The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/character-and-story-fit).
**John August:** Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 606 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
How do you know if you got the right characters for your story, and whether you got the right story for your characters? To help us solve this crucial piece of matchmaking, we welcome back Pamela Ribon, a screenwriter whose credits include Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and the new Netflix feature, Nimona. Her short film, My Year of Dicks, was not only a previous One Cool Thing, it’s also an Oscar nominee. It made Craig giggle every time I said it. Welcome back, Pammy.
**Pamela Ribon:** Hi. Thank you for having me.
**John:** I’m so excited to have you on the podcast again. Full disclosure, you moderated a session very recently about screenwriting, and your questions were so brilliant so insightful, and you’re leading of the discussion. I actually suppressed my need to take over all those things. You know what I’m talking about.
**Pamela:** I do. This is the highest praise I’ve ever received. Thank you so much.
**John:** They were so, so good that I stopped myself in answering questions and didn’t try to redirect the question. I recognize you as a fellow podcast host. If at any point you feel you need to elevate yourself from just guest to podcast co-host, feel free.
**Pamela:** I will be your Craig as much as you need. I will take umbrage, but you will find that I’m a more empathetic umbrage person.
**John:** Yeah, but you have strong opinions though, and I like that too. You have strong opinions about craft. I really want to dig in and talk about craft. I also want to talk about recapping, because you were a recapper. I want to talk about that relationship between writing about film and television and writing film and television, what that is. I’ve got some listener questions. I’m excited to get to it.
Also, for a Bonus Segment for Premium members, I want to talk about your podcast, because you have a podcast called Listen to Sassy, which is all going through the back issues of Sassy Magazine and discussing the relevance then and the relevance now?
**Pamela:** Yes, and the official issues of Sassy Magazine, because there are some that we might say aren’t canon.
**John:** Wow. I did not even know that. I’m learning even as we start this podcast. Hey, let’s jump into this. Let’s talk about character and character fit, because this is a large part of the discussion we had a few weeks ago as we were talking. You started with a really smart question, which was, what is your favorite character that you did not create. I don’t remember what your answer for that question was yourself. What is a character that you wish you had created?
**Pamela:** What’s interesting is I wouldn’t have answered this in any other room, but the room we were in and the conversation we were having led me to answer Annie. What I’m going to say right now is Paddington in Paddington 2.
**John:** Let’s talk about Paddington in Paddington 2, because it’s a great movie. It’s a great character. Talk to us about, why is that a perfect movie for Paddington to be in, and vice versa.
**Pamela:** Part of why Paddington is perfect in Paddington 2… That movie is perfect. Perfect movie. This movie, imagine like double XL. This movie is perfect, because when you know what Paddington wants, from being a little bit in a book, which only this movie could do, from us knowing his backstory, which just happened, we’re just in. We’re just in. I remember saying out loud, “This is perfect.”
It’s not easy. I was so awed by how you can bring every single person in the whole wide world to understand, what if I could walk this person I love through the world, because of the book. I just need this book. I grew up with The NeverEnding Story and Annie. I think in the room, I answered Annie.
**John:** You did. I remember you answering Annie.
**Pamela:** Definitely. You love her.
**John:** Annie and Paddington are similar characters, in that they are not hugely flawed characters who have to learn a valuable lesson that transforms them. They start the movie with clean and simple wants. The movie wants to give it to them, but will make it difficult along the way.
**Pamela:** I think I am drawn to those characters, like in Whale Rider, or going all the way to the other end, secretary. I think I am drawn to characters who know who they are, but the world doesn’t understand them.
**John:** That’s so fascinating, because usually we think about, movies are journey of self-discovery, so over the course of the movie, the character has to learn about themselves and challenge their assumptions about what they’re able to do, in order to conquer the problem in front of them and to transform the world in front of them. They have to transform themselves in order to transform the world.
I think I brought this up in the room. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie Bucket is not a character who has to go through a big arc. The character in the book, he is a good kid from the start. I kept fighting these studio notes from like, “Oh, Charlie has to want it more. We have to see him struggle.” No, he’s actually a good, perfect kid. He does need to change the world around him, but he’s changing it in the way an antagonist changes the world, rather than protagonist. He doesn’t have to exit the movie profoundly changed from how he entered into it.
**Pamela:** I always think of characters are moving right, being right. I have a problem when they’re always moving right, always being right. I do think you have to find this balance of, you’re right, the world needs to know you’re right, and because the world is bending, you actually learn you can be wrong inside that right. That’s that end of second act feeling of, “Oh, shit. I didn’t have it all figured out, because no one let me grow.”
**John:** Let’s back up and talk about character and story fit, because I think so often, we are lectured that story comes from character, character want is what drives story. It’s true, but also, that’s generally not the starting place for an idea.
An idea is generally about like, “This is the world in which I want to tell the story. I want to tell a story about a character who does blank blank blank.” Then you’re backing into, who is the best, most appropriate character to put into that story.
It’s not so clean. It’s like, “I’m going to create a character in a vacuum and then set them in a world for a story.” That just never happens. It’s not a thing that a writer almost ever really experiences. Instead, they’re like, “This is the place in which the story needs to happen. Now we need to find who is the perfect character to tell that story.”
I’m wondering if we can talk about some animated movies, because they often are cleaner ways to get into this. For something like Moana, which you were writing on, was this like, “We want to tell a story about Pacific Islanders and this universe,” and then you had to find a character, or was there a clear like, “We want to tell a story of a chieftain’s daughter who goes on this quest.” What was the back and forth between the two of them?
**Pamela:** It’s a little of what you said on both sides, and also neither, let me say.
**John:** Perfect. That’s what it is. It’s complicated.
**Pamela:** It’s very complicated. I come in right after Taika Waititi had written a draft. My first day was a table read, which you’re just in the story trust, day one, like, “Welcome to this.”
I would say a lot of times, I am brought in when people are very comfortable with structure, they understand where they want it to go, but perhaps their female character could use some help owning the film.
**John:** Making sure they’re not a passenger in the film, but actually driving the film.
**Pamela:** Maui’s a very dominant character. In Taika’s hands, he was beyond charismatic, so what do you do? Moana at the time was only 13. She had a bunch of brothers. She wasn’t allowed to sail because she was a girl. That is where we started during my time there.
**John:** A lot had been done before you got there, so it wasn’t a completely clean slate. When you’re thinking about a movie from scratch, it’s that balance. Most of our listeners are probably thinking of their own thing they want to do. They will look through books that will tell them, oh, story comes from character. We’ve said it on the podcast. They may be beating themselves up, like, “I need to find this perfect character, and then the story will come out of that.”
That’s not necessarily a good solution, because I’ve had experiences where I absolutely love this character, I’ve been down a draft with a character, and I love this person, and they are just not the right person to base this movie around. I made the wrong choice. We often talk about how sidekicks steal movies, because they are characters who are just more interesting to watch in the world that we’ve created for ourselves.
**Pamela:** They’re there because your protagonist has to be on a straight line, and so they aren’t always allowed to be so chaotically funny. We enjoy our sidekicks, because they can just keep nudging at that protagonist, to say, “I think you need to change. I think you need to change. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see what’s wrong with you? Isn’t it better to live like me?” That sidekick has some growing to learn. The protagonist is what’s actually going to help the world.
**John:** Exactly. I think back to Big Fish. For the adaptation of Big Fish, there’s a book that I could base it off of, but the book is really thin, and it only has sketches of these characters and situations. I went into the adaptation knowing who Edward was, knowing who Will, the son, was, which is basically a proxy for me. I knew that Will had a French wife, which I just created because I needed someone for him to talk to. Then I had to figure out everything else.
