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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today on the show we have some clips with some bad words in them, so if you don’t want your kids to hear those words maybe listen to this one on headphones.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 508 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I could not get our schedules to sync up this week, but lucky for all of us we have a remarkable replacement in the form of Jen Statsky. She’s a writer-producer whose credits include Broad City, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and my previous One Cool Thing Hacks, a series which she co-created. Welcome Jen.

Jen Statsky: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

John: I’m so excited to have you here. So we’ve not really met in person I don’t think, maybe at a WGA thing?

Jen: Maybe at a WGA thing. But I think this might be our first in-person meeting.

John: It very well could be. So on Twitter I congratulated you on your show, but I think we probably retweeted the same things in the past, but that’s about as much as we’ve done together.

Jen: Yes.

John: Well today on the show I want to talk about how you got started and particularly how you got started in comedy because that’s a thing I know nothing about. And then I really want to dig into the form of single camera comedy, because Hacks is just great and Hacks and Broad City are both single camera comedies, but they’re very different. And I want to talk about writing those, writing towards act breaks, writing without act breaks.

Jen: Sure.

John: And we have the pages in front of us, so we have some scenes. So I really want to get very specific if we can.

Jen: I love it. Let’s get into it.

John: And you know who else has questions? Our listeners. I put out a call to the premium subscribers and they sent in 130 questions about comedy that Megana has sorted through. So, we will not 130.

Jen: Let’s do them. Let’s hit them all.

John: All of them. We’re going to knock them all out.

Jen: 130 questions.

John: And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk through the cat person discourse, so cat person which is that short story that everyone is talking about years ago, well now there’s an update to that, so I want to get your take on that.

Jen: It’s so funny that we are once again reliving cat person on Twitter. It’s all come full circle from 2017.

John: Yeah. I feel like there’s people who were in a coma all this time and they wake up and we’re still talking about cat person.

Jen: On one end of a global pandemic there’s cat person discourse, and on the other end of the global pandemic there’s cat person discourse.

John: It gets into those questions about like who owns a story. And we’re all sort of drawing from real life, especially writers. And I’ve run into situations where an event will happen and it’s like, oh, do I get that event, or do you get that event?

Jen: Exactly. I know. It’s a super nuanced conversation about art and who owns certain life things that have happened to people. So it is a really interesting conversation.

John: Cool. Two little bits of news and follow up to start with. First off, the WGA put out this pilot deal guide, which was kind of cool. So coming out of the agency agreement we now get all the contracts, and so we can see everybody’s contract and we can see how much people are getting paid for their deals, not just as writers but also as producers, and how much they’re getting paid to write pilots. And so they have all this information. The guild looked through 700 pilot deals from 2020 and 2021 to see what the averages were.

Jen, were there any surprises in here for you?

Jen: No, no real surprises. I mean, I think it’s so helpful to have this information out there. I’m just so delighted that the guild did this because you know so much of what happens is people get kept in the dark about what other people are getting paid. And in doing that it allows studios and networks to have all the power, because we’re not talking. We don’t know what our counterparts are making. And so just to have this information out there is I think wonderful.

I remember when the guild was asking for people’s contracts I had a couple of friends reach out and be like, hey, is it OK to send them this. And it’s like yeah it’s to help us, it’s not for nefarious purposes that the Writers Guild wants to look at your contracts. It’s all in the name of the information being out there and just being super helpful and give writers a stronger place to be in for negotiations.

John: Yeah. So if you have an agent or manager or lawyer getting your deal, great, they should have some of this information. They should have a sense of what this is. But this is a chance for a writer to say like, OK, this is above the median, this is below the median. If it’s below the median, why is it below the median? There could be a good reason. I mean, half of writers are going to get paid more. So, there could be a reason why you’re below median. But it’s helpful to understand. And if there’s a reason that you can solve about this, great.

Jen: Totally. Were there any surprises to you in looking at it?

John: I was happy to see that there were changes from 2019. So that a pilot script went up $17,500. That’s great.

Jen: That’s great.

John: And so that’s progress people are making. And the split between one hours and half hours is also good. So you deal for Hacks, was it a streamer at that point? Was it clear that it was always going to be something that was made without commercials and made for not a cable?

Jen: Yeah. It was always – the idea was always to go to the cable streaming places. Like we didn’t really ever entertain pitching this to networks. I and Mike Schur under overall deals at Universal Television, so it started out – we pitched to Universal and then kind of going from there we plotted out where we were going to take the show. But, yeah, in the very early iterations as Paul – my co-creators Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and I were talking about this idea. We just always knew it had to be for streaming or cable. It’s just baked into the idea.

John: Great. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it talks through sort of what broadcast network and streamer deals are like and you can see where things are at right now. And the good news is that it’ll keep going forward. So each year they’ll be able to put up an update to see what progress is being made, or if stuff is retrenching at all.

A bit of follow up here. Two episodes ago we talked about getting fired. Phil in LA wrote in. Megana could you tell us what Phil said?

Megana Rao: Yeah. So Phil wrote in and said, “I listened to Episode 506 where you discussed how to handle being fired. While bad communication isn’t limited to screenwriting, it doesn’t need to be the practice. In Episode 399, Notes on Notes, instead of accepting the status quo on notes you and Craig created a program to help producers learn to give better notes and fix communication issues. The same could be done on this issue as well. And industry build on relationships and communication needs a bedrock of respect. And important moments like firing need to have established norms.”

John: Yeah. My daughter just applied for her first job. She’s a high schooler. And so she applied for her first job and she keeps asking like when do you think they’re going to tell me if I got the job or didn’t get the job. And I’m like they’re never going to tell you.

Jen: Oh, you’ll never know. I’m still waiting to find out if I got a job at Jimmy Kimmel from a packet I submitted in 2008. So, you just never know.

John: Well you’re in a position now to hire people, or to fire people if you need to. So, what are some things that you’re thinking about in terms of communication outward with people that are either under your employ or want to be under your employ?

Jen: It’s a good question. I mean, I think when it comes to hiring, and especially firing, there are just difficult conversations that you have to have. And with the privilege of getting to be a showrunner, getting to be a show creator, getting to be the boss you are also taking on the responsibility of having difficult conversations. And so I think you can’t shy away from that. I think you have to say, OK, if this person is being let go we’re not just going to do it in an unethical way where we don’t treat them like a human being. We’re going to have a conversation.

And so it’s about being a human being and just treating that person like a human being and saying, OK, this is going to be a difficult conversation and it’s probably not what I want to do with my day to day, but I at least owe this to someone to talk to them about it.

John: Well from a writer perspective the golden rule really applies. You know what it would feel like to be ghosted or to be fired in a bad way. We can understand what that’s like. And so even though we may not be trained as managers, which is a whole separate issue, we do have a sense of what it feels like to be the writer who is not getting the full information. And so just being honest with the person and just being thoughtful and human with the person seems to be great progress.

Jen: I listened to you guys talk about it and as someone who works primarily in TV, not in features, I knew this as a fact but it is so fascinating that in features it does seem like you have to get so much more used to being fired than in television. Like in television, you know, maybe you work on a show for a season and they don’t ask you back, but even that doesn’t totally feel like firing. It feels like in features it’s a much more common occurrence that people have not figured out how to handle well still.

John: Talk to me about not being asked back. Because that is a different thing than being fired. And it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as being dropped off of something.

Jen: No, not at all. You know, I have friends who have run rooms and they’ve not asked people back the next season and it’s never necessarily because, oh, that person was bad and didn’t work. Sometimes you’re just like oh you know what going forward we found that the tone of the show is way more dramatic than we thought and so we’re going to try to hire some people with more experience in drama for example. And so that really just becomes looking at every single, the makeup of your writer’s room, who do you need, what are you feeling you need more of, what direction is the story headed, and who can help you serve that?

So a lot of times I think if someone doesn’t get asked back, like yeah sure there are situations where it was just a bad fit and that person didn’t gel with the room, but it doesn’t – like you said, it doesn’t have the same stigma. It’s not quite the same as being fired and told like, OK, you’re not doing this job again on Monday basically.

John: It also strikes me that with so many shows being done in mini rooms are being entirely written before anything is being shot, there’s not that same expectation that you’re going to be coming back season after season on a show. Because those people will not be available necessarily. So you’re just kind of assembling a team for one heist.

Jen: Exactly.

John: And then you go off again.

Jen: Exactly. Like there’s so many shows now, so many opportunities. So you can’t really expect – like we have some wonderful writers who wrote on season one of Hacks, but they might get their own. They’re doing their own stuff. They might get a pilot. They might not be available for that reason. Yeah, it’s very much so one heist at a time, one season at a time.

John: Let’s talk about the staffing up on a show. So, this is a good transition between your role as a showrunner now versus when you were first starting up. You mentioned that you had submitted a packet to Jimmy Kimmel. What were your first jobs in the industry? What were your first attempts at writing in the industry? Because you were an intern also, correct?

Jen: Yeah. So long before I worked I was a kid who just was like obsessed with television. Reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite was like that’s what raised me. Because my parents kind of kicked the can down the road on that one. And so I was obsessed with television from a very young age. I didn’t really know that it was a job someone could do until maybe towards the end of high school. And then I realized like, OK, it seems like NYU has a very good film and TV program. I’m going to apply there. And I got in. And I studied film and TV there.

I went through the film and TV program which is actually more for directors, but pretty quickly learned that I did not like directing and only wanted to be a writer. And so at NYU the thing that was an incredible privilege of being at NYU was that you’re in the city during the school year so you can apply for these internships that people at other colleges can really only do during their summer breaks. So my senior year I interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. Kind of found myself in this insane situation where I was going to 30 Rock six out of seven days a week as a 21-year-old because I was able to do, yeah, three days at Conan, three days at SNL, which was an incredible learning experience.

It was actually 2007, so it was an incredible learning experience which was then cut short because of the writers’ strike. So I got to also see how all of that stuff was going down.

John: Tell me like it was an incredible learning experience because they had set it up to be, or because you were doing something that you actually – were you being entrepreneurial about your learning there?

Jen: Kind of a combination. They definitely were very kind people who I think wanted interns to learn from being there. But I lucked into a very specific role at Saturday Night Live which was I was a photography intern, which made no sense because I have absolutely no photography skills whatsoever. But that’s just the department I ended up in. And in being a photography intern you are tasked with going down – at least this was how it was in 2007, I don’t know if it still is now – but we were tasked with going down on the floor and taking photographs of the dress rehearsal, like on the Friday, the day before the show on Saturday. And so I had like this firsthand front row view of the sketches being worked out, the actors running through them, the writers whose sketches it were being on the floor, figuring stuff out, what works, what didn’t.

And that was just so incredibly fascinating. So it was kind of a combo. Any time you’re in an environment like that hopefully your eyes are wide open. You’re listening and you’re just trying to take in as much as you can to learn. And then I also kind of lucked out with the position I got.

John: That’s great. So you were there to see the tension of sort of like these are the sketches we think are going to work. These are the tweaks we’re making. Just all of the stuff that gets cut.

Jen: Exactly.

John: And you’re seeing the writers trying to save their things along the way.

Jen: Exactly. And just seeing firsthand what a high pressure environment it is. I mean, it’s been well documented, but that show it’s like really crazy that you are under that kind of time limit. And there’s a gun to your head and it’s like, OK, the show happens Saturday, figure it out. You’ve got to write 12 sketches or whatever it is. And they need to be done by Saturday by 11:30 and it’s Tuesday or whatever. And so that was also just kind of a good intro into realizing like, oh yeah, a lot of these TV writing jobs are super high pressure and can be really intense.

John: Were those writers on the show talking with you? I mean, I guess you were the photography intern at SNL, so you weren’t probably interfacing so directly with them. But something like Conan O’Brien did you have a role of actually working with them?

Jen: Yeah. SNL was like you said I was more in the photo department for that. But I remember at Conan there’s a long term Conan writer, I think he might be at Colbert now, this guy Brian Stack who is just the funniest, loveliest man and he would always come into the bullpen where the interns were and talk to us and say like how are you guys doing, and any questions we had we were able to ask. So like, yeah, you did mingle with the writers there a lot, which was amazing, because you’re getting to see the people doing what you hopefully – what you want to be doing. And so that was a great experience, too.

John: So you come out of these internships and NYU with a degree, but also hopefully some writing samples? What were you trying to do next after this experience?

Jen: I knew that I wanted to work in comedy. But I wasn’t quite sure what lane I wanted to pursue. And by that I mean I was taking classes at UCB. I was taking improv classes. I was taking sketch writing classes. I had some half-hour samples that I had written at NYU. But I was also doing standup. And that’s kind of an interesting thing about comedy is that there’s so many – if you are like I want to write movies, you’re like I’m writing movies. But if you’re more broadly like I know I’m interested in comedy and I want to work in comedy there are a bunch of different kind of paths you can dabble with.

And so I was doing a bunch of that and pretty quickly like the things that I was having no fun doing I realized like, OK, that’s not for me. I’m not meant to be a standup. That’s not going to happen. And so the way it happened that I got my first actual job in the industry is that when the writers’ strike happened and so SNL and Conan kind of shut down and didn’t really need interns for a bit there was a satirical newspaper called The Onion which I’m sure people are super familiar with.

John: Oh yeah.

Jen: Which was like a huge touchpoint for me comedically. Like one of my first big comedic influence was The Onion. I just loved it. And I spent my last semester at NYU interning there because they at the time were doing web videos based on Onion headlines and articles. And so I worked there at The Onion and then as I graduated I just got a job in a coffee shop because had rent to pay and wasn’t sure the exact path I was going to take to make it in comedy.

But my two bosses there at the time, Will Graham and Julie Smith, they were tasked with running shows – The Onion did a show for Comedy Central and then they did a show for IFC. And these shows were happening at the exact same time, which was pretty crazy. And so they offered me a job of being their assistant and I took it. And so that was my first kind of real TV production experience.

John: These internships were clearly so important for you because you met the people who both inspired you but also gave you a job. So what advice do you have in sort of pursuing one of those internships and how do you land one and how do you make the most of it if you’re in one of those spots?

Jen: I think that’s a great question. You really just can’t underestimate what it means to be a kind, good person who seems happy to be there, which sounds like the most simple advice in the world, but I think sometimes people forget it. I think like treat those opportunities like they’re really great opportunities and work hard. And I think you will reap the benefits of it. It’s also a tricky thing because even in the ten or so, 13 years since I was doing that we’re having more conversations about what is free labor, are these internships totally ethical? So I also understand that you might find yourself in a situation where you’re like am I being taken advantage of.

