the first draft that Benji tried to commit suicide. There were little droppings within the movie that indicated that this guy’s pain was far more, was darker than mine. My instinct was to not put something so explicitly detailed like that. The reason I put it in, again, I hope it’s okay to talk about this stuff, because it’s inside baseball-y a little bit. But the first movie I made wasn’t received that well.

I think the reason it wasn’t received that well is because I assumed that the audience would totally understand how I felt as a director about my characters, and they didn’t. They thought I maybe had contempt for them, and I didn’t. I was in love with them, but they were not being their best selves in the movie. It was really hard to read harsh criticism of the other movie. For this, I just wanted to make sure the audience understood what was happening and that, yes, you could imply in 10,000 different ways and looks and lies of omission and all this stuff, indicate that that character may have done something like that or tried to hurt himself or kill himself, but I needed to be more specific.

John: Yes, because we’re seeing this as an audience. We’re approaching it only with the information that we’re seeing on screen. You as the writer or director you know the facts. You know things that we’re not necessarily able to see.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: We don’t know whether this is typical behavior for Benji or atypical. Is he always just an asshole? What’s going on in this moment? What I like about the revelation where you put it is that it re-contextualizes the scenes that we’ve been thinking about beforehand. The same way that we as an audience are doing that, the other people around the table are like, “Oh, okay, the stuff we saw before…” It actually does provide just really good dramatic fodder for figuring out what happens next. It makes us appreciate both you and Benji differently for now knowing this information.

Jesse: The scene used to end– the kicker at the end of that monologue was not this revelation that Benji tried to kill himself, but the kicker in the– kicker is such a sleazy word to use for something emotional. The great ending prior to that, it was that our grandparents survived by a thousand miracles to get us here. The ending of the monologue was, “And I know we were born on third base. I know I was born on third base and I feel so lucky, but it feels like Benji is just constantly trying to run back to second.” That was the ending line. It was this guy who had everything and was trying to make his life so much worse.

John: Yes, and that’s such a great line. It’s not supported by the scene that’s there beforehand. I can understand why it changed, but it’s such a great sentiment. I want to drill into this aspect of it because what’s interesting about your movie is that it’s hard to make a dramatic comedy, comedy drama, something that walks that line. It also goes to the fact that this movie has to become quiet at moments.

It has to let the concentration camp be what it is and then find a context for it. Because you’re talking about the loss of a grandparent and your own personal pain in this environment of just unspeakable, catastrophic, unfathomable loss. And trying to hold the balance of that. And the shame you feel of feeling bad when others have it so much worse around you.

Jesse: Right, exactly.

John: Talk to me about the rest of the people in that group and how you thought about those characters and the tour guide, Will, and how you thought about putting together the rest of the folks who are going to be surrounding them.

Jesse: In a macro way, after I read up a lot on what these Holocaust tours mostly are, they’re mostly suburban, middle, upper-middle class Jews who are doing their responsible trip. Instead of going to Rome this year, they go to this place. It’s very well-intentioned. I don’t mean to sound flippant about them. No, it’s wonderful that they’re doing that and exploring that history. Basically, I knew I couldn’t have 15 people on the tour that were all basically my parents. It would just be monotonous. I was trying to think of who could be on this tour, realistically, that is just a little more interesting than probably what most of these tours offer.

For me, that meant, I wrote a character based on my friend, Eloge. I met this guy named Eloge in real life. He survived the Rwanda genocide, converted to Judaism. If you look up his name, the first video that comes up is him talking about going on an Auschwitz tour. He’s my most religious Jewish friend. I asked him, “I think you’d be a really interesting character.” I told him what I was writing. I said, “Would you mind if I used your life story in this?” Not only did he agree to it, but helped me with casting and wardrobe. It was wonderful. That was interesting.

I had a neighbor, Martha. She’s the basis of Jennifer Grey’s character, Marcia. She was divorced and she was curious about her roots in Hungary. I just put the story together in my head of how interesting it must be to be going through a divorce and trying to find grounding in your own family’s history, even if that means Holocaust history. That was a character.

Then in terms of the tour guide, I thought it’d be interesting to have a character that is– there’s a term that Jews use called a philo-Semitic. Anti-Semitic is a hatred of Jews. Philo is of course a lover of Jews, but it’s a weird– the word is not used exactly. It’s kind of derogatory. It’s basically used to describe somebody who fetishizes Jewish culture. Like, “You guys are so, and I love the food,” that kind of thing. I thought it’d be really interesting to have a character as a tour guide who is an academic so that he can represent just the cold facts of the tour because I wanted somebody–

Basically, I was just trying to create people that Benji could play off of, that Kieran’s character could play off of. I knew if I had this guy that was overly academic and intellectualizing this tragic history, I knew it would just create some tension for Kieran. As I was writing it just proved to be true because once they got to the cemetery and they’re looking at this oldest Jewish cemetery, Kieran just goes nuts on him.

John: Yes, so you’ve assembled sort of this group of folks who are traveling through this place. At this point, you’ve cast Kieran. How much time did you have to figure out the relationship between you two guys? Because I can imagine if you weren’t also the writer-director, you were just the two actors, you might find some time to get together and figure out what your dynamic was. How much time did you have to spend with him to figure out how to play things? What was the process of working with him?

Jesse: Insane. I had no time with him and that’s more having to do with Kieran than it is anything else. Kieran is the most unusual person. Every writer listening to this, hire him in your movie, but don’t expect to have any conversation with him. Don’t expect him to know what scenes you’re shooting during the day. Not only is he the main character in this movie, he’s the focus of every scene in this movie.

First of all, he showed up to Poland a day before we shot. He didn’t want to talk about it with me on the phone ever. We did a 15-minute rehearsal. Basically, he showed up to Poland the day before we shot and I had a three-hour rehearsal planned. It was the scene where he calls up all these characters to this monument to take pictures and he just bringing the group out of the shell.

I thought we’d had a three-hour rehearsal. Kieran, he was late to rehearsal. I’m criticizing him only because I’m about to compliment him. He came to the rehearsal and he didn’t know what scene we were rehearsing and he didn’t know any of his lines. He said, “Can I look at the script for a second?” I showed him the script. He looked at it for 30 seconds and then was word perfect and did the scene once so perfectly that I said, “Let’s not rehearse any more. Let’s just shoot it.”

Then he would come to set during the days and I would say like, “Hey, are you okay?” He’s like, “Eh, I’m okay.” He said, “What scene are we doing today?” I would say, “It’s the scene you have five pages of dialogue on a train and it’s moving quickly.” He goes, “Oh, I remember reading that scene. That was funny. Can I take a look at the script?” I would say, “You don’t have your script?” He’s like, “Oh no, I don’t know if I brought it.” I give him my script. I’m sitting there panicking that this guy doesn’t know his dialogue and we have eight hours to shoot on this train scene. Again, he looks at the pages for like a minute and he’s word perfect and brilliant.

He’s just the most unpretentious actor but he’s doing all of the work. He’s just not doing it in a way that’s performative. We found out from his hotel towards the end of the movie that he had been sleeping on the floor and his room was a mess. His mattress was on his floor and he was living– I don’t know if he was eating at night. He was living like Benji, the character in the movie. He was just not telling anybody about it. I contrast that to the actor that comes to set every morning and says, “God, I was just going over the pages last night and it just reminded me of Lear.” This bullshit pretense that adds nothing to the movie but just makes you realize that this person is doing their work or whatever. Kieran’s the exact opposite. I would love to work with him again and again but he doesn’t make the director comfortable or the writer comfortable.

John: I want to talk a little bit about directors here because a thing that I was thinking through this morning as I was getting ready for this is there’s some actor directors who’ve directed themselves incredibly well. I was thinking like Bradley Cooper directed himself great in A Star is Born. Lena Dunham did a great job directing herself in Girls. Yet there’s other, I won’t name names of the people who didn’t do a great job, but people who are really good actors who are good directors who don’t direct themselves well. How did you make sure that your performance is working as an actor when you’re also worrying about everything else as a director? What are the challenges there? Do you have any hints or tips?

Jesse: Yes, I guess from the outset, because I’ve been writing so long, it was not like I was an actor trying to make a vanity project for myself where I was putting so much emphasis on my performance because I had written it for me to show the audiences that, “Hey, I can do this dark thing. Look, I can play homeless.” That was not my intention with the script.

I’ve been writing for myself for years. I’ve been in my plays and I don’t know who or what you’re referring to when you say it doesn’t work, but my sense is that probably those are intended as not vanity pieces, but trying to show something that they’re not often cast in and those things just go wrong for the reasons because the initial intention is off there.

For me, I just didn’t have that and I’m sitting at the library writing the scripts and I’m crying when I’m writing because I’m feeling all the emotions and then I’m on set, it’s an extension of that. So it’s coming from a real place. I’m probably an unusual writer, actor, in that I’ve started out doing plays and stuff and so I just never think of the extravagance of a movie being something important for me to act in. Yes, maybe that helps.

John: We have two listener questions that I thought we could take a crack at together here. Drew, can you help us out with a question from Tate?

Drew Marquardt: Tate writes, “I’ve written about seven scripts now and I found that a specific central theme always seems to wriggle its way into my stories. The characters, the narratives, the settings, they all vastly differ, but this one thematic question can’t help but rear its head. Is this a problem? Where do you draw the line between crutch and signature when it comes to a screenwriter’s overall work? At what point does something shift from being a unique, constant quality of a writer’s work to a laziness that the writer continues to rely on?”

Jesse: I’m expected to answer this?

John: Together we can answer it.

Jesse: Okay, great, because like, gosh, I couldn’t possibly. Yes, no, please.

John: It strikes me that we’re trying to answer this question on the day that David Lynch died and David Lynch had very common things that kept appearing in his stuff. They felt like of a consistent piece and so I wonder whether Tate is just actually recognizing what their style is and what interests them. I think if you look at a lot of my movies, generally it’s about a person crossing from one world into another world, having to learn the rules of it and survive within it and get back out at the end.

Go is that movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that movie. A lot of my movies have those same themes in them, but they’re all very different where sometimes people become a crutch and they say that they’re a hack, they’re basically doing the same scene again, movie after movie, they have one way to go to. Jesse, talking about the plays you’ve written, the two movies you’ve made, they’re consistent and of a piece, wouldn’t you say?

Jesse: Yes, they’re all based on my preoccupation of why do I have a good life when other people have a bad life? All my plays are exactly that theme. My first movie is that, it’s about a woman who works at a domestic violence shelter and resents her son because she’s raised an upper middle-class son, and so she tries to parent this kid at a shelter.

The thing you said though, you used the word interest, that seems great. You’re finding the things that you’re interested in. Well, that’s great. That’s really great, and you could repeat forever and ever, because if you’re interested in them, maybe it feels like maybe perhaps you haven’t found the solution. When you don’t have a solution for something, that’s always the best thing to write about because it has an unanswerable tension.

John: I fully agree. Tate, I think just as you’re looking through the seven scripts you’ve written now, which is great, you’ve written seven scripts, you have a sense of what it is that you like to do, those are things you’re writing for yourself. Down the road, if you’re going to be a writer who’s working for other people, you may be writing stuff that’s not that. You may be using your skills at putting scenes and words together to do a very different thing, and that may be a great opportunity for you. The same way that Jesse gets to act in movies that are not his movies, and he gets to play different people too. It’s not a problem that the stuff you’re writing for yourself is of a piece, it’s you.

Jesse: Yes, it means you have a voice. To me, it sounds actually great. When I read writers and you can recognize that it’s theirs, it’s wonderful.

John: Drew, next question.

Drew: Victoria writes, “One of the things I struggle with most is handling sequences where I’m relying on multiple perspectives to move the action forward. The problem isn’t one of plot or emotional outcomes. I know story-wise and emotionally where the characters will be, but more of rhythm and fragmentation. It’s a filmic problem. At this point, I’m almost ready to start using storyboards and diagrams to augment my process. How do you guys make directorial choices for sequences like these? Should I think in terms of shot coverage, where I outline each character’s full action in the timeframe of the scene, and then edit them together? Is there another good way to look at this? Do you have any specific directorial techniques you use when writing these action sequences?”