Those characters can feel very functional along the way. They’re getting me through a section of story. Then the trick is to make them feel like those were characters who were always there, who always had a reason and a purpose and own their life, you could make a story about them, even though they really were just functional for me in this story to tell this one bit of it. It’s that sleight of hand, where you feel like, oh, any one of these people could drive the story, but of course they couldn’t, because it has to be about this one time, event that this one character is going through.
**Pamela:** Going back to the question you asked me earlier, this is not true, but Taika likes to joke that all that’s left in the script from what he did is exterior ocean day. It’s not true. It’s not true, but it’s a very funny joke.
That was the part, going back to that question, that was interesting, because you had so many scenes that had no walls, they had no props. You’re two people maybe, or just Moana, on a boat. Ocean. Exterior ocean day. That is not a world that is populated.
When you think about moving on to something like Ralph Breaks the Internet, where the whole world is very important. In fact, you can’t make some of these characters exist until you understand what this internet world looks like in the, quote unquote, room they might be in. You’re like, “Oh, I understand a knowledge base, a data search engine was that character.” In terms of Moana, you have the endless sea.
**John:** Can I ask you a question? I remember looking at the initial posters. I went in and saw early art on Moana. I got a talking through of who the different characters were. Some of those characters did not make it through to the movie. I can say that specifically there was a poster that released that showed the pig on the boat.
I feel like my instinct was that some of those characters were brought along on the journey just so there would be stuff to do on those boat journeys, as we were off on sea, exterior ocean day. They ultimately were not crucial to the story. They probably got trimmed, maybe late in the process. That’s the kind of discovery that can happen in animation particularly, because you just got to keep iterating and iterating and iterating. Without spoiling, revealing any NDA stuff, am I kind of right?
**Pamela:** Listen. Look. How old is this? Are these NDAs still happening? I feel like I’m just going to tell you. First of all, like I said, she was younger when I was writing on the script.
I can talk to you about Pua, who was named Kuni [ph] when I was working on it, because kuni means pig. So does Pua. That pig originally went with her, because you also learned how she had rescued this pig as a little tiny runt that was going to be left to die. She brought that pig home and raised that pig. That was her pig.
There was something about having Pua along on the journey that made the stakes a little too high. I totally understand this was past my time, but you’re just like, “She can’t just leave the boat.” I knew this feeling. She left the boat to go somewhere else. You’re like, “I don’t care about Hei Hei, but you can’t leave Pua. He’s such a sweet piggy.”
**John:** No one cares about the chicken.
**Pamela:** Yeah. The sweet piggy can’t be… It became too high of stakes, actually, for her to continue her journey. I do understand Pua’s going to stay home, because otherwise, you’ve brought a puppy on your boat, and how are you supposed to leave that puppy in a lava realm? You just can’t. It’s too scary.
**John:** Let’s talk about the room and animation, because we had Jennifer Lee on the show, and she was talking about her experience on Frozen and coming in at a place where they had a lot of the pieces, and they couldn’t make all the pieces fit. A lot of it was figuring out, “Okay, what do we have here? How do we get back to this central relationship? How do we make this all work?”
As a feature writer, I’m mostly used to working alone, or I get notes from a person, or I work with a director. There’s TV writers who are used to working in a room of other writers. As an animation writer, you can find yourself in situations where you’re at these big tables, where it’s not just other writers, it’s a bunch of other people from other departments. You’re all having to talk through these things. You’re having to figure out how do we synthesize these ideas and get back to a place.
If you’re the writer who’s coming in on a project like Moana or Ralph Breaks the Internet, how do you take all that in and synthesize this and give them back something they need? At what point do you stop talking and start writing and show scenes? What is that like for you?
**Pamela:** Much like in TV, it’s different in every room. It’s led by that showrunner, who will be your director, or directors. They set the tone. Moana and Ralph and Smurfs, so whatever, each one is a very different room.
I would say what’s interesting, coming into animation when I did, was a real specific change, probably Pixar led, of, hey, a writer might have something to say in this room and might have some reason to be talking to you.
What I found really cool was, this might be because I moved around a lot, but part of it was looking at each room and going, “Oh, okay. Oh, so now I’m talking to mostly visual artists,” whose brains are already adding. They take a sequence and think of it as five minutes. They’re already adding and plussing, which is why we have the best stuff in animation, because each person is really filling it to the top of their own game.
How do you talk to that person without stifling them, while also explaining, like, “You don’t have to think about the other 88 minutes, but I do. This scene is great. Put everything you want in it, but just make sure this happens and this happens and at the end it’s this. If we can do that together, if you do that on your own… ”
I think I prefer working with storyboard artists, because they’re able to give me what exterior ocean day looks like, or interior Fale night. I don’t really know what that means. Interior Ebay day. Once I can see what they see, I can show them what I think they should say. Then together, we can make something that you can pitch back to a director, that is more fully formed than either of us can do on our own.
You don’t get that option often in a TV writing room, unless you’re off in a B-room or whatever, and you’re all like, “Let’s hope these jokes make it.” It’s the same skill.
**John:** In TV though, you don’t have the chance to iterate, where you see, “What was this? What did it look like? Great. Now let’s go back,” because in TV, ultimately you’re still delivering a script, which will then go off to another group of people who will make the show. You’ll have, hopefully, writers there to help oversee it. You don’t get that chance to like, “Oh, everyone’s looking at the same thing. What are we going to do for this next pass?”
**Pamela:** I started in more multi-cams. You did have a rehearsal. Everybody’s on their feet. Everybody’s giving input. You also have a lot of weird downtime, because you’re a staff writer, and learning what to do with all of that time and then learning what everyone else does. I would say for any room I’m in or any job I’m on, while doing the job, I also want to know, what can I learn from this?
**John:** Of course.
**Pamela:** I would say that, from working in IBM tech support before I moved out to LA, all the way to anime dub jobs or working in reality television and recapping, all of that leads into what I’m doing in a Disney room, where I’m talking to people who are seeing what I’m saying, before I’m even done saying what I’m saying, and just knowing how to pick up all these words, which you do as a writer once you’re in the edit bay or you’re in casting or whatever. These are just different words. It’s their language.
**John:** Now, I have made a lot of animated movies, but weirdly, the movies that I’ve worked on have been much more like traditional features, where I’ve delivered a script, here’s the script, or I will get reel back, but then I’ll change stuff in the reels. It’s not been that sort of collaborative thing, because it’s mostly been stop-motion.
In stop-motion, you get that one shot to shoot something, and there’s not the iteration there is in either traditional animation or computer animation. We don’t get to do the kinds of things you see in Disney features. I remember going in on some Disney features that I was shocked what a mess the project was, and like, “Is this coming out in a year? Are you serious?”
**Pamela:** That’s a good screening five is what I’m going to guess, when you’re running screening four, screening five of a-
**John:** I’m like, “Oh, god.” Then somehow, it does come together, which is just remarkable. It’s a strange thing for me to see. You have to trust the process that you’ll get there, to the right place. I guess you don’t always get to the right place, but you often get to the right place.
**Pamela:** It’s tough to trust the process, I think, depending on where you are in the situation. How do you trust the process when you’re not given access to the whole thing all the time?
**John:** That’s the thing. In many cases, I haven’t gotten full access, or it was so clear, the movie is shooting in London, and I just know they’re going to make it happen, or it’s Tim Burton, he’s going to shoot exactly what’s there, and so it’s going to work.
Giving up control for any writer on any project is part of it. It’s recognizing that it’s never going to be exactly what you saw in your head. With animation, sometimes the timelines are so long and the iterations are so many, that you could really lose a sense of what the intention was.
**Pamela:** Yeah. I think the trick is knowing that you’re usually not the first, and probably not going to be the last, unless you’re like, “This movie’s coming out in six months. I got it. I got it. I’m going to get credit. It’s going to be great.”