But hopefully in a situation like mine was where I was being compensated in the form of school credit and I was treated with respect. I was able to I think work really hard and be available and engaged with the people I was working for and serve their needs and learn from them. And I think it led them to be like, OK, maybe she’s someone we should bring on in a more fulltime capacity.

John: What was the first thing you were hired to write, that you were paid to write for film or TV?

Jen: So the first thing I was paid to write freelance was actually Onion headlines. While being an assistant there I wanted to also be writing and so I asked if I could submit headline. And Megan Ganz actually who is a very talented writer who co-created Mythic Quest on Apple, she was an editor at The Onion at the time. And so I submitted to her and she gave me such helpful notes on why this headline works, why that one didn’t, and all this. And she kind of guided me through that.

John: Talk to me about an Onion headline. Because I have a sense of what it is, but it’s hard to break down specifically what it is. But is it really the order of words?

Jen: That can be one part of it, right? Like, oh, this needs to be more succinct. There’s too many words here. You can cut these ones out. Other times it would be like just the general premise of the idea. It’s like I kind of get the observation you’re going for here but it’s not clicking for me. Things like that. And then I eventually got hired as a freelance Onion headline writer. And so that was every week you submit Onion headlines and they send back, OK, here’s the 40 we picked and your initial would be next to yours if yours made it in. And then you don’t even know if they’re going to use them, but those are at least these the ones they’ve culled down they’ve picked that they’ve liked.

And then if they did eventually use them I think you got a $25 check in the mail. So that was my first freelance job, which again I loved because I just loved The Onion so much and I felt so grateful to be getting to write for it.

And then my first fulltime staff job was writing monologue jokes at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

John: So that was a job you probably went through a packet process?

Jen: Yes. That was a packet process. I was lucky enough to get a manager through a UCB class I took. The teacher very nicely said, “Oh I think my friend who is a manager would like your stuff, can I pass it along to her?” And he did. And to this day she’s still my manager. So through that I started submitting packets to late night shows. And, yeah, did a bunch of those that I am pretty sure I didn’t get the job for because I never worked at those shows.

John: In all those cases you’re submitting – you or your manager are putting this in and you just never hear back? For all you know they’re just going into a void?

Jen: Oh, you never, ever hear. Basically like, OK, SNL is looking for sketch packets. Conan is looking for monologue joke packets. And so you just do it and you send it out into the world and, yeah, you typically don’t hear.

I remember the monologue one for Fallon, it was like a weeklong, almost challenge or something. You would every night get sent premises and then you would have to send in your jokes either later that night or by the next morning. And you did that for like four days.

John: And you’re not getting paid for that.

Jen: No, you’re getting absolutely no money for that.

John: That’s why the WGA sort of stepped in there and said like, OK, you have to limit that.

Jen: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I’ve been out of the late night game for so long now. What is the situation with packets now?

John: So, here’s what happened. Both on the east, but also some on the west, we were getting these complaints about, OK, this has just become abusive. They’re asking for just tremendous amounts of just free labor to do these things. And even if that stuff is not making it into show, it’s just abusive.

Jen: It’s not cool.

John: It’s not cool at all. And so there are limits to sort of how much they can ask. And trying to get some standardization of like what packets really mean, so that you can theoretically submit a packet to more than one place, so it’s not all specific work to this. And if there’s real research involved at some point they have to pay you for like those later rounds, because some of these shows were having round after round after round you have to go through.

Jen: So crazy. Yeah. So unnecessary to make people jump through those hoops.

John: And it was clear when you talked to some of the people who were hiring it’s like they were just doing it because they were doing it. And it wasn’t actually helpful in their process.

Jen: Yes. That’s one of those things. And I do feel like in the late night world this happens even more than in half hour of like ways of doing things just get calcified and people go, “But it’s just because it’s the way it’s done. That’s how we do it.” Even on SNL they still stay up all night writing when I don’t know that that necessarily needs to be the process. It’s so good that the guild got involved to challenge these ideas of like, yeah, just because it’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean it’s actually cool to be doing to people.

John: Yeah. So it sounds like you knew in the general sense you wanted to write comedy, but you decided I’m going to try all the things and then decide from those things which things are not my things. So standup was not your thing.

Jen: Standup was not my thing. I am really not a performer. It is not where I shine.

John: So UCB was learning sketch writing.

Jen: Yes, UCB was sketch writing, which I liked OK, but I still wasn’t great at. And so what happened actually was around this time, I guess this was probably now 2010, before Twitter became a hell scape it was a place where people were just writing stupid jokes. And in a really cool way it kind of democratized comedy writing a little bit because anyone could just write a funny joke. And if it was funny enough a ton of people would see it and get retweeted. And a lot of people made their careers by doing that, which was cool.

And so I joined Twitter in like 2010 and started just kind of writing little one-liner jokes, which like I said there were things I wasn’t great at. I wasn’t great at standup. I wasn’t great at sketch. But I found that one-liner jokes I had a lot of fun writing those. And so I always tell people when they’re starting out in comedy like kind of follow the fun. The thing you’re having the most fun doing is probably the thing you’re best at.

So I just was doing that on Twitter and what’s funny is I had submitted – like I said I had submitted to Fallon many times. I had done that week-long challenge of sending jokes in every night, not getting any sleep, and never hearing back. But what happened was is A.D. Miles, the head writer at that time, learned of me through Twitter and then just sent me a direct message being like, “Hey, do you want to submit a packet for Fallon?” Which I was like, yes, of course, even though what I could have said is, “Yeah, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Just hire me off one of those.”

But they were actually looking for sketch writers at the time, so I had to a sketch packet. Got hired off of that. And then though quickly again since sketch is not really my strong suit I started also – even though it’s divided into up into sketch and monologue writers at that show, or at least it was when I was there, anyone is allowed to submit monologue jokes. You can just send them in.

So I started doing that and getting a decent amount on. And then it kind of became apparent, oh, this is more your skill set. We’re going to move you over to here. And then I became a permanent monologue joke writer for the rest of my time there.

John: What I hear you saying is that you didn’t go in saying this is exactly the kind of writer I am. You actually sort of discovered and you just tried a bunch of things. And then winnowed out the things that didn’t work. And so if people are listening to this at home who say, oh, I want to write comedy, maybe take a broad approach to what kind of comedy you’re writing and see where your natural strengths are.

Jen: Exactly.

John: Rather than assuming I’m the person who is going to write this exact show.

Jen: Exactly. I think that when I started, you know, growing up, even though I loved – like Mary Tyler Moore was, again, a huge influence, I also loved SNL. And I think a big part of me was like oh I’m going to be a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live. That’s what I want to do. And I think if I had just tried to like force myself into that it would have been a much tougher path because, again, I don’t think my natural skill set, I don’t think sketch writing is something that I’m great at. And so by trying a bunch of different things and allowing myself to go, right, I’m having the most fun doing this thing, let me follow that, I think that’s the thing I’m best at, it allowed me to find what my path was.

And so, yeah, I think anyone starting out, especially in comedy when there are so many different ways to approach it, I think give yourself the freedom to try a bunch of stuff, and be bad at some of it. And just because you’re bad at one part of comedy writing doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other parts. You know?

John: Now, what’s the segue from Fallon to writing for shows, writing for Broad City, writing for Parks and Rec? What was the step in there?

Jen: So I was at Fallon for about 2.5 years, which I always say felt like 20.5. Not because of the people there. They’re lovely. But because monologue joke writing is so grueling. You basically – I think every morning by 11:30 in the morning I would have to have like five pages of monologue jokes written, something like that. And let me be clear. Most of them bad. They’re not good. It’s not a good five pages. But still you’re expected to produce this volume of stuff. And it’s all based on the news. And it really – I think the people who can do it forever, like I truly tip my cap to them, because it’s really challenging and it’s really hard. And especially as the world seems to be getting darker and darker it’s hard to write topical jokes based on the news. That really, really weighed on me after a while and I was gone in 2013.

So I really appreciated the job there because – I say it was comedy writing boot camp because I just had to produce so much material every single day. But pretty like towards the end of my time there, like the last year, I realized I think I want to tell longer stories. I want to explore writing for characters and characters that have arcs and just get into that. So I knew that half hour was the place I wanted to be.

And so I made the decision to just leave. I didn’t have my next job lined up, which I remember at the time people were like why are you doing this. But sometimes I think you just have to force yourself to make the move. So I left Fallon. My then boyfriend at the time, now husband, we moved across the country. Came to LA. I wrote a spec of, wow, this is going to date me. I wrote a spec Happy Endings. Do you remember that how?

John: It’s a good show.

Jen: Yeah, I loved Happy Endings. Very funny show. So I wrote a spec for that and that was my sample, because I think even back then half hour people were looking more for specs than original pilots. And, yeah, I got hired. My first half hour job was actually the show Hello Ladies, on HBO, which was co-created by Stephen Merchant and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. So that was my first half hour experience.

But that was a pretty short – it was like an eight-episode HBO show. One of those shows where you kind of are going to write everything in preproduction and then they’re going to go off and make it. And so towards the end of my time in that writer’s room I also came to know Mike Schur via Twitter. And he I guess, yeah, liked jokes I had written there. And then I think he read my spec, but I honestly think he also hired me based off of Twitter and just meeting me and being like, all right, she’s not a total crazy person.

John: So that was for Parks and Rec?

Jen: That was for Parks and Rec.

John: And again these are very joke dense shows. These are things where there’s expectation that there’s going to be a joke every 10, 15 seconds.

Jen: Yes. Totally. Yes.

John: So from there then back to New York for Broad City?

Jen: Yes. I did my first season of Broad City in between the last two seasons of Parks and Rec. It kind of worked out beautifully where I think the day we ended season six of Parks I got on a plane and went to New York and started the Broad City season two writer’s room. And I did that for a couple months. And then came back.

And then going forward Parks and Rec ended. I went on to a show, Lady Dynamite on Netflix. I did that in the interim. And then once The Good Place started I was always kind of – I was never again fulltime in the room in Broad City. I was always just writing a script from LA while they were in New York and giving notes on episodes and punch ups and stuff like that.

So I was very lucky in that I was able to be on The Good Place fulltime, but also be working on Broad City as well.

John: Great. So you’ve mentioned all the people who seemed to be involved with Hacks. So talk to me about where did the idea for Hacks come about and how did the three of you, but also Mike Schur and everyone else come together on this property?

Jen: So Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, and I, we met doing comedy in New York. Lucia and I were the only two women in this sketch group that was kind of like an offshoot. It was all people who had met at UCB. And then slowly but surely the sketch group stopped emailing us to come to the meetings and we both realized, OK, I think we’ve been let go from this sketch group. Cool.

But, we instantly connected and shared a sense of humor. And I loved her and I was desperate to make her my friend. And then she was dating Paul and was also comedic partners doing sketches with Paul. And same thing. We hit it off. And I was lucky to just kind of be in their orbit for a while. If they had sketches and stuff I would pitch jokes and they went and they made their movie Rough Night. And I was on set as a punch up writer for that.

And so we just always loved writing together and knew that we wanted to make something together one day. So what happened was Paul was doing a Netflix Characters special, which I don’t know if you guys have seen, but it was basically just a bunch of sketches he was shooting. I came along just to pitch jokes for them. And we went to Maine. We were going to a monster truck rally. So the idea for Hacks was born out of a monster truck rally.

Paul has a character called Jasper Cooch, whose catchphrase is Big Trucks. And he was being allowed to just host the monster truck rally in Portland, Maine. They gave him the mic even though – like he could have absolutely said there’s a bomb in here and caused and incredible panic. But they trusted him. And so on this road trip we met up in Boston and then we drove to Portland, Maine for this monster truck rally.

And I don’t know how we got on the topic, but we started talking about comedians, particularly female comedians, and women in the arts in general and how maybe they hadn’t gotten their due the way their male counterparts had. And how it’s just such a harder path for women, like how they had to keep their heads down and pound the pavement and put up with so much bullshit frankly while, yeah, for other comedians who were maybe straight white men, they didn’t have as hard of a path.

And so we just kind of started talking about characters like that. And wanting to tell a woman like that story. And that was sort of the birthplace of Hacks.

John: All right. So for listeners who haven’t seen the show yet, let me give you the briefest logline so you get some sense of what we’re going to be talking about today. Hacks is a limited series, well now it’s going into its second season, so it’s a series about a legendary Vegas comedienne who hires on a disgraced, young Hollywood writer to freshen up her act. And their relationship is alternately contentious, very contentious, and maternal. And it feels like it’s mostly a two-hander.

Jen: Yes.

John: And yet other characters have some storytelling power. So Paul W. Downs plays an agent who can drive scenes by himself. Marcus who is her COO can also drive scenes by himself. How early in the process did you know who the characters were and sort of what the shape of the show was going to be?

Jen: Well, I think you’re right that it is a two-hander. That’s very much so like in the DNA of the show. That’s kind of what it was born out of. It was this idea of, OK, what if it’s this woman who has been through so much and has so much trauma from what she’s done, but also amassed this empire, making so much money doing it. And then what if there was a younger woman who didn’t fully appreciate what this woman has been through and has also maybe like so many women like this, the younger writer has the story about her wrong. Because so often we get women like this, we get their story wrong. And something gets pushed in the media and people just blindly go along with it. And only in the last few years when we look at when like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton have we started to reevaluate these stories we’ve believed about women in the public eye.

And so that was kind of the genesis of, OK, they’ll be forced to work together and they will butt heads, but actually they both really need each other. And at the heart of it it’ll be a love story. It’ll be about these two women falling in love with each other through their friendship, through their working relationship, and how does that change them and what new places does it bring them to.

But then you also are correct to bring up Marcus and Paul’s character and Kaitlin Olson who plays Jean Smart’s daughter so wonderfully. We knew we wanted to fill out Deborah’s ecosystem, right? We’re very interested in the idea of people like Deborah who are empires. Like I said they have a very carefully curated ecosystem around them. They have enough money and enough power that they get to choose all the people in their world, and there’s a lot of people in their world whose job it is to only fulfill their needs and think about them. And so someone like Marcus, played by the wonderful Carl Clemons-Hopkins, we wanted to explore the idea of well what does it mean that Marcus has devoted his entire adult life to working for Deborah and building something up for her. And also taking from her this kind of workaholic attitude and how does he reckon with but is that fulfilling him, is that fulfilling his soul.