John: Whether it’s an action sequence or any time we were moving between two different things in a movie, that’s one of the great wonders of cinema, is we can cut between two different things. It’s how do you make it that feel like every time you’re cutting back and forth between them, you’re gaining energy that you’re actually moving the story forward in a way that it all fits well together. It’s just honestly so different than what you do in a play. A play is a continuous space and time, generally, and this is so different. Jesse, what’s been your experience? Because I would say that I can’t think of moments in A Real Pain where you’ve had to sort of intercut between two different things that much.

Jesse: Yes, to me, I couldn’t even imagine doing that. I’m so impressed by this questioner’s ambitions. I was just thinking, “oh wow, yes, notecard sounds like a great idea.” I’m the last person that should be asked about this. I just finished acting in this movie, Now You See Me 3, and to me, the writers are great. It’s like, to me, they built the Empire State Building. I have no idea how they put this thing together. They’re accounting for an ensemble, they’re accounting for tricks, they’re accounting for studio notes from a big studio. To me, it’s like they built a building. It’s that far afield from the thing I know about.

John: Yes, and so, listen, I think, Victoria, if you’re writing stuff that involves intercutting between that stuff, reading a bunch of scripts that do it is going to be a real help to you. Look through the For Your Consideration scripts. We have them all up on Weekend Read. Just read the scripts of the movies that you like that do it and see what that looks like on the page, and you’ll get a sense of it.

The most challenging script I had for intercutting was probably the first Charlie’s Angels, actually, in which you have the three different angels in different parts of this castle. You have your villain, you have all this stuff that’s happening and all is fitting together, and that had to work on the page before we started shooting it. What I wrote is very much the cut that there, and it’s making sure that every time you’re moving from one thing to the next thing, you’re remembering where it was there, but also you’re getting energy out of that cut. It’s a skill to learn. If it’s something that you like writing that kind of stuff, it can be really exciting.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is this little website, gamey kind of thing called Network of Time. It’s networkoftime.com if you want to go there, it’s free. It’s basically doing six degrees of separation between two famous figures. You put a person on the left, a person on the right, and it figures out like, okay, how are they connected through what other people are they connected? Not just the names, it actually connects them through photos. It shows you the photos that put all those people together.

I’m going to go to Network of Time here, because I think you are a person in here. I’m going to try Jesse Eisenberg. What other famous person should I put you into? It could be any historical figure as long as they lived in some time of photography. Anybody post-Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Shakira?

John: Shakira, a hundred percent. I suspect Shakira will be a link through some other actor or a talk show host. Let’s see, because you’ve probably been on the same talk shows.

Jesse: Oh, got it. Okay, so that’s an easy one.

John: It’s loading up now.

Jesse: Oh, wow, you’re right.

John: Talk show. Four photos. All right, so the connections are Jimmy Fallon. You’re both on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show. There’s a photo of here with Fran Lebowitz, all right? Jimmy Fallon, then Donald Trump, Jimmy Fallon and Donald Trump, then Donald Trump and Jennifer Lopez, then Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

Jesse: Oh, this is amazing. Oh my God. This is amazing.

John: Before we started recording, I did one to figure out how many steps between you and Abraham Lincoln. For Abraham Lincoln, it goes to Jimmy Fallon, Paul McCartney, Queen Elizabeth, George V, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Robert Lincoln, was Lincoln’s son, and then Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Got it. Oh, I see, that’s interesting. I could see this website is Jimmy Fallon and probably the British royalty are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

John: They are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, presidents do a lot there. What’s weird about it is it has a limited set of things because if I try Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, it’ll go through Jimmy Fallon. It’s like, “No, no, no, there’s photos of you and Kristen Stewart.” You starred in two movies with Kristen Stewart, at least.

Jesse: I see. Okay, got it. It sticks to its own game.

John: Absolutely. Jesse, do you have something to share for us? One cool thing?

Jesse: Yes, sure. One of my favorite shows of all time– God, when did I first learn about it? Probably when I was 14 years old? I’m 41, so do the math. It’s called Floyd Collins. It’s a great musical by Adam Guettel, my favorite composer. It’s coming back to New York. It’s a musical that’s basically every college kid’s favorite musical, but it’s never been produced on Broadway. Now it’s coming. It’ll be in New York, I think, pretty soon. I just recommend it to anybody who can go. It’s just the coolest music.

John: Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel. Tell me the story of Floyd Collins, I don’t know it.

Jesse: Actually, you probably would know the Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole. It’s about a caver in Kentucky in 1925 who gets stuck in a cave, and then this circus forms around him. Ace in the Hole, I think, follows the reporter. In this, you’re following the guy who gets stuck in the cave, and this just circus forms around the cave of he turns into a novelty and he dies. This is a true story of the guy stuck in the cave. Come look at the guy stuck in the cave. The guy died, he couldn’t get out. It’s just this really dramatic irony and tragic true story and the musical.

John: That’s awesome. Floyd Collins.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies.

You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about in the newsletter you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on audio dramas. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: Thank you so much, John. What a great honor to be on your show.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Jesse, I want to talk to you about audio dramas because you have written a few, you’ve starred in some. Talk to me about that as a form and what interested you about them and how you do writing that you know is only going to be heard and never seen.

Jesse: I like writing fiction. What I mean by that is prose. I like writing. I’m not a very good writer when it’s not about characters. I can write voices really well. I wrote this book called When You Finish Saving the World and it’s three characters over the course of 30 years. That for me was my version of a novel because I can write those characters really well. It’s all first person. That’s as good as I can get at prose, which is essentially monologue form. Stories are being told and characters are shifting and changing and it takes place over 30 years. Things that are seeds that are planted in, when was it, 2002, come much later. That for me, I loved. I loved and I would do that all the time if I could.

John: So in writing something for an audio drama or performing in one, you’re just reading a script like a play, but you also have to think about creating the space. I don’t listen to a lot of fiction podcasts, but the way that you establish, ‘Where are we? What’s going on around us?” You’re in a black void without any visuals to establish what’s happening there.

Jesse: Exactly. What I did with that book was I created three mechanisms for these stories to be told, because it was all real audio, it wasn’t like a narrator. Basically, it was all audio that would have actually been recorded. The first story took place like five years ago. I played this character and it was a guy who was having trouble connecting to his emotions and they recently had a baby and they went to a couple’s counselor and the couple’s counselor told me to make a recording for them once a night where I try to talk about my feelings about the baby, where I can really talk about feelings, try to emotionally connect to the baby. Basically, the first set of tapes were just me on the iPhone messages.

Then it jumped 15 years in the future and this kid is going to therapy and it’s a therapy bot. It’s essentially like a ChatGPT therapy. You’re hearing him talk to the therapist. Then it jumps 30 years in the past and it’s a young woman and it’s the mother of the boy and the wife of me but in her past and she is making tapes for her boyfriend who is deployed overseas to Uzbekistan right after 9/11. Anyway, once I came up with the mechanism for it and you slip in as much exposition as you could possibly put in briefly and entertainingly to just establish where they are and what they’re doing and why they’re talking, then you’re good to go.

John: Just like for your movie, you had to provide a context for why we’re on this Jewish cultural site tour, but you had to provide a context for why are we hearing this audio.

Jesse: Right.

John: This is audio that would have been recorded at that place, that time. That makes sense.

Jesse: Yes, and what I’ve discovered by being in movies and writing plays and stuff is, once you just like establish that thing, audiences go on the ride because they’re no longer– as long as you make it seem relatively reasonable that they would be doing this, then they’re into the emotions and the human stories. Then you can, basically, have free rein.

John: I went to go see this play, I Am My Own Wife, which is a great one man show.

Jesse: Yes, I love it.

John: I went to see it at the Geffen here in Los Angeles and this older couple was in front of me. The woman leans to her husband and says like, “It’s a woman, but I think it’s a man in a dress. He’s all alone on stage.” I’m like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” It took me a while to realize like, “Oh, the guy she’s sitting next to with is basically blind.” She basically had to provide a context, but then the rest of it, you didn’t need to see things.

Jesse: Not in that play.

John: A radio play made sense for that viewer there.

Jesse: Do you work in that genre at all or media?

John: I really haven’t. I’ve done the Big Fish stage musical. I’ve gotten a chance to do that, but I’ve not done the audio drama. Other than Scriptnotes, the only other audio format thing I did was called Launch, which was about my Arlo Finch book series. It was the whole process of putting that series out into the world.

Jesse: Oh, interesting.

John: I had to learn the ways of establishing, “Where are we at this time?” Literally finding audio that grounds us in a place where this conversation is happening. If we had to do audio mixing to get you back and forth from that place to this place, this time to that time, it’s just so different than the one-on-one conversation that we’re doing right here, right now.

Jesse: Right, of course. Yes, exactly. That’s interesting. I wonder if you’d find it interesting or liberating to basically just be able to write long monologues.

John: I think it would be great. It sounds really appealing. It also sounds like something that probably more of our listeners should try to do because it’s very producible, and it’s just a good writing exercise in terms of how do you convey this information out there and not worry about all the rest of prose that has to happen there.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: I get frustrated sometimes by screenwriters who say like, “Oh, I could never write a book.” It’s like, “Wow, it’s just words?” Yet I recognize that people have different skill sets and there’s things that are interesting to them or not. You’ve also, I think, acted in some things that have not been stuff you’ve written for audio, is that?

Jesse: Yes, that’s right. Yes, I’ve done books on tape and stuff like that.

John: Do you enjoy the process?

Jesse: Not really. Doing a book on tape is actually like the most physically strenuous thing of all the things I do, including big action movies where you’re shooting overnight. Doing a book on tape, just sitting there reading for like eight hours is mind numbing and really tough vocally. I’m constantly surprised because I always forget, like the pain of childbirth. You forget like, “Oh, I forgot. Last time I did this, it was miserable. It was really hard to do.” It’s hard to do. It’s not really the performance I like. I’ve done a few like radio plays. Those are better. Books on tape is not my thing. I think some actors are really great at it and have the stamina. I have too much, whatever ADD and weak constitution to–

John: My friend Graham is a narrator and it’s such a different way of living. He gets to make choices every sentence about how he’s going to do things. He gets to find a character’s voices that feels really appealing if you’re good at it.

Jesse: Right no, he’s probably great. That’s probably, he’s figured out a way to be really performative and great. I just didn’t have that skill.

John: We’re facing the question of what’s going to happen with the Scriptnotes book. We have a Scriptnotes book coming out at the end of the year.

Jesse: Oh, cool.

John: Probably should have an audio version of the book, but Lord knows I don’t want to narrate it and I don’t think Craig does either. We’ll have to find the right choice for that.

Jesse: You could also do a thing where you have multiple voices.

John: Yes, that’s probably the way to do it.

Jesse: Especially you, because you have so many contacts of performers that would love to do it, I’m sure.

John: We’ll find somebody good to do it. Maybe we’ll draft you in for a short chapter because I know you don’t like to do it.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. I’ll do the titles.

John: Fantastic. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: You too. Thank you so much, John.

John: Congratulations on your movie.

Jesse: Thanks so much.

Links:

• A Real Pain | Screenplay
• Jesse Eisenberg
• WGAW Wildfire Resources
• David Lynch
• Mongolia by Jesse Eisenberg, Tablet Magazine
• Jesse’s plays The Revisionist and The Spoils
• Network of Time
• Floyd Collins the Musical
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads and Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 661 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why is screenwriting, both the craft and the profession, so difficult? Why are the people who were really good in school not necessarily good at screenwriting?

Craig: Nerds.

John: We’ll take a look at what’s weird about screenwriting and why skills in other areas don’t always translate well. Then it’s another round of the three-page challenge where we look at submissions from our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you talk about movies and series without spoiling them? We’ll offer our tips and tricks and suggestions.

Craig: We are five episodes away from 666.

John: Now, Craig, let’s talk about this because Drew brought this up. We need to think of something for episode 666, the number of the beast.

Craig: It’s almost going to line up with Halloween. It won’t but it’s close.

John: It won’t. It’s close-ish.

Craig: I feel like we should have Megana on because, A, it’s spooky season, B, 666, it feels like she would have input.

John: Yeah. Should we focus on devil and possession movies?