You just stay very invested, in the time that you’re there, to do the thing that you know the movie needs the most work in, which is either our main characters, our dynamic of our most important relationship is not zinging, or, “Man, this first act is too long. How can we care about them sooner?” and shoot the movie.
Animation in particular I think needs long first acts, that eventually we cut, once the movie is like, I feel this moment, the movie has begun. That takes a little while to find.
**John:** The gears click in.
**Pamela:** Yes, because the last thing animation looks for are characters.
**John:** Say more about that.
**Pamela:** They start from a world that’s impossible to do in live action, or you do it in live action. You have to start in this like, “What is the internet? What would the internet look like?” Just taking that one as an easy answer.
Once you try to figure out how a place can be both something you’ve never seen before and a place that feels like, “Of course I’ve been here, because I’m here all the time theoretically, but I’ve never seen it,” then you’re like, “Who should go through this journey and make us feel the most like us going through this crazy world we’ve never seen before?”
**John:** Yeah, but in this case of the internet, you have characters you’re bringing back for another movie. Yes, you’re going to create supporting characters who are going to be exactly right for that, but you cannot create your two central characters. You have to create a world that is going to challenge them and their relationship and still be rewarding for the world itself. That’s a big ask.
**Pamela:** That’s very astute, because you’re taking two characters who only know old-school video games and an arcade that’s not visited as often, because there’s this internet. What would they do in this infinite world?
There was a want at one point that kicked off the movie. It didn’t last, but it’s still one of my favorites, where Vanellope could see a little bit beyond the door every time the arcade was closed. The only thing she could see was Yoshinoya beef bowl. She just wanted to know what that… It just sounded so perfect.
**John:** Oh my god, what a great lyric to sing. (singing:) Yoshinoya. Yoshinoya.
**Pamela:** (singing:) Yoshinoya beef bowl. She was just like, “Doesn’t it sound perfect? I just want to know what it is. I want to eat it if I can, or swim in it if I must. I just want to know what that is.” That was that idea of eventually Slaughter Race, of, I want to know this thing that makes me feel like that’s where I’m supposed to be. Originally, they were just going to get online and try to find the Yoshinoya people. I think we moved into bitter yearnings.
That’s the idea of how do you get a character that you know and love, in a sequel, how do you get a character you know and love to want just the next step, so that you have the same wonderful feelings that you’re visiting your old friends, but you have a new adventure? That’s very hard in a sequel, because your protagonist is arced.
**John:** Yeah. They’ve gotten all the way through it. Toy Story, god bless them. Those characters arced and arced, and we’re going to make them arc more. It’s a challenge.
**Pamela:** We’re going to get hard in there. We’re going to cause forever scars on people who watch this.
**John:** Let’s go back to some of your forever scars. I want to talk about recapping, because for folks who don’t know, could you explain what recapping is or was? Because I feel like there’s a whole generation that may have just not experienced this as a thing, but it was so important to me as a person who was growing up on the internet.
**Pamela:** First, imagine the internet as a place where you read. You just read. You go there to read more about what you saw. It is something you’re doing to look like you’re working. That’s what’s great about the fact that it’s a lot of reading. You look very busy.
Television Without Pity started as Mighty Big TV, which was actually an offshoot of DawsonsWrap, which Tara Ariano and Sarah Bunting and Dave Cole had made, which was recapping Dawson’s Creek episodes. It’s the idea of, you’re sitting on a couch with a friend, and the two of you are talking the entire episode of your favorite guilty pleasure, because it’s way more fun to watch something like that with a friend.
When Television Without Pity came out as Mighty Big TV, I don’t even remember how many there were the first year, 10 shows maybe. I don’t know. It was a bunch of us that had been writing on their other sites, like Hissyfit and Fametracker.
**John:** What year would this have been? I looked it up on Wikipedia.
**Pamela:** Is it ’98 or ’99?
**John:** It’s ’98. ’98 is when the first one was.
**Pamela:** I know where I worked. I still have my first recap handwritten in a Mead notebook. It is 20-something pages, handwritten, of Get Real. Get Real.
**John:** Get Real.
**Pamela:** Do you know Get Real? You shouldn’t, but let’s see if you can remember one actor from Get Real. It was on Fox on Wednesday nights.
**John:** That helps. Greg Evigan?
**Pamela:** Nope, but I love where you’re starting.
**John:** Tell me who. Give me an actor.
**Pamela:** Anne Hathaway.
**John:** Wow, Anne Hathaway on a Fox show.
**Pamela:** I’m not done. Are you ready? Eric Christian Olsen.
**John:** Oh yeah, of course.
**Pamela:** Jesse Eisenberg.
**John:** Wow, nice.
**Pamela:** Taryn Manning. Jon Tenney, and others.
**John:** That was the same year as Go. It was when we were filming Go. It’s that caliber of those people.
**Pamela:** I was learning about you while I was writing for Get Real. The reason that most people didn’t see it and it didn’t last forever was, it was on opposite a new show called The West Wing.
**John:** Yeah, I’ve heard of that show. There’s a guy, Aaron Sorkin was the guy who wrote that.
**Pamela:** Yeah, he’s still around. I hear he’s still doing things. Good for him.
**John:** You were assigned to recap Get Real, or you volunteered to recap Get Real.
**Pamela:** I was assigned it.
**John:** What does a recap consist of? The show’s airing live on Fox. How quickly are you supposed to be putting up this recap? How long was a recap? Really, what is the purpose of a recap?
**Pamela:** It morphed over the years. I moved on to things like Gilmore Girls, which I did for five years. Over the years, and as it got popular, we had to deal with what those demands were.
I would say originally, you had to record that so that you could watch it again. Later, we used to have to do these recaplets, which were very fast, here’s what you missed, if you were just waiting the next morning to find out what happened, and you missed it, because you used to be able to miss television.
Essentially, you would then write these, I did call them dissertations, because they felt that way, where you took each scene or each episode and talked about where the characters were on their journey, what was happening, and often, how you felt as a viewer watching this. That led to jokes, and sometimes inside jokes.
I had these two patron saint of televisions, I don’t know if you remember this, from gift shops. There were these glow-in-the-dark Saint Clares. And they were the patron saint of television. And I had two under my TV. And I used to let them sometimes do some dialog when I was bored with an episode.
You would just try to make an entertaining recap, which was, “Here’s what happened scene by scene. Here’s where it’s working. Here’s where I don’t like it.” It’s weird to say now, because it does feel like it’s common now to see these versions everywhere. They would be 12 to 20 Word doc pages of deep diving into what’s going on.
The people who were reading it and writing back, that was also really early internet feedback, a forum that was super popular, that then became something that you know people in LA and writers’ rooms were reading and changing the writers… It makes so much sense to me now that a writers’ room is obsessed with the one thing writing about writers.
**John:** That’s what I want to get into, because that feedback loop has to be really strange. It would be impossible if somebody were recapping my show and actually deep diving into it, to not read that thing and think about that thing, because that person is a super fan, but also a super critic. It’s the person who wants the show to be better, the person who’s studying the show more obsessively than-
**Pamela:** Anyone.
**John:** … some of those writers in the room.
**Pamela:** It’s your actual audience in many ways, and accessible in a way that we had not had before. It’s not a Nielsen. There’s no dial I could hit. I was telling you, “Here’s where I felt my intelligence was insulted. Here’s where I cried and called my mom.” That’s feedback. How could that not affect a room?
I think often now about a story editor or a co-producer who read a recap and was like, “That’s fucking what I said. When we were pitching this out, I knew this was a problem. No one listened to me. Now here she is saying this is insulting and I wish it were this.” I wonder what it did to a writers’ room back then to have anybody validating someone whose job in the room is to not be validated, but to be a part of the room.
**John:** The tone of recapping was also very specific, because it was love, but it was also snark. We were coming out of Spy magazine, Entertainment Weekly. There was a tone there that was very specific. It was smart. It wasn’t mean, but it was poky.
