Search Results for: notes on notes

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/notes-on-notes).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 399 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, this afternoon Craig and I did something different. We went over to Amblin and spoke to a group of about 30 development executives to discuss what it feels like as a writer to get notes. And to offer them suggestions for how to give notes that will actually achieve what they want.

In many ways this episode reminds me most of Episode 99 where we sat down with therapist Dennis Palumbo to talk about psychotherapy for screenwriters and the weird ways that writers process emotion. In the first half you’ll hear me and Craig sort of giving a presentation. Then we open up for discussion with the whole group. Enjoy.

Ah, so nice. So this is theoretically going to be Episode 399 of our show. 399 episodes of our show, which is crazy – crazy, crazy. And on one of these episodes Craig proposed you know what we should go in and talk to studio executives about how they give notes because we as people who get notes a lot could give them insights in how to give notes. And so Craig made this offer. Someone took us up on this offer. We went and talked to some folks at Disney.

**Craig Mazin:** Yep.

**John:** It was a good conversation. A much smaller conversation than this group. Ben, thank you for bringing us in here to talk with this larger group about our notes on notes. Because usually we’re coming in here to hear these notes and we are filled with sort of this emotional response sometimes to these notes and we’re trying to figure out how to do them.

But I thought if we talked through the process of giving notes and hearing notes we might honestly be all able to do this a little bit better. So that’s the impetus behind this presentation.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is mostly to help you guys help us. I mean, it’s always self-interest really. Because we are kind of allies, whether we realize it or not, there’s a little journey that we’re all going on to try and make something which is impossible to do, as we know. And so we are allies and that means we have to figure out how to help each other along the way. And I think sometimes in everyone’s zeal to help the opposite occurs. I won’t say what that word is. It’s hurt. You’re hurting people.

So, anyway, we know that all the intentions are good, but hopefully we can give you some practical advice just so you can hear how things filter through our minds when we have these experiences with you.

**John:** Yesterday Craig emailed me to say, “That thing we did at Disney, did we have a script? Did we have anything we were working off of?” And I said I don’t think so, I think we just winged it. He’s like, “No, no, I’m pretty sure we had some sort of script.” And then Craig texted me last night saying like, “I found it. I found the shared Google doc.” So this is the shared Google doc we’re working off.

**Craig:** Should inspire a lot of confidence in the two of us.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So these are the notes on our notes on notes. And it keys in with this slide show, so that’s why I was hoping we could stick a little bit on this first–

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it. Where should we start?

**John:** Why is it so hard to get notes? Craig?

**Craig:** Got it. So, when our work, and I include all of you – your work, everything you do – when it is exposed or critiqued we feel emotional pain. That’s common to every human being in all circumstances. I don’t think that that is a sign of weakness, even though you may have been taught that, particularly if you grew up in the ‘70s. But rather it is a sign of being human. So congratulations.

But here’s a question that might seem obvious until you really think about it. Why? Why should being criticized or critiqued make us feel emotional pain? Well, it turns out there’s a good answer. Let’s talk about a little science. This is the last bit of science you’ll have to deal with today. So Chernobyl – no – neurologists know that emotional pain doesn’t come from this part up here. So our neocortex or frontal lobe, this is all of our rational human thinking/processing/reasoning brain. Emotional pain comes from this little lump underneath called the limbic system. I can’t get there because it’s underneath. But it’s basically an inheritance from rats and lizards and birds. And all it really does is control our fight or flight response.

And this fight or flight response happens before the human smart part of our brain even knows what’s happening. A little bit like if you touch a hot stove your spinal reflex will have your hand moving back before the rest of your brain goes, ow, that’s hot. Well, similarly when you get negative threatening input the limbic system is going to fire off messages before the front of your brain even has a chance to process what has happened. And unfortunately the limbic system only has one alarm message to send. It’s very stupid. Again, it’s from rats and birds. And the message it sends to you, to the front of your brain is you are in danger of dying. That’s the only phrase it knows. You’re in danger of dying.

So, start fighting or starting fleeing. Now, that may sound a little dramatic, but if so–

**John:** Craig, it sounds a little dramatic.

**Craig:** I can make it more dramatic.

**John:** But honestly I’ve had that response to notes in a room where I felt like the floor was collapsing underneath me. And so therefore I have to do something. I have to take an action right now which is not just sitting and listening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another writer we know told me a story once that in the middle of a notes meeting she just asked if she could take a break to go to the bathroom and then she vomited. And then she came back. This is – I understand this.

Here’s what’s happening. When you’re writing or directing or creating something you’re creating a kind of external expression of yourself. We put ourselves into these things. And what you’re doing is essentially recreating the contents of your mind on page or on screen. And the more you care the better you are at it frankly. The more you invest of your own humanity and passion and love, the more enmeshed you become with it. It becomes hard to figure out where you stop and it starts.

If you have kids, and I don’t know, it’s a pretty young crowd, but if you do have children you will understand this. The children are not you, but if they are threatened well then you will feel fear and pain and adrenaline. The limbic system is pounding its alarm system. You made the so they are you. Rationally we understand that the script isn’t us, but the limbic system sees no difference at all.

**John:** Yeah, it’s sort of the mama bear syndrome. You see your cub being threatened and therefore you must protect your cub. And so how do you get past that sense of like I must protect this thing that is partly me that is in danger.

**Craig:** Yeah. And to try and connect it a little bit to what you guys do, if you’re not also writing things, I want you think of how you feel when somebody criticizes something that is inherent to your identity or your being. There they are. I want you to think about how you feel when somebody criticizes your appearance. Your weight. Your sexuality. Your race. I want you to think about how you feel when someone essentially says you’re not good enough the way you are. I’m talking about your parents basically.

That’s why you’re here in Hollywood. You’re not good enough the way you are. Here’s a bunch of things that are completely wrong with you. Let me enumerate them and go into detail. Here’s what you should be instead. And please listen carefully.

Well, when these things happen it’s quite likely you’re going to want to run out of the room or wring their neck. It’s fight or flight. And in these instances now switching back to writers when they begin to feel emotional pain writers will get angry, they will get sullen, they will get argumentative. They’ll get snippy or passive-aggressive. Does any of this sound familiar? Have you seen this happening? It’s fight or flight.

**John:** From the writer’s perspective, this sort of is a natural reaction. They feel like they’re under attack. From the outsider’s perspective it’s like why are they being so weird about all of this. We all have the same goal. We’re trying to make a better movie, a better pilot. We’re trying to – theoretically rowing in the same direction. Why are they acting so weird?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s actually a great sign. I know it’s annoying to deal with in the moment. If you’re dealing with a writer who is like, oh yes, who is reacting to your notes as if they didn’t write the script at all, that’s a psychopath. And also probably a bad writer.

But John is absolutely right. That the irony is all of that emotional pain and the response to that emotional pain has nothing to do with making the movie better. And this is where writers kind of start to circle and cycle a bit because the more emotional pain we feel the worse these meetings and encounters get, which leads to worse interaction, which leads to more emotional pain. And we could even start to become viewed as the D word. Difficult.

And it’s hard because the front of your brain is saying, “Hey, they’re going to start thinking of you as difficult.” But underneath there’s this little blurb saying, “Kill them.” And that’s a rough one to correspond. Yes, you will look at it from your side as somebody trying to make some sort of intellectual or angry defense of what they’ve done, to deny what you’re saying, to essentially negate everything you are putting into this. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s just somebody who is terrified that they’re about to die and they’re trying to stay alive, whether you realize it or not.

So, John, how do we do this better for us and for them? Can we get into some practicals?

**John:** Let’s do some practicals. Let’s talk about some dos and some don’ts, which are almost always going to be sort of opposite reflections of the natural instinct versus what’s probably most helpful at the moment.

So let’s start with owning an opinion. And so when you have an opinion and you’re sharing an opinion, really take possession of that opinion. Really feel it. Have it be a meaningful opinion to you that you think will actually improve the project. Not just an opinion you’re repeating because you’re supposed to be passing it along.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s essentially why you have your jobs. You have your jobs because somebody says, “Look, you’ve got good taste. I like the way you respond and react to things.” So it’s really important that you own that opinion. But what you should not do is convert your opinion into a fact. It’s OK. Opinions are good enough. It’s just good enough. I think sometimes there’s this game that happens in these rooms. You’ve probably watched it or maybe even participated. It’s called the battle of examples.

Here’s my opinion. And someone says, “No, because they did that in this movie and it didn’t work.” And then someone says, “But, they did it in this movie and it did work.” Someone says, “No, that movie is different.” Someone says, “No, because of this.” No because of this. Everyone is trying to [empiricize] an opinion.

Here’s the deal. The first person to do something well in a movie that works – that’s original and they win. And the first person to do something poorly in a movie that doesn’t work – that’s stupid and it was a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what happened before. There is no way to turn your opinions into fact. You might as well just say it’s how I feel. That actually is good enough.

**John:** Yeah. And when you try to make your subjective opinion into an objective fact or presented as an objective fact we immediately go defensive because we can see logically that’s not actually an objective fact so then we start to doubt everything else you’re saying, too. So saying your opinion as an opinion, as your subjective take on a situation, is great. And it also reminds the writer that they’re being hired for their subjective opinions, for their subjective skills and sort of negotiating this emotional terrain. So keeping it in the realm of opinion is really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A do. Do share your reactions and your questions. You are often one of the very first audiences for a script so share what you felt. Share what you felt as you were reading through it because as we’ve been writing a thing we’ve been living with this thing for months and so we don’t have clean eyes on stuff. You guys do have clean eyes. So phrasing what you find in what your first read was, what it felt like to you to be sitting in an audience watching it on the screen of your mind is really helpful because particularly when there’s things that aren’t clear or places you thought the story was going that it wasn’t going that’s great for us to hear.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you guys have all been in focus groups in screenings and there are people in those focus groups who say when this happened I felt this, but when this happened I felt this. And we think, OK good, we’re getting our NRG money’s worth. And then there’s that guy who, you know, “Actually,” because he goes to cinema school and he’s thought about this during the screening. You’re like that’s useless. What we need are true honest human reactions, right?

So what you want to do is hold on to those for sure, but try to avoid announcing the conclusions of your reactions. Because that’s where you’re sort of short-circuiting a natural process. If something worries you in a script as you’re reading it or confuses you or makes you annoyed or bores you that’s really valuable. We need to hear that. Tell me where it got annoying. Like right here, or this is where I got confused. Where it becomes less useful is when people say to us as writers, “You know what, she’s too angry. This character is too angry. She’s too mean. She’s a turn-off.” That’s a conclusion. And we don’t know quite what to do with it.

And what it really sounds like is, “And that’s a fact and somehow you missed that.” When what is useful is to say, “I don’t understand why in this scene she’s so harsh with him given the circumstances. Can you talk about what you were going for because what I felt was put off?” That’s a discussion. That’s a conversation.

**John:** Absolutely. Because now you’re talking about what your reaction was to something that you read and we can discuss that moment. We can discuss what our intention was behind that rather than she’s too mean. We can’t do anything with that. There’s nothing we can write that fixes “she’s too mean.”

**Craig:** You’re kind of just inviting us to say, “Well, I don’t think she is.” And now we get into an argument over a fact that is not a fact at all.

**John:** A suggestion, speak towards the passion. What you’re interested in. Speak towards what you want. Even if it’s in the context of criticism. So always be discussing where you want things to be going rather than sort of where things are right now that aren’t exactly what you want. So speak towards what is getting you excited about the project, not what is turning you off.

**Craig:** Yeah. You wanted to do this in the first place for some reason. Something excited you about it. If the script isn’t there say, “Listen, when I got to this place I wanted it to go here. How can we get it there?” That’s a thing where you can move toward.

What we really don’t know how to process as writers is how to write away from something. There is really no way to write away from a thing. So, here’s an example. Don’t make this scene so talky. OK. You’ve probably felt that a lot of times. Don’t make this scene so talky. This scene is way too talky. That’s writing away from something. Don’t bother with all this plot language. There’s too much plot language. Less. That’s writing away from something.