Craig: That’s a great idea, actually. The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies.

John: Let’s do it.

Craig: Yes. I am not a horror movie aficionado. I like a good horror movie, but I’m not somebody that subscribed to Fangoria when I was a kid and saw all those slasher films like the ‘80s. So Drew, you remember the ‘80s.

Drew Marquardt: Oh, yeah.

Craig: John and I would walk into a video store, not Blockbuster, didn’t exist yet.

John: Our local video store.

Craig: Local video store. There would be a wall, just a solid wall of videotapes of nothing but movies where people slashed each other with blades. They all had great names like I Dismember Mama. There were like twelve Prom Nights. I never saw any of them. Wasn’t necessarily my thing, but The Exorcist had a profound impact on me. I do think it’s an incredible film and well worth discussing.

John: Yes, let’s do it. I haven’t seen The Exorcist probably since it came out. Honestly, I think most of my experience with The Exorcist has been while my parents were out, I would be watching it on TV and get so scared that I have to change the channel.

Craig: That’s correct. The other film that we should probably take a look at is a movie that, and I’m going to get in so much trouble, but it’s too late at this point, right, for me, is The Omen. Because The Omen came out somewhat contemporaneously with The Exorcist, not inspired by, but it existed in part because of The Exorcist. The Omen is the film that made a big deal about 666. I think The Omen is an inferior film to The Exorcist. It would be interesting to compare and contrast.

John: Sure.

Craig: There are some wonderful things in The Omen. It’s still better than most movies that try and do possession stuff now, but not as good as The Exorcist. The Exorcist also, and we’ll get there at episode 666, is a fantastic example of a film that is in a genre where almost every movie is bad and somehow they were great. That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yeah. There’s lots of examples of police procedurals or we’ve got to find the killer movies. Then there’s Silence of the Lambs, which is just like such a cut above–

Craig: Something else, right? It’s not doing anything necessarily overtly different. It’s worth digging into what they do subtly that does make it better.

John: Fantastic. This discussion of the video store we used to go to, it’s reminding me of a conversation I had this last week with my reps. We were talking about how the business was overall. We’re saying like, “Okay, well, streaming has never come back to what it was before. There’s never going to be as many deals as there were.” They were referring back to, oh, but we’re now never going to get back to the era of made-for-home video and the ability to make a zillion movies because you knew you could make a profit off of them on home video.

Craig: Unless something happens. That’s the thing.

John: Unless something happens. It totally could happen.

Craig: Yes. I don’t think anybody saw home video on the horizon in the ‘60s, for instance. Maybe some engineers at early Sony and their Betamax experiments, they were thinking, “Oh, maybe.”

I always think of that moment in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how the aliens have figured out how to make a tiny CD and that he’s going to have to buy the White Album all over again. The entertainment business is really good at figuring out ways to get us to buy the same thing we already own over and over and over. Some new format, some new thing. It’s almost inevitable. We all figured like, “Oh, streaming, I guess, one day would be–“ We just didn’t realize how fast and how intense it would be.

John: I think we all assumed that, okay, well, this is going to kill home video because you’ll just stream stuff. We didn’t realize there’d be a made-for-streaming boom that would change the industry, but then it would contract again and leave a lot of people– there’d be a musical chairs quality of it.

Craig: We had a bubble. I think that’s fair to say. What did Landgraf call peak television, peak TV? 600 and some odd, maybe 666? It was possibly 666 streaming television series. That’s obviously the work of Satan. What it’s back down to, I think a lot of people are thinking is some abnormally small number. I suspect we still have more television shows available now than we did, say, in the ‘90s. It was networks and some basic cable.

John: In addition to things that were made for streaming, we have things that were made for international audiences, made for global audiences that are available now. We’re watching series that are in English or other languages from other places too. There’s a lot more content still.

Craig: There is. There’s a ton of stuff. The contraction, I think the absolute number of television shows is it’s not something that’s going to make anyone feel better if they were employed within that bubble. I don’t think they’re going to sit there and go, “Well, but there’s still a few more than there were in the ‘90s.” It’s not exactly a relief. Contraction is difficult, even if it follows expansion.

John: Talking with my reps this week, we had a dinner. I’ve got a sampling of what they’re experiencing because you and I, we all have our own experiences and our friends we’re talking to. Reps, they’re making a bunch of deals all the time. I was asking them what’s happening? They say there are a lot of deals being made and pilots are selling, and stuff is selling, and pitches are selling, but there’s not flow. There’s a lot of one-off things that are happening and it’s busy, but not in a regular way and it’s not a predictable way. You can’t say, “Oh, this is how it’s building up to this thing.” The machine is shuddering.

Craig: It’s trying to figure itself out.

John: Which feels accurate.

Craig: That’s right. We have one predominant streaming service that is very successful at what they do, which is obviously Netflix. There’s Apple, who I don’t think care necessarily because they have more money than most nations. There’s Amazon, who I think presents their streaming service probably as some loss leader to make money off of their core business.

John: They want to make a lot of movies.

Craig: They do. I’m thinking about what your representative said about the flow.

Amazon and Apple probably aren’t going to create this rhythmic vacuum that you need to fill. Obviously, Netflix has that machinery. How Max and Peacock and Disney Plus function, am I missing one? Hulu? Hulu is Disney Plus. Paramount is Peacock?

John: No, Paramount is Paramount.

Craig: Oh, they’re their own?

John: Paramount CBS.

Craig: Paramount Plus. Paramount CBS. Right. Of course. How could I have possibly confused these? All of them, I think, are still trying to figure out how much, how frequently.

John: What’s the right number?

Craig: What’s the right number? What’s the right rhythm? That makes complete sense to me.

John: On the feature side, what I was hearing from them is that studio sides are saying the covers are bare for right now. There’s not the next thing to put into production. Summer 2026 is going to be super jam-packed, every weekend is full, which is great. Good problems to have.

Craig: The strike.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: That’s bottom line, right? It’s going to happen. It’s a really interesting thing. When I talk to people, what I often hear is, “We need stuff, but it’s hard for us–“ This is them talking about their own internal process as buyers. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get your bosses to agree to buy something.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So you are responsible if you’re on a certain level at one of these places. I’ve talked to people, streamers and everywhere, and they’ll say, “I need to get five shows on the air next year. I don’t have them. I can’t get them to pay for the things I want. I can get them to pay an insane amount of money, but only when the algorithm says that it fits their thing. But I know that we already have those–“

It’s almost like we have a bunch of people making a lot of food on the street, and we have a bunch of hungry people driving around, and there’s somebody next to the hungry people going, “No, just keep going, or try something else, or go somewhere else.” I can see why it’s difficult. Yes, the machine is not functioning particularly efficiently right now.

John: It’s like a dating app where the algorithm is wrong and swiping one way or another way. You’re not matching up with the interested parties.

Craig: Yes. Yes. That’s actually a great idea for a dating app, where if you swipe right or left, it has to go through an intermediary who considers whether or not you’ve made the right choice.

John: Yes. I like that.

Craig: Maybe changes it.

John: Yes. Maybe you designate a friend who is actually a serious concierge there who’s like, “No, I don’t think that we want this.”

Craig: “Actually, you really should give this person a shot. It’s a bad pick, I know. Give them a shot.” I think that might be nice.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Let’s get into that.

John: You don’t do app development, but my company does do app development. This is my segue into saying that we’re actually hiring a new person. One thing I’ve learned over doing 12 years of this podcast is our audience are the best, smartest people in the world. If we need to hire somebody for somebody, this podcast is the first place to start. That’s how we found the person who fixed our WordPress plugins, the video game that we’re doing. Let’s do this.

We are hiring a person to do marketing for us, for Highland, Weekend Read, Bronson Watermarker, Writer Emergency Pack, AlphaBirds, and we need somebody who’s more of a manager than a creative. Somebody who can oversee Instagram ad campaigns, app store search optimizations, really be able to tell us what’s working and what’s not, because it’s not in our skill set. We need somebody who just does this stuff that we don’t do especially well.

Craig: Where in the world will you find somebody that knows anything about social media optimization, SEO?

John: SEO.

Craig: Yes, I’m going to guess 89% of our audience is like, “I can do that. I’m already doing that.”

John: We should stress, you probably already are doing this. We don’t want somebody who’s like, “I could learn something.” No, you need to show that you actually have done this.

Craig: Some experience here.

John: Oh, we’re pretty flexible on what the position looks like. It could be part-time or full-time. It could be fully remote. It could be a Los Angeles person. You’re probably based in the US, but if we could hire you or contract with you overseas, this may be doable. Crucially, we need somebody who already knows and is in the Mac and iOS ecosystem, because that’s what we make. You need to be part of that space. You need to know what you’re doing here in this.

Craig: You need to be good.

John: You need to be good.

Craig: Do a good job.

John: We’re going to put up a link in the show notes to a webpage that talks through what we’re looking for. If you are that person or you know that person, take a look at that. If you are the candidate, submit your stuff.

Craig: This is exciting. Does the job pay $850,000 a year?

John: It does not. It pays an amount commensurate to what the job is.

Craig: That’s fair. That sounds fair. Yes.

John: We have some follow-up. Last week, we talked about Moneyball.

Craig: Moneyball.

John: It was such a good episode. Everyone completely agreed with everything we said on the show. There was no feedback whatsoever, right?

Drew: No, my inbox has turned into an AM radio call-in show.

Craig: That’s weird. Do sports fans have any opinions?

Drew: Oh, yeah. I get stats on Johnny Damon and his–

Craig: Johnny Damon. Great. Let’s have the Johnny Damon argument. I want to.

John: Craig, you were wrong about baseball. For one thing, there is a clock because now there’s a pitch clock.

Craig: Let’s talk about the pitch clock. We actually got that note from, I believe it was a scout with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, which is awesome. I stand quasi-corrected. One of the rules changes that I referred to, I referred to a bunch of rules changes in that episode. One of them, most importantly, is the pitch clock, which makes the game go faster. The word clock there, I think would better be described as timer.

It’s a little bit like the shot clock in basketball. You have a certain amount of time to do something, or there is a, in basketball, the foul or turnover, or in baseball, it’s a strike, or it’s a ball, depending on which side of the– but the game itself has no timer. You can have an at-bat that lasts one pitch long. You can have an at-bat that lasts zero pitches long. If there’s a guy at the plate and there’s a man on first, there’s two outs, and the pitcher picks that guy off first base, inning over, man at home didn’t swing, got no pitches.
You can have an at-bat that lasts 18 pitches, all within the confines of pitch clocks.

So yes, there is a small element of a timer, but the game itself, no one can tell you at the beginning of a baseball game how long that game will last. Everyone can tell you how long a football game will be in terms of game time play, or a hockey game, or a basketball game.

John: The larger point, in terms of being a clock and not being a clock, most sports are frantic. There’s just a lot of activity suddenly all at once. Baseball, yes, there are bursts of activity, but most of it is very open and people can take their time to do a thing.

Craig: Absolutely, and innings last as long as they last, and there are nine of them. In football, a series of downs, you can have possession of a football and you keep getting a new first down, that’s great, but the clock keeps getting eaten up.

John: Yes, so unless you’re able to stop the clock by doing the thing, yes.

Craig: You can stop, but when you stop the clock, there’s no more playing, right? Then everybody talks, and then they get back and then the clock restarts. While that is a good point from the scout that there is now an element of time, where there used to be no element of time– the only element of time that there used to be in baseball was, if there’s a visit to the mound, let’s say the pitcher is in trouble or there’s a situation that requires discussion, either the pitching coach or the manager would go out to the mound, bring in the infielders, and they would all have a huddle on the mound and chat.

The umpire, at some point, will mosey on over and go, “All right guys, it’s enough. We got to go get back to playing baseball,” When? Uhh when he feels like it. Like, “Ah, it’s enough.” That’s the only thing I remember prior to the pitch clock.

John: All right, more follow-up, we talked about residuals in 658 and the fact that they are now digitally depositable.

Drew: E&A writes, “While I appreciate the greater efficiency of having residuals be direct deposit, I would like to stand up for the joys of the home-delivered paper residual. It is always a cheery surprise, a bright spot in the day, the flash of green among the mailers, the happy announcement to the household, the ritual chant of, “Big money, big money, big money,” and finally, the reveal of a quantity which may range wildly, but which is always better than nothing.