Did you ever scale back your snark? How did you moderate the tone of these things? A Gilmore Girls, it feels like you’re going to approach that differently than you would approach maybe a reality competition show. Talk to us about that.
**Pamela:** That’s why I didn’t really do many of those. I have a lot of thoughts about snark, having grown up with it, into it, and out of it. I think for me, snark was important. I don’t know that we need snark right now. I think snark at the time was important to say, “Can’t we do better than this? Is this enough? Is this okay?” I think now when we say, “Is this okay? Is this enough?” we say it like we all know that this is wrong and someone isn’t addressing what’s already wrong. I think snark at the time was, we’re just supposed to be fine with this, but we all know that maybe this is not good enough.
I would see sometimes snark taken to a mean place. That was just never the idea. We’re not just here to call this person an asshole. Let’s back it up with some things.
**John:** It’s important to note that recaps are always talking about the characters and not the actors. Is that correct?
**Pamela:** Yeah. Yes. Sometimes that actor blurs. Sometimes you’re like, “This actor is acting in my scene with a character.” I couldn’t recap now. I definitely couldn’t.
When I started working in reality television, where I was a logger, which meant I watched unedited footage of The Bachelor, in the middle of the night, until 5:00 in the morning, and wrote everything I saw, and flagged anything that was maybe interesting to a writer. That’ll mess your brain up.
**John:** I’m sure. It just burns a hole. It’s like doing coverage on scripts, where just like, “Oh god, I’m reading all these scripts. None of this will ever get made. I have to write this detailed synopsis of the things that don’t actually make sense.”
In the case of logging, you’re just looking at all the raw footage and seeing is there any moment that’s worth pulling out here, so that the editors can snip that out, and some assistant editor could keep in a bin to put into the cut. Lord.
**Pamela:** I was a pretty good logger, but I shouldn’t have been a logger, which is probably true to anybody, if you read what I wrote. I had to watch two hours of Lorenzo Lamas on a motorcycle. Not a lot to pull from there.
**John:** No one should have to do that.
**Pamela:** I watched a guy make salmon. I also watched a girl sit alone in a room that they wouldn’t let her leave, waiting on a date that was running late because of time, just because of producers and the show. That wasn’t what they were going to show. I ended up making a fake monologue for her, because I couldn’t stare at this shot of a girl sitting alone at a table, not moving, for two hours of my own life.
**John:** You weren’t allowed to fast-forward through that?
**Pamela:** No. What if she does anything interesting?
**John:** I just feel like a little command-J there and speed through there and just see if she’s now… Wow.
**Pamela:** You’re also supposed to, a little bit, transcribe. Sometimes someone would open the door and be like, “Are you thirsty?” She’d be like, “I’m okay.” If she rubs her nose in a way where you could use that clip later-
**John:** That’s right.
**Pamela:** … that’s it. You’re watching the whole thing. I also got the flu during that. It made me have an idea for a book that I wrote, because I think that’s what my brain does is when my time is being wasted, I start thinking a way out.
**John:** What this could mean, how this could be worthwhile outside of this impossibly not worthwhile thing you’re doing.
**Pamela:** Where that helps in animation is you can get so stuck on a moment that needs to happen that nobody can back all the way up. Also, most of the people in the room shouldn’t back all the way up. A writer can go, “Okay, oh my gosh. I’m just going to take a hundred steps back and look. Why are we doing this? What needs to happen later? Why are we even here right now? We know what needs to happen later.”
I think that is the benefit of a writer in the room with everybody at the intensity and sophicity [sic] level that storyboard artists have to and should be owners of what they’re given, and the director or directors have to be owners of thousands of people asking them questions.
The benefit of your writer, if you know what to do with your writer, your writer just looks at you and goes, “That’ll work,” like in surgery. “That’ll work. This is great. That won’t work, and I’ll tell you why.” A director that can be a little bit flexible with the writer, and think through that without feeling like someone’s yanking your Jenga, that’s a great writer-director relationship, to go, “Thank you. You are my scaffolding. Will my characters be okay through this new shiny thing that I think is really funny?” You just figure out all the iterations so that you can keep all the parts you really loved and get rid of the parts that weren’t working.
I think by the time you get to screening seven or eight, I always think of them as seasons, you’re like, “We have the villain from Season 2 talking to the love interest from Season 4. Now it’s really going. It’s all the things we liked in Season 1. It’s all working.”
**John:** So often, as I come in to work on movies that are going in production or about to go in production or in crisis, it is those conversations where everyone has their opinions. They’re trying to make their movie, but they’re not all the same movie. As the writer, I have to come in and understand which movie each person’s trying to make and get them onto the same page and honor the choices that they’re trying to do and get them to all making the same movie. It’s a writing skill, but it’s very much a psychology skill.
**Pamela:** Definitely.
**John:** It’s being comfortable in the room, making people feel heard, but also leading them to a decision. It’s like a hostage negotiator.
**Pamela:** I always think of it as the therapist. “How does this script feel for you today? Are you up here? Are you down here?” The difficulty is, some of the people in the room are empowered all the way to level 10, and some people know they’re actually level 11 or 12 or 13, but they haven’t told anyone. You can sense as the writer, where you’re like, “Oh, I can help this person’s vision, but it’s ultimately this group’s mandate. How can I make everyone feel good and still be myself? Why did you bring me in? You could hire a therapist, but you actually need someone who can make these characters sing in the way that you’re all hoping for, the feeling you’re looking for.”
**John:** It’s always so tough when you’re trying to deal with the actor and the director, and you realize the actor and director have tension with each other about a completely unrelated thing, that is sometimes a wardrobe thing, and that you’re not going to be able to get an agreement on the two of them on the story point because of this other thing. You just have to accept that and, again, do your best work and try to provide what the movie needs, even if it’s not necessarily solving this crisis moment right in front of you. It’s tough. Sometimes just remembering that it’s hard and it’s not your fault that it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s hard.
**Pamela:** It’s hard because it’s hard. I think what’s unique about animation is you do get a lot of shots on goal, and so you can hear what you heard in the room and what you recorded and all the different takes that you asked, because you couldn’t possibly guess. They’re not in a room together. You don’t often have these actors acting together. You’re putting together does this feel right. You’re like, “Oh, you know what it is, is we rushed this part.”
You can go in the edit bay and record something really fast and put it up in scratch, and see does that work, where you’re just like, “I’m so sorry, Ralph. I didn’t know.” You’re like, “Does that make everything better?” Before you’ve booked everybody and cost all this money, you can try it in these little places. There’s no other world where you get to do that.
**John:** In live action features and television, you can do some little things. You can put in some scratch. You can make some experiments. You’re never going to really get people back. If you’re ADR-ing lines, something’s gone wrong generally, so it’s tough.
**Pamela:** In animation, you have so many more chances to have them. What you don’t want is for them to come in and go, “What happened to this awesome arc I used to have?” They’re like, “We had to throw it out, because it turns out you’re not the main character.” These aren’t things you can say. One shouldn’t, if you want your actor. You want all the talent to be as excited as they should be about the part that they’re in, because they’re so great. How can you keep a lot of it from them, so that they don’t feel, “Oh, it’s my responsibility to get back to what it used to be,” because it isn’t. It just isn’t. Nobody’s working against their talents.
To be able to be in a room and have everybody scratch these characters a lot, which is what we did in Ralph, it was five or six of us doing all the voices, until we were like, “We’re ready to go.” Then an actor could really go forward with these scenes.
In the case of that film, there were some actors who wanted to be in the room together when they acted, and we could make that happen. Then a lot of times, it was just me reading with Gal Gadot, just being like, “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. It’s going to be fine. I’ll just sit here in a room with Gal Gadot and hope she likes it.”