And these notes are generally born of fear. That’s not a knock on you guys. That’s really useful. I mean, that fear is necessary to kind of evaluate this material. You’re scared that an audience, to whom you’re accountable to, is going to get bored, or turned off, or confused. Your fear is completely warranted. Just please keep it to yourself because we are drowning in our own fear and we cannot handle your fear as well.

And also to help us write towards something just re-contextualize these things. For instance, OK, this scene is too talky, please write it less talky. Write away from that. Not as helpful. But what you could say is, “These two characters have this great vibe in this scene where they say almost nothing, when they’re kind of just reading each other’s minds because it’s clear that their relationship works like that. They don’t need as many words as two other people might. And so they’re intimating things like for instance this point.

This scene here, how can we move this scene more toward that? Then the writer goes I know how to do that. It’s not even about buttering them up and saying, “Look, you did it really good here.” It’s not that. It’s just giving them something to write toward.

**John:** Absolutely. And you’re giving them characters to write towards. In all your conversations talk about characters and talk about the choices the characters are making. Talk about it in terms of these characters being living creatures within the universe of your movie or your TV show. And what they are literally doing. And so that way you let the focus of choice less on the writer and more on what the characters are doing.

**Craig:** Yep. Because characters are talking. Characters are boring. Characters are beautiful. Characters are interesting. Characters are illogical. What we weirdly don’t know how to work with effectively is discussion of the scene or the script, which seems odd. But the scene or the script is this other thing that is a function of characters. So, when we hear talk about scenes in scripts and stories we’re weirdly jarred out of the mindset, the writing mindset, where we solve problems. Because where we generally solve problems is in the realm of character. Well, OK, if this isn’t working how can I make it a better function of this character? Or how can I change this character to get more like something else?

If all you do – if literally all you do – is write the notes as you would normally write them and then say now let’s just funnel this through a filter of characterize it. Let’s just put all these notes now within the context of character notes, you’re already going to be literally 50% closer to getting what you want.

**John:** When you’re giving notes, give the notes that can lead to meaningful changes in the screenplay. So here’s an example of the most meaningful note I ever got on a screenplay. And so this was right here at Amblin. It was Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. I was up in their office, they were in one of the bungalows. And it was the second draft of the script. And in the script I’d written Will tells a story of how his father died, but he tells it at the funeral rather than telling it to Edward Bloom while he was in the hospital bed. So their note was what would happen if you told that story to Edward rather than about Edward. And it was just – I did have that immediate like, “oh no, they want me to change something,” but then the light went on and I was like, “oh, that is just so much better.” That is a meaningful change. It is not a huge change, it’s not a huge amount of work for me to do, but it is a huge change in sort of how this all works. And it was just – it was a fantastic note. And it was a meaningful note that changed a lot of things in the script.

There were other small things which wouldn’t have been as impactful. So be thinking about what is the thing that opens up possibilities.

**Craig:** Quality. Not quantity. Here is another kind of note which you and I have seen. This is an actual page note that I received from an actual studio. “Let’s cut Elena saying please at the end of this scene.” Well that’s just stupid. And it’s stupid for so many reasons.

But the most – I guess the most prominent reason is anybody that has spent any time on set or in an editing room knows that of all the resources that are required to make motion pictures and television the amount that is expended to add one more word to the end of a scene is zero. You are already there. That’s dumb. And when we get notes like that it kind of starts to undermine our confidence.

It may be that you think I really don’t like that she says please there at the end. Fine. When it comes time for the editing room if people have still left it in you make that argument there. That’s a meaningful note in the editing room. But it is not a meaningful note when you’re writing the script.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s some meaningful notes that are meaningful on set but not in the script. So this is an example from me. “Page 71, Aladdin’s line at the middle of the page, ‘I want to show her I’m someone worth knowing,’ feels a bit too direct and declarative. Can we find a way to say this with more subtext?”

I get why they gave the note. They were trying to be specific and kind of creative and helpful, but it had no relation to the actual we made. There is not a single moment in Aladdin that is anywhere near this subtle or with this kind of subtext. I can guarantee you.

**Craig:** I mean, that’s already way more sub textual than the rest of it.

**John:** Oh yes. Oh yes. It’s a very declarative movie. And this was like an actor line reading. Honestly it was trying to get way too detailed on a moment that was not – we just weren’t at that place. And so trying to use really fine pens on something where like we’re still kind of at Sharpie level here. And that was the wrong note for the moment.

**Craig:** We understand, by the way, that in many ways the notes process is your last attempt to exert control over this material before other people come and kind of start doing things that you cannot control. And we know that that is terrifying. But just be aware that controlling the script is really a thin substitute for controlling the shooting of the script and the editing of the script and the performance of the script and the direction of the script. It’s not going to get you what you want.

So the real thing is how can you work together with the writer to build in those protections so that you do get what you want?

**John:** How do we set up the world of the movie where this note makes sense? That’s sort of the macro.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Do – present a unified set of notes. Try to give one set of notes to a writer rather than three conflicting sets of notes to a writer.

**Craig:** He said try.

**John:** Try.

**Craig:** Try.

**John:** And the converse is don’t pretend you’re giving one unified set of notes because that’s even more frustrating.

**Craig:** That’s the worst. Because sometimes you will get like the three groups of notes. They don’t overlap whatsoever so you are essentially paralyzed. By the way, paralyzed after reading three different documents explaining why essentially you’re stupid in different ways. So then you call up, say can you guys just agree on why I’m stupid. That would be fantastic. And then they send you an agreement of why you’re stupid and then they call you afterwards and say, “No, no, no, that’s not why you’re stupid. You’re stupid because of this, not because of that.”

And so it goes. Again, you’re trying to do your jobs. And we know that your jobs are difficult. We understand that there’s a lot going on back there. We don’t know what to do. We are – I mean, I will tell you this much: we’re naïve about how the situation works back here. And you want us naïve. You don’t want us thinking about that stuff. We just don’t get it. So if there are battles to be fought and battles to be won, fight them and win them, but do them before you get to us. Because it just stops us dead.

**John:** When you make a note stand by your note. If you truly have an opinion on material it shouldn’t change based on outside opinions or based on what worked last week at the box office. And so we’re going to believe your opinions if your opinions are consistent through time rather than they feel variable. Because if it feels like it’s a moving target it’s tempting for us to just kind of wait and see where the target is next.

**Craig:** It takes effort on our part to get past our pain to absorb the value of your reactions and your opinions, your honest thoughts and your honest opinions. Then we do. And we take them in and we become enmeshed with you and with your opinions. And then someone else comes along, like a director, or an actor, and they say, “Nah, what if we did this instead?” And you say, OK. And it’s all gone, like that, in an instant.

I’m not accusing any of you individually of doing this. But it has happened to me many, many times. And you start to think well then why am I ever listening to you about anything. If you’re not going to stand up for this, if you’re going to be so fastidious and insistent and specific with me, and then so flippant and casual once somebody else comes along, why bother?

**John:** Yeah. And I’ll say that sometimes it just naturally does happen that a director or some other powerful person has a note that directly conflicts with everything else you’ve been trying to do. In those moments acknowledge it to us privately. Otherwise it feels like we’re being gaslighted. That this was all – they never said that thing before. No, they did set it. This really is a change and this is why we’re making the change.

**Craig:** This is a really important point because I think sometimes it’s a natural instinct to think if I call up a writer and I say to them, “You know that thing that I was really on you about that I finally convinced you of that you believed in too that I just rolled over on completely?” If I call that writer up and admit that I’m going to look weak to them. I assure you it is the opposite. You only look weak to us when you pretend it didn’t happen. We know it happened. We know it happened. And we know why it happened. And if you call and say, “I fought as best I could but this is the deal, so I’m saying my powder for another bigger fight. And I apologize, but this is how it’s going.” We get it. And then we love you again.

**John:** Indeed. A do – do make it your goal to love the script. And that your notes are on a path towards loving it even more. The converse would be don’t attempt to win the who-can-complain-more game, which is a thing that happens. Sometimes it has happened in rooms where there’s multiple people all trying to fix a problem. Or sometimes it’s not a thing that I’ve written but it’s a project that I’m being brought in to rewrite and it just becomes this who can bitch most loudly about this thing that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit like those nature movies when the gazelle gets brought down and then all the hyenas come in and it’s just like fun at that point. It’s happened. The dam is broken. Let us tear this thing apart. Obviously if you’re doing it to a writer and she’s written something and everybody in the room is tearing it apart that’s incredibly traumatic. And it also begins to feel cruel.

The whole point is that we’re trying to improve something. If the point of the meeting is let’s all try and outdo each other to see who hates this more, why are you having the meeting? Just fire her and move on. You know?

But if you are going to have that meeting then you have to sort of get back to first principles. Why we loved you. Why we hired you. What we hope for you. And it may be that she can’t get there. But she’s definitely not going to get there if the tenor is a kind of one-upmanship of critique. Somebody among you must be the advocate in one way or the other.

**John:** Do ask writers how they like to receive notes. And so what is most helpful for the writer. And so you may have a process that’s your normal process and maybe that’s going to work great, but ask them first. And if there’s a way that you can actually communicate with them better try doing it their way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, some of us like conversations. My preferred mode is a conversation. I don’t actually read the printed out notes. Just totally admitting it. I don’t read them. It took me a while also to realize that they’re not real. That they are a representation of a lot of – like some sort of power-brokered consensus among a lot of people. And that eventually you get to these notes and you’re like well this is a weird one. And then someone goes, “Yeah, none of us really agreed with that, but X wanted it, so it goes in.”

And the reading of it just for my brain when I just flip through and it just becomes like mush and it doesn’t work. But if I have a conversation, if I can see your eyes, and I can feel your emotional response, because those things are so dry. They’re so dry. Then I feel like I’m getting somewhere and I can have that conversation and you’ll actually get way further with me just talking than handing me the document.

But other people do not get – like the face-to-face thing tears them apart and they run into the bathroom and throw up and they really do need that document to kind of ease them into the process.

**John:** And also because we’re writers we will dwell on a specific word choice far too much. And so “it feels gloomy,” I’m like gloomy? Gloomy? What does he mean by gloomy? Foggy London gloomy? And so I end up getting on the phone and I’m like what do you mean by gloomy? And he’s like, “Well it feels like serious.” And I’m like, oh, serious, OK, serious. That’s not gloomy. It’s like you went through your thesaurus and found gloomy because you didn’t want to say serious, but–

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re bad at wordsing.

**John:** Yeah. You are bad at wordsing. So, that’s why actually conversation is so much more helpful usually than a document.

Finally, do reread your last set of notes before you get the next set of notes before you give the next set of notes because we will and we’ll remember and it’s not a good sign. But at the same time don’t feel like you have to defend your old notes with the new ones. If they’re bad ideas don’t feel like you have to defend them. You can move forward. Just make sure you’re moving forward in a consistent direction.

**Craig:** You’re allowed to be inconsistent. You’re allowed to change your mind. Just don’t pretend that you’re not. That’s the most important thing. It’s the gaslighting factor that makes us feel like we’re going insane. Just say it. I changed my mind. I change my mind all the time. I change my mind while I’m writing. I’ll do an outline and then I’ll do the script and some things are going to change because I changed my mind. It’s totally fine.

But if I was like, “No, that’s what I said I was always going to do.” What? It’s insane.

And, you know, that will kind of get you out of a lot of problems, too. It’s also OK to admit that you made a mistake in notes. Very frequently what will happen is because we know the script better than you do just because we wrote it – that’s not a knock on you – it will say, “On page 86 she says this, but she couldn’t have known that because she never ran into so-and-so.” Yes, she did, on page 5. You just missed it.

“Oh, OK. You know what? My bad.” I’ve been in meetings where they’ve been like, “Yeah, but not really.” And I’m like we’re going to change the movie because you skimmed? Nah. That’s bad policy. Yeah.