John: And it’s not into late in the series that we learn that he’s actually a fan. That he got the job because he was a super fan.

Jen: Exactly. And we just I think never wanted any one character to feel purely like an accessory, which is a challenge to do that because even though it’s streaming you only have so much time. You only can afford to shoot so many pages in a day. So it’s definitely a balancing act of trying to give – when it’s a two-hander but also kind of also an ensemble, giving the other players in the ensemble rich storylines that feel and grounded and interesting.

So, I hope that we achieved that because that definitely was our goal going into it.

John: Let’s take a listen to a scene. This is a scene from the pilot in which Deborah Vance is meeting with the owner of the casino who is trying to tell her that basically she’s going to lose her theater and this job that she has is going to be ending. Let’s take a listen to it, then I want to get to what’s actually on the page.

[Clip plays]

Marty: You know how I’m redoing the casino’s east tower?

Deborah: Oh yeah.

Marty: So the contractor double orders everything. And what the hell am I supposed to do with two tons of fertilizer?

Deborah: Dumb it on Steve Wynn’s doorstep.

Marty: Bingo.

Deborah: Marty, you set me up.

Marty: Deb, 2,500 shows. Now, I think it’s a Vegas record.

Deborah: It is.

Marty: Well cheers.

Deborah: Cheers.

Marty: And they’re naming a street after you.

Deborah: I know. Deborah Vance Drive. It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.

Marty: [laughs] Now that the big show is all planned, maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future. You know you’ll always be a part of the Palmetto’s history. But maybe it would be good if you did a few less shows a year.

Deborah: Good for who?

Marty: Yeah. I need some marquee dates for new acts. Like Pentatonix.

Deborah: What the hell is that?

Marty: They’re a beatbox forward acapella group. They do medleys. They won the Sing Off.

Deborah: Who gives a shit?

Marty: I have two buckets to fill. Families and idiots in their 20s. The families want to see singing and dancing and the college kids want to spend a grand to watch a guy in a helmet hit play on an iPod.

Deborah: You’re forgetting about your third bucket. People from Florida. They love me. And my numbers are strong.

Marty: You’ll still be doing shows, just not Friday and Saturday.

Deborah: Oh, just the most important nights. Un-fucking-believable.

Marty: Deb. Why do you even want to do 100+ shows a year? It’s not like you’re having fun. I mean, you’re on cruise control up there.

Deborah: I fucking wish – wish I was on cruise control. I’ve been defense my entire career thanks to assholes like you.

Marty: Deborah, calm down. Please.

Deborah: Oh, what do you care, you own the place. The service sucks. Where’s my fucking doggie bag? I’ll take his, too. And the fork! There was a cockroach in my salad.

Marty: Shit. Comp everybody.

Waiter: OK.

[Clip ends]

John: Great. Let’s take a look at the words that are actually on the page. So this is starting on page 5. This is scene 114 of the script. There’s a lot of changes at the head of the scene. So the script starts with another conversation about being wealthy. It’s about a yacht and an infrared sauna. At what point did that change?

Jen: So what you see here on the page we did shoot. We came into it writing the scene like first thinking OK we need to set up what is the dynamic between Marty and Deborah. And the idea being, OK, well one they connect over rich people shit. So they’re talking about their yacht and infrared sauna and that. And then also as – spoiler – but I don’t think we have to worry about that, as the series progresses you see that they have romantic history these two characters. And so there’s also a line here where Deborah says, “Oh yeah.” He says, “Remember my first 70-footer,” talking about his yacht, “Remember that one?” She says, “Oh yeah, we had some fun on that.” And it’s kind of a coy moment where they’re alluding to their sexual history.

But as we got into the edit room it just felt like this is such a lesson in storytelling you learn time and time and time again. Get to the action, get to the crisis. Also, I think once we saw obviously Jean Smart phenomenal. Chris McDonald is incredible, too. Their characters feel so lived in from the moment they appear on screen. We realized like, oh, we overwrote. We didn’t need to write stuff to establish their dynamic.

John: You gave them a big onramp that they did not need.

Jen: Exactly. Exactly. Trust your actors. Capable actors can communicate that even without words. It’s how they’re interacting with each other. It’s how they’re laughing at each other. It’s how they’re truly sitting across the table from each other. So what happened was is that in the edit we just realized oh their dynamic is clear. This is overwritten probably. Let’s just get right to the heart of the scene which is Deborah finding out your dates are getting taken away from you.

John: Great. So the lines we hear in the show, are those just looped lines that you threw in? Did you shoot alternates on the day?

Jen: We shot alts on the day. Because it comes in about the Steve Wynn stuff. One of the benefits to having Paul, Lucia, and I are always on set. I mean, Lucia and Paul direct, so they’re of course there. But the three of us are able to pretty easily rewrite on the fly. If we feel something isn’t working there’s three brains. We can huddle up, come up with something. And so that Steve Wynn kind of leading into it that just came from us at village being like all right let’s try this. And credit to Jean and Chris, too, because they’re so nimble and quick that they can have something thrown at them like that and knock it out of the park.

John: Great. On page 7 I want to call out some things you do here. So there’s a great moment early on page 7. So she tells a joke, Deborah Vance Drive, and then she writes it down in her notebook, which is just such a great little detail. Is that something you’ve actually seen in real life, or just something you created for this character?

Jen: Yeah. It’s something that I think comes from all of our lives. Like I have on my phone Notes app of just like if a joke or if I see something going into it and writing it. And I know on Broad City they had – I think it was a doc of convos we could have. Things we could just talk about. Things that would be funny to see Abby and Ilana talk about and we’d just go into the Google Doc. So that’s something that feels very true to – I mean, I don’t know if it’s all writers. Maybe it’s more specific to comedians, but just constantly observing things and not wanting to forget them so you write them down in your notebook or on your phone.

John: So this lunch is set up on the pretense of just like oh let’s get together, but of course he actually has news to deliver and it’s going to lead up to this argument here. A thing you do on page 7 which works really well is Marty’s dialogue is interrupted by a scene description line that is just actually Deborah’s action here. So Mary says, “Now that the big show is all planned maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future.” Deborah puts down on her drink. “What’s this?” in quotes. He presses on.

And so the “what’s this?” is a reaction that she can give. It’s a line that she can say just with her face.

Jen: Yes.

John: It’s such a great use of breaking up the dialogue here so that we can actually see what the shift is that happened here.

Jen: Yeah. It’s a great way I think to show that Deborah is incredibly perceptive and very smart when it comes to business. And so when someone is gently trying to guide the conversation and maybe sneak something by her it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not getting anything by Deborah Vance. Just come out with it, man. And I think Chris does a great job then of like shifting uncomfortably in the seat because he’s a little bit scared of Deborah Vance. So yeah.

John: Without that line in there the delivery of his whole thing wouldn’t work. You’re going to need to have some kind of break in there so to call it out in the text is great. You also on page 7 have “Beat” just as its own line as a sentence. And listening back to it she doesn’t actually take that beat, but it’s a nice – Beat is just used as a placeholder like there’s a shift, there’s a moment, there’s a little air here.

Jen: A little air to show that Deborah – and again it’s not really in the version that ended up in the final cut, but yeah to show that Deborah is trying to process this tornado that’s been thrown at her of like what are you talking about, I’m losing these dates. These are the most important thing in the world to me.

John: Moving on to the next page, here’s an example of I bet you shot all this and people don’t realize that in the edit you have magic scissors and you can cut anything out. So what was actually probably shot was she says, “My numbers are solid and presales from the holiday are on par with last year.” That shows that she’s savvy and that she’s on it. But you probably recognized you did not need the line, so you just cut back to him and her line disappears.

Jen: Exactly. Exactly. It was really like – and I had been in the edit a lot on Parks and Rec and The Good Place, always for our episodes. Mike was super like, yeah, get in the edit and do stuff. But this was, running my own show, I was the most in the edit I’d ever been before. And I was just like oh yeah you can truly do anything in the edit room. So, yeah, we shot those lines and then, again, at this point the conversation is getting heated and they’re kind of speaking on top of each other. And so we just wanted to amp up the pace and the frantic energy of it, so it just made sense to lose those lines.

John: Now, the decision of when she actually loses her cool, and even when she loses her cool it’s kind of a performative losing her cool. She recognizes she’s doing this in front of a crowd and that she has power because she’s doing this in the crowd. You’re going, “This hits Deborah, then she explodes.” That’s done as scene description but then there’s a parenthetical, hitting the table, getting loud, really emphasizing that this is going to color her vocal performance in this next piece.

Jen: Yeah. We knew that this was the moment where we wanted her to lose it because someone like Deborah Vance being told you’re on cruise control, even though it is somewhat maybe true with regard to the quality of her material or how much she’s updated it, she is a woman who like we talked about has had to fight and claw for her position. And so the idea of someone telling her, especially a man telling her, you’re on cruise control is so opposite to what she believes about herself to be true, which is that she is a shark. She just keeps moving. She’s never on cruise control. She’s always fighting, and fighting, and fighting. And so hearing this makes her really lose her top. And yeah.

John: So this is a dramatic moment but you’re still in a comedy, and so that’s why you have the runner of the doggie bag coming back. And so can you talk about the shape of this scene and sort of how much did this change in the writing from its initial conception. Was this the scene you kind of always envisioned it to be, or how much did it change as you approached it?

Jen: This one I would say of all the scenes in the pilot this one changed quite a bit. We definitely reworked this one more than we reworked some others because it’s such a pivotal scene. It’s the inciting incident for this change Deborah is going through.

John: The series would not happen if this scene didn’t happen.

Jen: Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a lot of rewriting in terms of like we talked about at the beginning, OK, how much of their dynamic do you need to set up, do you understand who Marty is. I think we got a note at one point that like someone didn’t understand his role, that he owned the casino. So I think that’s where some of the Steve Wynn stuff came in from.

So we rewrote it a decent amount. And I think the beat where she grabs the fork and stabs his steak and throws it, like that came later. She always was going to freak out, but I don’t remember that – that was a later pitch. And, again, you’re also rewriting on the day. And I got to give a shout out to Jean Smart. That “I found a cockroach in my salad” line, that was improvised. She just yelled that as she walked out and we thought it was hilarious and we kept it in.

So this scene went through a lot of rewriting. It was always, OK, he’s telling her he’s cutting back her dates. That was always what was happening. So that never changed. But a lot of the pieces around that inciting incident did change.

John: Now the pilot is working on basically parallel tracks. So we’re seeing what’s happening in Deborah’s life, and what’s happening in Ava’s life. And as she’s going to Las Vegas to meet with Deborah about potentially writing for her. They finally meet at the end of the show at it does not go well. It’s a long scene, so we’re going to play just a smaller clip from it, but let’s take a listen to the actual interaction between Ava and Deborah.

[Clip plays]

Deborah: So why are you here?

Ava: Oh, well, obviously it would be a huge honor to work with someone like you, who has been working so successfully for so long. I mean, you’re a legend.

Deborah: Wow. A legend. So you’re a fan?

Ava: I mean, of course. Would I be here if I wasn’t?

Deborah: What’s your favorite joke of mine?

Ava: Man. You know. That’s so hard.

Deborah: Well it shouldn’t be. I’ve written over 30,000. Just pick one.

Ava: Uh…you know what? I would have to say that your TV show is my personal favorite thing that you’ve ever done.

Deborah: You mean my sitcom from 1973? You’ve seen it?

Ava: Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen clips.

Deborah: Clips? Wonderful.

Ava: Um, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the actors on the show that I most recently worked on were standups.

Deborah: You know, I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t work with writers.

Ava: You don’t?

Deborah: No. Jimmy sent you against my wishes.

Ava: I’m going to kill him.

Deborah: No, I’m going to kill him.

Ava: Great. Well, this sucks.

Deborah: Yeah. Sucks. Well at least you didn’t waste too much time researching me.

Ava: I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend you?

Deborah: Other than walk those chimney sweep boots on my silk rug? Um, no.

Ava: Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a shoes off situation.

Deborah: Well it’s shoe-dependent. Thank you for your time.

[Clip ends]

John: Great. So they’re finally meeting. In the actual episode they start to meet and then of course DJ the daughter interrupts and so you see all of that drama happen and then they finally get to their discussion. This scene was clearly always going to be part of this first episode, because we have to get these two women together in the room. How early on did you know who Ava was in the show? Like who her character was?

Jen: I think pretty early on we knew, too. But that one was certainly more – we learned it more and more as we cast. You know, we had this incredible thing where Jean signed on to do the show and you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart, and then you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart. Who is going to be play opposite her that’s like 25 and can go toe-to-toe? Oh no.

So the casting process for Ava was really, really long and intense. We saw I think maybe over 400 women for it. Watched that many tapes. And it was always this thing of what Jean has, what Jean is so incredible at is she can in equal parts do comedy and drama. She’s so skilled in both. And so we knew we were looking for someone who also could do that. Someone who could tell jokes and realistically seem like a comedy writer, so someone who is in their bones funny and you believe that, but also can play the more dramatic parts of this show. And so they had to have some real acting ability.

John: So what were you looking at for this? Did you write up sample scenes? Or were they scenes from this pilot?

Jen: They were scenes from the pilot. So everyone auditioned with the initial Ava and Jimmy scene in his office where he’s telling her he can’t help her get her job and she’s kind of laying out her situation. So they auditioned with that and then they also auditioned with the Deborah/Ava meeting scene.

John: OK. So a version of what we just heard?

Jen: A version of what we just heard, yeah.

John: And that didn’t burn a hole in your brains? Because I’ve always been reluctant to do that because I don’t want to hear that same scene a thousand times and then actually have to deal with it on the day.

Jen: Totally. Mike Schur is a big fan of doing fake audition sides because that’s I think part of it. He does not want to hear the same scene over and over and over. And it definitely at a certain point did burn a hole in our brains. I remember just being like I can’t hear this Ava/Jimmy scene one more time. It’s not working.

So, but what was interesting is that there were a lot of really wonderful, talented women who read the part, but for whatever reason a lot of the times we heard the scene Ava just came off as pretty whiny and it was not what we wanted it to be. And then when Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, auditioned it just felt different with her reading it. She was like projecting the strength and confidence of a 25-year-old who thinks they know everything, but also there was some very obvious vulnerability right below the surface that felt like she was also accessing, which made Ava not feel whiny and made her just feel like a very interesting character to us.