**John:** If you’re in there with Gal Gadot, are you playing Sarah Silverman’s character? Are you doing the voice opposite her?
**Pamela:** Yeah.
**John:** It feels kind of right?
**Pamela:** Yeah, so she has something to play with.
**John:** Fun.
**Pamela:** And vice versa. I also was Gal for Sarah. You want them to be able to look at… They have someone to look at. You’re in a room that has nothing. Exterior ocean day, interior recording studio afternoon. Nobody’s in hair and makeup. Nobody looks like the character they’re playing. I’m trying to be very quiet and not pick up on their mic. I want her to feel as there as she can be, so that we can have a real moment, because a lot of those scenes were, for Vanellope, heart-to-hearts with Gal’s character.
That room is silent. I’ve been in the room recording, where you can’t hear the other room. You’ll say a line three times, and then you just see them all talking, and maybe even fighting, but you can’t hear any of it. You’re just like, “Cool, cool.” They’ll come back and be like, “That was fine.” You’re like, “I know that wasn’t fine.”
**John:** That wasn’t. There was disagreement.
**Pamela:** Someone’s mad at someone. If you’re in that quiet, quiet room with an actor, the nice thing is you get to be together on stage and just make a scene happen. It’s something I could’ve never predicted would happen in my life, but I’ve been in a quiet, tiny room with some really incredible performers and gotten to see what they look like when they’re acting, without anything but themselves.
**John:** Exciting.
**Pamela:** It helps as a writer.
**John:** Absolutely. That experience of just, we’ve written dialog, but how do we actually make this line land, is tough.
**Pamela:** Because they don’t have their body, they don’t have their hair, they don’t have a smirk. They don’t have their fucking gorgeous eyes. They have what they can say.
To get someone still enough to also be screaming in pain sometimes, but still, but not stomping or clapping or anything that we are naturally, like the slapping of thighs that every actor wants to do. You can’t do any of it. It is so limiting, that at least the life vest, whatever I am over them, the buoy, whatever it is, someone else that you can look at and go, “Can I at least say these lines with you?” It’s very helpful.
I find it an honor to be able to be in those situations where they’re also saying the things that you wrote. If they just look at you and go, “Is that right?” As a writer, you very rarely get to be like, “What do you want to say? How can we make this happen?” That’s great.
**John:** It is great. Let’s answer some listener questions.
**Pamela:** Yay.
**John:** We have a couple of little crafty ones I thought might be good. Drew, can you start us off with Denise?
**Drew Marquardt:** Denise writes, “What criteria do you use to choose the sex of a character, mainly supporting characters, when it could go either way? Do you play against type, or do you go conservative?”
**John:** Sex and gender of characters and assumptions about who that doctor, that engineer should be, what the mix is. Pamela, what’s your instinct? If there’s no reason why a character needs to be male or female, what are you thinking?
**Pamela:** My instinct is something I haven’t seen before. That’s where I’ll start, if it can happen. I have also seen where I didn’t do that. I thought I was doing something I hadn’t seen before, and then someone would flag, that character is actually pretty stereotypical, that you’re using to have your new scene in with this other character.
That’s something I learned, where I’m trying so hard to make a protagonist unique that I will accidentally surround them in something you’ve seen before, to help show how unique they are. Let’s call it the first and last time that that was flagged, I really was like, wow, I would’ve never noticed that I had done that without someone going, “What if it’s not this other person in the room that you’ve seen before?”
**John:** We’ve talked on the podcast before about Black judge syndrome, Black lieutenant syndrome. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this on the podcast, but there was a project I was brought in to rewrite, and the main character had a sister who was gone a lot. The draft I received, she was a flight attendant. In the rewrite, I made her a pilot. The producer said, “No, there are no women pilots.” I’m like, “But… ” The female producer said, “There are no women pilots.” I’m like, “I don’t know, I think there might be more female pilots than there are female producers at your level.”
It was a really strange comment, because I thought the pilot thing actually made a lot of sense. It tracked more with this woman’s sense of responsibility and control of her life. I got shut down, so she’s a flight attendant in the final movie. I think it’s always worth pushing against those things.
What I would caution Denise though is look at the choices you’re making. If the choice is going to be distracting in a way that pulls from your story, think about why that is and how do you have it support the needs of that scene, rather than pushing against the needs of that scene.
**Pamela:** It’s also seeing where and when your movie is set, and so that character can be different than default, because theoretically you’re past now. I wrote on a space thing where I wanted an astronaut that was essentially Lizzo.
**John:** Great.
**Pamela:** It was pretty soon after the thousand tampons for Sally Ride and all that stuff of like, “Women in space, what do you need?” Even maybe you can make a suit that is not just one suit for a dude. Even that, in exciting that character, which I was like, “This is where that should be,” there were times when I noticed I was trying to over-explain why that was okay. That wasn’t my job in the script, to pitch why this character was okay. It should just be, and also this character, because we’re in the future, and maybe we’re evolved. We can make space suits in other sizes.
**John:** I was talking with a writer about his script, and there was a police lieutenant. There’s a police detective and a police lieutenant in it. They had a scene in the police lieutenant’s office about the police detective overstepping. I’m like, “I don’t think you can have that scene. I just don’t know that there’s a version of that scene that is not going to feel tropey tropey tropey trope. We’ve seen the TV version of that just too many times. You’re going to have to change. I would say just get it out of that office. See if that lieutenant’s actually the crucial person to be giving that information or if you even need to get that information, because it’s just such a stock moment. It’s not just a stock character. It’s a stock moment to have your cop protagonist be challenged by the authority figure on this thing. You need to find a different way into it.”
**Pamela:** Once you’ve seen puppets do that scene…
**John:** Absolutely.
**Pamela:** Once puppets have done it, you get to retire the scene. You get to say, “Here we are. The puppets have done it. We’re done here.”
**John:** Let’s go to Bradley’s question.
**Drew:** Bradley asks, “What do you do when you realize you’ve grossly underestimated your page count? How can I better construct my outlines so I’m landing closer to my goals? I’m working from a 37-page detailed outline, and the parts I expected to land around page 25 or 30 are actually landing around page 45. At this rate, this spec is going to wind up around 140 pages instead of the 100 pages I planned. In retrospect, I may have overstuffed the outline.
Generally, I find cutting huge swaths of the script to be much harder than cutting an outline, but I’m already midstream, and the story feels like it’s working. What would you do in this situation? Finish the story and then cut, or go back to the drawing board, re-outline, and start over? How can I change my outlines to more accurately gauge how long something will be in a script?”
**John:** Bradley, I think you’re fine. I think something that’s 45 pages, they thought was going to be 30, that’s a really common scenario for me. Pamela, I see you nodding here.
**Pamela:** Yeah, for sure. I was like, “You’ve gone past your outline pages?” I find myself with the opposite problem all the time.
**John:** Oh, really?
**Pamela:** Oh, yeah.
**John:** You’re a big outliner? You outline deep deep deep?
**Pamela:** No. My scripts end up being short short short. I don’t like to outline, which is probably my why scripts end up short. I think what Bradley’s got is a trilogy he doesn’t know about. Write the whole thing, and then figure out, when I’m reading this, when do I think the movie has begun. Probably page 28 if your script’s that long. You’ll find your midpoint is something different than you thought it was. Then a lot of that stuff was just for you to know your characters really well. You’ll figure out, oh, these first 15 pages are actually better as a one-page scene, or this thing happens in a gas station. We learn all of that stuff. I find that to be the fun part.
I don’t like first drafts, but that second draft of, “Oh, here’s what I’m working with. How do I make it look like a real script?” is fun to go, “This is too long. This is too short. This isn’t enough.” I find a lot what I think will be my end of second act is actually the midpoint, because I think that’s going to be huge, but when I make the whole thing, I’m like, “Oh, that wasn’t as big as where I ended up going.” That end of Act 2 is actually that midpoint moment of, “This is actually much bigger than we ever thought.”