**John:** Let’s imagine some perfect notes. So if we could ever see some perfect notes in the world they might describe a movie that you want to green light, not a draft you want to read. And that’s really helpful for you talking in general about notes, it’s like always talk about the movie, don’t talk about the script. The script is a way to get to a movie, but don’t get so focused on this 12-point Courier. It’s always talking about the vision you have for a movie that’s going to be in a theater.

**Craig:** Yeah. I refer to it as the document. And I know that it’s tempting in those meetings to talk about the script, the script, the script, but in every other meeting you have you will talk about the movie. In casting, in pre-production, in budget, in hiring directors, in lighting, locations, movie, movie, movie, movie, movie. You sit in the room with the writer, document. The writer will go along with that completely. The writer will follow you right down that document hole and perfect a document. That’s not what you want the writer to be doing.

What you want the writer to be doing is to helping you perfect a movie, the theory of a movie, the imagination of a movie.

**John:** Perfect notes celebrate what’s working and not just what works in the first paragraph of notes.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** Yes, congratulations–

**Craig:** On a terrific first draft.

**John:** There’s so much stuff we love here.

**Craig:** However, we have a few remaining concerns.

**John:** Yes. I have to tell you, you know, 20 years at this and very rarely do I get notes that midway through will say like, “This is a fantastic moment. We’re so happy with this scene.” And they may feel that. There’s moments that they’ll independently say it, but they don’t ever acknowledge it in a notes session about how much they love a moment. Telling us what you love about a thing is so helpful because it lets us steer the ship towards something. And lets us know that we’re not crazy. We actually were able to do something good here.

**Craig:** This may be the biggest piece of advice for you guys. Because it does two things at once. Obviously we are desperately craving love and attention that we didn’t get from our parents. And so you can help provide that. In a very real way in the psychological phenomenon of transference you become our parents in this process and we are desperate for your approval, no matter age we are. No matter what level we are.

So, dropping those things in the middle makes us feel good. But John is absolutely correct when he says us knowing what you love is just as useful to us from a writing towards point of view as us knowing what you aren’t responding to because now we get like, OK, there is an aesthetic that we are forming together as part of our relationship. We had an opinion, you had an opinion, we’re finding points of commonality. And from there we make more points of commonality. And the notes process somewhere along the line just became a Negative Nelly list. Which is fine. We’re not running away from Negative Nelly. But we need to know Positive Patty because if we don’t all you really are doing again is writing away from something.

**John:** Finally, perfect notes inspire the writer to explore and create. The times in my career when I’ve had just great notes I’m excited to get back to that next draft because I’m seeing all the new things I can do. I don’t have the answers to things, because the notes didn’t provide answers. They provided really good questions that made me want to explore new things. And they got me past some of my hang-ups. They got me to realize like oh you know what if I did cut all of that then I’d have this space to do all this other stuff. They got me excited to build new things. And that’s what notes should ultimately do is it’s a plan for what is possible to create going forward.

**Craig:** There’s a phrase in family therapy, “Do you want a relationship or do you want to be right?” And that’s kind of how it works with this. You want a relationship. And you can be right, but through the lens of the relationship. If your goal at the end of a notes meeting is to make sure the writer has heard every single thing that you want to change, shape, control, move around, or alter, you haven’t done it right.

Your goal at the end of that notes meeting should be that the writer is excited to get back to the computer to make this new thing better. And that takes effort. And it also means you’re going to have to kind of sublimate some of your needs and your desires, too. But just keep in mind in the emotional tally sheet we’re taking it much harder than you are. Even though you’re the guys that paid all the money. We’re still emotionally taking it harder than you.

**John:** So this is not meant to be just a lecture. It’s meant to be a discussion and a conversation.

**Craig:** I wanted a lecture.

**John:** Yeah, he wanted a lecture.

**Craig:** I’m all about the lecture.

**John:** So now we’d love to talk with you guys about sort of about your response, questions you have, push back on anything you want to push back on. Who would like to ask a question or raise a hand? A silent group.

**Craig:** We also may have just been perfect.

**John:** Yeah, it’s entirely possible.

**Craig:** Oh, no, not perfect.

**Male Voice:** What do you find the note that comes up again and again most frequently in a general sense that you guys either don’t like or you don’t know what to do with? And I know that you’ve given some examples here, but something more specific that, you know, the scene isn’t working, or yeah. Go head.

**Craig:** The, and I think we’ve said this on the show before, the note I hate the most, the note I respect the least, and the note I think should be stricken from everyone’s development vocabulary is “this character isn’t likeable enough.” Good. Those are the good ones. Every movie I’ve ever loved was full of unlikeable characters. We are here – are we allowed to say where we’re doing this? We’re recording this at Amblin, the home of Steven Spielberg. Go watch Jaws and find me the likeable character. It’s wonderful.

So, it just has to go. And I know that it comes from places. Marketing has wormed their way into things and so on and so forth. But just fight back. Fight back as hard as you can. And if you can’t, if you lose that battle, then preface that note by saying, “I am so sorry to say this and I don’t believe it myself, but I am forced to say this. This character isn’t ‘likeable’ enough.”

And it’s particularly bad when it’s about a female character. I find that at that point we’re starting to drift into the whole like trope, you know, she’s got to be, you know. That one.

**John:** My biggest one is probably “faster.” Basically like can we get to this moment faster and basically like can you not do all the stuff that you’re doing to set up the world. And somehow have everything already be set up so we can get to this moment faster. And I think so often because we are rereading scripts and rereading scripts again we know what’s going to happen, and so therefore we’re always anticipating the thing happening and we forget that for an audience watching it they have none of that information. And so they are coming into it at a speed and they have to get that information.

So, I would say that we are constantly in push to get to those moments faster and faster and faster in ways that are not helpful usually for the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The classic one is the first act is too long. And this ending is a bit abrupt. And I’m always like the first act should be longer and the third act should be shorter. I love first acts in movies. It’s when the people are meeting and I’m discovering them and this world is being built. And when I get to the climax I just want them to blow stuff up as fast as they can and get me back to the relationship because I know like, ugh, [croaking noise]. So yeah, rushing the first act in particular, I think try and fight that one as best you can. Because it does translate into movies where you end up reshooting because people don’t connect with the characters.

**John:** Funny how that works. Yeah. Moments you cut out. Other questions.

**Female Voice:** When someone gives you a note of like this is the bad pitch.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Female Voice:** Is that a more or less preferable note in general, and also do you prefer having more specific direction or the response and then you guys decide?

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Great questions. So I would say the bad pitch or the bad version, so the bad version is this, I can hear that and understand why it’s being said that way, which is basically don’t do this thing that I’m telling you to do because I know how incredibly cloying it is or how it is just clunky. But the effect that I’m hoping we could get to is this, so that I can take that really well. Some people will bristle more at it, but I’m actually fine with the bad version.

It’s kind of like giving an actor a line reading. You’ve got to be a little bit mindful of that. In terms of specifics, specifics help if they are giving – if it’s specific to what your response was. But if it’s trying to provide a solution then we’re going to be like then why do you need us in a certain way. So it’s trying to be really clear on sort of why you are feeling this way, you’re feeling it as you’re reading it, but not sort of like therefore this must happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s exactly right. It’s a little bit writer dependent. I mean, the only thing I’ll caution about the bad version is it’s the bad version for a reason. And so John’s right. You’re trying to get at kind of an effect, but just make sure that you’re policing yourself that the effect that you’re not going for is also just bad. In other words, sometimes it’s like, god, that would really solve this here and also make it boring and same-y. Right?

And for suggestions, I find that if someone says, “Here’s a solve, and take it or leave it if you want, but maybe in my proposed solve you find some interesting thing to take off and blah, blah, blah,” that’s great. If it sort of comes down as, “Here’s what I want you to do. Do this and this and this.” Then you begin to just lose your will to live.

**John:** You feel like a typist rather than a writer and that’s frustrating.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** More questions?

**Craig:** Yes, come on down.

**Male Voice:** Honestly, I kind of want to dive in more to the likeable character question, because I think I gave that note yesterday maybe.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**Male Voice:** And it’s not that I want a perfect Disney princess as the protagonist, but I usually will be feeling that when I’m not connecting to the character. I’m not engaged in their journey.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And so there is a mistake that happens in our brains when we are not connecting with a character and that character has qualities that are difficult or confrontational or testing we associate it with that. But those aren’t the problems. I love a great villain. I feel deeply connected to great villains. Like I watched The Little Mermaid again the other day and Ursula is the greatest.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** She’s not likeable. I mean, she’s a bad octopus lady.

**John:** You understand exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Correct. And so the issue is how do you find a way to make that person’s unlikableness relatable. Relatable is not likeable. Relatable means that I understand it. You know, a lot of Melissa McCarthy characters work this way. And we just talked about this with Mari Heller. She was on the show talking about How Can I Ever Forgive You. Is there an Ever in there? No. How Can I Forgive You? Can I–

**John:** Can You Ever Forgive Me?

**Craig:** Can You Ever Forgive Me? Will she ever forgive me? And the entire process was managing someone who is not likeable. And about finding moments where you can relate to the not likeableness because all of us go through our lives having moments. I mean, unless one of you is just a saint everybody has moments. And so you don’t want to push things into likeable. You want to push things towards relatable, meaning make me understand and sympathize with the conditions that make her or him unlikeable.

**John:** Yeah. Mari Heller was also talking about Diary of a Teenage Girl and how important it was for that character to have a voiceover at the very start, or not even a voiceover, where you’re picturing the world through her eyes so you can see how she perceives herself before she tells you that she’s having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend. So, you know, that is an unlikeable character thing to do is to have that relationship, but we loved her before we sort of knew that thing that was happening. And so it sounds like what you’re describing in this note that you said unlikeable is that you were having a hard time connecting with the character to see the movie through that character’s eyes and to really want to sign up for the journey with that character.

And so Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day is very unlikeable.

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** But also funny.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because he’s funny you’re willing to go on this journey with him and sort of see him grow and change. So, phrasing things as not being able to click into them is I think going to be much more helpful to than saying unlikeable because then a writer is going to be like, “Well, can I just spackle something on them? Can I just spray a little likeability perfume on them so that they’ll pass the test?”

**Craig:** Or sand off the edges. Unsharpen the pencil.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And then everything just gets sort of generic and soft. And we just lost interest.

**John:** Or you give them a puppy to make them likeable.

**Craig:** Give them a puppy.

**John:** Give them a puppy. Other questions or things you want to push on?

**Craig:** You can tell us we’re wrong. We’re OK with that. You can give us notes.

Yeah, so the question is what do you do when you’re developing a comedy and people, meaning the producers, the executives, don’t like the jokes versus the story. So that comes down to sense of humor. And there is no note. The note is we don’t think you’re funny. The note is you’re fired, I’m pretty sure.

Now, there is obviously a lot that goes into a comedy, but I’ve always felt from the work that I’ve done that if the plot and characters aren’t connected inextricably with the sense of humor and the comedy and the jokes and the set pieces then just something is wrong. I don’t know if you can properly write a comedy using somebody over here dumping character and plot sauce on it and someone over here doing the jokes.

I mean, I’m sure you guys have been in a lot of those roundtables where we do like the punch-up. And everyone just laughs for six hours and maybe get one usable joke out of there because none of it is connected to anything. It’s just floating on top. Like that goop on top of soup. So, I think in that case the note is you’re fired. I just feel so bad about saying that, but I mean why torment somebody. They’re not going to become funny the way you want them to be. I don’t think that’s how it works.

**John:** No. The other thing to remember about comedy is that if you’re reading the same script ten times, 15 times, it’s going to stop being funny. And nothing changed about the jokes, it’s just that it’s not fresh to you anymore. And comedy is about surprise and unexpected twists and characters doing things you couldn’t expect. And once you expect them it’s not funny anymore.