And so I think what was helpful was even though we had to hear these scenes over and over and over and go through the process of like oh no this isn’t working, junk all the thing in our darkest moments, once we heard it with Hannah and certainly when we heard it in the screen test with Jean and Hannah reading it it was like oh this works. This absolutely works. Which I don’t think I would have felt that if they were dummy sides that weren’t actually from the pilot.

John: We had that experience on Go. As we were seeing a zillion actors for Go, and I started to question like did I even write something that is even castable. And then suddenly you get the actors like, oh, that’s Sarah Polley. I get it. It all works.

Jen: Exactly.

John: And I wasn’t imagining that there was a person who could fill that.

Jen: There’s a certain chemistry that happens between the writing and the actor. And when it’s the right actor you’re going to feel it in your gut in ways that you’re not if it’s maybe not the right person reading it.

John: So Hannah Einbinder has the vocal fry of a 25-year-old. Did you hear that voice as you were writing this? And also her tendency to kind of stop in the middle of thought. You write with a lot of ellipses in her dialogue. Was that always part of the voice for it?

Jen: Yeah, I think we knew that Ava felt more like kind of a drier sensibility, so that was very baked into the character. I think there are a lot of ellipses, but then I also think that Hannah’s natural – she’s also a very talented standup and if you see her perform she has a very interesting, unique cadence, which is much slower than probably your average 25-year-old up on stage. And so it kind of like naturally lined up that way. But, yeah, that was always kind of – she was written on the page the way we imagined it.

John: Looking at the words on the page, on page 29 there’s some cuts here and I’m just curious when the cuts came or if they all came in the editing room. So Jimmy actually sent you against my wishes/I’m going to kill him/no, I’m going to kill him, but feel free to kick the corpse. It’s a joke. Did you try it and it didn’t stick?

Jen: So this scene, it’s I think a 7.5 page scene or something. It’s incredibly long. And so we always knew – we knew two things. We knew, well, this show lives or dies by the chemistry between these two characters. So, hopefully the chemistry you’re interested in watching them for 7.5 pages. And if you’re not we’re in trouble anyway. But then we also knew when we get in the edit we’re going to need to trim this down, but let’s just shoot it as is and then see where we’re at.

And so, yeah, that was this “I’m going to kill him but feel free to kick the corpse” line, it totally worked. Jean delivered it perfectly. It just felt like the scene was running a little long.

John: It’s a little bit of a detour also. It’s pulling attention to somebody–

Jen: Exactly.

John: Off the focus here. What happens in the rest of the scene is like we finally get to see Ava kind of monologue and actually have her voice and express her power which is ultimately what impresses Deborah. It’s so fun to actually see somebody sort of cut loose eventually, because we’ve seen Deborah be able to go off, but to actually see – it’s a strange place for an audience to be kind of rooting for both sides of the equation. Because it’s really a true two-hander we’re sort of seeing both sides of the story. And to see them go after each other was just sort of delicious. Just a nice job here at the end of this.

Jen: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean that was always by design that that was how the scene was going to end. That Ava would let loose and in letting loose and kind of they would start roasting each other the way comedians do and that is their love language. Jokes are their love language. And Deborah would be impressed by Ava’s ability that way. And, yeah, I think it’s written that way and then Jean and Hannah just perform it so wonderfully together. They have such amazing chemistry that we were very happy with how it turned out.

John: We have a ton of listener questions, so maybe we can do some speed rounding through some listener questions.

Jen: Love it.

John: Megana Rao, if you could get us started.

Megana: Awesome. Joel asks, “Standup comics seem to get far more freedom to go more controversial while TV writers have to be far more careful with jokes and topics. First, do you think that perception is accurate? And if so how do you find that balance?”

Jen: Interesting.

John: So standup versus sitcom writers.

Jen: I think that, sure, there’s probably a little more leeway given to standups because you are just one person getting on stage one night. You might say something controversial but on the flip side when it’s in a TV show it has to go through so many layers of approval before it actually makes it to air. So I think in the case of jokes that are seen as offensive sometimes I certainly think this when I see it, I’m like how did the – so the initial writer, then the showrunner, then the entire writer’s room, then the studio, then the network, like no one gave a note on this? There are lots of rounds that that could have happened.

I think if it is true that standups are allowed more leeway that way it’s probably because it’s just one person getting up on stage saying something one random night and it’s not going through so many levels of approval. But I have to say as a TV writer it’s not something I think about. I never think like, oh, I wish I could say this controversial thing but I got to get up at the Improv to do it. I don’t really think about, oh, can I get away with saying this or not.

John: The incentives are also different for the standup comic. And one of the episodes sort of goes into her trying new material and the standup guy who she confronts. And the incentives are trying to get the laugh, to keep the audience laughing is so different than in a sitcom situation. When it’s just you up on that stage you’re going to say whatever you can do. You just keep saying–

Jen: That’s a good point. It’s almost like it’s survival. You just need them to laugh, so you’re probably – who knows what you might say to get that to happen. Whereas, yeah, TV you’re crafting characters and you need to make sure that if someone is saying something controversial it better not be punching down or something that makes this person seem like a horrible person if that’s not the intention.

John: Because you don’t have to go home with that standup at the end of the night, but with a sitcom character you want to come back the next week and see that character again.

Jen: Exactly. Totally.

Megana: Awesome. Nora asks, “So many of my favorite comedies get better the longer they go on. And audiences tend to say stick with it, it gets really good. Why do you think many comedies are growers and not showers?”

Jen: I think that is really true. I think it’s – well I think it’s for two reasons. One is, and Mike Schur, again, my mentor and the man I credit with teaching me how to make television, is fond of saying I wish I could just throw out the first episodes of a show when you make it. Because the first eight episodes is kind of this sludge pile of figuring out–

John: Parks and Rec, those first episodes are rough.

Jen: Yeah. And I think Mike – he would be happy to admit that they were figuring it out. Especially in an ensemble comedy. You are figuring out how are all these characters funny. How are they funny with each other? How does that actor mesh with that actor? And so you are really figuring it out. And so I think when comedies start out maybe not as strong as they get as they progress, it is because the writers, the actors, the crew, everyone is figuring it out a little bit. Comedy, I think there’s chemistry to it. It’s intangible. And you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways. And so it takes a little bit of trial and error until you really get there.

And then I think the other reason that comedies feel they get better as they go on is like great jokes come from character. You know, yes, there are some lines on sitcoms where if you just saw them written on someone’s Instagram page you’d be like that’s a funny one-liner. But for the most part jokes are funny because they’re specific to character. Like a Ron Swanson joke can’t be put in the mouth of Leslie Knope or Andy Dwyer because they all have very different character games and world views. And it’s why you love them, because they’re specifically drawn characters.

And so I think when you watch a pilot you don’t know these characters. You don’t know their game. You’re learning them. And it’s the writer’s job to introduce you to them and that takes some time. And so I think as a show goes on you learn these characters, you love these characters, you know their games, so you say like, oh yeah, of course Monica has 11 categories for towels. That’s so her. But you don’t know these characters as well when you’re first watching a show. So I think the longer you spend with them the more you understand them and the more the things they say and do are funny to you.

John: You just used a term which I don’t use at all in features. Character game. So what is game?

Jen: So character game in comedy is basically like – and this is something that I don’t know in the streaming world if it’s as relevant, but character game is like what is their specific trait that they exhibit over and over again in behavior that is how they are funny. So for example Leslie Knope’s game, and you could say she has multiple games, but one game is she is type A crazy optimistic to a fault. She is like the craziest, hardest worker you’ve ever met in your life. And she does everything in her life 150%. And that is both endearing but also sometimes exhausting to her friends and coworkers. And so that’s the character game.

In the most simplest of terms, like sometimes the character’s game is they’re the dumb one. And that is what gets hit over and over again in their jokes and dialogue and what they do. And so it’s a term that gets used a lot in comedy and I think maybe as comedies become a little more – or at least some of them become a little more grounded, a little more real, maybe we say that less and less because the characters – at least when we were making Hacks like we want the characters to feel like real people, real grounded people.

We don’t all have character games in life. Some of us do. But it’s something that maybe we talk about a little bit less. But certainly in a more traditional comedy network sense you do talk about character game a lot.

John: So on the Scriptnotes podcast Craig’s umbrage is his character game?

Jen: Exactly. Exactly.

John: He goes off and my desire to keep things moving along to segue, like this next question.

Megana: Leah asks, “In a previous episode Jac Schaeffer mentioned that she received good advice about staffing people in the room. Pick writers who offer something different from what she already had. Is there a type of comedy that is your strongest? And if so, what types of writers do you look for? For example, physical humor? Adept one lines? Etc.”

Jen: That’s a good question. That is really good advice for staffing a room. I think to look for people who fill in the gaps for you, who are stronger in things that you are maybe weaker in. Listen, I’m really good at formatting a script. I’m really good on the keyboard. That’s definitely number one maybe. I guess, let’s see, comedy wise probably I feel stronger in terms of jokes and one liners, like just sort of naturally where I come from from the monologue writing world. I think that maybe in jokes more than I think in story.

Story is something that, you know, I think the longer you work in narrative TV you get better at it, but that certainly wasn’t my strong suit when I started out. And so for example I think I’m always, like when staffing Hacks, looking for people who are really great with story. Really great with coming up with story. Coming up with twists and stuff like that. So, yeah, that certainly is good advice. That if you are staffing you want to find people who do things that you don’t maybe do as well.

John: This is an obvious point, but something just occurring to me now. A difference with Hacks is you have two central characters, two women who are telling jokes and are aware that they’re telling jokes because it is their business to tell jokes all the time. So there’s two characters who are aware that they’re funny, which is really unusual actually.

Jen: Yeah. Exactly. Most times in comedy people are funny but they don’t know they’re making jokes. And in this show, yeah, they know they’re funny. Making jokes is their business. It’s also been an interesting thing because I think when you write about comedians or comedy writers the bar gets set pretty high I think about how funny they need to be in their every interaction. And it’s funny because as a comedy writer, like I personally – the comedy writers who are constantly making jokes in every day conversation are the worst ones to be around. They’re pretty rough.

I, you know, I’m like – I am a comedy writer, but I’ve had so many people, like my hairdresser one time who shares some clients, some friends with me, and he said, “You know, everyone says Jen is so funny, but I don’t see that side of you.” And I was like, OK, cool. I think comedy writers, you think oh this person is playing a comedy writer they better be cracking wise every line. And that’s just truthfully not – it doesn’t feel like a realistic portrayal of a comedy writer to me anyway.

John: Yeah. Our next question was from Jay who asks…?

Megana: “What’s the correlation between being funny in person and being funny on the page? How does one get better at one or the other?”

Jen: Well, I mean, my hairdresser would like me more if I could learn.

John: It’s been my experience, too, is that like there’s people who are really, really funny, but they cannot write it down. They don’t have the ability to write in anyone else’s voice. Actually just something falls apart when they actually try to put it down on paper.

Jen: it’s really two different skills. And I think there are some people who are so wildly funny in person and also incredibly funny writers. That certainly exists. Someone like my co-creator Paul Downs is an incredible performer, so he’s so funny in that way, but then also a very talented writer. So it’s not like it doesn’t exist. But I think it’s hard. I think there’s no way to learn to be funny. You know, you either have it or you don’t.

So, what was the second part of the question?

John: How does one get better at one or the other? So like obviously people can – you went through UCB and so you learned how sketches works and you also learned some performance stuff, but it wasn’t your natural thing. And there’s going to be an upper ceiling to how good you are going to be as a performer, right?

Jen: Yeah. I think so. I think I could have taken a million more classes and they happily would have cashed my checks to do it, but I don’t think I ever – it is not in my wheelhouse to be a dynamic, incredible performer. It just isn’t. And that’s OK.

John: And we all know some really tremendous comedic actors who could not be any funnier, but they just cannot write. It’s just not natural to them.

Jen: Exactly. It is two very different skill sets. And sometimes you’ll find someone who has both, but it doesn’t always line up. And comedy writing is an interesting, especially TV comedy writing, is an interesting hybrid. Because when you are writing on a TV comedy you’re spending all your time in the writer’s room. And the writer’s room is just sitting around a table, breaking story together, pitching ideas, and then going through a script and pitching jokes for that script. I was shocked to find out my first narrative half hour job how little time you spend in front of a computer. When it’s your draft, you’re out on script, you’re writing the episode, but that’s pretty much it.

And so writer’s rooms are a very social place. You have to be comfortable sitting with five, six, seven, eight – back in Parks I think we had like 16 writers. A room of 15 other people and you have to get comfortable pitching your jokes out loud in front of all of them. And that was a real – again, for someone who isn’t a natural performer, and I’m not like an extrovert, that was a real challenge is to get comfortable learning like, OK, I need to just kind of be performing to pitch this joke for this character. So it is two different skill sets. But when you do work in TV comedy in writer’s rooms both come into play.

John: Yeah. On the feature side, if you’re pitching a comedy there’s not an expectation that you yourself are going to be hilariously funny in that pitch, but they need to believe that you actually know what funny is. And so if you’re a humorless person going into that you’re not going to get the job. That’s just how it works.

Jen: Yeah.

John: It’s tough. What else we got?

Megana: OK, a different Jay asks, “How many story arcs ahead do you and the staff have a feel for from the start?”

Jen: 1,012. No. There’s no set number to be honest. I think basically from the start what you’re more looking at is kind of, especially in a serialized streaming comedy, you’re looking at your tent poles for the season. You’re saying, OK, tent pole one, they meet, they clash. Then mid-season she’s going to quit, but she’s going to go on this bonding trip and learn more about her, which opens her eyes to new experiences and brings them closer. OK, another tent pole, her old LA life calls her back and she gets an opportunity that way.

You’re laying out the very big story points that you want to hit over the course of the season. And then you’re kind of filling in in between that all the little stories. And that is how it works like on our show, Hacks, which is a little more serialized. On more network TV shows, or even Broad City, those shows they were able to withstand a little more one-off episodes I think. So, I remember Parks and Rec like the beginning of every season we would have a writer’s retreat and part of your assignment for your writer’s retreat was to come up with ten episodes and you would just go to the retreat and then you pitch your ten episode ideas to Mike and we would write them all down on index cards and by the end of this retreat we would have this huge board of all the index cards of just crazy one-off episode ideas. Because a 22-episode network sitcom you have a little more leeway.