If I end up in something that is let’s say 120 pages, I don’t know if that ever happens, but let’s say I get into 118 when I want 99. That’s usually what I find, is I’ve missed where the moment of everybody going, “This is bigger than we thought it was. I have more moments for bad guys closing in than I thought.”
**John:** Like you, I’m by my nature not a planner, and so I’m not a person who does detailed outlines, except on projects where I’ve been required to do it. Then it’s always like, “Oh my gosh, I have this outline. I know what it is, the next thing I need to do. That’s exciting. I know what my daily work is going to be, a little bit more clearly.”
Writing the Arlo Finch books, with those, I would have a sense of like, “Oh, this is what happens in this sequence.” I would think, “Oh, this will be a chapter,” and it’ll be three. I could never accurately predict it.
Now that I have 20 years of screenwriting experience, I have a much better sense of how many pages it’s going to take to do a thing, how many pages it’s going to take to do a moment and land that. You’re probably new, Bradley, and so this is all the first time you’re experiencing it. I would say don’t be so worried about the match of your outline to your script. You’re just trying to figure out how many pages it takes to deliver a moment. It’s not a function of your outline. It’s a function of how you write.
**Pamela:** That’s right, Bradley. You’ll learn as you do this more often, where you’re like, “Oh, that’s going to take me five days. That’s actually three pages. This outline is so long in the beginning, but it’s really only going to be four pages. For you to understand what I’m talking about, I’m going to take three or four pages of outline space to just explain this crazy world that you may not understand, because you haven’t seen it before. It’s not your fault. I have to walk you through how we got to why we’re making this film.”
That stuff probably won’t go in your script, because you have an establishing shot or an opening scene that says all of that, that your outline can’t. Your outline can’t. It’s not for your script. Your outline’s not for your script. Your outline is for other people to let you go write your script.
**John:** Or your outline is for yourself, to remind you what it is… It’s the plan for your plan. If it’s helpful for your process, that’s great. I just often feel like writers get forced into outlines that don’t ultimately serve them well. They get handcuffed to outlines that were never the right plan for making the movie.
**Pamela:** What I do for that, I think of a beat sheet, but I really am making a Claire Danes board of notes and lines and all kinds of things that will eventually all mostly go into the script. You can’t hand that to anyone. When I think of a beat sheet, that’s for me. That’s a cleaned up version of my chaos on the wall. It’s just for me. An outline, just a pitch. It’s a book report of what you’re about to write. I try not to do a lot of dialog in an outline. I will do it if you end up in these script-ment places where you’re doing a treatment script half thing. You can do it in an outline.
What I think is missing a lot, that helps you so much if you can put it in there, is your tone. If a outline reads dry, people are going to be worried about your script. The faster your outline sounds like what you’re writing and how the characters live, the more successful that outline’s going to be. You don’t have to worry about how many pages. It can actually be even shorter for what you show people. You can keep your 40-page outline, but you can give them 18 pages of a tight version of what it feels like to watch your film.
**John:** Exactly. While I have you here, when we were at the Austin Film Festival, I remember sitting in the restaurant, and Craig came down. He was incredibly sick, and then he went back up. You talked through this project that you were pitching. If I get this wrong, correct me.
How you were pitching this, it was all on Zoom, but you would start the Zoom meeting and talk to the executives you were pitching to. They’d say, “At this moment, we’re going to give you a link that you can click through, and you can all watch this prepared video that is the pitch, and then rejoin us on the Zoom.” Is that what you actually did?
**Pamela:** Yeah. This started because we had lockdown. Originally, we were all going to be in a room. I was working with animators in Austin. They were like, “Oh, our travel budget got cut. We’re not allowed to fly anywhere. What is it, two weeks?” I was like, “It’s going to be a little longer than two weeks.” I said, “Let’s duplicate the feeling of pitching in the room.”
I tell everybody this still. I still do it. What’s great about making your own 8 to 13-minute Vimeo pitch is you are controlling it. You only do it once. You get to give it to everyone and say, “Hey, here’s this. You’ve met us all. You think we’re great. Instead of staring at my eyes not looking at you, here’s something where I’ve given you visuals while I’m talking, and I’m showing you what the thing will feel like.
This was Slam, for my graphic novels. I ended in a sizzle reel that I got to make with a talented editor, and show them not just what the pilot would be or why I’m here, or here are other people doing roller derby, and where it was at in the state at the time of lockdown, because they were one of the first sports to come back, because they had COVID protocols and figured out how to do it.
**John:** Roller derby’s a great sport. The community around roller derby’s fantastic.
**Pamela:** It also for a long time was the fastest-growing female sport in the world. It was the first sport to include transgender people. If you identified female, you got to skate. It 100% is a forward-moving sport that is completely do-it-yourself. There’s no big business coming in and changing things. Even within that, there are factions of, “I want to go to the Olympics. I want to be Mamie Thigh-senhower because I’m a kindergarten teacher.” How does a sport move when you’ve lowered an age to 18? All of these things to be able to put into a video.
As I said, there’s no way you’re going to want to be amped enough to watch more roller derby without seeing some roller derby. Being able to put all of that in a pitch that I said, “Just go watch it, however you like to consume your media. We’ll all be here in 13 minutes, and we’ll talk some more.” It just let people come back excited to talk and really helped. I like it a lot.
I learned this from animation, of giving something for people to look at so they don’t have to stare at you and feel bad when they’re writing notes or feel bad if they’re thinking about dinner. They just do. Sometimes I stopped a pitch and been like, “Oh, it’s so late. It’s 5:00 on a Friday, and the sun’s going down behind me. I can already tell I said feminist and all of you shut down. We could just stop right here.” I don’t know, I’m always trying to find a way to humanize the experience.
Being able to like, “We’re talking about something you’re going to see, so go see a little of it. If you like it, we can talk more about what it might be like to make it together,” I love it. It’s a lot of control.
**John:** It’s a lot of control. It’s a lot of upfront work to make that thing. I’ve also been in the situation where I’ve done the exact same pitch to 13 different places, with a slide deck, that Megana was driving the slides as I was talking, so there was stuff to look at. It was a beast. The best version of it, I was just on rails. I felt so bad for the producers who had to sit through me giving the exact same presentation 13 times. A video does feel like it’s more choice.
**Pamela:** I also think what happens when you’re going to have to do it 13 times with producers who are in the room, listening to you do the show, they’re going to have opinions after the fifth, sixth, seventh, what’s next. You find yourself doing even more free work to hone it to what maybe we think the mandate is over here. Then you got to change it again for the next one. You end up rewriting your pitch a lot.
If you can be like, “You’re in or you’re out on this show.” Roller derby is a good example. You’re in or you’re out. You like this or you don’t. Please don’t make me figure out this version and that version, because you can talk to me about, “Can we do this, because that’s more what we’re into?” That’s a conversation, as opposed to me trying to guess whatever you were told that morning is the new thing you’re supposed to be looking for. It’s a lot easier to put something down that doesn’t sell if you know you really gave it your best.
**John:** True.
**Pamela:** I know it is a lot more work at the beginning, but you spend all that time really getting to know the show or the film or whatever. You spend a lot of time doing that to be able to make a presentation.
I have an acting degree. I really was horrible at pitching, until one of my friends was like, “This is the only time we’re asked on stage. You’ve got 20 minutes.” I was like, “I’m making a show. I’m making a show.” When I think of it as the one-person show about this, it is less annoying, because the pitch is not the script. It’s just this one little moment for this little thing. The script is not the film or the show. It’s one little moment to get hundreds or thousands of people on board to make the thing.
Breaking them into these milestones has been helpful, because they’re all hard, and we all want to procrastinate. If you can know that you’re actually thinking while you’re procrastinating, it feels like you’re not working. What you’re doing is giving yourself a minute to go, “Something’s not working, and that’s why I’m not working.”