I’ve been to so many test screenings where suddenly the audience is laughing, they’re like, oh that’s right that was a joke. I completely didn’t remember that that was a funny thing, but that’s a joke apparently. And that absolutely happens.

One of the most edifying experiences for me was I did the Broadway version of Big Fish and I’d have to swap out jokes from one run to the next run to the next run. And you’d just see like what gets a laugh and what doesn’t get a laugh. And you just don’t know until you try it. And that’s the hardest thing about comedy. You won’t know if that script just in 12-point Courier is funny until you get it on its feet and sort of see it with people. That’s why if you can get a reading together that’ll help.

**Craig:** I will say for comedy features that generally speaking the people that write them are technicians. And so they’re way more concerned about getting laughs than you guys are. Way more concerned. I mean, every first screening of a comedy I’ve ever done I’ve gone with a Xanax in my pocket, right here, and I’ve had to take it a couple of times because when you’re not getting laughs it’s the worst feeling in the world. So, partly I would say if they have a track record trust the track record. If they’ve made people laugh in a dark room before, they’re going to make people laugh again.

You may not necessarily see the connection from the page to the room but they’re working it and they know what they’re doing in theory. So, some of it is an act of faith. Which is scary.

**John:** So the question is what are the best practices for when a writer is brought on to rewrite a different project. How can you set them up for success as an executive? So what I always tell writers who are being brought on to a project is if at all possible talk to the previous writer. And that way you can sort of know where the bodies are buried. What things were tried that didn’t work? It’s a cleaner handoff. It won’t always be possible. Sometimes it’s not a happy situation and it’s just not going to be realistic.

But for you as an executive who is like bringing in a new writer to the project I think having a discussion about some of the things that have happened before, but most importantly is where you see this headed and sort of what the overall goal is and what the intention is. Again, talking about what the movie is going to be rather than what the script is right now. And the times that I’ve come on to rewrite projects where it’s gone well I could take a look at the script and say like I can see what the intentions are here. I can also see where there was a bunch of just crud that built up over time. A lot of my job is just to scrape away the crud and get you back to what the clean movie of it is and make it all read better so you can see like, oh wait, we had a really good movie here and I couldn’t see it anymore because so much stuff had been built on top of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. When a movie works it all seems just intentional, like it just fell out of a camera in one big chunk. And there it is and it’s done. And sometimes when you arrive as a rewriter what you’re looking at is a script that’s more like, you know, the way the city looks in Blade Runner. It’s like a city built on top of a city with a thing that’s sticking out this way. And it doesn’t look intentional at all. Nor will it ever look intentional. And it has to be kind of torn down.

One thing that helps me when I come in is an understanding that the people involved are aware that they’ve gone wrong. I mean, unless it’s one draft – unless it’s one and done, and even in that case there has to be some shared culpability for kind of it just didn’t work. We’ve made mistakes. We as a group have made mistakes. There is no shame in that. And being able to say, “You know what? We think our mistake is this, but what do you think our mistake is? And we definitely shouldn’t have done this, and what do you think we should do?” That’s all fine and good.

But the dangerous thing is when you come in, the jobs that I will routinely turn down are ones where people say, “It’s just two weeks. We just need two weeks.” And I go you do not. You need all of this – there’s no way to – “Oh, we just have to fix the first act. That’s it.” What? Oh, we’re going to change the first act and everything – all we have to do with this house is fix the foundation. That’s all we’ve got to do. That’s all we’ve got to do. The rest of it will stay just fine. We’re just going to undermine everything and it will magically float and then we’ll put…

No. And so owning it a little bit I think and just being honest about the work that’s going to be required and thinking about your rewriter as a craftsperson. You know, like if a plumber says to me, “Look, I could do this, but you don’t want me to do this,” then I go, you’re right, I don’t. Don’t do the thing that you don’t think I should do. Let us be plumbers. If we say, “You need to do this the right way,” and then you go, “OK, do it the right way.”

**John:** Sir?

**Craig:** OK, so the question is how do you breakup with someone? It’s coming to an end. You can’t continue working with the writer. You would love to. That was your intention. But it has to end. What’s the sort of best way to end it and still stay in a relationship and maybe something in the future will happen?

**John:** The best example I can give you is Dick Zanuck. So Dick Zanuck produced a zillion things but the first time I met him was on Big Fish. And I remember he called me on Dark Shadows. And he called to say, “John, I’m so sorry to tell you but Tim and Johnny decided to bring on a different writer to do this next pass. These are the things that they said they want me to do. I talked with them about it, but I wanted to make sure you heard it from me before you heard it from anybody else.”

And he was so awesome and such a gentleman. I was upset and he let me be upset and angry, but I wasn’t upset and angry with him. I was upset and angry with the situation and sort of the stuff that was going on. But I would have willingly worked on another movie with him tomorrow because he was so straightforward with me about what was going on.

What kills you is when you’re just ghosted. Or when you find out from somebody else. When Craig texts me and says like, “I can’t believe they hired this writer.” I’m like, oh, on that thing that I thought I was still on. That’s–

**Craig:** I didn’t know that that was happening. I swear to god. I thought you knew.

**John:** Yeah, I know. And I didn’t know. And like that is what kills you when you find out, you’re like I assumed this was my movie and it’s no longer my movie. That is what sort of really kills you. And so just as soon as you can and being really clear that you value them and the work that they’ve done. And that you would like to work with them again. I think that’s the message you want to–

**Craig:** The spirit in which you ask the question is your answer. You feel something for this person. You have a natural empathy for them. Let them know. It’s OK. I mean, this is business. Things happen. Things are going to happen to us. Things are going to happen to you guys. But let them how you feel. And let them know that you tried your best and they tried their best and if it’s your decision let them know why and how it’s sad for you, too, but it’s what needs to happen.

It is always I think about intention. And if we feel seen and heard and treated like a human being. Of course, there’s no way to make us not feel sad if we want to stay, but at the very least we know that the relationship that we had with you it was legitimate. Because you’re feeling something, too. That’s why I would come back because I know, OK, if you’re all puppy dogs and sunshine and then one day it’s like ghosted, bye, or oh, sorry yeah, we’re moving on, OK, well why would I ever go back to you? The puppies are not real. That sunshine is a lie.

So, just, yeah, and that requires you guys to be vulnerable. And I’m sure somewhere there is a kind of like executive and producer school where they’re telling you don’t be vulnerable and don’t show any of this stuff and don’t get embedded with these people. And stay like tough. And all I can tell you is it’s not going to work well with us. You won’t get better work out of us that way.

It requires you to feel. I mean, my favorite development person in any capacity is Lindsay Doran. And Lindsay Doran feels more for my work than I do. The hardest arguments I’ve had with Lindsay are about things that I wanted to cut. I’ve literally had a discussion with her where she read it and she said, “Well, you cut that one line and now I just don’t care about the characters anymore.” I’m like that’s not possible! It was a line.

But she is so emotionally invested and, you know, we have a movie together that’s set up here and we had a director on it that we loved and then the studio just wanted to go a different way. And we had to say goodbye to somebody. And we both felt a lot. And we shared that with that person. And I would like to think that that mattered. It may have not made things better at that moment, but it means that we showed what is true which is that our relationship with this person was real.

So, do that. And you will be rewarded with repeat business.

**John:** Cool. Last question.

**Craig:** Oh, she’s reading a question. Oh, this is a great question. Boy did you just stand in front of a target and ask us to wheel a cannon in front of you. So the question is what should be achieved in a producer’s pass. And the answer John is?

**John:** Ah! I mean, we should just stop on the term “producer’s pass.” Producer’s pass does not exist. You won’t find it in any contract. You won’t find it written down anywhere. Here’s the reality from a writer’s perspective is that we think we’re done. We hand it into producers. I think I’m done. And they’re like, great, there’s just a little fix up. And it’s like, OK. And so we do this little bit and it’s like, oh a little bit more, a little bit more. And then we find out they actually did turn it into the studio and we’re actually getting the studio development executive’s notes back. And so it’s a whole extra pass before we’ve turned it in.

I get this at my level, but when I talk to newer screenwriters it’s endless drafts for them to actually get a thing in. And producer’s passes are a useful way of pretending that it’s not a real thing but it is a real thing. So here’s what I’ll say is that if a writer is choosing to give it to this producer for a weekend or whatever for sort of last looks/clean some stuff up, that’s fantastic. But it can’t be about profound changes to the script. It can’t be a week’s worth of work or two weeks’ worth of work. That’s just crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is no producer’s pass. And producers have gotten away with murder. They really have. Congrats. Good job.

**John:** I will say some sympathy for producers. I think they have a really tough job right now too because they are scrambling to get movies made in a tough environment. They have tremendous expectations on them. Writers are often dealing with one-step deals which is a problem.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** I don’t want to slam producers for trying to get too much free labor out of us, even though I sort of am slamming them for getting too much free labor.

**Craig:** Well, but it’s logical. I mean, look, the economics of producing are such that you don’t really get paid unless the movie gets made. Development isn’t a job. Getting movies made is a job if you’re a producer. That’s where all the money is. And everybody deserves to make a living. And then on top of that the studios have taken away two-step deals. They give you one step. You now have one shot with this person that you argued for to make it work. And if you don’t maybe this whole thing dies. So of course you want a thousand drafts for that one draft.

The problem is that’s not fair to the writers. What we should be saying to our partners at the studios is make two-step deals. If you want a producer’s pass how about we all get the pass together? It’s called the second draft. There used to be a thing called the second draft. It’s less important honestly for me or for John than it is for new writers. I really strongly urge you guys if you know a writer is getting paid less than twice scale, which is lot of writers, give them two steps.

It removes this panic. And then you’re able to get the draft. If you want to do your three days of twinklies, do your three days of twinklies. And then turn it in and then everybody can talk about it. And everybody can have the conversation. And then they write a second draft.

But if that’s not there what ends up happening is people do get abused. So, that’s my big thing there. For me, when it comes time to – and look, we’re going to have this experience. You and I are about to have this experience. I’m going to hand over a script to Samantha. You know, if you need a couple days here or there, no problem. A couple days, here or there.

**John:** But let’s say you need more than a couple days. Let’s say you have a writer who is making scale or twice scale, but not a lot of money. And you do need more than just a couple days. It’s gone into the studio and they’re like, there’s just this little thing before it gets up to our top boss before we can actually get it – we just need a little bit more work.

There’s already a provision in there for a little bit more work. Everyone has a weekly. And there’s a scale weekly which is not expensive. Pay that writer for the one week or the two weeks of work it takes to get that next thing in between their real steps.

**Craig:** Pay them an optional polish if you want.

**John:** Move stuff out of order, but it’s when you hold somebody on with the promise like maybe they’ll get to that second draft that’s where it becomes exploitive.

**Craig:** And the say like, “Look, if you don’t do this then you’re going to get fired and the movie is not going to get made.” And it just becomes this kind of thing of, well, if what you’re telling me is I’m going to get fired unless I work for free, yeah, I’m fired. That’s what fired is.

**John:** You’re taking a person who is making scale and making them the villain in the situation, which isn’t good. Them not doing that free thing is–

**Craig:** We just got all Che Guevara on them. I love it. That’s great.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** But it’s true. It really is true. And I will also say that for – if you can – if you’re working with a writer and they agree early on, before deals are made or anything, if they agree early on to write a treatment, some writers don’t write them. I don’t think you’re a big treatment guy. You know I’m a huge treatment – I love a treatment. I’ll write a 60-page treatment. I’ll write the hell out of that thing. You’ll know what the movie is before I ever write in Fade In or Final Draft.

If that happens, then your producer’s pass is baked in because you’ve had a chance to discuss and go through that. And I like to do that specifically so that when I’m done with the draft I’m done. There it is. Now you know what the weekend is going to be like. But you’re going to like it. It’s good. It’s good.

**John:** Thank you guys very much.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** And thank you for putting this together.