One that I pitched I remember was like Donna sends a tweet that she thinks is from her personal account but is actually the Parks Department account and it spirals. And that was just a one-off episode that we did that wasn’t tied to a larger arc. But because there are 22 episodes you had the time and space to do that.

And same on Broad City. Broad City we had much more ability to do kind of like one-off episodes that weren’t tied to a larger arc, even though we did on both Parks and Broad City you’re still telling longer arcs, but for something now like Hacks which is only 10 episodes, there’s less of a need to go, OK, we need to generate 500 episode ideas. It’s much more about these tent poles like I said of knowing where you want your character’s story to start, what’s happening in the middle, what’s happening in the end. And then filling in in between.

John: Well in the case Hacks in this first season you established stakes for both of the characters right at the very start. And so we know as an audience that by the end of this series we should have an answer to these fundamental questions about what’s going to happen to these two women.

Jen: Exactly.

John: Which would not really make sense for something like Parks and Rec. That really wouldn’t make sense because the idea of characters leaving, it just wouldn’t track.

Jen: Yeah. And we did some stuff, like Leslie is getting recalled at the beginning of the season, what’s going to happen with that? So we certainly did that. But it was less central to the way the show was built.

John: Let’s try one more question from a listener.

Megana: Jerry asks, “I’ve heard Breaking Bad and Succession both described as comedies. Atlanta has had at least two horror episodes. And Insecure has had episodes that have brought me to the edge of tears. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the form as of late and what do you see coming over the horizon?”

Jen: That’s a great question. And I agree with all those assessments of those shows. Those shows have made me laugh and cry similarly, too. I think it’s really honestly exciting to me. It feels like there’s no longer these strict parameters of like it’s a comedy so it needs to sound and look like this, and it needs to be this one way, and the tone always has to be comedic.

Something with Hacks we talked about all the time is like we wanted it to feel really grounded and we wanted it to feel like real life. And real life is equal parts drama and comedy and you’re switching in between the two tones in a matter of instance sometimes. And so what I think is so exciting about all those shows, you know, the question mentioned is like those shows all play with tone in such a cool way. They can be like, yeah, Insecure can be so funny, but then it also has these real grounded heartfelt moments that do make you cry.

And to me that’s so exciting. Like I want my art that I consume to reflect the real world I live in. And it feels like these half hour shows, or all these shows, not just half hour, are getting closer to reflecting the way the real world is in that it plays with tone and it isn’t just one thing.

So I love that shows are now able to do all these different things and it doesn’t feel like there’s hard and fast rules about what they can do. And as far as what’s on the horizon, I hope that trend just continues because I think it’s really exciting. And I think what’s in, I mean, maybe I don’t know if this is on the horizon, because I don’t know what the future of network comedy is, but maybe because these shows are so successful and people love them like maybe network comedies will also get to be a little more fluid with tone and a network comedy doesn’t have to like you know be just one thing. I think that was something Mike did with The Good Place in such a great way. That is not your typical network sitcom and he was given the chance to make it. And I think people were really excited by that.

So hopefully just kind of playing with tone and the rules and letting things be more fluid is something that will spread to not just streaming or cable but also network.

John: A thing I noticed about Hacks and Succession both is that they’re not very classically comedies, and yet the dialogue and how the characters are sort of presented are presented with a sort of comedic voice to them. Comedic things can happen in their universe and it makes sense for them do it. And characters talk in a way that I don’t want to say they feel like they’re written by comedy writers, but it feels like they’re writing at a pitch that can feel funny.

As opposed to something that’s done as a straight drama which just would never happen. And so you can basically take the same outline for a Succession episode and write it as just a true drama and write it as this. And the same things could happen in the scenes but it’s really just how characters are expressing themselves mostly that makes it feel like kind of a comedy.

Jen: Which is what I love about that show so much. It’s not just a straight drama. I love the comedic moments. And the specific character, again character games, that they kind of play with. I think that’s what makes that show so rich and run to watch.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. I have two short One Cool Things there this week. First is an essay by Zachary Zane that ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago called You Are Bi Enough. And it’s just a nice way of looking, as we head out of Pride month, bisexuals always kind of feel like should I even be at this party. There’s that sense of like do I even belong here. Am I sort of stealing someone else’s valor for being in the room for this conversation?

And he does a really good job sort of laying out what to do if you’re a bi person who is in a mixed gender relationship and stuff like that. It’s just a really smart essay on approaching that.

Second is much more important for me personally which is that one of the things that has been hardest about the pandemic is it’s been impossible for me to get Caffeine Free Coke Zero, which is my go-to drink.

Jen: That is a tough one to find. I’m a Coke Zero drinker too and I never see Caffeine Free Coke Zero.

John: It’s really tough. So all the canned beverages took a real hit during the pandemic because there was not enough aluminum to sort of make all of our favorite sodas. But the niche drinks, like the Caffeine Free Coke Zero just became impossible to fill. So my two placeholders have been the Caffeine Free Diet Coke, which is OK. If you can find it, that’s great. And so Megana was able to find it this week. God bless you, Megana. But the other go-to for me has been I have a SodaStream and we always just use it for fizzy water. But they actually sell the syrups to put into it.

And so I was able to track down Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup for the SodaStream. And if you use just under one ounce in a bottle it is a pretty good approximation of what Coke Zero should be like, what Caffeine Free Coke Zero should be like. So if you’re really jonesing for it – it’s not even really economically advantageous, because I worked it out and it’s $1.50 per liter which is not great.

Jen: Not great, no.

John: It’s not great. But I mean when you absolutely need it it’s there.

Jen: I love that you’re over here doing chemistry, too. You’re in your lab mixing.

John: One after another, I’m tweaking the formula to get it just right. And so I would say just under one ounce is what you need to make a perfect caffeine free diet cola.

Jen, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

Jen: My One Cool Thing is my favorite show that I watched over the pandemic, and honestly one of my favorite shows I’ve watched, which is a British show called I Hate Suzie. I don’t know if you guys have seen it.

John: I have not. Megana is nodding that she has.

Megana: Yeah, I love it.

Jen: It is co-created by Billie Piper who stars in it as well. And Lucy Prebble who is a phenomenal writer/playwright. She also writes on Succession actually. But this show is just so, so good. Billie Piper plays this actress who is like somewhat famous. She was like a pop star and now is on a zombie sci-fi show which is like seen OK. And then she’s up for this big career opportunity which is Disney is maybe going to hire her to play an “aging princess.” And so she’s very excited about that.

And right as this opportunity is about to happen her phone gets hacked and compromising photos of her leak. Her with someone who is not her husband. And it is just an eight-episode series. They’re all available on HBO Max. And it’s kind of this exploration of what it means to be a woman in the public eye. What it means to be – just modern womanhood in general. And the performances are just so wonderful. Billie Piper is amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances in a comedy of all time I think.

The woman who plays her manager and best friend, Leila Farzad, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, she’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful show that I feel like not enough people I’ve seen talking about. So, I’m doing the work.

John: We’ll start talking about it more.

Jen: I love it. Great.

John: Great. We’ll do it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. You’re on Twitter?

Jen: Yes, I am on Twitter. I’m @jenstatsky.

John: And we have t-shirts. They are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Cat Person and the discourse around Cat Person.

Jen Statsky, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming in.

Jen: Thank you so much for having me. This was a real career highlight as a longtime listener.

John: Aw, thanks.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right, Jen Statsky. What was your experience with Cat Person before this? So you were aware of the original short story?

Jen: Yes, I was aware. I remember reading it back in 2017 and I remember being very struck by it because it came out during the #MeToo movement when I certainly as a woman and I think a lot of women I knew and globally were like reevaluating their relationships with men and interactions with men and just what kind of it meant to be a woman out in the world. And certainly a woman with a sexual life. And so I was very – I thought the story was – I remember reading it and liking it. And then was also was so – I was like, wow, this is like the first viral short story. I couldn’t believe how much Twitter was discussing it and talking about it. So, yes, I was very aware of Cat Person.

John: I remember when it broke as well. It was a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and it just spread everywhere. I think because it was a short story it wasn’t a huge commitment. It wasn’t like a book where you had to read the whole thing. You could sit down and read the thing and like, oh, that was really good. And what struck me as I first read it and it was a lot of part of the discourse originally was it felt like it maybe kind of wasn’t fiction. It felt like it was actually just an essay. It felt like it was a first person thing that she was writing about her own experience. And she said like, no, I’m not, it’s fiction.

The term auto-fiction came up there. The sense of like it felt like autobiography but it was actually fully fiction.

Jen: Yeah. And I mean I think partly is because it’s so well-written, or so confidently written that people found it hard to believe it wasn’t someone’s actual experience.

John: Yes. And that’s where we get to this week. So, this past week Alexis Nowicki, another author, wrote in Slate saying like, OK, well this is actually based on my own experience, even though she’d never actually met Kristen, the original author. And so we’ll put a link to both things in the show notes. This summary of what Alexis is writing is that she read this short story and everyone was texting her saying like, “This is about you, right? This is about you and that guy?”

And she’s like, yeah, but I never met this woman. I don’t understand how this could be the situation. And she eventually reached out to Kristen Roupenian who said like, yes, I knew that same guy. And while I’m not the person, you sort of are the person who is the other character in the story.

Jen: Yes. That must have been such a crazy – I found the essay by, it’s Alexis–

John: Nowicki.

Jen: Nowicki. I loved the essay. I thought it was really, really well-written and interesting. And she describes coming out of a movie and having like dozens of texts being like, “Is this about you?” People sending her the story. And that must have been such a bizarre, strange experience for a person to go through. And yet it goes into a really nuanced, interesting conversation about art and who owns the details of one’s life. Is it ever OK to just point blank take facts from someone else’s life and use them as fiction? It’s really interesting.

John: Well so often on the podcast we do a segment for How Would This Be a Movie and Craig is always arguing you don’t need people’s life rights because facts are facts. And the facts that Roupenian was using here are kind of facts. It was basically she didn’t know this person. She looked up and she had heard about this earlier relationship this guy had had and sort of imagined what this woman was like. And Googled and found real information about where she went to school and where she used to work and was just imagining what this life was. And imagined pretty correctly sort of how a lot of this stuff worked.

But it’s the issue of like nothing was illegal here, but where the ethical boundary is between sort of pulling that stuff in.

Jen: Yeah. I mean, I guess what was interesting to me and this Kristen when she did, if you read the essay, you’ll see she apologizes for this eventually. She says I’m sorry I should have taken some of the details and changed them so that it wouldn’t be so directly linked to you, which I do – as a writer myself I can’t picture, yes, it’s of course you don’t need someone’s life rights necessarily. You’re always pulling from different people’s lives and experiences. But I can’t really picture writing something and using such specific details that could easily be traced to a person and not just taking the extra step of changing them slightly so that person wouldn’t think it’s about them.

John: Yeah. People were pointing out that it’s always dangerous to be around writers because you never know if you’re going to be sucked into this, but in this case it’s dangerous to be around people who could be around writers.

Jen: Yeah. Right. There’s always a writer within a few degrees of connection to you and that’s really dangerous.

John: So a thing that I’ve always been aware of as I’ve been around writers is like events will happen, or somebody will say something or things come up. You were saying this before about Deborah writing a joke down in her book. Like as a funny thing happens, who owns that funny thing that happens? Who owns that moment?

Jen: I have friends who are standups who talk about this specific issue because they’ll go on tour together. And then when you’re on tour you’re living together. You’re going out to eat. You’re on the bus. And something crazy will happen and then it’s a race to who can craft the joke about it first. Who gets to tell it on stage first? It is a really interesting thing when creative people are together. Who has ownership over it? There’s not really a hard and fast rule about it.

John: I also – Dana Schwartz makes this point on Twitter that whenever there’s two people it always feels like you have to declare two sides. And it’s this or it’s that. And you can’t actually say that’s an interesting conversation about this thing. She was in the right, she was in the wrong. She’s trying to claim credit for something that she didn’t actually write. And it makes it more complicated than that. I’m not on either team here. I don’t think they should have teams. I don’t think we’re playing a game.

Jen: Right. Twitter always rushes to be judge, jury, and executioner, right? So someone always, yes, exactly, like Dana is saying has to be in the right and someone has to be in the wrong. And what I thought was so interesting about Alexis’s essay is that she wasn’t casting herself as the victim and Kristen as the villain primarily. I thought the essay was so well done because it’s a really nuanced, holistic look of like this very strange thing happened to me. I feel angry about it in this way, but I also see that this person has a particular experience of their own.

So I found it interesting that people didn’t take the hint from the essay which is like I’m not trying to cast, oh, this action was evil and this person should be condemned. I’m just working my way through this specific personal experience that happened and kind of exploring this conversation about art and the ethics of art.

So, yeah, that was interesting. Twitter is not great for nuance.

John: What’s also strange about this situation is that the third person in this relationship, so Charles who is the basis of the character, is apparently dead, which is dismissed in a single line and not explained.

Jen: I know. My jaw dropped when I got to that part of the essay. And then I don’t know if you saw this, but a lot of people – and again we have no idea – but a lot of people on Twitter took the extra step to say, oh, he killed himself. He must have killed himself because of the negative portrayal in this work of “fiction.”

John: I don’t think we know that.

Jen: We don’t know that at all. That’s just complete conjecture from people on Twitter, which again like rushing to try to put everyone into the category of villain and good person. It’s just so fascinating. But we have no idea how this man passed away. It’s very sad. It’s a very sad part of the essay and that both of these woman are left I think grieving this person is just like a sad bookend to it.

John: And there is theoretically a movie version of this, so the tie in to this is so Nicholas Braun of Succession is apparently supposed to be playing this character.

Jen: Right.

John: And so it just becomes complicated as reality and fiction and meta fiction overlap.

Jen: I don’t know what stage – do you know if they’re–

John: I don’t know where they are.

Jen: I wonder if the current writer is scrambling now to include this newest twist into the Cat Person saga.

John: The next Zola saga.

Jen: Yeah.

John: Thanks Jen.

Jen: Thanks.

Links:

• WGA Pilot Guide
• Hacks on HBO check out the pilot script here.
• Jen Statsky on Twitter
• You Are Bi Enough by Zachary Zane for NYT
• Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup by SodaStream
• I Hate Suzie on HBO Max
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Peter Hoopes (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 474 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This episode is coming out Tuesday, November 3, 2020. So if you’re listening to this while standing in line to vote, thank you.

Craig: And if you’ve already voted, thank you also.