Additionally, there’s the hopefully fond memories evoked by the source of the residuals, gratitude for the achievements of the WGA in securing these residuals, and sometimes even a sense of abundance in the universe. So until paper cuts or affluence dim our delight in the little green envelopes, this house will never direct deposit our residuals.”

John: I’m completely in agreement with E&A. I loved the green envelopes, and I loved opening them and I loved having– predict how big a check would be. I would say, “Oh, it’s from Sony,” and he would nail it within 1%. He was so good at it. It’s great. It just feels like found money.

Craig: A weird carnival skill.

John: It’s like, “I don’t deserve this, but it came and it’s great.” For the last three years, four years, they’ve all been going to my business manager anyway, so I haven’t seen them.

Craig: Yeah, I completely salute this person and the love of the green envelope and the excitement of that. No question. Partly it’s also just a function of age because I started getting green envelopes, I don’t know, in 1997? Yeah, after a while, you’re like, “Here’s another green envelope again.”

John: Here’s a proposal. The green envelopes are inefficient because those checks get lost and sometimes, they did get lost. It’s a good reason not to send them to people’s houses. Maybe we still do the green envelopes and inside it says like, “This is how much we just direct deposited for you.” Then you still get the feel, the joy of it, but you don’t have to deal with the check.

Craig: Sure. If they could maybe do that, that’d be great. What if there was an email that said– the subject header was, “Green envelope.”? You’re like, “Okay, when I open this email–“ Then there’s a bunch of texts just in case your email program gives you a little– no, it skips it. Then you open it and you scroll and there’s the number. That would be fine.

John: A little joy.

Craig: Yes. Why not?

John: All right, well, I’m going to propose that to the WGA. More about capitalizing off of a short what we talked about in episode 658.

Drew: Erin writes, I want to build on the excellent advice you gave Michael in episode 658 in which he asked what’s next after a short film he wrote won an Oscar qualifying award. If he wants to capitalize on the success, I would encourage Michael to write a feature version of his short film. Even if his short wasn’t initially meant to be blown out into a feature, there will be something, a theme, a character, what have you, that will make for a compelling feature script and he already has an award-winning short as a proof of concept.

The first question I’m asked when somebody sees and likes my short is, do you have a feature script? My answer is always yes, and because I always have a draft ready before attending any festival, it’s led to my scripts being read by reps and producers. I guarantee the director and/or producers are being asked this question, so he should also reach out to them to let them know he’s getting started on the feature so when they’re inevitably asked, “Is there a feature script?” they can reply, yes, Michael is working on it right now.

Craig: If you can. Not every short is expandable into a feature. I imagine many aren’t.

John: I think it’s good advice in general. Even if you can’t take this exact concept, something that’s in that space feels right because they like the short, they want something that’s like that but is a feature. That all tracks and makes a lot of sense.

Craig: Whiplash.

John: Yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s the theory of Whiplash, worked for Damien Chazelle, could work for you at home. I think that makes sense.

John: Totally makes sense. More on how to be a script coordinator. We’ve talked a lot on the show about the value of script coordinators.

Drew: Joshua Gilbert writes, I’m a long-time listener and a mid-level TV writer. Prior to staffing, I did all the writer’s office assistant jobs, writer’s PA, showrunner’s assistant, writer’s assistant, and script coordinator, the gig I did the most. As such, it occurred to me that if a YouTube video can teach someone to fix their sink, they can learn to script coordinate the same way.

So I created a two and a half hour training video in eight sections that gives step-by-step instructions for taking a script from first draft to shooting draft.

Craig: That’s interesting. Two and a half hours? There’s really two and a half hours of stuff to say?

John: There was two and a half hours of stuff to do to explain about how to do Roll20. You and I put those videos together.

Craig: That was extraordinarily efficient. Roll20, especially the old Roll20, they’ve streamlined it, was so unuser-friendly.

Listen, it may be that he’s just very patient in his explanations. Ally Chang, who’s our script coordinator on Blast Bus, I walked her through it. It was only about 30 minutes.

John: You’re approaching script coordinating from one point of view. You’re also a single showrunner who’s doing stuff and a single writer. People who are on more complicated shows, I think it probably is more complicated stuff. You’re integrating multiple things from different writers.

Craig: Yes. I could see that. There’s a little more traffic.

John: I’ve watched through it, too. He leaves no stone unturned.

Craig: Okay, so it’s an incredibly thorough, too. Thank God. I was just hoping that you weren’t like, “I watch it and–“ No, okay, if it’s super-duper thorough, then great. Look, either way, I just like complaining about things. He put it on there for free. It’s a free class. One more reason to not go to film school.

John: Yeah, film school doesn’t teach you how to be a script writer, though, either. It’s one of those– just someone shows you.

Craig: Yes, but that’s one of the jobs that we have.

John: It’s a job. It’s a job. It’s actually a union cover job.

Craig: Film school just teaches you the job that no one has to give you. Just why? Anyway.

John: All right, last bit of follow-up here is from Lori, and she’s talking about, Craig, you use this word calculating a lot. “You need to stop calculating.” You actually use it in a Scriptnotes book. A little follow-up on this.

Drew: Yes, she says, “What exactly does Craig mean by that? Does he mean that writers shouldn’t have a strategy or pursue a set of goals other than writing good screenplays? If so, how do those good screenplays ever get into the hands of someone who can do something with them?”

Craig: Here’s what I mean. Calculating means figuring out how to game the system. What do people want? What does the market want? If I did this and this and this, then maybe this and this and this. There’s so much effort that you can put into that kind of thinking. “Everybody knows that if you write a such and such story that they want it, they don’t want these unless there’s a this in it. I’m going to do that.” That’s calculating. Not calculating is writing something that you love, that you believe in, that is personal to you, that nobody else could do, or that just expresses your unique creative talent and then putting it out in the world. Then other people work on the calculating part.

In fact, part of our jobs as individual writers in our careers is to resist all of their calculations when their calculations go against what is the beating heart of the work. Otherwise it will turn into crap, which happened to me repeatedly in my career because I didn’t understand that part of my job was to defend against their calculation. I thought in a somewhat humble way, all these calculations must have value. These people are paid for these calculations and the emperor has no clothes.

It’s not about being strategy-less. You write something great, then you’re like, “I wrote this, and I need Renée Zellweger to be in it. It was designed out of my heart for Renée Zellweger. I need to get this to Renée Zellweger somehow.” That’s not calculation. That’s just makes sense. That’s creative desire. Saying, “I wrote this for Renée Zellweger, but what I’m hearing maybe is that Sabrina Carpenter is looking to do something in a movie like this. If I just change the age and change the this and make it more Sabrina Carpenter, then get it to the person that I know who knows her friend, then da-da-da–“ What have you done? No offense to Sabrina Carpenter. If you write something for Sabrina Carpenter, truly–

John: Yes, fantastic, love that. All right–

Craig: I know who Sabrina Carpenter is.

John: I was going to say, nicely done. Weirdly, a Sabrina Carpenter, Renée Zellweger axis, it’s clear. There’s a vector that connects the two.

Craig: I actually am proud of what I just did. I really am. It would have been a very old guy thing to be like, “No, instead I’m going to make it for Reese Witherspoon.” Eh, contemporary, doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked. It would not have been as cogent of a point.

John: I like this. This discussion of calculating actually ties in very well to our main topic today, which is about screenwriting being a poorly defined problem. This verbiage I’m taking from this blog post by Adam Mastroianni, which is about why smart people aren’t happier. I think it also really resonates with last week’s episode where we’re talking about how we measure and quantify talent.

In this blog post, he’s talking about how it’s not just physical attributes that we try to measure and quantify. We do it with intelligence too. If you Google the smartest people in the world, you’re going to find physicists, and mathematicians, computer scientists, chess masters.

Craig: Donald Trump by his own admission.

John: 100%. You’re going to do that because if accomplished things that you can point to and say like, oh, it was your intelligence that did that. You can measure that. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to this event with Hillary Clinton who spoke and, Jesus, that is a very smart woman.

Craig: Just a little.

John: Her intelligence is not quantifiable in that way. She didn’t invent a thing. She didn’t solve some mathematical problem. She ran the state department.

Craig: She ran the state department of the United States of America.

John: Not a small thing. The things that I would say, if I could point to her intelligence, she can take a question and then pull it into its parts and come up with, on the fly, this seven-minute answer that goes from the personal to the political to everything. That’s experience. And it’s honestly the difference between what we’d say in D&D terms is intelligence and wisdom. She has the ability to take this whole thing and pull it apart.

Really what it comes down to, and this is from this blog post, is that we tend to value and aim towards these well-defined problems. A well-defined problem– he defines in four things.

That there is a stable relationship between the variables. You can see how everything connects. There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems or if they’ve already been solved. There are clear boundaries. There’s a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions. And the problems are repeatable. So the details might change, but the process for solving the problems does not.

Craig: Science.

John: Science is exactly that. It’s the scientific method.

Craig: The results needing to be robust, repeatable. What a joy it would be to work in something where you could actually go, “The answer to this question is yes.” That would be lovely.

John: A lot of us, and I suspect you were as well, Craig, we were good at doing those well-defined problems. All standardized tests, the ACTs, the SATs, they were those things. We were rewarded for that. We’re told we are smart because we’re good at these things. Unfortunately, the career we’ve chosen to go into does not reward that thinking at all.

Craig: It does not.

John: We’re dealing with these really undefinable things. We don’t even know what the edges of this is. What do they really want from here? How am I supposed to do this thing? Am I making the right choice to go, “Should I move to Los Angeles?”? These are not questions with single answers. Many of the questions we get from our listeners are grappling with this. When we say, “Don’t be so calculating,” I feel like so often we see people trying to take these difficult situations and boil them down to well-defined problems.

Craig: Yes, because it’s comforting. You probably remember in math class, there was somebody that was sitting next to you who was struggling with a process. Let’s say quadratic equations.

John: Do you remember the first time your teacher did the quadratic formula or showed how you discover the quadratic formula? There’s no way you end up with such a messy formula. It’s so ugly.

Craig: And so beautiful.

John: Beautiful. It works but it looks so awful.

Craig: We are used to science boiling things down to elegance. E = mc² is so absurdly elegant. It seems like a joke. Most things are not that perfect. The Pythagorean theorem is so gorgeously a² + b² = c². But there was always a kid that didn’t understand the concepts and would turn to you at some point and go, “Just tell me what to do. Okay, so now what do I do? Then what do I do? Then what do I do?”

Meaning, break this down like I’m a computer, code it for me, so that I don’t have to understand what I’m doing. I just follow steps, which are certain. Therefore, I can’t get lost. It’s not actually a bad way to teach certain people certain things that they are struggling to grasp conceptually. However, if they need that, it’s probably not really worth it for them because ultimately, they’re not actually learning anything. They’re merely just obeying steps.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What we have here in our business is a very– there’s an analytic way of doing things, and then there’s synthesizing things. We have to synthesize stuff. We have to make things out of nothing. It’s art, so it’s all objective, subjective at the same time. There are things that just we all agree on, then there are things that we cannot agree on, and then there are things that we find out most people agree on. There are things that no one agrees on, except 10 years later, they do.

Nobody can really teach this. Yes. What we’re taught is how to analyze, which is fair, and what we can test is analysis and memory. There is this concept, when we were learning about the SAT analogies, we were taught about this thing called the triangular non-relationship, which is that this– and these two things are only related because they both relate to something else, but they don’t directly relate to each other. I think that for people that are good in school and good at SATs, and also are good at screenwriting, those two things are not connected to each other, they’re connected back to one thing, which is a certain mind.

John: Yes, absolutely. Let’s think through some of the stuff that we’re dealing with as screenwriters that are these poorly defined problems and that we’re constantly grappling with.

What is this movie about? This movie I’m writing, what is it about? No, what is it really about? We know it’s not actually about the thing on the surface, it’s actually really about something else.

Who is this character? How do I show that to the audience?