**Craig:** Thank you guys so much. Thank you guys.

**John:** And that’s our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks to Ben Simpson and Samantha Nisenboim for putting this session together and for the folks at Amblin for hosting us.

Our outro this week is by Mackey Landry. 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 Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

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Links:

* Episode 99, [Psychotheraphy for Screenwriters](https://johnaugust.com/2013/psychotherapy-for-screenwriters)
* Episode 394, [Broken but Sympathetic](https://johnaugust.com/2019/broken-but-sympathetic) with Mari Heller
* Now accepting recommendations for updating the [Listener’s Guide](johnaugust.com/guide)
* Submit to the Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch)
* Watch Chernobyl May 6th and listen to [The Chernobyl Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chernobyl-podcast/id1459712981) with Craig and Peter Sagal
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Mackey Landry ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Episode 729 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week, Craig and I are off on different adventures, so producer Drew Marquardt has assembled a compendium episode. Drew, what do you have for us?

Drew Marquardt: We’re doing endings.

John: Endings? But we’ve done endings before.

Drew: We have done endings before. I didn’t realize we’d done endings before, but Megana did a wonderful Episode 524, which is our first endings compendium. I am going to use a few different episodes, so hopefully you can listen to them both.

John: Endings compendium part two?

Drew: Part two-ish. There’s a few bits from the previous episode. I figured we’d start with Episode 44, which is Endings for Beginners. That’s just a good overview of how endings work.

John: Episode 44, wow, reaching way back there.

Drew: Way back. Then we’ll go to 366 on denouements, and how that works, and the last moment of your film. Then we’re going to go to Episode 648, which is Farewell Scenes. It’s just you and Aline, but it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve done.

John: Great.

Drew: I love it. Then we’ll end on Episode 392, which is about how and why endings change and how to communicate it at different stages of production from your first idea all the way through to the end.

John: This all sounds great. I remember going through the endings chapter of the Scriptnotes book, and these were the episodes we were pulling from to get that material that’s in there. It’s nice to hear them again as conversations.

Drew: That’s my secret. That’s how I’m pulling these topics.
[laughter]

John: You’re like, “What was in the book? Oh, yes, that’s it.”

Drew: Just checking it out. That’s what we’ll do it. We’ll listen to these four segments. You’ll hear the loops between them. Then at the end, in our bonus segment for premium members, we will continue the discussion we had with Drew Goddard recently talking about casting minor characters in your story and particularly writing character sides because a thing that often happens is you have a character who may not have very many lines in the show or in the movie, but you need more material for them to actually audition with.

You write special scenes that are longer than what will actually be in the movie because if it’s just three lines, you’re not going to really be able to get a sense of that character from those three lines.

John: Love it. Great.

Drew: We’ll do that. Join us after these four segments. We’ll do some closing business and then our bonus segment.

John: Thanks, Drew.

Drew: Thanks, John.

[Episode 44]

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings and let this be more of a craft episode because a lot of times, as you start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first 10 pages about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

I thought we’d spend some time today talking about endings and the characteristics of good endings and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is, both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig Mazin: Yes. I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. For me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends because, essentially, the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last 10. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending, everything. I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

John: I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader. It’s the same with a book, but we’re talking about screenplays. You’re saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you a story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. It will surprise you. It will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.” The ending is where you won or you lost. It’s the punchline.

It’s the resolution. It’s the triumph. So often, it’s the last thing we actually really focus on. So many writers, I think, spend all their time working on those first 10 pages, the first 30 pages, that start powering through the script. Those last 5, 10 pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. Those last 10 pages are just banged out, and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started. Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully, you’re enjoying how it starts.

Hopefully, you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended. My impression of The Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and what happens there. As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yes, I like what you say about contract. That’s exactly right because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling, depending on your perspective, towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always talk about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying, it had to go like this. That ultimately, the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment.

I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. There’s a decision, and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. That is connected. It always seems to me it is connected through all the way back to the beginning in a very different way from what is there in the beginning. That’s the point is that there’s an expression of faith in something that has changed, but there is a decision.

There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie, they are not the same person they were in the beginning.

John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you’ve promised the audience that they’re going to get to. If you’ve set up a location that they’re going to get to, is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? You could have ended the movie when she got to Oz or when she got to the Emerald City because she was running the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated.

If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that on the movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. There’s also her need. Her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that she’s with to find some independence. I don’t know. What’s the need?

Craig: That’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith in a choice and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie, she leaves home. She runs away. At the end of the movie, she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. Essentially, you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me, kid, if you want to go back home, you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away.

You made a stand. You thought you were grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.” That’s what The Wizard of Oz is. The whole thing is a runaway story. Yet, the ending, it’s funny. A lot of people have always said, “The ending, it’s deus ex machina. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click her heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.” The point is then, okay, fine. Maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point. The ending is defined by faith and decision.

I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious. The Ghostbusters have decided, “We’re going to cross the streams. We’re going to have faith that we’re going to do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process, but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.”

I see it all the time. I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yes. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. Sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often, it’s expressed as what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. By the end of the movie, they’re able to do something that they weren’t able to do at the start of the movie, either literally or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. It’s a great way of thinking about, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. We look around, and we think, “This character could go anywhere and do anything.” Stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie because, frankly, there’s not much more reason to watch movies.

John: We are talking about movies, not TV shows. A movie is really a 2-hour or 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, on one section of a cinematic world. You’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. What are the first things we’re seeing so we can meet those characters? You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end, what’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world, and why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

You will change your ending just as you change your beginning, but you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing, frankly, if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. To me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes, they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10, you can write your whole movie because you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment. It makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process, while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it.

I’m not writing those last pages in a panic and with coffee and momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision. Then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness. If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: I have the OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all, but I won’t start writing until I know the ending. What I mean by “ending,” I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end, why that difference is interesting, what decision he’s going to make. Then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind? When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be or which city should the aliens attack.

If you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life. Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. It’s funny because I really started thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. I was watching Up, and they got to that point where Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. He brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back.

I liked that, but I thought that’s not quite that difficult of a test. Then, of course, see, Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say, “I have moved on,” is to let that house go. They design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid. That’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as man on airship with boy scout, flying talking dogs, and a house tied to him. No problem. You can make it work.

John: An example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two storylines. The implied contract with the audience is, you know the father’s going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it, like the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father’s going to die. The question of the movie is, will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended? Quite early on, I had to figure out what is it that the son can–

The son is really the protagonist in the present day. What is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? The son has to tell the story of the father’s death. Knowing that that’s going to be an incredibly difficult, emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel all that, knowing that was the moment I was leading up to, what is it that lets the son get to that point? You’re really working backwards to, “What are the steps that can get me to that point?”

It’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories against Jenny Hill that fills in this missing chapter and why that chapter is missing. It’s backtracked into, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement? What are the conversations along the way? Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was, was what let me track the present-day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Exactly. John, there has to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identity Thief comes out because I can talk specifically about how that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was that I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and that it was an interesting climax of decision. The decision meant something, and it was interesting, and I liked that. To me, it’s all about the ending like that. Looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully, people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of, I met John Williams. He was at USC. The scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. When they were rededicating it, John Williams was there along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and they were talking about the movies they worked on together. John Williams made this really great point. It was that the music of a movie is the thing that you take home with you. It’s like the goodie bag. It’s like the one thing you, as an audience member, get to recycle and play in your head is that last theme.

As I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. It’s like, what is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? That’s your ending. We’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to you.

Craig: Sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yes. In fact, when people are testing movies that have absurdly happy endings, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost have to discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98, and you’ll think, “It’s not really a 98.” At this point, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up. If you ask these people tomorrow or the next day, would they pay to go see it? You might get a different answer. Similarly, when you end on a bummer or on a flat note, it’s just like the air goes out of the theater. People will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when, in fact, they just didn’t like the ending.

John: Yes. I want to make sure that people are listening. We’re not arguing for happy endings. We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point. It’s one that tracks with the characters along the way. It doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end. That’s absolutely fine. As long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yes. Maybe just a little bit of hope. I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. This man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person, when inside, in fact, he was awful. In a moment of explosion at the end, truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We sickly root for it. Then he goes back home. It basically says he just died alone.

Yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling and we just dealt with all that, the final images of him alone on his farm putting some flowers down, I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll, is somebody that he truly loved and was good to. There is a bit of hope there.

[Episode 366]

Craig: It seemed to me that one of the things we hadn’t talked about over the course of our many episodes is the end. Not the end the way people normally talk about the end when we say, “How’s the movie end?”

Usually, people are talking about the climax. There’s all sorts of stuff to be said about the dramatic climax of a film and how it functions and why it is the way it is. The real end of the movie comes after. The real end is the denouement, as the French call it. This is the moment after the climax. When things have settled down. There’s actually a ton of interesting things going on in there. It is the very last thing people see. It’s an important thing. I’ll tell you who understands the value of a good denouement. The people that test films.

They’ll tell you if you have a comedy and you have one last terrific joke there, it’ll send your scores up through the roof. If you have one last little bit of something between two characters that feels meaningful, it’ll send your scores through the roof. The last thing we get is, in a weird way, the most important. I wanted to talk through the denouement, why it is there, and what it’s supposed to be doing.

John: Great. Dénouement is a French word. Dénouer is to untie, to unknot something. It’s interesting that it’s to unknot something because when you think about it, they’re tying everything up. You also think about it like undoing all the tangles that your story has created. It’s like straightening things out again so that you can leave the theater feeling the way we want you to feel. As we’re matching the prototypical 120-page screenplay, these are the very last few pages, correct, Craig?

Craig: Yes, absolutely. This is after the dust has settled. There’s going to be inevitably something. We’ll talk through it. For instance, sometimes it’s one single shot. Typically, it’s its own scene, but there’s something to let you know this is the denouement. In that sense, I guess the first thing we should do is draw a line between climax and denouement to say, okay, what is the difference here? The climax, I think, we all get the general gist there. It’s action, choices, decision, conflict, sacrifice. All of it is designed to achieve some sort of plot impact.

In the climax, you save the victim, or you defeat the villain, you stop the bomb, you win the money, whatever it is that the plot is doing, that’s what happens there. The climax dramatically serves as a test of the protagonist. The test is, have you or have you not become version 2.0 of yourself? You started at version 1.0. We know some sort of change needs to happen to make you better, fix you, heal you, unknot you. Have you gotten there yet? This is your test. At the end of the climax, we have evidence that the character has, in fact, transformed into character 2.0.

The denouement, which occurs after this, to me, is about proof that this is going to last. That this isn’t just a momentary thing, but rather, life has begun again, and this is the new person, this is the new reality.

John: Absolutely. In setting up your film, you establish a question for this principal character. Will they be able to accomplish this thing? Will they be able to become the person who can meet this final challenge? In that climax, they have met that final challenge, they have succeeded in that final challenge, generally, and we’ve come out of this. Was it just a one-time fluke thing? Are they always going to be this way? Have they transformed into something that is a lasting transformation? That is what you’re trying to do in these last scene or scenes, is to show that this is a thing that is really resolved for them.

Craig: That is why so many denouements will begin with “six months later,” “one year later,” because you want to know that, okay, if the denouement here is, “Right, I used to crash weddings like a cad, but now I’m crashing my own friend’s wedding because I need to let this woman know that I really do love her and I’ve changed.” She says, “Okay,” we need, six months later, one year later, to know, yes, they did change, they’re still together, they’re now crashing weddings together as a couple, so they have this new reality, but it is lasting, and their love is real.

We need it, or else we’re left wondering, “Oh, all right. Did they make it or not?” Now, that said, sometimes your denouement can happen in an instant, and then the credits roll, and it’s enough because of the nature of the instant, particularly if it’s something that is a very stark, very profound reward that has been withheld for most of the movie. Karate Kid maybe has the shortest denouement in history. Climax, Daniel wins the karate fight. Denouement, Mr. Miyagi smiles at him. That’s it. That smile is a smile that he has not earned until that moment, and when he gets that smile, you know that he’s good. This is good.