**John:** The devil’s advocate, I do want to bring up, because we’ve talked about the rise of pitch decks on the show, is that this is an escalation even well beyond pitch decks. If a writer’s being asked to do this on spec, that’s a huge commitment of time and space. This goes beyond.
**Pamela:** No one’s asked me to do it. I’ve had to convince a couple of people, “Let me go show you what it is,” because it is hard to understand. You’re going to make a Vimeo. They do. You’re making a short.
**John:** Do it for something that you control, but not for someone else’s project, not someone else’s IP.
**Pamela:** I’m trying to think if I did it for someone else’s IP. Once. Once. You know what? In this case, I ended up… Whatever. We can talk about that some other day, all our heartbreaks. I’m glad I made that. If I hadn’t gone all the way to make that full-on, “Here is the pitch. This is what it looks like. This is the sizzle reel,” I mean this, it would’ve been harder to not get that gig.
**John:** Let’s do some One Cool Things. I see that you are a prepared cohost. I see two things in the Workflowy here. What’s your One Cool Thing or your two Cool Things?
**Pamela:** It’s One Cool Thing, but one’s an intro to explain why my One Cool Thing, because we’re talking about character. Judd Apatow has some great books about talking to funny people and writers about their process. One of the things that he has said… I’ve never met Judd. I don’t know him. One of the things that he has said he uses to get deeper into both himself and therefore his characters, is self-help books.
Esther Perel, I feel like when I’m telling someone something that’s a podcast on its fourth season, perhaps most of you have already heard of it. However, I will say that what Esther is very great at is getting into why these dynamics are happening between people. That’s the best part of characters. Why are these two or these three or this family or this ensemble of office workers going through this together? What is it where they’re going to step on each other’s insecurities, secrets, and, for lack of a better word, traumas? I think that what she does with such compassion and empathy is allow people the space to learn.
Anyway, she has a brand new season. She’s also doing some Premium subscriber stuff. That’s new, where there’s extra bonus things. If you haven’t listened to Where Do We Begin, usually they’re a one-time session with a client or a couple, and it’s an edited situation. She never meets them again.
**John:** I like that.
**Pamela:** It’s fascinating. You drop right into a crisis moment. She also has a How’s Work. I think it’s called How’s Work, where she does it with business partners, because it’s another relationship that can sometimes need-
**John:** Me and Craig are going to have to sign up for this.
**Pamela:** Oh my gosh, I would listen-
**John:** It would be the best.
**Pamela:** … to you guys. It would be so good. It would be so good. I barely know what Esther looks like, because I don’t want to see.
**John:** It’s always best when you don’t know what a podcast host looks like.
**Pamela:** Her voice is wonderful.
**John:** They’ll have different faces in my brain.
**Pamela:** She’s also, through the pandemic, ended up making a game of cards that no one will play with me, because no one wants to do these questions. I tried to bring this up with some group in some sort of pandemic moment, where I was like, “I have this deck of cards. It’s called Where Should We Begin. It’s just these questions.” My friends were like, “We were already having a conversation.” I was like, “No, I know.” They were like, “We were just talking, and now you’re-”
**John:** You’re making it a thing. You’re making it work.
**Pamela:** “You’re making it a thing. You’re making this work. You’re making me uncomfortable. Why are you asking me about a moment I wish I had shined in?” I was like, “I hear you. I hear you.” I was always that kid who was grabbing those books at the bookstore that were like, 100 questions to ask your best friends or 300 questions about sex and love. I just think that when you’re on a road trip and you’re asking someone next to you, “What did you wish you had won in high school that you didn’t get?” you find out so much about that person.
That’s also the stuff that we’re looking for in these scripts to be like, flashback. “I didn’t win this. This was my dream, my wish, and it didn’t come true, so I’m taking all these coins back.” That’s how we get that stuff of knowing this is a person who’s been many persons before this person.
I think that’s the longest version of a One Cool Thing to say here’s a podcast that’s many years old. If you haven’t heard Esther Perel yet, I highly recommend it.
**John:** I will listen to it. My One Cool Thing is an article from a couple weeks ago. Evan Osnos writing for the New Yorker. It’s about “How to Hire a Pop Star for your Private Party.” These are bar mitzvahs, private parties, by the ultra wealthy, who bring in a pop star to perform at them. We see Jennifer Lopez doing something for a million dollars or whatever.
The story centers around Flo-Rida, who is playing bar mitzvahs and other events. He has one big song he’s known for. He makes good money otherwise. What I really liked about this article and Flo-Rida in it is that he’s not resentful. It’s not a sad story. He’s not doing this because he feels like he has to. He’s doing this out of a sense of professionalism. He’s a really good entertainer. This is a way that he gets to entertain these crowds and give them exactly what they need.
For all of the potentially gross stuff about just the ultra wealthy doing these events, it made me happy and hopeful for a future for some of these artists who are not going to be in the mainstream but still have a venue for making money and making their art.
**Pamela:** Have you ever tried to figure out how much it would cost to make a dream come true musically, pop star-wise, for a party or an event?
**John:** I never have. I do remember back in college, I ran the student activities board, because of course I ran the student activities board. We could bring in events. We could bring in bands and stuff for that. At some point you could just get a list of like, this is how many thousands of dollars each of these groups cost. It was exciting to feel that power, like, “I have a $200,000 budget. I could do these things.”
**Pamela:** My husband once just, not just once, but enough that I knew it was a real thing, said he would love to hear Roxette with a full philharmonicy orchestra for one night. I was like, “I feel like this is an attainable goal.” I was wrong. I was wrong. It’s not an attainable goal. First of all, they were a lot of money. Then I was like, “What if it’s just a string quartet playing in a room? That’s fun. We eat a meal or something.” I learned from people who do this professionally, they’re like, “Why would we learn so many Roxette songs? We’ll never do it again. That’s so much time of ours.” I was like, “That’s fascinating.”
**John:** Wow.
**Pamela:** “I can’t pay for that kind of time for all of you.” I was like, “What about four of you?” They’re like, “Still, no one wants to do this. Where are we going to find a singer? Get a cover band.” That’s not what he wanted.
**John:** No, he wanted Roxette.
**Pamela:** So much money. So much money to make your dreams come true.
**John:** You pay for experiences, not things. That’s what we’ve learned, is that the experiences are what really matter, not material possessions.
**Pamela:** I didn’t have that kind of cash. It was a lot. Not now, but someone at the time could’ve made that happen, but it was not me. I was like, “Oh, I see. Oh, I see.” You get used to it when you’re working in film and television of like, “Here’s this. What do you need? Here, you’re in the Griffith Observatory. Look at all the stars. What star do you need?” You get a bit out of your reality and go, “I’m sure Roxette would love to work with the LA Phil.”
**John:** They’re chomping at the bit.
**Pamela:** No. It’s hard. Good for Flo-Rida. I understand that. It’s like a TED Talk as a musician. You’re like, “I get to come in, perform for people who are… “ That’s what Britney’s Vegas residency was theoretically. That’s what I thought I was doing.
**John:** Absolutely. It wasn’t a hostage situation, which apparently it was.
**Pamela:** Not what I thought at the time. You never know. I’m glad for Flo-Rida, but I do think a lot of people are in bar mitzvah hostage situations.
**John:** That may be the title of the episode.
**Pamela:** Great. Glad I could help.
**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Pamela:** Yay.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. This week on the picket line, I saw two vintage Scriptnotes T-shirts or related Scriptnotes T-shirts that I’d never seen out in the wild before, which was very exciting. It’s always fun to see those T-shirts out there.
You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Listen to Sassy. Pamela Ribon, what an absolute pleasure it is to have you on the podcast and be talking with you.