What does this moment look like from the character’s point of view and from all the other characters in that scene’s point of view?

What do they say next and why?

What is the right title for this movie?

Am I using the word “being” too much?

How is this movie I’m writing different from every other movie ever made?

But how is it similar enough to a genre that people can relate to what the hell it actually is?

Then, completely independent of what’s happening on the page, the actual career of being a screenwriter is, how do I describe this thing to an executive? Who should I pitch this to? Should I be focusing on Sabrina Carpenter or Renée Zellweger? When should I send the follow-up email? Should I send the follow-up email?

I see this with my own daughter. She’s a sophomore now, and super smart, so good at so many things. She’s texting me, and it’s not about schoolwork, it’s about, what should I put in this box on this form for this internship I’m applying for? They ask me, “What is your desired hourly salary?” She says, “Should I put 15?” I’m like, “I think 20?” but there’s no answer here. I don’t even know what comes out of this. You’re nodding, because this is exactly what– you do it too.

Craig: We occasionally get these. It’s funny, Jessica is so independent and so much a force of nature. She reminds me so much of me when I was her age. Just all these things that a lot of people consider difficult that she’s just doing. But kinda had a little bit of a meltdown over figuring out how to pay the utility bill for her apartment.

John: We’re on the same page. We got a bill for power, but with some from the previous tenant, and it’s like, “What do you do?”

Craig: Actually, as it turns out, nobody likes doing that stuff. Everybody has to learn. I remember this as great, but it wasn’t great. It was stupid, but I still remember because this is one funny bit where Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live played a character maybe only once called Middle-Aged Man. He’s a superhero. He’s asked, “What are your powers?” He goes, “I can’t fly and I don’t have super strength, but I can explain what escrow is.”

These are the things that you sort of accrue. When you are in your 20s, you’re like, “What do I do with a utility–“ Those are all learnable things. That list of stuff that you put there. The other one that came to mind was, what is the tone of this? Also what is tone? What are we even talking about? These things are only defined by a strange passion and a confidence that comes from feeling good about it. It is all about feeling. When you look at people who are composing, why that note? Why not this note?

Feels wrong, feels right. For us, we have no choice but to actually find some genuine feeling. That feeling then we have to convert into some explanation to either get people to resonate with our same feeling and feel it or get them to hear a rationality that allows them to go along with it.

But for everybody else in our business, that area of what is it and I’m going to feel it and I know what’s wrong and what’s right allows for so much chicanery, charlatanism, fraud, confidence masquerading as knowledge, just bad faith, baloney, gaslighting, because it’s not science. Because I can’t just go, “Stop. Everything you just said is provably wrong and has been proven wrong.” Can’t do it.

John: Of course, we’re talking about this in a context of there’s now more data than ever and more data being used against us about the choices that we’re making. As we’re pitching to Netflix, they will say our metrics show that we need to have– we cannot show a dog in the first three minutes of the show or else, or there’s all this stuff. They have data. They can show that scientifically this is true, but of course, that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual feeling of what it is.

I love to contrast that development process to a film festival where they’re buying a film at a film festival. In that case, they’re emotionally responding to the thing they saw and it’s like, “Oh, this works for these reasons.” We want this movie and we are going to put this on our streamer.

Craig: I think our business has shifted, especially the feature business, very much in favor of that vibe in a way, there is more humility on the side of the buyers because they’ve almost finally admitted they have no idea. Therefore, instead of the old method, which is really– if you want to talk about something that changed our business, the old method of making movies was have a bunch of writers come in, hear pitches, buy scripts, have ten things in development that one of them eventually will be worthy of a green light and be made.

That’s gone away. Now it’s more like, hey, we’ve shown up with a script already, an actor, a director. Everything is here and we also have a budget. All you have to do now is just flip a lever, but all the components are in place. We basically cook the meal for you. It’s a frozen TV dinner. Just put it in the microwave, right? As opposed to, we would like to cook you a meal. We’re going to go gather ingredients. We can discuss if you want chicken or fish, right? And they like that.

John: The episode that Marielle Heller was on that you weren’t able to come for, we were talking–

Craig: Passive aggressive.

John: Sorry. It was a good episode.

Craig: I bet. Jeez.

John: We were talking through this new research study that showed that almost none of the movies that are greenlit came out of studio development.

Craig: Exactly. Which was all you and I knew. All we knew was studio development. In fact, the thing that we would complain about in the ‘90s was studio development and development hell and how we all knew we were going there and getting paid something and then we were just going to be strung out for a while and eventually it probably would just die on the vine like everything else.

John: We were getting paid during that time, which was important.

Craig: Important that we were getting paid. Now what has gone away is all of the money being spread around, but there is a little more certainty. It used to be, if you made a deal, there’s a 5% or 10% chance they would make your movie. Now it’s like we’re making a deal, it’s kind of a green light.

I remember the first time this happened to me, it was at Universal, and I think it was maybe Identity Thief where I came in to pitch the rewrite because it was a page 1 rewrite. There was a pre-existing script. There were two pre-existing scripts, I believe.

I came in with Jason Bateman and Scott Stuber and normally you would go in a pitch meeting, you would pitch to the head of the studio. Everyone was in that room, from Peter Kramer, who’s the president of production, but then Donna Langley also, and then Adam Fogelson?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Is that right?

John: Yes.

Craig: The guy that was the top of it. I’m like, “What the hell is going on?” When I walked out, I remember I was like, “Why are all these people in a pitch meeting?” He goes, “That was a green light meeting. The deal is if we’re going to pay you to write this, we’re making the movie.” That blew my mind. That was the first time I’d ever experienced that where that’s the deal now. Either no development or make movie. That in a way expresses humility on their end, I think. We don’t know. If you bring us all this stuff, fine.

John: What can we take from this is that, listen, I think there’s going to be moments where you’re going to have this instinct to reduce these difficult problems, these poorly defined problems, and you’re going to try to find edges of things that you can clean up and solve. I see people doing that with the obsession over like, “Oh, I need to get rid of all the widows and orphans in my script.”

Craig: Control.

John: Control. You’re trying to exert control over a thing that fundamentally doesn’t want control. You’re going to submit to a bunch of film festivals and screenwriting competitions so you can get scores and so you can be graded the same way you were graded when you were–

Craig: People love grades.

John: Yes. I miss them. Listen–

Craig: It’s validation.

John: I’m 30 years out of college but I miss that validation.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s validation. When I do see a lot of people on social media saying, “Congratulations to me. I was a semi-finalist,” and blah blah blah, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. It’s actually not relevant at all because there’s somebody who didn’t make it past the first round who has written something much better.” The people who judge these things don’t know either. Nobody in that world knows because the people that are at the highest level of our business also don’t know. They are constantly being surprised. Everybody agrees that this kind of movie doesn’t work until somebody makes one that does. Listen, if there was one genre we knew would not work, it would be to adapt a video game. That was the law. That’s the thing.

John: Two good series.

Craig: There you go. Superhero movies were just dead in the water forever. Musicals keep coming and going. I think Wicked is going to bring them back. Westerns disappear. Probably they’ll come back. That’s the joke. That’s the big joke. So why calculate? Just follow your heart.

John: Absolutely. All right, let’s take a look at some pages from our listeners. For folks who are new here, every once in a while we do a three-page challenge where we invite our listeners to submit three pages from something they’ve written, generally the first three pages. We give our honest feedback.

As a reminder, people want us to be reading this stuff. They’re soliciting this feedback. If we’re mean at any point or harsh, they asked for this.

Craig: That’s a weird phrase. They permitted this.

John: They permitted this. We’ll say that. If you would like to read along on these pages, you can follow the links in the show notes and click through. There’s PDFs for those. You can take a look and maybe stop this podcast, read first, and then listen to what we’re going to say about them. Let us start with Flunge-

Craig: Flunge.

John: -by J Wheeler White.

Craig: I apologize. If you guys hear a page flipping, it’s because I like a physical page.

John: Likes a physical page.

Craig: Forgive me.

John: Drew, for folks who are not able to look at the pages, can you give us a quick summary?

Drew: “In the middle of a fencing match, with seven seconds left on the clock, 17-year-old, Will Stetson, ignores all the onlookers and focuses on his opponent, Alexander. They stare each other down. We then cut to six months earlier where Will is elbowed in his high school wrestling match and starts punching his opponent in the face. Coach Vargas tries to hold him back, but when his opponent calls him a psycho, Will lunges at him and crashes into the scorer’s table. Later, in a school hallway, Coach Vargas kicks Will off the wrestling team. Will punches a locker. Outside the gym, a Mercedes pulls up in front of Will, driven by Alina, another teenager who is currently very angry.”

John: All right. Let’s start with this title page. I love this title page.

Craig: Flunge. Yes. It’s got a nice graphically designed title with negative space fencer in the middle.

John: Absolutely. Craig, do you know what a flunge is?

Craig: I absolutely do not know what a flunge is. A flying lunge?

John: Close to a flying lunge. It’s a combination of a flèche and a lunge. Flèche is where you’re racing up to your opponent, you’re running up to the opponent.

Craig: Oh.

John: The illustration in there is actually what a flunge would be.

Craig: It’s a flunge.

John: It’s a daring stab forward.

Craig: Flunge is going to be changed. That title is not going to last.

John: No.

Craig: Just going to be honest.

John: It looks great.

Craig: It’s fun for now.

John: Fun for now. Page 1 opens with, “Time left on clock, 7 seconds, score 14-14.” I think this is crucial information. I like having it here. I’m wondering how it’s going to be shown on screen. I don’t need it to be shown on screen on the page in a certain way, but I was wondering about that. I like that it’s 14-14. That you know that this match has been going on a while. You know that you’re near the end of this.

This setup reminds me of Challengers, and I don’t know how this is all going to be structured, but I feel like we’re going to be moving back and forth into this this match, which I’m excited to see. It may not be a true Stuart Special where we start at one point and then flashback in time. I think it is a back and forth.

Craig: This does feel like a Stewart Special, though.

John: Well, it’s a Stewart Special in the sense that it started at a time, and we can catch up to this.

Craig: Only because he’s a wrestler and then he becomes a fence– I doubt we’re going to go back and forth. I could be wrong. Also, it’s a television show.

John: Oh, a television show. Pilot, yes.

Craig: It’s possible, but I agree with you, the setup felt really exciting. First of all, I got excited by fencing because– listen, at this point just show me something, and fencing is fun. It’s swordplay and it’s exciting.

John: I had fencing in a movie that didn’t shoot, which I was really sad about.

Craig: Oh, you had a fencing movie?

John: I had a fencing movie.

Craig: Ugh. Do you want to sue this guy? John, that’s what people do.

John: Yes, absolutely. I had fencing in my movie.

Craig: This guy stole your idea.

John: Yes.

Craig: Jesus.

John: I’ll say that if there’s a contract lens that plays an important role in this movie, I’ve won. I’ve won the lawsuit.

Craig: You’ve won the lawsuit. It’s an interesting thing. We have a guy– this is how it opens. “William Stetson, 17, catches his breath. He’s in a full electric saber kit.” I assume that means that-

John: He’s wired up.

Craig: -fencing outfit. “Fencing mask pulled up, a single curl of light hair glued by sweat to his forehead.” Just be aware, that’s the kind of thing that they’re going to have a meeting about, and it’s going to probably look stupid. Maybe just say sweaty.

John: Yes.

Craig: “His eyes, consumed by a deep indecipherable fervor locked with his opponent’s, Alexander Sasha Su, 18.” Now, why do they both have their masks up? Is that a thing that people do?

John: Yes, between parries.

Craig: This is exciting to see on page, but just want to think ahead here. This is J Wheeler White, which is a fantastic comic book name, by the way. J Wheeler White, he owns a newspaper in Gotham, not in New York. They’re just staring at each other. If you’re staring at somebody, and they’re staring at you, the two of you are in a staring contest, that just feels a little weird.

If you’re staring at this guy, and he’s drinking some Gatorade, or doing something, and then he turns and sees you, and expresses something back, whether it’s hatred, jealousy, I’m going to get you, you lost, whatever it is, that creates a moment. I think, here, what’s happened is, they’re just staring at each other, which feels a bit odd.