John: As we’re talking, I’m thinking back through some of my movies. In Go, the denouement is they’ve gotten back to the car at the end, and the main and final question is, “So what are we doing for New Year’s?” It’s establishing that they’ve been through all this drama, but they’re back on a normal track to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing before. That was the journey of the movie has gotten them back to the place where they can take the same journey the next week, which is the point of the movie.

In Big Fish, certainly, the climax is getting Edward to the river. There’s a moment post-climax where they’re at the funeral, and they see all the real versions of folks. The actual denouement, as we’re describing right now, is sort of that six months later, probably actually six years later, where the son who’s now born and saying, “Oh, did all of that really happen?” The father says, “Yep, every word.” Essentially, you see the son buying into the father’s stories in the sense that there’s a legacy that will live on.

They’re very short scenes. They’re probably not the scenes you remember most in the movie, but they are important for sending you out of there thinking like, “The characters are on trajectory I want them to be on.”

Craig: Yes. The climax of Identity Thief is that Melissa McCarthy’s character gives herself up so that Jason Bateman’s character can be free of her and the identity theft and live with his life, which is a huge deal. That’s something she does. That’s a self-sacrifice she does because of what he’s helped her to see, and that’s what he’s now learned from her. The denouement, which is important, is to see, okay, it’s a year later, and she’s in prison, which was really important to say, “Look, it’s real. She went to prison.” What’s happening? Jason and Amanda, who plays his wife, they’ve had their baby, and everything’s okay.

He’s got a great new job. He’s doing fine. She’s been working hard in prison and studying so that she can get out and come work for him. He then has something for her, which is he’s found her real name because she doesn’t know who she is. He found her birth certificate and found her real name. You get a kind of understanding that this relationship did not just stop right there. It could have. She was a criminal, but it didn’t, and that they’re going to go on and on. Then she punches a guard in the throat because the other thing about the denouement is typically it is a full circling of your movie.

It is in the denouement that you have your best chance for any kind of fun or touching full-circle moment. In Identity Thief, you have both. She, at one point, says she doesn’t know her real name. Here we find out her real name, which is Dawn Budgie, which is the worst name ever. The way she met him originally was by punching him in the throat. Here she’s going to go ahead and punch a guard in the throat because you change, but you don’t change completely because that feels gloppy. Both of those things are full-circle moments.

In the denouement, if you can find those, or if you’re wondering what to do in your denouement, start thinking about that and looking for that little callback full-circle moment. It is incredibly satisfying in that setting.

John: Yes. A crucial point I think you’re making here is that the denouement is not about plot. It’s about story and theme, but it’s not about the A plot of your movie. Your A plot is probably all done. It’s paying off things you’ve set up between your characters. It’s really paying off relationships generally, is how you are wrapping things up. It’s showing what has changed in the relationships between these characters and giving us a sense of what those relationships are going to be like going forward.

Craig: Oh, and that’s a great point, too. You’re absolutely right that it is showing what has changed, and therefore, it’s also showing what hasn’t changed, which can sometimes be just as important. For instance, if your theme is all you need is love, then it is important to show in the denouement that, okay, our protagonist has found love. She now has fulfilled that part of her life, but the other things that maybe she had been chasing aren’t there. If your problem is, okay, my character is Vanessa, and Vanessa thinks that it’s more important to be successful than to be loved, which is an incredibly trite movie.

I apologize to Vanessa. At the end, if she’s found love, I think maybe that’s good. I don’t need also then success because then I start to wonder, “Okay, what was the lesson here?” Sometimes you just want to show nothing has changed except one thing. At the end of Shrek, he still lives in a swamp, and he is still an ogre, but he’s not alone. One thing changes, and the denouement is very good for almost using the scientific method to change one variable and leave the others constant.

John: Absolutely. You’re saying that if you did try to change a bunch of variables, if the character ended up in a completely different place and a whole new world than how they started, then we would still have questions about what is their life going to be like. We just don’t understand how they fit into all this thing. By changing the one thing, we can carry our knowledge of the rest of their life, and see that, and just make that one change going forward.

Craig: Yes, exactly. It’s a chance for you to not have to worry about propelling anything forward, but rather letting people understand something is permanent, and permanent in a lovely way. Very often, the denouement will dot, dot, dot off the way that a lot of songs just fade out. Some songs have a big, dum-dum, da-dum, and that’s your end. You can do that. Some of them just fade out, which is also lovely. The end of Casablanca is a brilliant little fade-out. He says goodbye to Elsa. She’s off on the plane. The plot of the Nazis is over.

Everything’s finished. Then two men just walk off and say, “You know what? I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Therein is a dot, dot, dot. They just walk off into the fog. A plane takes off. You understand more adventures are ahead, but for now, everything’s okay.

John: Yes, it’s nice when you get a sense that there will be further stories we don’t necessarily need to see the sequel, but you get a sense of where they’re generally headed and that you don’t need to be worrying about them an hour later from now. Here’s the counterexample. Imagine you’re watching this film, and you’re watching Casablanca, and for some reason, the last 10 minutes get cut off, like the film breaks. That is incredibly jarring because you’ve not been safely placed back down.

There’s a social contract that happens when a person starts watching a movie. It’s like the writer and the filmmakers say, “If you give me about two hours of your time, I will make it worth your while. You trust me, and I will take you to a place, and I’ll deposit you back safely where you started.” If you’re not putting people back safely where they started, they’re not going to have a good reception, a good reaction. That’s what you find when you do audience testing is so often, what’s not working about the movie is that they didn’t feel like they got to the place where they expected to be delivered.

Craig: I suspect that people reasonably invest an enormous amount of time, energy, and thought into building their climaxes, and then the denouement becomes an afterthought. For me, it is the actual ending. That’s actually the ending I back up from, is the denouement.

John: All right, so let’s wrap up this conversation of denouement because denouements are about wrapping things up. The key takeaways we want people to get from a denouement is that it is a resolution of not plot, but of theme, of relationships, of the promise you’ve made to the audience about these principal characters and what is going to happen going forward. What else do we want people to know?

Craig: That is essentially what they’re going to do. You’re going to show them that last bit, whether you’ve done a good job or a poor job. When they see the last bit of the movie, they will, in their minds, add on the following words, “And thus, it shall always be.” If you have done it well, “and thus it shall always be” will be really comforting and wonderful for them. By the way, sometimes it’s not comforting. Sometimes it’s sad. Honestly, the denouement of Chernobyl is quite sad and bittersweet. No shock there. Fiddler on the Roof has one of the best denouements of all time.

The Fiddler on the Roof opens with a guy playing this, [vocalizes song], and it’s very jaunty, and he’s on a roof, and it’s silly. Tevye is talking to the audience and saying, “This is like our life is hard and it’s tricky. We’re like a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a simple little tune without breaking your neck.” At the end of the show, they have been driven from their town of Anatevka by pogroms, and they are trudging off to a new home, and the fiddler is the last person to go. He plays that same little tune, but it’s so sad this time. The denouement is to say, “And thus it shall always be.”

Meaning, we know based on the timeframe that what follows the people who leave Anatevka, and whenever that takes place, let’s just call it 1910, is going to be worse. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, and thus it shall always be. It doesn’t always have to be, “And happily ever after.” Sometimes it can be, “And sadly ever after.” The point is, it will be thus, and it shall thus always be. If you think about it that way, the denouement becomes incredibly important because that’s where you’re sealing the fate of every single character in your film.

John: Yes. Everyone’s going to be frozen in that little capsule that you’ve created there, and that can be placed up on the shelf. That is the resolution for this world that you’ve built to contain this story. That’s why it’s so crucial that it feel rewarding. Whether it’s a happy ending or a sad ending, that it feels like an ending.

Craig: Yes.

[Episode 648]

John: Today, I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye, presumably for the last time. We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also what are the characteristics of a farewell scene? This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. Big Fish, of course, it’s obviously a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there, too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart.

Maybe buddies who’ve come to, they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there. I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?

Aline Brosh McKenna: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada, where they see each other on the street, and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. Then Meryl says, “Go.” I say, “Meryl,” because in the way it was scripted, actually in the scene description, it said she looks at the driver, “Go,” was in the scene description. They had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver.

It snaps you back into her actual MO. It’s funny because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing and that has a finality. You need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca, and then they ran into each other in a bar two days later. It needs to feel– and the same thing with rom-coms, if it’s end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back. You don’t want to feel like cut to four days later, where it’s like, “This is insane.”
You leave your pants on the floor. What is this? How do you make any ending feel like it’s stuck?

John: Yes. That’s why I think, because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing, regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time. Let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s going to be the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end.

The location that they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.

Aline: Oh, that’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Oh, the irony.”

John: Yes. It could be the location rhymes that we’re back in the place we were before. The dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes the thing that happened before. Looking through these examples, we’re going to see that there’s a bunch of non-verbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these, and that’s honestly the characteristics of these, and that’s why sometimes we’re not going to be playing the audio for this because there’s a lot of people not talking.

Aline: I hope you’re going to put these up on the website because this is fantastic. This is fantastic. This is really good. Now, I did send you that funny– there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big that he goes back to class, and there’s a girl named Susan in his class. They wink of like, “This is going to be Elizabeth Perkins,” but they drop that, and so they’re never going to see each other again.

I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. Then you have E.T. is probably one of the– and as we had discussed, I think Past Lives is people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of they’ve been separated for so long, and this is another separation, possibly permanent.

John: I think what’s important about Past Lives is a good example of this is that you’re closing, hopefully, two characters’ arcs. It’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey, too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that. If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate, but I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.

Aline: Can I ask you a question?

John: Please.

Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?

John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating, and also as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that there was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all, and then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did? That sounds weird.” It felt like it was more of a–

Aline: Of a cheek moment.

John: Yes, cheek moment rather than on-the-lips moment, and I was like, “Ugh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.

Aline: Yes, lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple of friends who were lip kissers, and I feel like, which was always like when you start coming towards you and time slows down, and you’re like– because my lip-kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to, that’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you, and you’re like, “Uh, slow motion, turn the page.” I think post-COVID.

John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.

Aline: Can you imagine if I lip-kissed John on the way out here? Drew would be so uncomfortable, or if I lip-kissed Drew on the way out here, it would be so weird.

John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.

Aline: So weird. I mean the French–

John: Yes, but it’s the cheeks.

Aline: The cheek. Yes, and it felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker. We don’t do that in America, but I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not. You’re saying it’s a full lip kiss. Interesting.

John: Of course, we can look at the video.

Aline: What do you feel about not knowing what he said?

John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?

Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has sort of a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think it suits Sofia Coppola’s vibe. I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that like, people are layered and mysterious, I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.

John: We, as an audience, need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us, unless we’ve seen that the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do. Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it. Because oftentimes, in these things, one character is being stoic and sort of holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves, but we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.

Aline: Something I think about a lot is that– because if you have a quieter movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. ET, interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. Like, the enemy is Keys, it never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be a shootout, an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.

I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge. I would put this up there with Casablanca, for me, in terms of a merely really meaningful goodbye. I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. In the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.

[Episode 392]

John: Our big marquee topic I want to get into today is the final moment in movies, or I guess episodes of TV, but I’m really thinking more in movies. This came to mind this morning because there was an article talking about the end of Captain Marvel. This is not even really a spoiler, but at the end of the original version of Captain Marvel, she flew off into space, and they changed it so that she flew off into space with some other characters. It was an important change in sort of giving you a sense of where the character was headed next.

It got me thinking that in pretty much every movie I’ve written, that last moment, that last bit has changed from the pitch, to the screenplay, to the movie. I want to focus on why that moment is so important, and also why it tends to change so much.

Craig: Interesting. It’s funny, because for me, because I’m obsessed with that moment, it actually rarely doesn’t change. It doesn’t change much for me, but that’s in a sense because I think I weirdly start with it. I don’t know.