John: And that’s the last we’re going to talk about the election in this episode. Instead, we’re going to try to lessen any anxiety you may be feeling today.

Craig: Think of this episode as a much of hot chocolate with the little mini marshmallows.

John: Or a dog sleeping in a sun beam.

Craig: Or that song you hear that takes you back to a fun night in college.

John: Let this episode be a half a Xanax and a glass of red wine. Not that you should ever do that. But people have.

Craig: Or if you’re more risk adverse a fuzzy blanket and a good book.

John: It’s Bob Ross painting fluffy little clouds for an hour.

Craig: It’s the Monday New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s just so easy to fill out.

John: It’s McDonald’s French fries that you don’t have to share.

Craig: It’s a lost episode Ted Lasso where he goes grocery shopping with Nate.

John: It’s Elmo from Sesame Street giving you a hug.

Craig: It’s your high school coach saying he’s proud of you.

John: It’s a marshmallow roasted over a campfire to just the right shade.

Craig: AKA completely burnt. It’s a hot shower you can stay in for an hour.

John: It’s hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock and then realizing it’s Sunday and you can just sleep in.

Craig: It’s an episode where we answer some listener questions. We help a writer figure out how to his agent. We discuss the quiet moments before the big set pieces. And we just keep things calm.

John: Yeah. And, in our bonus episode for Premium members, we’ll talk about dogs.

Craig: I mean, dogs.

John: Dogs.

Craig: Dogs.

John: In the spirit of keeping things calm and quiet the only bit of news is that I’m going to be doing a panel for YALL Fest. So, if you’re a person who is interested in middle grade writing or YA writing, either reading those books or writing those books, I’m doing a panel on November 13. YALL Fest is great. And it’s all organized by middle grade and YA authors. And so it’s a national thing. It’s all online. It’s all free. My panel is on November 13 at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, with a bunch of other middle grade authors. But if you’re interested in writing in that space at all you should sign up for it because it looks to be a great, great program this year.

So there will be a link in the show notes to that.

Craig: Wonderful.

John: Now, Craig, why don’t you start us off? You suggested this topic of the calm before the storm.

Craig: I wonder why. I wonder why this came to mind. So, in movies and television shows we have all experienced this moment and it’s something that I think we write a lot without being even conscious that we’re writing specifically this moment. It comes before the end. Pretty much right before the end. Something big is about to happen. The final movement of the story. And right before the final movement of the story whereas the normal order of business is to propel things constantly forward everything just stops. The whole thing stops. It’s like everyone takes a break. Which theoretically is anti-dramatic and disrupts flow.

But in fact the calm before the storm moment, and I’m talking about right before the verdict of a big case, or right before the big battle in the war movie, or right before the performance in the singing movie, or right before the big final game in a sports movie, in the moment before that everybody has this quiet night before/moment before moment. And I wanted to talk about why we have those moments and what’s supposed to happen in them and what the value is.

John: Yeah. What is the dramatic purpose of these moments? Because as you describe them, yeah, I see them in all of these stories. In all of these movies. And I feel like it’s true because in real life there is a buildup and a buildup in anticipation, but there is also a moment before the thing that I know is going to happen is going to happen. And it can be a moment of anxiety but it can also be a moment of coming together. It can be a moment of synthesis of sort of what I’ve learned so far. So talk to me about this moment. What do you see there?

Craig: Well, it’s usually at a point in your story where all of the things the characters needed to do, all the things they were capable of doing, they have done. So, there’s a sense of you’ve earned a break. We need to know as the audience that you have done all the preparations. And then you have this moment that we right now as people are listening to this are probably experiencing. Because we are in it right now. On Tuesday we wait to see how this all turns out. We’ve done it. We voted. We did what we could do. And all of the phone-banking and all that stuff is over and now you have a moment of reflection. And before the big final action typically there is a shared moment.

It is shared between our main characters. There is some sense of a relationship that is completing. Oftentimes these moments are a drink or a celebration. In the last season of Game of Thrones, before the big huge crazy battel began there was an episode that was basically a long party. And in the party people were drinking and celebrating. They were essentially reconciled. All of the “family business” had been completed. What happens in those sequences? People give each other advice. People consummate relationships that maybe were meant to go to a higher level. And they have a moment where they can help define for us watching who they actually are. Because in those moments – I think when I watch those moments at least – what I’m seeing is something that most closely approximates those moments in real life where things feel slowed down.

Where everything just slows down to a stop.

John: Classically in a story we’re looking at a protagonist/antagonist relationship. And so there’s still going to be a battle, a final moment to come. There’s going to be that big showdown is going to happen. But then a lot of smaller protagonist/antagonist relationships along the way. And so talk about those family relationships, how the team has come together, those other smaller tensions are hopefully resolved in this moment so we can basically concentrate all of our energy and all our force on this last thing.

So it is that backstage moment where the two rivals finally sort of come together to do this thing. Or the two people on the team who were always fighting and bickering are now united in a common cause. This is the moment where that happens so it doesn’t have to happen in that final set piece.

Craig: Right. In fact, it needs to happen here because it can’t happen in the final set piece. The problem with those things happening in the final set piece is that they feel circumstantial. When you make an alliance in a moment where if you don’t make the alliance your head is going to come off that’s not a dramatically fulfilling alliance. That’s just an alliance of convenience. But in these moments before what happens is we do take a minute to quietly talk to each other about where we went wrong and how it can be better and right and how we are now unbreakable.

So our alliances are secure. There’s no more question of where we stand with each other. We solidify our position no only vis-à-vis each other but with the community around us, whether that’s a baseball team, a small town, a city. Or an entire country. Thinking, OK, another classic example, the rah-rah speech is a version of this. The “we will not go gently into the night” speech before you fight the aliens. Everybody is now on the same page finally. All on the same page.

And why? Because symbolically these moments are about preparing for death. We are getting our affairs in order. It’s remarkable how similar these scenes are to pre-death scenes. What do you do? You get your affairs in order. You say your goodbyes. You tell people you love them. You bury the hatchet and squash all beefs. You write your final messages. You complete the circle. And we need this in our drama because if we don’t sense the characters are prepared to die then victory just seems sort of inevitable.

John: Yeah. Now we’re talking about this from the point of view of the characters. We’re talking about it from our point of view as the writer. But let’s think about this from the point of view of the audience. Why does the audience need this moment of calm? Think about your experience watching a movie and if it’s just relentless, you’re on a constant forward march to this finale, you never get to catch your breath yourself. You never sort of get to resettle in the seat and enjoy the movie that you’re watching. It’s just relentlessly pushing at you.

And so it gives you a moment of a tonal break. A moment to pick up the popcorn that you sat down on the floor and get back into it. It’s just changes the dynamic for you so that you have some different textures in your movie, otherwise it can just be the same thing the whole time through.

Craig: Yeah. And it also decouples your feeling about the hero from their potential success. Because I don’t want to love someone simply because they win. I want to love them for who they are in a moment. And when they have finally struggled past their flaws and patched up the conflict between themselves and the people that they should love or protect, or be an ally for, you feel like they’ve earned your love. Before they go into that battle I go, “They get it. They’re good. If they die now they die. But if they win they win. But either way I love them now.”

As opposed to just sort of like, well, let’s see. Because if he wins, then hooray, but if not, screw him. He just didn’t have it. And we don’t like that. We want to know before the big swing happens that they’re good. We want to know they’re good.

John: It’s crazy that you bring this up right now because this is actually the scenes I’m working on this week are in this space of the script. And it is so fascinating that you need to give the story permission to sort of go either way. So that the central characters, we want them to succeed, but we also know that if they don’t succeed, if this thing that we hope happens doesn’t happen that’s also OK. And obviously we’re talking about in general movies where there’s a final set piece, a final sort of thing that needs to happen. But even the thing I’m writing right now which is not so set piece driven there’s a fundamental dramatic question that’s being asked at the start of the story and changes along the way. But it’s a binary choice. What’s going to happen?

And to have this moment of quiet at this place 85% of the way through the story it makes it OK with either answer, which is important.

Craig: It is. It doesn’t have to be right before something large. My own example when I was working on Chernobyl was our big battle is a courtroom case which isn’t even a courtroom case. It’s a show trial. So the verdict has been predetermined. There’s nothing less dramatic than that. But there is a break in the trial and two of our three main characters go outside and they sit on a bench. And essentially what happens is one of them says, “I’m dying. And I didn’t matter. But you did and I’m happy I was with you.” And the other one says, very convincingly, “No, no, no, you mattered the most.” And in that quiet moment where there are no stakes, nothing changes other than that, their feelings about each other, there is a conclusion. And we need it. We just need it so that we understand when they go back into the courtroom whether they both die quickly or slowly. It doesn’t matter. They have settled their affairs with each other. And they have essentially said to each other that they love each other.

If you don’t have it, then what are the symptoms of the story without these moments? A sense of rushing. And it’s so weird because you will feel people complaining about a sense of dragging everywhere except this one spot. This one spot they will accuse you of rushing if you don’t take a pause.

John: Now, a thing that you will sometimes notice as you’re looking through a script that’s not working in its last section is you may be trying to do this either during that last set piece or after the last set piece. We’ve talked before about how in a football movie it’s not really about winning the game. It’s about the quarterback’s wife being proud of him. Then that’s the emotional moment. But don’t mistake that for this quiet before the storm moment where you see important relationships resolve. Important things being solidified and anchored before that last set piece.

And so if you’re having problems in your third act this may be one of the issues is that you’re not getting into that last beat right, or you’re trying to pay off a thing after the movie kind of wants to be over. After the story of the movie kind of wants to be over. So you may need to pull something up earlier on.

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Because once it’s over it’s just a confirmation of what happened in this moment we’re talking about, the moment before. Where typically you look at somebody like across the field you’ll see the person that you had the night before with, that whole discussion. You’ll see them. They’ll smile at you. You’ll smile at them. Because, yup, what we said last night, that was true. That’s all you need.

John: Yeah. You’re establishing the emotional stakes for this last set piece as well. You’re reminding the audience of where the characters started, where they’ve come from, and what literally just happened right before this moment is that they are unified as they’re going into this last thing.

And so you see this on every episode of Glee for example. It’s all the tensions that happen during the course of the episode and then in the final performance there’s a look between two characters and it’s cheesy and you just know it’s going to happen. But if it didn’t happen it would be very frustrating.

Craig: You’d be like where’s my look?

John: There’s your look. So, what lessons do we want people to take away from this quiet before the storm? I think it’s just a reminder not to rush. A reminder that you need to actually plan for this. Because if you didn’t anticipate you need to do this it could just be – if you’re just doing sort of like the note cards of set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece you won’t think about how important it is to have these transitional moments. Because it’s not flashy. It’s not exciting. There’s no big giant fireworks happening in this moment. And yet the movies you love most probably have this moment and you’re just not paying attention to it.

Craig: Absolutely. Just imagine your characters when they have nothing being asked of them. The movie essentially says, oh, normally there’s an event after an event after an event. But unfortunately because of a scheduling problem there’s no event right now. The event will be in one hour. The event will be tomorrow morning. What do you do? What you’re doing is you’re giving them time off. And in their time off they can reflect on what has happened and how it made them feel. And what they think is going to happen tomorrow.

And they can be honest with each other and they can express that they’re afraid. And they can express why it matters more than it might otherwise. All of that stuff is the most important stuff. If you don’t have it your climax will be active. But it may not be meaningful.

John: Agreed. Great. Now in previous episodes we’ve discussed when it makes sense to write something as a spec versus pitching it, but it’s not always a binary choice. In many cases you’re pitching these nascent ideas to your reps, your agent, or your manager who are going to weigh in on what they think they can sell or help get you into rooms to meet.

So my personal experience with this, my first agent was a good guy, a good friend, and I liked him a lot, but he just did not seem to share my taste. I had a hard time expressing to him what it was that I was trying to write. So I wrote this horror western and he just had no idea what to do with it. And I wrote the first part of Go and he’s like, “I don’t get this at all.” And that was a sign that, oh, then maybe you just don’t really get me as a writer and I ended up moving to another agency.

But then I started to realize that in some cases I was having a hard time describing these ideas and sort of why I should write these ideas. And it wasn’t really just the other person’s fault. I was having a hard time communicating what this was just because I was new at this.

And Craig what was your experience as a newer writer? Did you have a hard time describing what it was you were trying to do?

Craig: No. But it took a lot of work. Because I was working exclusively in feature comedy, and this was the ‘90s where everything was generally high concept feature comedy, you had to actually have this really clear concept. You needed to be able to explain out how the movie was actually a movie and not just a comedy sketch. And you needed to give them a sense of set pieces. So there was a lot of rigging and moving parts that needed to be there. And somehow you had to do all of that without boring them to tears. And it’s really hard to pitch comedy – I’m sure Drew can get into that as well – because pitching is not funny. It’s a comedy-killing medium. So it can get sweaty and it’s hard.

John: Yeah. So let’s bring on a guest because he wrote in on Twitter saying that he was running into this exact problem where he’s having a hard time connecting with his agent about the things he was trying to write. Drew Champion is a writer whose animated show Archibald’s Next Big Thing has its first two seasons on Netflix and a third season coming on Peacock soon. Drew, welcome to the program.

Drew Champion: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Craig: Drew Champion is such a good name. I want you to be like one of those huge robots in Pacific Rim. Like Gypsy Danger. Drew Champion.

Drew: It’s a great last name that unfortunately growing up you had a lot of pressure. Like, oh, let’s get him on our team. He’s going to be great.

John: Good omen.

Craig: And then what happened?

Drew: Exactly. Exactly.

Craig: Blew a draft? Take on Champion. Oh god.

John: Now, Drew, talk to us about what you’re writing right now because you have a writing partner but you also write by yourself. So what’s your current situation?

Drew: Right now my writing partner and I we did this show, Archibald’s Next Big Thing, at DreamWorks and we’re kind of between shows right now. We’re doing a little bit of development for DreamWorks Animation. And at the same time together with my partner we are also doing non-animated stuff together. And trying to work that out. And then also I’m doing some solo stuff, non-animated, as well.

John: Great. And so in animation, so it’s DreamWorks Animation, the stuff that you’ve been doing so far is not WGA work. It’s Animation Guild?

Drew: Yeah. It’s all Animation Guild. Yeah.

John: And you have an agent and a manager? What’s your representation situation?

Drew: Just an agent. No manager right now.