John: I get that. Again, the reason why I would say Challengers is challenged. Have you seen Challengers?

Craig: I have.

John: Challengers is all stares across on that between people-

Craig: It is.

John: -doing stuff. I love it for that. In this first page, fans, teammates, former opponents, uppercase those. Those are other groups of people that we’re going to see. There’s a thing that J Wheeler White does where it’s a word then a single dash rather than a double dash. It’s consistent. It’s fine. It’s not what I would do.

Craig: I don’t do it either, but it doesn’t matter. I get it.

John: It’s consistent.

Craig: It’s consistent. As long as it’s consistent. It would be nice to know how big. It says hundreds of fans. Hundreds of people– that’s another thing you learn when you’re making stuff is, hundreds of people look like 12 people. Thousands of people look like hundreds of people.

John: I need a sense of– is this State Championships? What is this? That would tell us.

Craig: Olympics. State Championship. Is this a gymnasium? Is this Madison Square Garden? Just give me a general sense of the space. I think it would be helpful. What I really enjoyed was how this just flung us — flunged us — into a different thing, but this is way easier to do on page than it is to do– because the problem is match-cutting from eyes, especially when there’s a mask, even though it’s pulled up, it’s going to be visible. Eyes to eyes of a person that’s in motion, wrestling, it’s just not possible.

John: It’s not possible. There’ll be a sound pre-lap, there’ll be a thing, and then you just have to cut into it.

Craig: Exactly, so probably not– it’s exciting to read, but this is something that I actually think is fine, but later you’re going to have to fix it.

John: Absolutely. It’ll be on a foot and a step will go forward and you’ll realize you’re going to do a different space. There’ll be different ways to get there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I’m loving everything on page 1 and on page 2. I thought the actual descriptions of what goes wrong in the match, and how it builds, I believed. It felt visceral and it’s funny.

Craig: Yes. I think the only thing that I would suggest here for this, because the point of this wrestling match is Will goes too far, right? He goes too far. He’s wrestling a guy, and he chokes him in a way that’s illegal, and ruins stuff.

John: He chokes him and then he starts beating him.

Craig: Well, because the guy fights back. Then he fights back again. It’s all precipitated by the fact that he’s choking this guy out, which is not legal in high school, or anywhere. That’s fine, but what I needed was something leaning into it. I think part of my issue was it just starts with this guy killing someone. That’s what he’s doing basically. How did we get to that? If you start leaning on someone’s throat– this is just logic stuff, and it’s important for tone. You’re in high school, you start choking this guy out.

Nobody says it– they’ll run in there and pull you off. You can’t kill somebody, and why would you think you could? The problem is this guy goes too far. I need to see him going too far, not already too far. Something leading into it would have been helpful.

John: Yep, agreed. Page 3, the one thing I want to scratch out here is mic drop. Vargas, the coach, says, “You smell like an f-ing litter box.” Mic drop. We don’t need the mic drop, he walks off. And at the bottom of page 3, we’re introduced to Alina Matero, 17, dark hair, clean girl aesthetic, currently very pissed off. That’s all we know about her. I liked that as the next thing we’re seeing.

Craig: I like that she seems rich. I’m guessing that he’s not. I don’t know what their relationship is, but she seems like she’s already heard about the wrestling situation. Again, tone. Page 3, Vargas, his coach says, “We were all watching Stetson,” which I think you need a comma there because it seems like we’re all watching Stetson. “We were all watching, Stetson,” that’s Will, “and good thing too, or that kid would be in an ambulance right now. Incorrect.

They watched him choke that kid out until that kid punched him to get him off of him. They didn’t do anything. And then, good thing you don’t know him.” I don’t know him either, and just because he goes to New Trier, I’m guessing that’s the school for rich kids?

John: Yes.

Craig: It doesn’t justify murder. This is so important. I need to understand why Will was trying to “kill” this kid. Why he was suddenly so vicious and so relentless that he would injure this kid and possibly render him unconscious.

John: Yeah so, thinking about that moment, if you switch it around and Will was the one who felt like he was threatened, or he was getting choked, and that he was the first person who blew up, and it was ambiguous whether the referee should have stepped in, that could have made sense.

Craig: This scene is broad. For me. This is what happens. The coach goes, “You did a dumb thing.” Will says, “No, I didn’t.” He says, “Yes, you did. You’re fired. You’re off the team.” “You can’t do that. Darn it.” Everybody deserves to be a character. Everybody deserves to be interesting. How does this really go down in life? I don’t think it’s like this. I don’t.

I think there is a possibility that as a coach you sit down with this kid– and there’s a scene where he says, “Just walk me through what happened. I want to understand why this happened.” Let Will explain. Just keep asking questions so that we start to understand Will, how his mind works, what the real problem was, and we’ll feel like maybe this coach is sympathetic, understanding, and the coach will listen to him, hear, get to the truth, and then say, “So you’re off the team. Sorry. Based on everything I understand, I appreciate it, I get it. You can’t be on a wrestling team.”

John: I hear you, and that is a version of the scene. I think there’s a way to keep the energy up the way that this scene currently does, but just with a little bit more finesse.

Craig: Actually, that was my problem.

John: That the energy was still too high?

Craig: Yes. We started with this exciting, flunging match, and then we go into an equally exciting and violent wrestling match, both of which it’s feeling like at fever pitch tempo, and then we get into this quick argument. The movie is going so fast, I felt like it’s a television show, it’s a pilot, you can breathe. If you look at Breaking Bad, everybody uses it as a great example because it is a wonderful pilot episode. It starts with, blah! And then it’s like, hmm.

John: It’s quiet. Yes.

Craig: It’s quiet.

John: There’s a description on page 3 that I did like. “Will tries to make himself big, arms out to his side, chest forward, steps to his coach, Vargas sighs.” That does a lot.

Craig: It does. Again, it’s a tone question. Will seems like an idiot here because you can’t big-guy your coach. What are you going to do? Beat him up. The coach isn’t buying it, but then I feel like, why would Will think that the coach would buy it and why is Will do–

John: I believe that’s a dumb high school character move.

Craig: To me, dumb high school characters are different to coaches that control their fate. Those are the people they don’t do this to. Those are the people that they get all solemn with because those are their father figures that they have daddy issues. Again, that’s part of what I’m saying here to J Will writers. The character right now of Will and the character of Vargas is angry coach, angry kid. I think we need to go a bit deeper in that, even in one page.

John: Great. Again, these are not well-defined problems.

Craig: No.

John: They’re all opinions and how it feels.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Before we move on, Drew, can you tell us the logline for what the actual–

Craig: For Flunge.

John: For Flunge.

Drew: “After being kicked off the team for one too many violent outbursts, a high school wrestler reluctantly joins the fencing team to keep his scholarship, unearthing a preternatural talent that may redefine the course of his life. An anime-inspired live-action sports drama series.”

John: Great. I don’t know that it’s a series. I think it’s a movie, but I’m curious–

Craig: It feels like a movie to me.

John: Feels like a movie to me. It feel like there’s a beginning, middle, and end, there’s a victory, there’s a thing.

Craig: It’s a classic. It’s like– What was that movie where Matthew Modine is a hockey player and then he becomes an ice skater? What was that one called? Look it up. It’s such a great idea. He was a hockey player who was like this, undisciplined, got kicked off, whatever personal problems, and gets stuck being paired up with an ice skater for figure skating.

John: It’s not Matthew Modine. It’s somebody who’s like Matthew Modine.

Craig: Oh, it is?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s not Matthew Modine?

John: Oh, shoot.

Craig: Who was that?

John: He looks like Steve Gutenberg, but it’s not Steve Gutenberg. We’ll find it.

Craig: That’s why we need our search engine optimization person.

John: Hey, can you tell me about a movie where a hockey player then becomes a figure skater? He gets partnered with a woman who’s a figure skater.

AI: The movie is The Cutting Edge. It’s a romantic comedy from 1992 where a former hockey player teams up with a figure skater.

John: Who were the stars of that movie?

AI: The stars of The Cutting Edge are D.B. Sweeney, who plays the former hockey player, and Moira Kelly, who plays the figure skater.

Craig: D.B. Sweeney. D.B. Sweeney and Matthew Modine were odd– My guess is that they bumped into each other at a bunch of auditions back in the day.

John: 100%. Absolutely.

Craig: What a great idea. Anyway, this reminds me in a way of like, okay, an athlete has to transition from one thing to another. It’s actually been quite a few of these. It’s not merely The Cutting Edge. Although what a great title and D.B. Sweeney. Anyway, I agree with the feels feature. What are we doing in Season 3, episode 7 for this? That’s my question, but meh.

John: Let’s move on to our next one. This is Cows by John and Mark DiStefano.

Drew: “In a bar for cows, Callie, a black and white spotted cow, and Wade, a bro-y bull, sit drinking milk. While Wade tells her wild stories about his recent trip to Moodrid, Callie stares at the bartender Jade who is also a cow, they’re all cows. They’re joined by Astrid, a Highland cow who makes fun of Wade from making his trip to Europe with his entire personality. They give Astrid a hard time because her new boyfriend is on a reality dating show, Udderly Single. Astrid wants to throw a watch party for the show, and Wade offers to organize it.”

John: This is an animated, televised, or it’s a pilot for an animated series. Let’s get into it. For what it is, it’s a good version of what it is, but I also think it’s not the pilot episode, or it’s not the first scene of what this should be. This is a Zootopia situation where these are anthropomorphic animals doing a thing. While this conversation tracks, it basically feels like it’s maybe a Friends-like sitcom, but with a lot of cow puns thrown in. It’s probably not the best way to setting up this world for me.

Craig: Yes. What I was struck by primarily was how mundane this conversation is. If you took away the fact that they’re cows, this is a pretty boring scene, unfortunately, because it’s just banter. It’s mild banter, it’s quippy. I don’t believe any of these people. The things that they’re saying to each other feels very canned, Disney television canned conversation. It doesn’t feel real. I have no idea who I’m supposed to be following here.

John: Yes. I don’t know who the central character is. I don’t really understand what the relationship is between the three of them. They’re all there.

Craig: They’re just talking. They’re just talking about something. There’s a lot of page time dedicated to the discussion of where he went to Moodrid and they’re like, “You’ve told us already.” This is not a good use of the first three pages of anything.

John: It’s just one scene also, it’s just like one continuous scene. There’s not a lot of story is happening here.

Craig: It says “Interior bar.” Now these are cows, so we’re in a cow world. “Bulls and cows mingle, dance on two legs”– I don’t know how that works. I’m just thinking about physics. I guess they’re just animated people but they’re cows. It would be nice if they made that clear– “And swill large quantities of milk. Callie sits on a bar stool next to Wade. This bar, where is it?

John: The scale of things also would feel strange.

Craig: What is the scale? What is the decor? What is the music? It says they’re dancing. To what? Can you help me feel like I understand where I am? Because all they’ve done really is, this just feels like a scene from the middle of a middle-grade sitcom where people are talking. Not an introduction to a new world where it’s about cows.

John: Yes, exactly. Here’s where I think writing the scene is useful for you. It’s like this might be a chance to say, “What does it even feel like to have these characters talking to each other? If you just do this as an exercise, it’s like let’s have a conversation where they’re talking. You get some sense of what their voices are. I can’t tell you individually what the three different cows’ voices are. You get a sense of what their banter feels like and what the kinds of cow-related jokes and puns you’re going to be throwing in here a lot would feel like. As an exploratory, let’s crank out some pages. Great, but it’s not the first three pages of this pilot.

Craig: No. If for instance, your hero is a cow named Vanessa and Vanessa works at this bar. Vanessa has to go from the kitchen, around past the bar, past the dance floor, over to cross a few booths, get to somebody, it’s bottle service, or she’s bringing them whatever grass tenders and whatever they eat. As she’s walking by, she’s catching snippets of conversation.

These things are only valuable as background snippets. I don’t buy that we would want to focus our camera and our attention on them because it won’t hold our camera and our attention. What I would understand is, okay, I’m meeting somebody. She’s tired, she’s cranky. Oh, but she has to be nice to these people. Maybe she knows somebody who’s like, “Oh my God, when are you getting off? We have to get out of here and we need to talk about this thing.” She’s like, “Yes, I will. I promise.” Then someone’s like, “Hey, blah, blah, blah, give me a, blah–“ whatever, it didn’t make a scene. This isn’t a scene, this is just people– We’re just like, talking.