John: I start with it too. As I was thinking back to Aladdin, my pitch for it had a very specific runner that had a very definite end bit. When I pitched it to Disney, and also I just pitched it casually to Dana Fox, it made Dana Fox cry. That last line, the last image of that last moment, it’s not in the movie at all. It totally changed the ways that things change.

I would say even movies like Big Fish and other things which have been very much, we shot the script, those last moments, and sometimes the last image, really does change because it’s based on the experience of sitting through the whole movie and sort of where it’s delivered it to. Let’s talk about that last moment as a way of organizing your thoughts when you’re first thinking about the story, and then what it looks like at all the different stages.

Craig: Well, to start with, we have to ask what the purpose is. I think sometimes people think of the last shot in cinematic terms: somebody rides off into the sunset, so the last shot really is about sunsets, but of course, it’s not. For me, the final moment, the final shot, that last image contains the purpose of the entire thing. Everything comes down to that. If your movie was about the love between two people, then that is that final moment.

We’ve talked about Lindsay Doran’s TED Talk where she talks about how movies are really about relationships, and how when– She would cite how sometimes she would ask people, what was the last image of some movie, like Karate Kid? A lot of people don’t remember, it’s Mr. Miyagi’s face, proud. It’s Daniel, and then Mr. Miyagi, looking at each other, and there’s pride. Figuring out the purpose of that last shot is kind of your step one of determining what it’s supposed to be, and you can’t get there unless you know what the hell your whole movie is about in the first place.

John: Yes. I mean, movies are generally about a character taking a journey, a character leaving home and getting to someplace. But it’s also about the movie itself starting at a place and getting to a place. That destination is generally that last bit, that last moment, that last image, and so of course, you’re going to be thinking about that early on in the process, of where do you want to end up? Way back in Episode 100, there was a listener question, and someone asked us, “I have a couple of different ideas for movies, and I’m not sure which one I should start writing.” My answer was, you should pick the one with the best ending, because that’s the one you’ll actually finish.

If you start writing without having a clear sense of where you’re going to, you’re very likely to either stop writing it, or get really off-track and having to sort of strip away a lot of what you’ve done. Having a clear sense of, this is where I think the movie lands, is crucial. It’s like, “The plane is going to land on this runway.” It tells you, “Okay, I can do a bunch of different stuff, but ultimately, I have to make sure that I’m headed to that place.” You may not be signaling that even to the reader, to the audience, so that they’re not ahead of you, but you yourself have to know where this is going.

Craig: John, when you were in grade school and you had some sort of arts and crafts assignment, and the teacher said, “You need to draw a circle,” and you just have to draw a circle. You don’t have like a thing to trace. Were you a good circle drawer?

John: I was a fair circle drawer. I know it’s a very classic artistic lesson. It’s like, how to trust your hand to do the movements and how to think of what a circle is. Were you a good circle drawer?

Craig: No, absolutely horrendous. If you asked me to draw a circle, you would end up with some sort of unclosed cucumber. The reason I bring this up is because, to me, the classic narrative is a circle. We begin in a place, and we end in that same place. There is a full return. Of course, we are changed, but the ending reflects the beginning, and the beginning reflects the ending. There is a circle. If you don’t know your ending and you don’t know how the circle finishes, it’s quite probable that you won’t know how to start the circle either, that you will end up with an unclosed cucumber, like nine-year-old Craig Mazin attempting to draw someone’s head. This is how things go off. This is where I think people can easily get lost as they’re writing their script, because they realize that the story is developed in such a way that it wants to end somewhere, but it has really not a strong click connection to the beginning.

One of my favorite albums is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, [unintelligible 00:48:02]– they play little games, the Pink Floyd folks did. And one of the games they play in Pink Floyd’s The Wall is very low volume at the very beginning. You hear this tiny little song, and then someone says, “We came in.” Then at the very end, they’re playing the song, and it finishes, and then you hear someone say, “Isn’t this where?” That’s exactly the kind of thing that blows a 15-year-old boy’s mind. [chuckles]

But also, it was satisfying. You felt things were connected, and they chose to make the very last moment some sort of indication that the beginning is relevant. It’s the way, frankly, Watchmen ends. It’s the same thing. There’s this beautiful come-around with that last final look.

John: Now, because we’re talking about narrative circles, I need to acknowledge that Dan Harmon has this whole structure thing that’s based on a circle, where there’s a circle, and there’s these little lines across it that the characters go on this journey. That’s absolutely a valid approach if you want to think about a story that way. That’s not quite what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how, in general, a character leaves from a place and gets to a place, but in both cases, they’re either finding a new home or returning to a previous home changed.

Just a character walking around in a circle isn’t a story. A character being profoundly changed and coming to this environment with a new understanding, that is a change. And sometimes it won’t be that one character. Sometimes it’s that the narrative question you’ve asked at the beginning of the story has gone through all these permutations and landed you back at a place that lets you look at that question from a new way. So, it’s either answering the question or reframing the question in a way that is more meaningful. That’s what we’re talking about. Like, the narrative comes full circle. There’s a place that you were headed, and that place that you were headed reflects where you began.

Craig: No question. And it’s really clear to us how someone has changed when we put them back where they were when we met them. It’s just one of those things where you can say, “Oh, here’s the variable,” right? Where we begin is the control, our character is the variable. Start in the beginning, get me to the end, and let me see the difference. Sometimes it’s very profound. I mean, we start and end in the same place in Finding Nemo, but we can see how different it is in the same place because the variable has changed, and that’s your character.

John: I’m finishing the third Arlo Finch book right now, which is the end of the trilogy, and so each of the books has had that sense of like, okay, reflecting where the book began and where the book ended, and that there is a completion there. But it’s been fun to actually see the whole trilogy, and it’s like, okay, this is the journey that we’ve been on over the course of this year of Arlo Finch’s life. Yes, he’s physically in the same space, but he’s a completely different character in that same space, and has a different appreciation for what’s happened. As I’ve been able to go back to previous locations where things have happened, you see that his relationship to them is completely different because he’s a different character, having been changed by what’s gone on. That’s what we’re really talking about with that last bit and how the last bit has to reflect where the character started and what has happened to the character in their journey.

Craig: Yes. I mean, reading Arlo Finch, you would never expect that he would end up a savage murderer-

John: No.

Craig: -but he does, and that’s–

John: [chuckles] It’s really shocking for middle-grade fiction.

Craig: Well, it is, but then when you look back, you go, “Oh, yes, you know what? He was laying the groundwork for that [unintelligible 00:51:29]. Actually, it makes sense. He’s a nightmare.” Then there’s the Dark Finch trilogy that comes next– Oh, you know what? Dark Finch trilogy is not bad [crosstalk]–

John: Dark Finch sounds pretty good.

Craig: Yes, you should do it.

John: Yes. I think it’s going to be a crossover with Derek Haas’s books, about his assassin.

Craig: Oh, yes, Silver Bear.

John: Silver Bear, Dark Finch.

Craig: Silver Bear, Dark Finch. That sounds like a Sondheim lyric–

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: I love it. When I’m thinking about these last images, everybody has a different way of thinking about this, but what I try and do really is actually think about it in terms of a last emotion. What is it that I want to feel in the end? Do I want to feel comfort? Do I want to feel pride? Do I want to feel love? Do I want to feel hope? The movie that I worked on with Lindsay Doran, which is, I think my favorite feature script, and so, of course, it hasn’t been made. [chuckles] They make the other ones, not those.

The last shot, to me, was always an expression of the kind of bittersweet salute to the people who are gone. It’s a coming-of-age story, and the last shot, when I just thought about the emotion at the end, the emotion at the end was the kind of sad thankfulness for having known someone who’s no longer with you, and that’s– I go, “Okay, I can wrap myself in that. That feels like a good emotion,” and I know how that is reflected by the beginning. How you then express it, that can change-

John: For sure.

Craig: -and it often changes frequently. This is an area where I think movies sometimes fail, because the system of movies is designed to separate the writer and her intention from the actual outcome. A writer will have an intention like, “I want my movie to end with the bittersweet thankfulness for those who are no longer with us. That is my emotional intention, and here’s how I would execute it.” Nobody else sees the intention underneath, or they don’t understand it, and they just go, “Well, you know what? We don’t like necessarily the way they’re executing that. Let’s make a new execution. Let’s do this, let’s do that. Let’s make it noisy. Let’s make it loud. Let’s make it funny. Let’s make it–” and the intention is gone. Then you get to the movie, and you show it, and people go, “Well, the ending–” And you’re like, “Yes, the ending. That writer never really nailed the ending.” [chuckles] You see how it goes?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s freaking brutal.

John: Yes. That’s never happened to me once in my career. Let’s talk about what that ending looks like in the different stages. In the pitch version of it, obviously, we’ve talked about in pitches that– I always describe it as like, you’re trying to convince your best friend to see this movie that you’ve seen that they’ve not seen. So really, you’re talking a lot about the characters, and how it starts, and you may simplify and summarize some things, especially in the second and third act about stuff, but you will tend to describe out that last moment, that last bit, because you’re really talking about, what is the takeaway experience going to be for a person who’s watched this movie that you’re hopefully going to be writing.

In the pitch, you’re going to have a description of what that last moment is, because that’s really important. It’s the reason why someone should say yes to reading your script, to buying your script, to hiring you to write that script. That last moment is almost always going to be there in the pitch, even if it’s not fully fleshed out, to give you a sense of what you want the audience and the reader to take away from reading the script.

Craig: What I’m thinking about in a room where I’m relaying something to somebody is, ultimately, I want to give them a fuzzy at the end. I want to give them some sort of fuzzy feeling. I don’t want to give them plot. If I finish off with plot– For instance, let’s say I’m in a room, and I’m pitching Star Wars. What I don’t want to do is get to the end and say, “In our last shot, our hero receives a medal, which he deserved.” What I want to talk about is how a kid– I would bring it back to the beginning and say, “This farm boy who didn’t know about this world beyond him, who didn’t know about The Force, who didn’t know about the fate of his father or the way he could maybe save the world, he is the one who saved the galaxy. And at last, he knows who he is.” See? Like some sort of sense of connected feeling to the beginning. If you’re selling plot at the end, then what you’re really selling is what Lindsay Doran calls the end that people think is the end, but not the actual end.

John: Let’s take your example of Star Wars, because you might pitch it that way, but then when it comes to writing the script, you actually have to write the scene that gets you that moment. As you’re writing that scene at the last moment, you’re looking at like, what is the medal ceremony like? Who’s there, what’s said, but most importantly, what is the emotional connection between those characters who are up there? Actually, painting out the world so we can see, “Okay, this is why it’s going to feel this way.” This is clearly the intention behind the scene, but also, I’m giving you the actual things you need to give us that feeling at the end. In the script stage, what was sort of a nebulous description of like, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” has to actually deliver on that promise.

Craig: Yes. I always wondered– I hate being the guy who’s like, would it be better if a movie that everybody loved ended like this? The last shot of Star Wars, it’s the medal ceremony, right? Then you have them looking at each other, and so the emotion is the relationships between them. I always wondered, what would happen if the last shot of Star Wars was Luke Skywalker returning back to Tatooine a different man, and kind of starting a new hope. That vibe of returning, I always wondered if I would feel more at the end if I saw him return.

John: I think it’s worth exploring. I think if you were to try to do that, though, it would just feel like one more bit. It would feel like the movie was over when he got the medal, and you had the swell, and you had– Whether the journey was, this is a kid [unintelligible 00:57:17] all on his own, who forms a new family, so like going back to where his dead family was, it wouldn’t feel like the kind of victory, so–

Craig: Dead family.

John: Dead family. I think you want to see his joy and excitement, rather than sort of the– I would imagine the music would be very different if he’d gone back to Tatooine. [crosstalk]–

Craig: Yes. It would be [unintelligible 00:57:38]– No, you’re right. I guess then the payload for that final bit is really the looks between Leia and Luke, and Han and Luke, that it’s, “We’re a family, we’re friends, we did it. We went through something nobody else understands.”