John: Great. So what stuff are you having a hard time with right now. Is it stuff you’re working on with your partner? Or stuff you’re trying to pitch that’s just you? Or figure out if it’s just you.

Drew: The stuff that I mentioned when I messaged you on Twitter was just my personal stuff. It’s like this fine balance of writing a pilot and sending it to my agent and having it not really connect very well. And then thinking, OK, maybe writing the full pilot was too much work. Maybe I’ll just write an outline. So I wrote an outline, a comedy, and sent it to him and didn’t really connect. And so it’s like, OK, what’s even less work than an outline? Let’s just try a logline. And so my loglines haven’t been landing as well. I feel kind of like I want to – I need my agent to be on my side. It’s the gatekeeper. And I need to write something that he’s excited about so that he would be able to take it around and do those things. But at the same time I feel like it’s kind of wearing down some of my enthusiasm on some of my projects.

So it’s like this push and pull of where should I put the effort into and should I just write it anyway? At most one of these outlines could be a sample. So, yeah, that’s kind of where my situation is at.

Craig: That’s a situation. Well, a lot of times there is some sort of systematic best practices answer. In the case like this, and I don’t mean your specific case, but just the experience of trying to convince a partner of yours, whether it’s a writing partner or an agent that what you’re doing is worth pursuing, I think the best practice is what fills your sail with wind. And if someone is not filling your sail with wind then it’s just no good.

Now that’s not to say that agents should just read things and go, “Great!” Because then that’s patronizing and it’s not real wind. But it does seem like maybe what’s happening is the dynamic has become I show up and I’m like here, what do you think about this, and he goes, “Yeah, it’s OK. I don’t know.” All right, well what about this? “Meh, I don’t know.”

As opposed to sitting down and saying, “I’m not going to pitch you anything. I’m going to tell you how I see things going. And what I want. And how I want to get there. I want to tell you about why I’m passionate about certain things and how I think it would connect to other people and why.” And rather than serve up some food, explain the theory and the desire. And also explain the context of what you want from them. Because, I mean, just as a side note, agents don’t know what good is. I mean, apologies to all of them, but that’s not their job.

Their job is to get you as much money as possible or as much work as possible. They generally figure out what good is based on what everybody else says good is. Generally. I mean, some of them really do have excellent taste. But that’s not their primary function.

Think about maybe like a tête-à-tête I guess is what I’m suggesting.

John: Yeah. I think Craig’s suggestion in terms of having a general discussion about where you want to be working in the next two years is a good way to sort of start this rather than focusing on this one thing that’s going to go out as a pitch versus that thing that you’re going to try to write as a spec. Talk about the kinds of things you want to be doing so that he gets the sense of what you’re looking at with your partner and what you want to be looking at doing yourself.

One thing to think about in terms of agents and managers is it’s cleaner when we think about like a real estate agent, because that real estate agent you don’t go to them for advice on what color should I paint this wall. They’re just there to help you sell your house or to help you buy a house. That’s their function. And our literary agents are really good at that and they have a good sense of what the market is and all that. But you’re not necessarily paying them for their taste or their ability to predict this is the thing that’s going to be the one that’s going to set you on artistic success. Based on their experience this is the kind of thing that’s going to make it pretty easy for me to get you in rooms to talk about stuff.

And so in addition to having a general sit down with your reps I would say imagine those hypothetical general meetings you’re going into and what are the projects that you want to be able to pitch to those executives you’re meeting with rather than thinking about what it is – how you’re going to pitch it to your agent.

Drew: Right.

John: Do you want to pitch any of the stuff that you’re thinking about to us? Is there anything that you’re working on that feels like–?

Craig: Good lord.

John: Well is there any sort of general spaces, like talk to me about – imagine that we are the agent where you’re having the sort of general conversation. What kind of stuff do you want to be writing?

Drew: Well part of my situation is that I come from kid’s animation. And this is the first show I’ve ever worked on. So I feel like I have a good foundation and then breaking out of animation might be – it’ll be a struggle. It might be a little difficult. But with conversations with my agent it sounds like that doing half hour comedies is probably the most adjacent thing to animated TV, especially in the kids space, rather than trying to do a broody period piece drama feature. That might be a little bit more difficult to get me on. But to do something in comedy.

So that’s where I’ve been kind of focusing right now is half hour comedies.

Craig: Let’s put aside what maybe structurally seems like the business appropriate move. What do you actually want to do?

Drew: I want to do those brooding—

Craig: Great. We just got somewhere.

Drew: That’s what I want to do.

Craig: Do you think going from Archibald’s Next Big Thing to a brooding drama, do you think that that is impossible? Ask the guy who went from Hangover 3 to Chernobyl.

Drew: No. I mean, it doesn’t sound impossible. It just feels, well, it doesn’t sound impossible, but then it does sound impossible. Because then it’s like well who the hell is this guy? He was just writing about a talking Chicken for Tony Hale. Why is he doing such-and-such?

Craig: Well, you know, I’ll just say that there are a lot of examples of this. Sometimes we miss them. Or we forget that Walter White was the silly dad on Malcolm in the Middle. There is a lot of this. In acting and in writing and in directing. And the beautiful part of doing what you truly want to do as opposed to trying to fit into some scaffolding is that it’s actually much easier. Believe it or not it’s easy.

It’s really hard to wake up in the morning and write what you’re supposed to write. It is incredibly easy to wake up in the morning and write what you want to write.

Drew: Right.

Craig: And it will open doors in a way that – look, if it’s good. Right? It will open doors in remarkable ways for you. What happens is they tell you you can’t go through any of those doors. You have to go through this one door. You write something else, you come in, and all those other doors fling open. Fling open. It’s like they just didn’t believe it until they saw it.

John: So, Craig, a very specific example that I can offer Drew from my own experience. My first paid jobs as a writer were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. They’re both kid’s books adaptations. And the only things I was getting sent at my old agent was movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was very, very typecast as the guy who writes those kinds of things. I was typecast and I was pigeonholed. That’s what I was getting sent.

And so I wrote Go largely as a kind of middle finger to I can write other things. Don’t just think of me as this one kind of writer. And I ended up using that as the script that got me a new agent and sort of got me started on a new thing.

What was great about Go is it was the movie I most wanted to see. It’s the movie that didn’t exist that I really wanted to see. And happily people could read that script and apply it to whatever they wanted to be. Some people said like, “Oh, he can write an action movie. He can write a comedy. He can write serious stuff.” It was a very useful script for me on that level, even if it hadn’t ever gotten made. It would have gotten me plenty of work.

And so I would say be thinking about what is the movie that you, Drew, specifically could write that best shows the kind of movie that you could deliver to the world. You also do have a fallback plan. You do have a writing partner and you have a deal at DreamWorks Animation so you can keep doing that stuff. That’s the kind of great situation you find yourself in is you can always just do another animated kids show. Take this opportunity to write the thing that you really wish could exist. And I don’t think it is about pitching it, honestly. I think it is just going to be a brand new thing that you write that shows that you are a different kind of writer. And a writer who can do this by himself without the partner.

Drew: Right.

Craig: It’s scary.

John: It is scary. But exciting.

Drew: I’m terrified.

Craig: Yeah. Good. I mean, you’d be kind of sociopathic if you weren’t. I mean, I was scared. But also there’s a freedom to it. I was talking to Alec Berg the other day about how as you go on in your career you get better at writing. It’s inevitable. You get way better at writing. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I started. But he did point out something that was absolutely true that when you look back at the stuff you wrote way, way back in the beginning you were probably – you meaning all of us – were freer. We were freer in our writing. We were less constrained by our fears or what we were trying to do. Ambitions. The market. Other movies. Insecurities. Whatever the hell it was, we were too stupid to know that you shouldn’t write some things. And in that we were wonderful.

And, after all, it’s that writer that got into Hollywood, right? So, they were doing something right. So in something like this the nice thing is you get to be completely free. There are no notes. There’s no rubric. There’s no syllabus. There’s nothing. You do whatever you want. It’s amazing. It’s free. And stick it in at the end of the day if you want. It could be a little side job for you.

Drew: Right.

Craig: And if it goes nowhere it goes nowhere. But what I would say is, and this is the meeting that I had with my agent way, way back. We sat down and I said, OK, so here’s the situation. I think that I’m a better writer than the opportunities I’m getting. And so I want to concentrate on that now. And we don’t have to worry about, if it’s OK with you, I don’t want to worry about money. I don’t want to worry about this or that.

Now, we can’t always not worry about money. But in that instance I said I just want to work with better material. I want to work on better material. Because I want to use what I have. I had been stuck in the same – working the same aisle in the same store for too long. I wanted a new position.

So it’s fair to sit down with that person and say, “I’m still doing the comedy. I’m still doing this. Let’s make some money. But also I want you to know I’m doing this and this is exciting because we can go out and make some fresh kills.” You know what I mean? We can open up a new front in this war.

John: Drew, how are you feeling right now?

Drew: I mean, my mind is just racing. This has all just been really interesting, really good stuff. I think this is really helpful and I feel energized to kind of open my mind to a different level of just being open and free to just explore some of this other stuff. That’s really exciting.

Craig: It’s crazy. Listening to you say that, it does strike me, because I’ve had the same feeling, that this business convinces you that you’re not free.

John: There’s a Stockholm syndrome that sort of kicks in.

Craig: Yeah. But we are. That’s the crazy part. We are. They just put blinders on us. And they’re very effective blinders. And of course, you know, we have obligations that we have to meet, and so we do have to work on things that we get paid for. But I guess what I’m saying is we’re giving you permission. And you don’t have to worry that you’re being self-indulgent. Because I’m guessing that you’re a lot like me in that you’ve always been the far opposite of self-indulgent. You’ve always been terrified as coming off as self-indulgent.

Drew: Bingo. Bingo.

Craig: Well then you know what? Indulge a little. You’ve earned it.

John: Cool. Drew, we are going to be looking for your credits. We’re going to be looking for the announcement of the project that you set up that you’re going to write now. And check back in with us and let us know what you do next, OK?

Drew: Yeah. You guys, this has been so helpful. Thank you so very much.

Craig: Our pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Drew: Thanks for having me.

Craig: Sure.

John: Thank you, Drew. Suddenly we’re in a call-in advice show.

Craig: I like that.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Putting people’s lives back together. It’s lovely.

John: These call-in advice shows, they also sometimes have producers who come on who are reading questions. So let’s bring our producer on, Megana Rao.

Megana Rao: Hey guys.

Craig: Hey.

John: We are so excited to have you here with us. And you, how many questions do you get in at ask@johnaugust.com per week?

Megana: Oh lord. Probably like 20 to 30.

John: All right. And what is your criteria for sorting through the questions? And which ones make it on to the Workflowy?

Megana: So I think about questions that we have answered recently. Things that I think are unique and interesting and personally curious about. Yeah, and then I think things that are broadly applicable or if there’s a specific situation that seems, I don’t know, like you guys would have an interesting take on it. I kind of send all of that to you guys, get your feedback, and then the winners are in the Workflowy.

Craig: I mean, you know I don’t actually give any feedback. I accept what you guys do completely. Openly. Happily. I try and be as happy as I can. You do a great job.

Megana: But like cryptic puzzles from last week was definitely a Craig question.

Craig: I know. I know. And I was so – thank you for this.

John: Yeah, we kind of wedged that in at the end there.

Craig: I really appreciated it.

John: What do we have this week?

Megana: So Lisa wrote in about misdirection. And she asked, “I’ve noticed that mystery writers, particularly Agatha Christie, use confirmation bias to trick the reader into ignoring what’s actually happening. The reader gets a couple of clues that lead to a red herring, then happily ignores or downplays contrary evidence until the big denouement.

“Similarly, one of the meta clues in a mystery is the unnecessary-necessary character. The villain is introduced early on as a minor character who the reader ignores because their appearance seems normal to the plot. Then, when they are revealed, the audience doesn’t feel cheated that the villain came from left field. It feels fair.

“Any thoughts on how screenwriters can best use these techniques of misdirection?”

John: What a good question from Lisa.

Craig: An excellent question from Lisa.

John: Yeah, so what you’re doing with a misdirection is very classically like a magic trick. And magic tricks rely on expectation. What you expect is going to happen next and then defeating that expectation. Surpassing that expectation.

So in any misdirection, in a mystery, or whatever you’re trying to do, you’re leading the audience into making reasonable assumptions about what’s going to happen. So assuming that the protagonist isn’t actually the villain, that the movie is a reliable narrator, that the story is taking place on earth or in a specific decade. Basically that you’re not doing an M. Night Shyamalan on them. That things you are assuming are true are actually true. And I like that phrase the unnecessary-necessary character. Because that’s a thing I see a lot, Craig, is that the character who well naturally is going to be there because of sort of the situation and then they have a role beyond what you expect them to be doing in the story.

Craig: Yeah. I like the Shyamalaning – I mean, there’s a difference between a joke and a prank. Practical jokes, which are not jokes, are just things that rely on someone’s ignorance of something that they shouldn’t know anyway. And that’s Shyamalaning. Whereas a proper joke or a proper trick or misdirection it’s legitimately fooling you. Because you could see it if you were able to. It’s right there.

So what Agatha Christie does, and I study her so carefully, is she is in fact using things like confirmation bias. She is allowing you to make conclusions that you don’t even realize you’re making. And she uses all of the tricks that we’ve talked about before. The ways that we are irrational. And the study of Kahneman and Tversky who sort of established the science of human irrationality. Agatha Christie before the scientists ever got ahold of this concept was preying upon all of those things. Anchoring, for instance. We tend to be influenced by the first thing that we see. But we shouldn’t. It’s just the first. It doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most important. But she’ll use things like that all the time.

So, part of the trickery of it, Lisa, is actually studying how humans think wrongly about things. It is fair game to take advantage of that. Because whose fault is it for overemphasizing the first thing you read? Or for presuming that if a coin spins three heads in a row that it’s more likely that the next spin will be tails as opposed to heads. Well, it’s our fault. It’s not the writer’s fault.

So the writer is allowed to take advantage of that. It’s not just about our skill in being sneaky. It’s about our awareness of how our audience is broken.

John: And I would say there’s a difference between what writers can get away with in prose fiction versus screenwriting. And the central difference is that in a book characters can disappear. Basically unless the writer actually puts that character in front of your face they can disappear back into the woodwork. So a character can be mentioned and then sort of not mentioned for a while. And because you’re just getting information from the writer you don’t have a sense of like, oh, this character is important or not important. Versus in a screenplay and therefore in a movie there’s going to be a physical actor there in the frame, in the shot. And if you’re trying to do a misdirect where that person who doesn’t seem important is actually very important, or that waiter is actually secretly complicit in the whole thing, that person is going to physically be there.