John: All that said, there’s nothing objectionable or wrong on these pages. Everything flows right, and it has the jokoid feeling that feels–

Craig: You said jokoid.

John: Jokoid.

Craig: That’s a problem.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is a problem.

John: It’s a problem, but what I’m saying is you don’t look at these pages and they’re like, “Oh, this is incompetent.” It’s not that.

Craig: No.

John: I feel like these brothers– I assume they’re brothers-

Craig: Yes.

John: -they can do this. This just wasn’t a very good example of the top of their craft.

Craig: Yes. I think they need to raise the bar a little bit on themselves because it’s in the form of. By the way, when I started, the very first stuff I wrote was exactly like this. It was exactly like this. It was in the form of, but it wasn’t. That’s part of the normal progress. Somebody needs to go, “Okay, it’s in the form of, so that’s good news.” You actually have internalized rhythm and general– like the idea of how to get information out without reading it off of note cards.

Now we have to think bigger, think better, and be more creative. Just always ask yourself, is the job to do the stuff I’ve seen, or is the job to do something that’s better, or different, or just truer to me that feels like it’s something that came out of me and not an imitation.

John: Drew, what was the logline for this?

Drew: “An ambitious cow and her cattle friends navigate careers and relationships in the cow-centric city of Bovine.”

John: Okay. So it’s either Friends or Sex in the City, and there’s actually a pretty wide range between the two of those.

Craig: Then I would love to– I actually don’t know the answer to this, but what was the first scene of Friends? What happened?

John: The first time in the scene of Friends is at Central Perk and Rachel is fleeing from her marriage. She shows up in a wedding dress.

Craig: Okay. There you go.

John: That’s a scene.

Craig: That’s a scene, there’s a situation, it’s on. That’s not happening here.

John: No, it’s not.

Craig: It’s not enough to say, “And they’re cows.” That’s the other thing. You can’t just say Friends, but they’re cows. What about cows? Look, I’ve written a movie about sheep, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m obsessed with the things that make sheep sheep, but also make the individual sheep different from each other. What can sheep do that we can’t, and what can’t sheep do that we can? Why cows? What is that getting me other than, “Ha, ha, ha, they’re cows?” It’s got to be more.

Actually, that’s almost something that needs to happen in these first three pages, too. That a burden that Friends didn’t have was, why humans?

I need to know why cows.

John: The audience demands a certain amount of world-building and rule-setting in cow Friends that they’re not expecting in a friends-Friends.

Craig: And justification, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: What do we get, because they’re cows?

John: Let’s move on to our final three-page challenge. This is Never Die Alone by Yeong-Jay Lee.

Drew: A storm rolls in over a barge on Lake Superior. On the deck, men dig through their cargo of coal and pull out a gaunt young man with a neck tattoo. They chain him to an iron ball and push him overboard. We follow the body down to the bottom where the iron ball crashes through a sunken colonial boat, releasing a glowing sapphire, The Eye, which begins to float to the surface. Behind it, we see hundreds of bodies on the lake bed.

In the neighboring Sault Ste. Marie, a shabby car pulls up to a trailer home. Inside, Adam Withers, 17, asks his mom, Sarah, 37, if he can go and hang out with the new girl, Jenny. Sarah’s reluctant and sets a curfew for 12:00. Adam admits he’s lost his phone, which upsets Sarah, but she still lets him go. When he’s gone, Sarah returns to her phone call and cigarette.

Craig: You left out the fact that it’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

John: What’s this?

Craig: Gordon Lightfoot.

John: Gordon Lightfoot, right.

Craig: One of my favorites of all time. Love Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite Canadians. Never met him.

Drew: This is my neck of the woods.

Craig: He’s a genius, though.

John: Let’s start with the title page. I’d love to see contact information and a date. Just useful. People can find you.

Craig: Or at a minimum contact information.

John: I circled a lot of things here, and I want to talk just a little bit about stuff that got me tripped up on this first page. “I barge traversing the Stygian Lake in pouring rain.”

Craig: Stygian.

John: See, I didn’t even know how to pronounce that word. It’s a thing I’ve seen, and never actually pronounced it out loud.

Craig: The Stygian decks.

John: Yes, we’ll need the word Stygian. It’s dark.

Craig: It’s a bit ornate for this.

John: Also, because you’re saying barge, I know it’s the River Styx. Wait, so are we on a barge of the dead? I didn’t know if we were going to shore or away from shore, it’s traversing. I didn’t know where we were at, which becomes important because it’s clear that they’re headed away from shore because they’re going to dump this body.

Next two sentences, “A few men wearing raincoats pace the deck as the barge slows to a stop. Lights from a town dot the horizon. They unfasten a large tarp–“ Wait, they unfasten, the lights unfasten? It’s the men. This is one of those little small things where we’re reaching back, what is this pronoun referring to?

Craig: Yes. In the prior sense, we have a little bit of an issue here, too. Yeong-Jay, I think, you don’t have to use your full vocabulary-

John: No.

Craig: -which is impressive. When you say, “Lights from a town dot the horizon,” the way I just read that makes sense. What we read is, “Lights from a town dot the horizon.” Town dot. It just doesn’t work. You don’t need that so much. Lights dot the horizon or the distant lights of a town are seen on the horizon, if you want. Horizon isn’t a great word for night. We don’t really see the horizon at night. We just see lights in the distance. We don’t know if it’s the horizon.

More importantly, information. “Two dig through the coal.” You just want to say two– Again, what? Two? “Two dig” is not a strange one, T-W-O dig. “Two dig through the coal to reveal a face buried within. They extract a gaunt young man from the pile. He bears a neck tattoo, “Beloved.”

John: Is he already dead or not, important?

Craig: That’s my problem. I couldn’t tell if they were murdering a guy or they were just dumping a corpse. I think it’s a corpse. I hope it’s a corpse.

John: He’s unconscious, he’s not protesting.

Craig: Generally, we don’t describe corpses as gaunt young men. We say-

John: The body of a gaunt young man.

Craig: -they extract the body of a– Exactly. It’s important information because I just presume they were killing him.

John: Now, what happens after this is they are going to attach to the body, this heavyweight, it’s going to sink down, and they were going to follow this down. In an unlikely way, but in a way, that is very elaborate, it’s going to crash through the sunken thing and let loose this stuff. It felt like an opening title sequence. It felt very heightened in a way. It’s like, okay, is this whole thing super heightened? Great. If it is, but then the scene after this is not heightened. This is a very plain scene that made me wonder.

Craig: I’ve seen this transition before where you see something insane happen, and then we cut to many years later, which I assume this is many years later.

John: Oh, no, I thought it was the same time, but we don’t know. It’s end of music cue on page 2, but then we’re in a kitchen, and–

Craig: I don’t know what time. I need to know if this was earlier or later. I don’t know if this was the 1960s or ‘70s. When you play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it implies– When was that? The ‘70s? ‘70s. It implies that’s the timeline, even though this body doesn’t crash into the Edmund Fitzgerald, he crashes into an early colonial trading vessel.

Now, I will say that what happens here is awesome. The problem is it’s overwritten. I got lost in all the words. I’m just going to read it. “The iron ball carries him, the corpse, through the sundered wooden hull and into the captain’s quarters festooned with the trappings–” Two things. “Of a wealthy and worldly trader. The ball crashes into an ornate glass cabinet, scattering the antique curiosities within. Among them, a black leather coffer–” a lot of people won’t know what that is, “Imprinted with a cross. As it tumbles through the water, it unlatches–” I’m not sure–

John: What is it? Is it the ball we’ve been following or is it this coffer?

Craig: It’s probably the coffer, but opens, I think, would be fine there. “And The Eye drifts free. It is not an impossible sapphire–“ It is not an impossible sapphire. It is a sapphire “Glowing uncannily in the darkness.” I have a problem. Until that thing comes out, how the hell am I seeing any of the rest of this? I’m in the bottom of a lake at night.

Now, you may think, “Oh, magic light.” If you then do a light trick here, that’s part of the problem. Just like, “How do we actually do this?” Then it says, “It,” meaning the sapphire, “Floats toward the surface. As it rises, pull back to reveal hundreds of bodies scattered across the lake bed.” That’s cool. That’s a cool image to see all those bodies. Do they move?

John: Yes.

Craig: Does one of them twitch? Does something happen to make me go, “This was worth watching all that?” This is actually exciting stuff. It feels very Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean if you will. It’s your choice, but it’s overwritten, so actually I got lost.

John: Yes, I got lost, too. Now, I was missing a cut, too, at the end of this thing because we’re about to go to Sault Ste. Marie night, but it wasn’t clear that this was that we were leaving this sequence and going to a new thing. That’s where I thought I needed a transition.

Craig: Looking at it, I think maybe it’s not. That’s why I’m so confused because it says “Exterior Lake Superior – Night,” and then you’re right, it goes “Exterior Sault Ste. Marie – Night.” Maybe it’s at the same time. I generally don’t think that in the early 2000s, guys on boats who find buried bodies in coal, which is a weird thing to have on a boat in the 2000s, would just dump the body. It feels more like something that happens in the 1800s. Something feels– I’m confused.

John: I’m confused about times, too. We have two scene headers back to back that are both exteriors Sault Ste. Marie. Don’t do that. You need to–

Craig: Yes, that’s problematic for everybody.

John: Then we’re ultimately getting into this kitchen of a trailer home. We’re meeting Adam and Sarah, who’s apparently his mother. They’re speaking with a distinctive Yooper accent.

Yooper accent, for our international listeners, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and it is a Finnish-Canadian thing. Just imagine it has a Finnish quality to it and the oo’s are different.

Craig: That’s why it’s Sault Ste. Marie?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s just wrong. You’re just abusing the French language. Sorry, U.P.

John: Adam asks, “Can I go out with Jenny?” He’s 17 and he’s asking a can question, which is, sure possible, but I didn’t understand the relationship based on this can–

Craig: He’s 17 years old.

John: “I’m going out with Jenny.”

Craig: Yes, thank you. You have a driver’s license. Good. What is going on here? Why are you asking your mommy if you can go out?

John: Is she on a sex line? What is she doing? We don’t know. You’re setting up that we should be curious, and I actually need to have a little bit more information because at this point, I don’t know if she’s just customer service.

Craig: I think she’s in a meeting is my guest. I like that you were like, “Is she a sex worker on the phone?”

John: It’s night, though.

Craig: Oh, it’s night. There’s also a fawn drinking from the lake at night.

John: We don’t know if this is the same night where this body was thrown over or if it’s 20 years later.

Craig: We don’t know. Also, how late at night is this?

John: Yes, no idea.

Craig: I don’t–

John: We need this information. We know it’s before midnight because he has to be back by 12:00.

Craig: Right. Oh, yes, also 17, I guess, maybe.

John: He’s lost his phone. I don’t know.

Craig: You’ve lost your phone. What year is it again?

John: We don’t know what year it is. It’s an early 2000s Fleetwood trailer home, but it could be an old– Is it a brand new– 2000?

Craig: That’s right. We don’t know what year it is. If, for instance, it was back in the Nokia days, yes, you’d lose your phone and whatever. It’s fine.

John: It doesn’t matter much.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I need to know. That said, look, Yeong Jay, this actually feels like there’s something awesome happening here. I love stuff like this. I love the use of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ve given us moments that feel like they’re from the 1800s, moments that feel like they’re from the ‘70s, moments that feel like they’re from the 2000s. We don’t know what’s going on. Pull back on the adjectives, there’s just a lot. Maybe if the other things were clearer, they would be more enjoyable, but when you have something awesome happening, let it be awesome. You don’t need to put as much ketchup on it.

John: Agreed. Drew, can you tell us the summary of what happens in this?

Craig: Never Die Alone.

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: A Necromancy of Thay. Obviously, he’s going to become a red wizard. Listen, necromantic magic is very powerful, as we both know. There’s a lot of great spells to use there. A couple of interesting cantrips. Chill Touch.