John: Let’s say you’ve written the script, you’ve gone into production, and you’ve– 100 days of production, there’s finally a cut, and you see that last moment in the film, and it’s different, or it doesn’t work, or the way you had it written as on the page doesn’t work. In my experience, it’s generally because the actual movie that you watched isn’t quite the movie that’s on the page, just naturally. As people are embodying those characters, things just feel different.

Obviously, some scenes get cut, things get moved around, and where you thought you were headed is not really where you’ve ended up, and so you have to make some change there. In some cases, it’s re-shoots. In some cases, you’re really shooting a new last scene, and you realize that this was not the moment that you thought we wanted to get to at the end. But in some cases, it’s just a matter of like, this shot versus that shot. Whose close-up are we ending on?

You talked about Mr. Miyagi. I bet they tried a bunch of different ways. It would make more sense to end on Daniel rather than Mr. Miyagi, but ultimately, Mr. Miyagi was the right choice. Thinking about like, what does the music feel like at this moment? How are we emotionally landing the payload here? The music’s going to be a big factor, so there’s going to be a lot of things conspiring to get that last image, that last moment of the movie, and you may not have been able to anticipate that on the page.

Craig: No question. This is why it’s really important for you to understand your intention. Because it may work out that your intention didn’t carry through in the plan, but if we know the intention, and we have married the beginning to the end, then the beginning has set up this inexorable domino effect. You have landed at the end, you require a feeling. Let’s see if we can make that feeling editorially a different way. If we can’t, okay, let’s go back and reconsider what it’s supposed to be.

In rare circumstances, you do get to a place where you realize, “Oh my God, having gone through this movie, it’s really about this. It turns out we care more about this than this. This relationship matters more than this relationship. Okay, so now we have to think of the beginning. Let’s recontextualize what our beginning means, and then let’s go ahead and fix an ending.” The ending can never be just, “You know what? It just needs to be more exciting.” That’s nonsense.

John: The danger is, a lot of times in test screenings, they’ll see like, “Okay, the numbers are a little bit low here and people dipped at the end, so let’s add some more razzmatazz to this last little bit, or like an extra thing.” Generally, people don’t want more. They don’t want bigger or more. They just want to actually exit the movie at the right time with the right emotion, and that’s the challenge.

Craig: Right. How do you leave them feeling, is the biggest.

John: Sometimes, though, the opposite holds true. Just this last week, I was watching a rough cut of a friend’s film, and he has this really remarkable last shot, and these two characters and their relationship has changed profoundly. But as I watched it, I was like, “Oh, that’s a really great last shot, last moment for kind of a different movie than I saw.” But when I looked at the movie I’d seen before, I was like, “Oh, yes, you could actually do some reconfiguring to get you to that moment and actually have it make sense.” It was really like talking about like, “This is where we get to at the end. I think you’re not starting at the right place, and so therefore, you may want to take a look at those first scenes and really change our expectations, and change what we’re following over the course of the movie. Because doing that, you could land at that place, and it would feel really meaningful.”

Craig: Again, the beginning is the end is the beginning, right? If something’s not working in that where your circle’s supposed to connect at, and you ended up with an open cucumber, then either the ending is wrong, or the beginning is wrong, or they’re both wrong, but it’s usually one or the other. It is, I think, tempting at times to say, “Well, since the ending is the last thing, everything else is the pyramid, and this thing sits on top of the pyramid, this is the easiest thing to fix.” John, you’re absolutely right, sometimes the easiest thing to fix is the beginning.

John: Yes. Change the expectations of the audience as they go into it, and you can get them there.

Craig: Right. Match them to where they’re going to arrive.

[Boilerplate]

John: That is our show for this week. Thank you, Drew Marquardt, our producer, for putting together this compendium, which was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you buy books. You can go back and read the endings chapter and see what we pulled from these conversations into the book. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes, and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware, you’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to our premium subscribers, you make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on casting minor characters. Drew, thanks for putting this episode together.

Drew: Of course. Thanks, John.

[Outro by Eric Pearson]

[singing]

My name is John August, I am captain of the Scriptnote

His name is John August, he is captain of the Scriptnote

We sail the open seas dispensing umbrage and reason, all things we have expertise in

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[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew. In our conversation with Drew Goddard, we were talking about his time on Buffy and Angel, and how it was often the job of the most junior writer on that staff to write up character sides, which I wasn’t clear was a thing that staff writers did, but makes a lot of sense.

Drew: I had no idea either. From my time as an actor, I’m thinking back to all those sides I got through that I was like, “oh, that’s why it wasn’t ever something that was in the show or in the movie.”

John: Talk me through this. Because you were often auditioning for shows, you were in the UK doing a lot of this, and you would get sides that had scenes that were not necessarily in the finished product.

Drew: Yes. Sometimes it’d be dummy sides from other shows or other things. Weirdly, the one that I can remember most is not one that I auditioned for, but a friend was doing a movie with a kid, and they were auditioning for this weird show that was going to be on Netflix about kids, and it’s like ’80s, and that kind of thing.

John: Oh, yes–

Drew: Yes. It was Stranger Things, and we were doing these sides with Anthony, and they were very specific. I remember watching Stranger Things and being like, “This wasn’t the scene that we did, but it’s close enough.” It’s like, oh, well, things change in production, but maybe it was something completely different.

John: Yes, and so the idea behind this– and this is a thing I’ve done in features a fair amount, is you will have a character who may only have three or four lines in a thing, but they’re crucial. Like, the camera’s going to be on them. You want to cast the right person, but if you just gave them those three or four lines, there’s no runway. There’s no building up.

There’s no beginning, middle, end. You’re not seeing a range in there. They have a face, they have a body, they can say these lines, and it’s really hard to do. And so what you’ll end up doing is writing longer scenes that actually give you a chance to hear their voice, really get to see what they can do. I’m thinking right now for Go, the character of Manny, who’s played by Nathan Bexton in the movie, he’s in a bunch of scenes and has important things to do, but he’s always the third most important character in those scenes. And so, I needed to give him basically a monologue where he could just do the character as himself.

Drew: For some of those characters, is it more important to see if they can hit the big beats that you need them to, or to see how they handle the shoe leather of it all, kind of?

John: What I need, if they’re just a functional role, so if they’re like the police officer in a thing, give them some yada-yada– do I believe them as a police officer? Otherwise, it’ll not work. For something like Mannie, you needed to see like they had a personality– How he could fit in that car with those two women, what is that vibe going to be like? I needed to give him just like much more space, and so give a sense of humor, what’s driving him, what’s motivating him. In a weird way, you’re also kind of helping that actor if they get the role, have a sense of who that character really is beyond the borders of just that one little scene that they’re in.

Drew: I feel like there was recently– Someone put out their audition tape, and then– it was a woman. She auditioned for a thing, and then she showed the finished product. She made bigger choices in the audition tape than I felt like she was doing in the thing, which they’re two different skills, aren’t they? Like, auditioning and showing what you can do there. Are you ever like, “That was a really great choice, and I’m going to adopt that”? Or is it usually like, “Great, they can go that far, but we know exactly what we want”?

John: Honestly, they’re two different things slightly, because there’s the audition tape where it’s just the actor without any coaching just delivering a thing, and that’s a situation where playing big is probably the right choice. Because if you play small and you’re not getting them where they want to go, they may not reach out to you again. They always feel like they can reign you back in rather than make you get bigger.

Drew: That makes sense.

John: It’s harder to negotiate bigger, but a lot of these scenes that I was writing, especially with Go, we had people coming in and physically auditioning in front of us, and giving more space there meant that we could actually direct you towards this thing versus that thing. There was a show that I was doing with Jordan Mechner that we never ended up shooting the pilot, but we went through a lot of casting on it, and the sides we built for that showed two different aspects of the character. It gave us enough space where we could say like, “Could you try that with your real accent? You’re trying to hide a British accent there, try to hit us with your real accent.” It just gave some space there. If it was just story, story, story, that’s not going to be helpful.

Drew: I do feel like finding the right people for those smaller parts is so important. Me and our friend Nima Yousefi were talking– he’s rewatching Mad Men, and I’ve seen that show a million times. We were just talking about it, and he has a theory that Mad Men doesn’t work without the character of Joan, and specifically, if Christina Hendricks is not cast as Joan. And I think he’s right. Like, she’s obviously a huge part of the series. She starts out sort of as a peripheral character, and I don’t think it has the same– it’s not the same show without her.

Whereas some of the big leads, the Jon Hamm characters, anyone could play that. It’s hard to think of someone else doing that, but that’s a type you can get a strong leading man, and even the Peggies and stuff like that. This is being very specific to Mad Men. Those smaller characters, getting that right, I think informs the tone and the flavor of your movie or your TV show in a way that it’s fundamentally different without them. I don’t know, is that overwhelming at all that you’re trying to find the right person, or do you just [crosstalk]?

John: Yes. I mean, this is going to be the first year where we have the casting awards for the Oscars, and casting is so fundamental. As writers, you’re creating these characters in your head, and you’re putting them on paper, but then they get assigned off one by one to people without your control a lot of times. And so, if you have the ability to write scenes that are designed to showcase what is special about this character, what it is that is going to be unique about this character, it’s another opportunity to steer the ship in the right direction from the page.

Drew: Yes, that makes sense.

John: Yes. I love it when people share their casting sides, you know. Listen, I’m not a fan of actors showing their auditions for things when someone else got it, or their better auditions for things. That’s not helpful, but I do love seeing the process behind it, and it’s great to see, this is the person’s audition tape, and this is them actually doing the part. That, I think, is really helpful. If it’s smaller than their audition, it’s probably because they were directed smaller, or because it’s just what actually fits in the story overall. As an actor coming in, you often don’t know what the whole shape of it is. You’re just getting these pages, and if those pages can give you some sense of who that character is beyond just those lines, that’s helpful.

Drew: My favorite pages I ever got was for when I did Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. Part of it is because David Koepp wrote that script, and that script was fantastic, but it was very active. My character was like going through boxes, and you’re trying to find a needle in the haystack with papers. It just gave me something to do, and I feel like that was such a gift. I feel like most things are just talky, and I think if you can do that for actors, you’re going to get a lot cooler stuff.

John: The other thing I would stress, and this is a thing that casting directors will often put together their scene, they’ll do like cut-and-paste versions of scenes to get this down, is to minimize the other person talking. And so, the theater lines, just to get rid of that, so it’s as much as possible, the person auditioning is driving the scene. Yes, there should be some moments where you’re seeing them react and listen, because active listening is important, they’re not just waiting for their time to talk, but they need to be the main person on camera, or main person in the scene, because they’re the only ones we’re supposed to be paying attention to.

There’s that cliche which happens in a lot of movies you see, where it’s like, oh, this person came in to read lines opposite somebody, but then they got cast as the thing. Sure, it happens some. I’m sure that there’s some anecdotal [unintelligible 01:12:09] truth to that, but that’s not the point in well-written scenes that the off-screen person, you wouldn’t have heard very often.

Drew: Yes, it can make a huge difference, whether those sides are good or just words.

John: Yes. Even if you’re just writing something small for yourself to shoot with people, it’s a good idea to be thinking about, what are the casting sides that are going to help me find the best actors for this? It could just be a weekend short film, it still helps.

Drew: Thanks, Drew Goddard, for bringing that up, and to you for talking more about that.

John: Yes. All right. And thanks, Drew, for putting this episode together.

Drew: Yes. Thanks, John.

Links:

• Our first endings compendium, Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
• A video essay of our farewell scenes discussion with Aline Brosh McKenna
• Episodes 44 – Endings for beginners, 366 – Tying Things Up, 648 – Farewell Scenes, and 392 – The Final Moment
• Dan Harmon story circle
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell, Drew Marquardt and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.