So as a screenwriter you may have to put in a substitute reason for why that character is showing up there so much. So you might be thinking about this is the guy who won’t stop freaking out during the robbery. And so he’s panicked. And so we think that he’s just a guy who is in the bank during the robbery but he’s actually part of the villains. Or the hacker who can get you through into that secure zone. So the reason why that guy is always sitting there at the computer is because he’s on our side. He’s one of our hackers, but he’s actually that guy.

You’re going to need to think of some reason for why that character is around so much and it’s a bigger issue for a screenwriter than it would be for the novelist.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a great example. Are you guys Agatha Christie fans?

John: In high school I read through all the books and I’ve seen some of the movies but not in a while. So not nearly the fan you are.

Craig: What about you, Megana?

Megana: Yeah, I’d say so. I was like very much so a Nancy Drew person growing up. So I feel like that followed a similar sort of format.

Craig: No question. The example I like to cite is Agatha Christie’s, I think it’s her first novel, her first full mystery. It’s called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And so this is super early. I think we’re talking like 1915 or something like that. And here’s how it works. It’s a first person narrator, which is odd. It’s not typical for a murder mystery.

But this guy lives in a small town and Poirot rents a summer house next to him. And so he becomes sort of fascinated by Poirot, because Poirot is such an oddball. And lo and behold what happens? A murder. There’s like a big super rich family in town. And the rich guy is murdered. And so our narrator basically accompanies Poirot and sort of tails along as Poirot begins to take the mystery part and solve it.

And there was at the time a mystery writers club, I think, in London. And I believe either they did or almost kicked Agatha Christie out because of this. Because, sorry for spoilers for a book that’s about a hundred years old. What happens you find out is that the murderer is the narrator.

John: Yes.

Craig: And she’s brilliant. He never really lies. He just leaves a few things out. And it’s astonishing. In fact, and what’s so astonishing is that he was not unreliable as a narrator. He was reliable. He told you everything. But that’s the kind of thing that takes advantage of a natural bias that we are not even aware of. So as we’re reading and trying to figure out, or as we’re watching a movie like Knives Out, which is obviously a little different because you kind of know technically who did it early. But we know the audience is trying to figure it out. We know they’re doing the math. So, how do you beat them?

Well, somebody has got to be innocent. That’s probably the one who is not.

John: The only other thing I’d urge Lisa to think about is obviously misdirection in mystery is crucial to it, but misdirection is important for other genres of films as well. As an audience we are always approaching a movie with a set of expectations about the genre, about the world, the kinds of things we expect to happen in this movie. And most of the times as writers our goal is to meet and exceed those expectations. And so the audience feels smart. The audience is with you. I thought this was going to happen and it did happen and so I trust this movie.

But if you can build enough trust you can then also surprise people. And surprise relies on misdirects. This thing that you didn’t think could happen in this movie did happen. And it shakes you and it gets you really excited because you’re suddenly on a ride you didn’t expect.

So it’s the romantic comedy where they actually do break up and they never get back together again. That’s exciting. But you would need to lay in the possibilities for those misdirections early on.

Megana, another question for us, please.

Megana: OK, awesome. So I feel like this one is a great follow up. Brian asks, “How much should you reveal during a pitch meeting? If your script has a unique twist that you’ve never seen done would you reveal that twist or try to entice your audience by mentioning all the other things that make this script great without revealing the one thing that no one has ever done before? Because to do this would be giving away an idea for free. And I know how adamant you are about leaving no writing behind without payment. It seems there’s a tightrope you must walk by selling your script or idea without giving away ever single detail.”

John: Craig, do you reveal it all?

Craig: Yeah. It’s not writing. You’re talking about it. And these theoretically are professionals. So, they’re like, look, I’m going to read it before the audience sees it. I’m going to read it before we cast it, we shoot it, all that stuff. So what exactly are we waiting for? Because if I don’t like how it ends I’m not buying it. I need to know. And if the twist is unique and exciting and kind of mind-wobbling like, oh my god, he was a ghost the whole time. Well, that’s what they’re going to buy. They’re not buying set up, pretty much. I don’t think they are. Unless what makes your movie or your pitch unique the set up itself. In that case, sure.

But otherwise, no, go for it.

John: Yeah. Let me try to rephrase Brian’s question thusly. Hey, John and Craig, so I have a really unique idea but in the pitch meeting should I not actually make it sound unique or cool but make it sound like other things and hide what makes it unique and cool? Is that a good strategy?

Craig: Yes. [laughs]

John: The answer would be no. You should actually do what makes it unique and coo. And here’s the challenge is that obviously how you reveal that twist in the screenplay is going to be different than how you’d probably do it in a pitch. But you figure that out. And that’s the excitement of doing a pitch is figuring out where the listeners are at and how you get them to that moment. But, yes, you absolutely need to do it and so they have something to hang on. So they can really feel what’s going to be special about the project.

So, yes, leave it all on the field. You’ve got to give them what is special and unique about this, because otherwise you’re not going to sell it.

Craig: Word.

John: Word. Megana, thank you for these questions.

Craig: Thanks, Megana.

John: Now, when people write in to ask@johnaugust.com with their questions what are some helpful things you’d like them to do in terms of question length? Do you like the audio questions? Help us out?

Megana: Ooh, I love audio questions and I know you do, too. So audio, like if you can record and send me a transcript of the question that’s the ideal. Yeah, otherwise I think keeping it short and sweet and sort of getting to the point. Just like Brian is afraid to reveal too much, I feel like in a lot of questions the person asking is also afraid that I’m going to steal their story idea or that someone would if we read it on air.

Craig: Oh lord.

Megana: But that ends up making for a worse question if it’s really vague because you’re not telling me any details about your situation. So feel free to let me know you don’t want me to use your real name. But otherwise please send some more context and information. That’s always really helpful.

John: And we also love when you include your location because it’s just more fun to say Brian in Massachusetts than just Brian.

Megana: Totally.

Craig: Oh my god. Brian from Massachusetts.

John: Cool. Megana, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is actually three books that are all about money and I think I may have mentioned one of them before, which is Debt – The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. It’s a great look at sort of how money came into existence based on just people owing each other stuff and it ultimately becomes money.

Two books I read recently, Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood are both really good and very different looks at sort of what it is that we’re doing when we think about money and economies and sort of how stuff works.

Craig, did you have economics in high school or college? When did you first learn about how the “economy” works?

Craig: I actually had a class in eighth grade. I went to an odd school. I was at Hunter College High School in Manhattan until we moved away. And so they kind of did their own funky curriculum. And in eighth grade I remember our social studies class did have a long section on how the economy worked, how the stock market worked, how money worked, loans, interest, compound interest, inflation, all that stuff. It was interesting. I mean, I never had any desire to take Econ in college or anything like that.

But, you know, I think everybody should understand the basics of how corporations function, for instance.

John: Absolutely. How corporations function. Just the idea of supply and demand. And it’s weird because I had micro and macroeconomics in college. And as a journalism major we were required to take both macro and micro and they were really illuminating, but they’re also basically like this is capitalism and it’s almost like a Darwinian theory of how stuff works. But it just happens to work but it’s not kind of the only way things could work. And so it’s fascinating to look at other ideas about sort of how money and economies function together.

We talked in a previous episode, actually one of our first bonus episodes, was about the gold standard and why the gold standard is stupid.

Craig: It is.

John: It’s just so, so dumb.

Craig: So dumb.

John: But it’s hard to explain why it’s dumb unless you have some background in sort of how money comes to be.

Craig: Right.

John: If people are looking for any sort of starter books I think all three of these – actually the one that’s not about the origin capitalism which is just a little too obscure to start with, but either of these other two books are great ways to be thinking about what money is and how money actually functions in society. Because it never grew out of barter. This myth that people started trading, like I’ll give you two deer for a bushel of corn. That never happened. And it was always just IOUs for things.

Craig: Right.

John: Cool.

Craig: Excellent. My One Cool Thing is America, maybe. [laughs] That’s all I’m going to say. It may be America.

John: It would be great if America were very, very cool.

Craig: I will do a follow up One Cool Thing next week to confirm or deny that America is cool.

John: Yes. All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net were you get all the back episodes and bonus segments and a segment like this where we’re going to talk about dogs. So, stick around if you’re a Premium member because we are going to talk about dogs. Craig, thank you for a very calm episode.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, do screenwriters need to have dogs, or is it just highly recommended?

Craig: I’m going to go with need to. I’m going to actually make it mandatory. Of course, everyone needs to have a dog. Everyone.

John: I mean, basically you join the WGA and they give you the little card and they give you a dog. That’s just how it works. You got to have a dog.

Craig: Got to have a dog.

John: Talk to us about your dog situation right now.

Craig: Right now we have Cookie. She is a Labrador who we keep trying to sort of pretty up. We’ll put little ribbons in her hair sometimes when she gets groomed and then she keeps trying to make herself disgusting.

John: You said she’s a Labrador, but she’s a Labradoodle, right?

Craig: Labradoodle. Yes. Oh, did I say Labrador? Labradoodle. She’s a Labradoodle which is a wonderful breed of dog. Poodles are not my favorite. Labradors are wonderful. Labradors shed all over the place, Poodles don’t. Labradoodle, it’s like a Labrador that doesn’t shed. And they’re adorable. And very sweet and friendly. She’s very, very beta. She’s the most beta dog I think I’ve ever encountered in my life. And we’re actually going to be getting another puppy soon, pretty sure.

John: Oh, very exciting.

Craig: In part because as Cookie gets older I just keep in mind the line of succession.

John: Yes. You have to. You always need a dog. My first dog that was my own dog was my dog Jake who was a Pug who was fantastic and he was very classically a screenwriter’s first dog. I invested in him all of my paternal caring and it was an absolutely ideal dog for me to have. We had another Pug later who looked like a dog but actually had nothing in his brain. It was actually just some sort of weird alien. Who I still loved, but was just really a challenging dog.

But my current dog–

Craig: Ah, Lambert.

John: Lambert is just an absolute dream. You’ve met Lambert several times. And is some sort of Terrier-Poodle kind of mix thing. And has just been an absolute delight and a source of warmth and comfort at all moments.

Craig: Lambert and Cookie have met each other. They get along famously.

John: They have. And Megana brought them up to your house at some point. So I’ve never seen them meet, but I’m sure they were best friends.

Craig: It was too gentle dogs sort of looking at each other and seemingly fine with each other and then they both sort of went their separate ways. It was like, OK, yeah, you’re here, I’m here, great. And then Lambert sat down in his funny way where he just spreads his legs and puts his balls directly on the floor. Or where his balls would be.

John: Yeah. Now, what is – you’re a person who is interested in science and the evolution of things, what is your belief in terms of how dogs came to be and to what degree is it just us wishful thinking that they are so empathetic and they seem to understand us so well? What is your belief about dog evolution?

Craig: I mean, I’m just guessing, because I haven’t studied it or anything, but it seems to me like along the way certain wolves were taken in by groups of people and over time gentler wolves were bred with other gentler wolves and you started to get breeds of dogs that descended from wolves but were like the nice ones. And then it just kept happening. And obviously around the world there are different kinds of wolves that become different kinds of dogs. And then you crossbreed them.

And I think that initially was because they were incredibly useful. Because they domesticate so well. They were helpful for protection back in the day when there was no conceal carry. Your dog was your conceal carry. They protected the family. They helped you hunt. And they obviously also were there for comfort. They were loyal. So they have all of these properties that make them incredibly suitable to live with humans. And I think that is probably why we imprint our own beliefs on what’s happening in their minds.

My dog, for instance, she has a little routine. When I come home from wherever she runs frantically to me, sits down in front of me, gets kind of low, and then starts whimpering as if to say where have you been. She’s crying. And I could think, oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything. In fact, if I put my hand right on her chest I can feel her heart pounding. Like oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything.

But I know actually what she wants is one of those dried chicken strips. And she knows that when I get home and she does this and she starts whining and doing that she gets one. And the second she gets that chicken strip she’s gone. So, it’s mostly chicken, but it’s easy to see – of course, they do love us. I mean, there’s no question about that.

John: Yeah. I always find it fascinating when I look at my dog’s behavior and then I take a step back and look at, OK, in what ways am I behaving like a dog who is really just stimulus and response driven? I think I want a thing but it’s really that I want this other more basic thing. I really am just hungry. Or I really just need to be around somebody but it’s not – I’m creating these elaborate reasons for why I do certain things when really it’s just sort of stimulus-driven behavior.

And yet I look into my dog’s eyes and I see like, oh, well this dog clearly loves me. A strange thing about Lambert I’ve noticed is that Lambert, his favorite thing in the world is a visitor. And anybody who comes to the house he is so obsessed. And I think people come to the house and think like, oh, this dog must not like it here because this dog just seems to desperately like me very much, or want to get away from this house. And, no, it’s any new person who comes to the house, it’s just like come on in. Do you want to take the TV? Take the TV. It’s fine. It’s good.

He’s just so obsessed with that and it’s been one of the hardest things about the pandemic and the lockdown is that Lambert just doesn’t get to see new people. New people don’t get to come to the house. And so he’s stuck with the three of us.

Craig: Same with Cookie. She loves new people. She likes to bark when a new person arrives to let everybody know that a new person is here. And then she just melts.

John: Yeah. Aw, that’s nice. Melty dogs are nice.

Craig: It’s the greatest. Melty dogs.

John: And they’re very calming which is the reason why I thought we’d talk about them here.

Craig: Yes. If you have a dog definitely take moment now to just sit with your dog, turn off everything, sit with your dog and think to yourself how nice it is in their mind because they don’t know any of this.

John: They know nothing. And like when a water bowl gets filled with water, like you did magic. You were able to touch something and water came out of it and you put it there. You were able to do all of these things that a dog can’t do. They live in a world of magic and we are the magicians.

Craig: Right. So you might as well get a little something back and try to get your mind right in the same frequency as your dog’s mind where the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me. Eye contact. Scratches.

John: Great. We’ll end it there. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

 

Links:

• YALL Write John’s panel is on Friday, November 13th at 3pm ET/12pm PT
• Drew Champion and Archibald’s Next Big Thing
• Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
• The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Debt – The First 5,000 years by David Graeber
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Peter Hoopes (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.