**Pamela:** Thank you. I like to be the anti-Craig. Whenever you need me again, I will bring anti-umbrage to your podcast.
**John:** [Indiscernible 01:07:43] embrace.
**Pamela:** I love your role. You’re doing it. You’re doing it.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** One of the main reasons I was so excited to have you on this podcast is you are also the host of another podcast, so therefore you’re a podcast professional and know how to do all the things. Talk to us about Listen to Sassy, in which you are going back through issues of Sassy magazine. Start us off, because I can picture Sassy magazine, but I never read it, because I was not the target audience, what was Sassy magazine, and why is it relevant today?
**Pamela:** You probably weren’t the target audience. Perhaps you saw its male spin-off, Dirt.
**John:** Oh, Dirt, okay, yeah.
**Pamela:** That was for you. They were like, “I know you’re reading Sassy.”
**John:** Dudes.
**Pamela:** “Dudes, what about skaters?” Dirt. And Spike Jonze, lots of Spike Jonze. The people I do this podcast with, Tara Ariano and David T. Cole, are professionals all the way back from Television Without Pity, as we were discussing earlier. They have their own podcast things.
During the lockdown, I was on a sad run. I got a text from Tara that said, “My pandemic thing was buying every issue of Sassy magazine ever. Do you want to do a podcast?” I just stopped. I stopped running, and I said, “Yes, yes, a million times yes,” not knowing what I was getting into time-wise, preparedness-wise. It’s a lot of work. I think you know this. Craig doesn’t, but you do.
We take every issue, which I also got my own Ebay-ed version of now. I now have every Sassy. We take every issue, and we break it into first teen life, then pop culture, and then the fashion and the magazine sections. Then our fourth one is, we call slumber party, which are calls and letters. We take the quiz, like a slumber party.
We started with the very first issue, which was 1988. We are at 1990 right now. We’ll be going until ’94 or ’95. I can’t remember when. That was when Sassy changed ownerships and just became a different then. Then Jane Pratt ended up making Jane magazine, which then became the website xoJane, which some of you are now like, “I remember this.”
Back, back, back in the day, Sassy magazine was an alternate to YM and Seventeen. Instead of talking about how to get asked to prom or six ways to wear your makeup, those things are in there, but what it began with really are, here are kids who got pregnant, here is death row, this is what suicide is like, this is what the skinhead movement is doing right now in the ‘90s, and then didn’t pull punches with celebrity interviews, and could be what one might say is the beginning of snark, of that, “Why do I have to love Tiffany or the New Kids, when REM and Keanu Reeves are right here?”
One of the things about going back to Sassy, which starting on Television Without Pity and Mighty Big TV and Hissyfit and Fametracker, one of the things that drew me to that site and writing for Tara and Dave and Sarah in particular was they did a thing where they would, as editors, come in and make little notes inside your recap, of jokes off your joke or inside jokes about all of us. That was what Sassy did.
Sassy made it feel like you’re in a room with all these young people in New York, and we’re all just excited about Michael Hutchence and a Meg Ryan movie we just saw, but Winona Ryder-y, in terms of an older sister who’s telling you, “Here’s some music you might like.” I had an older cousin who was like this for me.
I was in a small town outside Houston. Before then, I was in a small town of Jackson, Mississippi, and no internet. To have a magazine say, “Do you feel not like everyone else? Are you mad about fur? Are you mad about meat? Do you want to know how to be a vegan? Do you want to know how to protest the circus?” There was all that, early activism stuff, of you can be 13 and still change the world, and then also what about John Waters, or what are indie things?
For me, it was Sassy magazine and Rolling Stone magazine were how I figured out there was a world outside the world I was in. I really appreciated the way that they wrote to someone young, to say, “You might be young, but you have agency in your world.” We wouldn’t have Rookie Mag without it. We wouldn’t have a lot of the things that we have now. I think Teen Vogue right now shows a lot of-
**John:** Yeah, it does that.
**Pamela:** Is the newest better version.
**John:** Talk to me though about the advertising in it, because magazines were ad vehicles, and that’s how they made their money was ads, not by the actual cover price of the magazine. What are the ads in there? Are they all makeup? What kind of stuff do you see in there?
**Pamela:** There’s a lot of makeup and vision streetwear and Bongo. Bongo the whole time. My whole teenage years were some girls, but in some short jeans, and me being like, “How can I have this butt?” Instead of it being Guess, which I guess there was a little bit of, it was more counterculture clothing or maybe even… I’m trying to think. There’s still Debbie Gibson in the ads, even if in the articles it’s about not. It’s about B-52s or whatever.
They actually ended up having problems with their advertisers. They lost a lot of advertisers at a certain point, because people were writing in, parents and church people were writing in about, “They’re talking about birth control, and they’re talking about sex, and they’re talking about these things that are not, quote unquote, proper.” We’re currently in the lean years, where you could tell they were having to deal with, how do you get an advertiser, but also stay true to your audience that is very grateful for no bullshit.
**John:** The way that magazines and film and TV writing have overlap, or the way that we always want to portray magazines in film and TV is just so fascinating. They’re always the backdrop we go back to, because it’s a bunch of people in a room who can say smart things, we believe they’re saying smart things, so we make our female characters editors at magazines. We make them young teen journalists or young magazine writers, because it’s glamorous. We believe they can be wearing that fashion if they’re in New York City.
Jane Pratt as a character seems great too. Has there been a fictional version of her on anything, that sense of that magazine founder? I think back to our high fashion people we always make as characters, but has Jane Pratt ever been one of those?
**Pamela:** First of all, I would say that Sex and the City is doing some of that that you’re talking about. So does Girls and all of that stuff. These are aspiring New York friends who are chatting. That’s what Sassy felt like. Skate Kitchen being more the modern version of what I think feels like Sassy magazine. A show that tried to do it, The Bold Type. That was close. That was a modern version of… Even Ugly Betty, if we’re going to get into the weird versions of how glamorous is this world.
What was fun about Sassy wasn’t so much that they were all in New York, because they were like, “I’m in New York, and that’s why I just saw Sting on an elevator.” They sounded like they could’ve come from wherever we were.
They also had contests for the Sassiest girl in America. You just felt like you were part of the magazine. I don’t know there’s any other magazine that made me feel like this came in the mail once a month to say to me, “Hi. How are you? Here’s what you want to see and hear next. Here’s what you’re going to want to talk about when you really are talking to your friends about real things.”
It’s a little difficult to go back. I was doing My Year of Dicks the same time I was doing Listen to Sassy, so I was really reliving my high school years. What’s tough about Sassy is how much Johnny Depp love is in there, which I had 3000 percent at the time. Now, as a other side of Johnny Depp person, you’re having to think about who you were then and who you are now and how much this magazine actually gave me a guide for who I wanted to be and how I wanted to do it. I know I’m not the only one, because you can see it in all these other, particularly female writers of now, who are like, “Sassy made me think I could do this as myself.”
**John:** Big sister energy feels like a good thing to put out in the world.
**Pamela:** Knowledgeable big sister energy.
**John:** Exactly. The podcast is Listen to Sassy. It’s listentosassy.com. People can find all the back-episodes. Pamela Ribon, what an absolute delight to talk with you.
**Pamela:** Thank you so much. This has been fun.
**John:** Great.
Links:
* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0962596/)
* [Listen To Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [Television Without Pity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Without_Pity)
* [Get Real (1999-2000)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212662/) on IMDb
* [How to Hire a Pop Star for Your Private Party](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/how-to-hire-a-pop-star-for-your-private-party) by Evan Osnos for The New Yorker
* [The Secret to Judd Apatow’s Comedy? A Huge Library of Self-Help Books](https://www.gq.com/story/judd-apatow-self-help-book-interview) by Clay Skipper
* [Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel](https://www.estherperel.com/podcast)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
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* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).