John: Toll the Dead.

Craig: Toll the Dead. Classics.

John: Classic.

Craig: Nerd.

John: It’s a–

Craig: But I like stuff like this. I see it’s a movie?

Drew: It didn’t say but I’m–

Craig: The idea of a teenager becoming a zombie lord is awesome.

John: Sure.

Craig: That could be awesome but who’s the villain? We need a little bit more of a sense of just read that again. It said what happens to him after–

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life, discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: The last bit is the problem. Plunges him with whom? That’s the most important thing to know from that logline. Plunges him into a battle with a mysterious visitor for his soul, with Satan, with the spirit of his own grandfather, whatever it is. That just sounds existential, which feels boring. I think this could be cool.

John: Yes, it could be cool.

Craig: Yeong-Jay got a good vocabulary, I’ll give you that.

John: All right. I want to thank our three entrants into the three-page challenge this week.

Craig: Brave people.

John: Brave people. Thanks to everyone else who sent in your pages. If you would like to send in your pages, you go to johnaaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there that you read through and click, and then you attach your PDF to it. If you’re a premium member, we will often send out a little email saying, “Hey, we’re about to do a three-page challenge, and we’re looking for things in a certain space,” and so that’s a benefit if you’re a premium member.

We really want to thank everyone who applied because you guys are heroes and let’s talk about the actual words on the page.

All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, my one cool thing is a movie I watched over the weekend called Strange Darling, and it is terrific. It is written and directed by JT Mollner. Everyone says– Which is true, that the less you know going into it, the better because it’s full of surprises, which is great.

That said, you need to know that it’s bloody because if you don’t like a bloody movie, you’re not going to want to watch that. Also, you’ll know from the very start that it’s in six chapters, but the chapters are not in order. What I think is so good about watching this as a screenwriter is you recognize, “Oh, that’s right. A story is told by the way the audience receives it and the order the audience receives it, not chronologically.”

The choice to put the chapters in this order is an incredibly important screenwriting decision, and you could not reverse it out of this. The story doesn’t work if it’s told chronologically. It’s such a great example of knowing what your audience is thinking and then being able to subvert those expectations by–

Craig: Putting things–

John: Putting things back.

Craig: Being intentional. That sounds awesome.

John: Intentionality.

Craig: I also have a movie.

John: Please.

Craig: My winkle thing. I think it’s a A24 movie, possibly, called My Old Ass.

John: Oh, yes. I think people love it.

Craig: It’s lovely. It was written and directed by Megan Park, Canadian. In my list of Canadians, it’s going to be hard again, to get past Gordon Lightfoot, but she has moved up the list. What I really like about it, it’s a comedy, but it’s like a weepy comedy. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s very simple. It is simple, short. It’s a formula without being a formula, which I love. It follows the stuff about the formula that connects to us on a deep level, which is why the formula became the formula, without just feeling like it’s walking along a similar path.

It does its own thing. It felt to me incredibly current. It was easy for us when we watched John Hughes’ movies in the ‘80s to go, “Oh, this older person gets us. He’s generally speaking, in our world.” This felt like that for 20-somethings now. It just felt correct, felt true. It stars Maisy Stella, who was fantastic. She’s opposite two people. One is Aubrey Plaza-

John: Iconic.

Craig: -who was great. One is this guy, Percy Hynes White, who I wasn’t familiar with, but I think he was in Wednesday, and I think he was briefly canceled and then got uncanceled. I thought he was spectacular. The two of them together, I just thought it was just fascinating. It was really, really well done. There’s a high concept at it that they treat as low concept as possible. There’s no spoiler here, it’s in the trailers. I guess she’s 22 or whatever she is in the movie?

Drew: She’s 19.

Craig: 19. It’s all the same to me, I’m 53, it doesn’t matter. 19 years old. She’s about to leave home. She lives in Canada, which took me a while to figure out, but Maisy Stella is from Canada. She takes mushrooms with her friends, has a psychedelic experience, but the psychedelic experience is merely that her 39-year-old self shows up and just has a conversation with her, and starts telling her things. That high concept is played as low concept as possible. It’s almost like they saw a looper and went, “We could be even less invested in the who cares how this worksness of it,” which I thought was really smart. It was just very beautifully done, well written. Really well written.

John: Yes, I love that.

Craig: Also, well directed. I really appreciate directors who don’t make me look at how they’re directing so damn much and just let the story lead us and just get out of the way. It’s like invisible directing, my favorite kind.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you’re 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 a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is 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. Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so I was just describing this movie that I like so much, Strange Darling, and I didn’t want to spoil anything about it. So I wanted, in our bonus segment here, talk through how we discuss and convince people to see movies or talk about movies without ruining what’s actually in them. For example, I saw the new Joker movie, and there’s things I really liked about it, but things that I think didn’t work about it. It’s tough to discuss those things without revealing big stuff that happens in it.

Craig: For starters, I think, we overestimate our ability to convince people to do anything.

John: True.

Craig: We get excited about, I’m going to convince you to see this because I liked it. I see that you’re not leaning in hard enough. Let me give you another bit, or let me tell you that something happens that completely flips you out. When you get there, you’re going to be so happy. Then maybe you won’t because that’s how that goes. So I think we start to tread towards spoilers when we’re worried the people are going to do what we want them to do.

The easiest version would be to say, you’re describing this movie and you’re like, “You should see it. I think you would love it. If you don’t, I’m sorry. I think you’re going to love it. You just look in them like stuff happens that you will like.”

John: I also feel like anything that shows up in the trailers or shows up in the first three minutes of the movie, that’s–

Craig: Fair game.

John: Yes, it’s completely fair game.

Craig: Like My Old Ass. There’s not this moment– Obviously, in the movie, it’s like, “What? Who? You? What? What do you mean?” The characters can experience that. We all know from the trailers that’s what this thing is about, so that’s fine for us because it’s in the first, 10 minutes of the movie. It’s all the stuff that happens after. Yes, there is something big that happens that if I mentioned it or even refer to it obliquely, would be a massive spoiler. Even saying there’s a massive spoiler in a way is a spoiler.

John: That is one of the challenges, too. That’s what I was running into with Strange Darling, it’s like, if I say things about the performances or the surprising things in the performances, as you start to watch the movie, then you start looking for, “Oh, when is this surprising revelation going to happen?”

Craig: I had this wonderful experience– I think I might’ve mentioned on the show, of showing Bella Ramsey The Matrix. Not only had she not seen it, she knew nothing about it. That was so glorious. I was like, “So you’ve never–“ She’s like, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anything about it.” I’m like, “I’m going to tell you nothing. Let’s just watch.”

And the delight– And it was experiencing it again in the best possible way, as opposed to, ”Oh yes, The Matrix, man, it’s going to blow your mind. It’s got this mind-blowing thing in the middle, it’s going to freak you out.” Then everything’s going to be, “Don’t worry, you won’t know what’s going on, you’ll be confused, but then you won’t be–“ None of that, just go ahead.

John: My experience with this recently was showing my daughter Too Many Cooks. It was fun watching it with her, because it was like, “Oh, okay, I sot of get it.” Then in the end it was like, “I did not like that,” because it goes to this incredibly dark place.

Craig: You shouldn’t like it, you should appreciate it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Exactly. Sometimes you just want people to have the same experience you had, but by telling them anything about your experience, you’re ruining their chance of having that experience that you had. It’s hard.

John: There’s a movie that I’m talking about doing a remake of, and so I described it to Drew, but I had Drew watch it. I was talking through, “Oh, these are moments that I think are really good, but there’s something coming out that you haven’t hit yet that’s actually a really good version of this scene and this moment.” It’s that balance between you want to provide a framework for why it is you’re liking this thing, even if the movie is not necessarily great. What the potentials are there, and still not spoil the experience of actually getting there.

Craig: Then burdening the person with pleasing you. I just want them to watch something, I don’t need them to turn to me and go, “Oh, you were right, that is awesome.” I don’t want them thinking about me at all, just watch it. I always say to people, “Listen, I love this, you may not.” I say, “If you feel, as you’re going through, “Okay, I’ve seen enough of this, I get what’s going on.” Just stop. It’s fine, just bail out.

Drew: What do you do if, so I feel like I’m at a lot of parties or get-togethers where maybe one or two people haven’t seen a movie, but then like, you brought up My Old Ass, and there’s a thing I want to talk to you about, but John hasn’t seen it, so I don’t want to– Do you just say like, “Oh my God [beep].”

Craig: No, don’t say that.

Drew: Okay.

Craig: Also, just be patient. You’d be like, “Okay, at some point, when it’s just the two of us here,”–

John: Absolutely, when he goes off to get a beer then we’re going to talk about this.

Craig: Yes, I just want to talk real fast about this. I don’t want to pull you away from them or anything like that, but if you love it and you want to have that moment where you love something with somebody together, just be patient. If you do the thing, what happens is, I think people resent it. They resent it because they feel like, “You know what? Then I’m not going to see it, actually.” Fine, you love it so much that you need to talk about it, I don’t want it.

John: I listen to Slate Culture Gabfest, and on that show, they will often do a segment about a movie, but then if they need to, as their bonus segment, they’ll do like, “This is the spoiler part of this stuff, and then we’re going to talk about all this stuff.” That’s also another good approach. It’s just like, there’s the conversation you have going into it, and then the expectation that behind a paywall or behind a little divider curtain, “Here’s where we’ll talk about the other stuff.”

The same thing could be true for online posting. It’s like you put it in a place that is spoiler forum or you use the spoiler tag on things so that people don’t see the stuff that they don’t want to see.

Craig: So much easier in that format. Spoiler tag is great. Sometimes I’m looking for something about, let’s say, it was Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m like, “Okay, I know this thing is supposed to be here, I can’t find it. Let me go and see what the answer is.” Then it’ll go on Reddit and someone will be like, “Oh, here it is.”

Then there’s all this other discussion, and people are really actually pretty decent about spoilers. Then you’re like, “I don’t actually want to know that, so I won’t click on that. I won’t click the fog of war there and reveal it.”

John: Yes, which is crucial. And the fog of war is actually the right, I think, metaphor for that. Because in fog of war, in gaming terms, is that as you pass through a space, you expose the stuff around you, and therefore you can start to see those things. Going in, you’re not supposed to know what the geography of a place is.

Craig: Right, sometimes there are movies where I’m like, “Look, I have no interest in seeing that movie. It’s not my genre, it’s not my thing.” People are talking about it, it’s annoying. I’m just going to go see what it is so that I don’t have to be annoyed and walk away from people. As if I’m going to see that movie one day, I know I’m not.

John: Mike’s thing is he’ll just like, “I will look up the Wikipedia article on it and just read it because I know I’m never going to see that movie, but I’ll know what actually happens.”

Craig: At least, I just don’t have to walk away from people. Sometimes people say, “Do you care if I spoil it?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. Just spoil away.” Never going to see it. I think the real problem is when we’re trying to convince people to do something that maybe they don’t want to do. It’s like we make a trailer that gives away too much with our mouths.

John: Yes. And I’m sure you’re constantly grappling with that on your show. It’s like in your ideal world you would love for everyone to come in completely clean and not have a sense of what– I haven’t watched the trailer for your show because I don’t want to know anything about how it’s going to be this season.

Craig: You don’t get hard information but you definitely learn things. It’s an interesting thing, adapting something that exists.

John: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: I don’t worry so much about the spoiler stuff because, to me, if you’re not in for the journey and the interesting things we do in a different format, then if you’re just watching it to find out the– It’s not Lost, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t need to know what happens. What is the island? There is none of that for us really. It’s not about that. It is why I had the nuclear reactor blow up instantly in Chernobyl because I’m like, spoiler, it blows up. Let’s just get that out of the way. It blowed up.

John: Yes, absolutely. Cool, thanks.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Quote-Unquote Marketing Director – Apply Here!
• Veteran Script Coordinator on YouTube
• Why aren’t smart people happier? by Adam Mastroianni
• Middle Aged Man – SNL
• FLUNGE by J Wheeler White, COWS by John and Mark DiStefano, and NEVER DIE ALONE by Yeong-Jay Lee
• The Cutting Edge
• Strange Darling
• My Old Ass
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.