Search Results for: outline

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 719 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, when is good enough, not enough? We’ll discuss how you decide whether a particular occasion calls for your very best work or whether you’re wasting your time. We’ll also answer listener questions on packaging, bleeping, and when you know you’ve got it, or you don’t. In our bonus segment for premium members, every year, I come into a new long list of things to do. We’ll talk through what I did last year and why, and my list for this new year.

Craig: So organized.

John: So organized. I try to be.

Craig: Yes. No, that’s you. I don’t remember the last time I made a New Year’s resolution.

John: We’ve talked about it. I used to have not resolutions but areas of interest. Archery would be my area of interest. I would do archery for a bit. I would do Austrian white wines. The thing we do now is, Mike and I make a list of 25 or 26 things that together we’re going to do over the course of the year. We do those because we’re efficient people who knock things off lists.

Craig: It’s terrifying.

John: I strongly recommend it for people. In the bonus segment, I want to talk through what those are because the key is achievable, doable things. Not like, “Do this thing more.” It’s like, “Do this thing twice.”

Craig: Right. Something that you feel like you can actually manage.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s good. Modest expectations.

John: We’ll also talk through a– I did a year-end wrap-up of the stuff I did, including the fact that I played, I think, 42 sessions of D&D.

Craig: Not enough.

John: Not enough.

Craig: No.

John: Never enough.

Craig: No.

John: No. Let’s get you some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Tyler writes, “I believe the origin of bumping this is from older web forums, where threads that have most recently been replied to will appear on the front page, and threads without a reply will fall down and eventually be relegated to page two.”

John: I think Tyler is exactly right. That’s where it comes from.

Craig: I think that sounds right.

John: Yes. Basically, because only the top 10 posts are listed. You go into a thread, you bump it, and then it shows up as a new thing.

Craig: Yes. Once you reply to it, it gets bumped up.

John: Yes.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: Thanks, Tyler.

Craig: Good job.

John: Nick wrote about back issues.

Drew: Yes. We were talking about Craig’s back issues in episode 716. Nick says, “I’m curious if your recent back problem listener is okay on their feet for more than 15 minutes and could possibly use a standing desk. Has Craig experimented with a standing desk at all?”

John: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a standing desk.

Craig: I tried.

John: You tried?

Craig: Yes. It made it worse.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Craig: Well, because my problem is standing.

John: Oh.

Craig: I recently received a little bit of treatment, feeling better. The thing about back issues is that it’s one of those things where everybody has advice.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Everybody. Everybody’s back is different. Everybody’s problem is different. It’s just part of growing up. You know what part of growing up is? Part of growing up is getting back problems, giving back problem advice, realizing it doesn’t matter or work, and continuing to have back problems. You have to get to the other side of the advice stage. That’s when you know you’re really getting old.

John: Yes. I use a standing desk. I like it. I try to move between sitting and standing over the course of the day. I will do unimportant stuff like emails and all that kind of stuff. I’ll just do all that standing up, which is just great. Then what’s nice is psychologically, then if I’m lowering the table and sitting down to actually do real writing work, it feels like a change of state.

Craig: [crosstalk] Like you’re locking in. My version of that is to walk. Walking makes my back feel better always. I’ll take a long walk. Walking is also good because that’s where I could figure out what it is that I exactly want to write. There’s something about the movement that is– My thing is shower, walk, something that gets me out of my brain and therefore into my brain, if that makes sense. Standing is uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of people in our production office that the standing desk is now considered a chair. It’s too easy. Now there are people with the treadmill desk. There are people with the bouncy ball, keep yourself balanced desk. I just want to slap everyone.

John: I think the bouncy ball thing largely went away. You don’t see that as much. Are you still seeing it in your offices?

Craig: As I walk down the hall towards the elevators, there’s one room that has a full Pilates reformer in it.

John: Incredible.

Craig: Yes. Now that may be some sort of punishment.

John: Yes. It does look like a rack. [crosstalk]

Craig: I don’t meet out punishment on my production, but I know that somebody surely does. That may be where the bad people go.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna famously had a walking desk for a while. She had the treadmill on her desk. I think that got incorporated into Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think literally, they may have taken her standing desk and just moved it over to one of the chairs there.

Craig: It is both admirable and frightening. There is something too efficient.

John: There is. We have a treadmill in the gym. I will set it at a low speed and just do very unimportant, email-y work on my iPad. We have a little keyboard that’s sitting up there. I will do some stuff like that, but I don’t have it on my main desk.

Big follow-up here, so this would be more of a topic. On episode 716, we had Mike Makowsky on. One of the things he talked about was how much he wanted text blocks and screenplays to be exactly even on the left-hand and right margins.

Craig: Yes, which is startling because that’s a neurosis even I don’t have.

John: Several readers wrote in to say that they felt seen. I think we have a little more of a conversation about things we said in that episode.

Drew: Jordan in Australia writes, “I just wanted to say to Mike that he’s not alone. I have an almost overwhelming compulsion to make the lines look neat on the page. Like Mike, though, I don’t consider it a problem because it makes me focus on the exact function of each word and line rather than accepting something as good or close enough that I can leave it. If push comes to shove and I think the result is worse or that something really just can’t be changed, I’ll put up with widows and orphans. Otherwise, I like that this compulsion helps with focus and attention, especially given my ADHD.”

Craig: It strikes me that when it comes to mental behaviors, people feel a need to justify all of it as if it mattered. It’s like saying, “I have red hair.” Let me give you the reasons why I think it’s actually okay. You don’t need to because it’s there. It’s not changing. That’s what you are. You’re a redhead. This is how your brain works. Don’t even bother justifying it. Let’s say it’s not helpful. Let’s say it’s actually harmful. So what? That’s how your brain works. We’re not perfect.

John: Yes. The last word of this response was ADHD. I want to talk about the medicalization of behavior, which I think is an aspect of what we’re going to be talking about here today, too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Go for it. Chris in Germany.

Drew: “I was blown away by the part where Mike had to explain his writing OCD. I have the exact same experience when I write. To me, these even blocks of text provide some sense of comfort through stability and order. It’s more important to me that the single lines in a block are the same relative to each other. Blocks on a page can differ. I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake than have the consecutive lines at different lengths. This sometimes blocks me, and it surely always slows me down. Best practice is not to look at the screen while writing. I really wanted to let Mike know that he’s not alone here.”

John: Again, I want to be supportive and say, what works for you works for you. Also, when you say, “I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake,” that’s making me wonder whether it is actually really working for him. That’s the balance I’m trying to find here.

Craig: I don’t know why I didn’t mention this to Mike, but I wonder if, for Mike, Joran, and Chris, just going into alignment and setting it to the justified thing, where it automatically makes it all the same length.

John: Yes. I wonder if that might be– It’s not typical screenwriting, but it also–

Craig: No, but neither is this.

John: Neither is this.

Craig: You wouldn’t have to think about it so much. It would just do it automatically. I’m sure that is a setting, justified.

John: Justified, yes.

Craig: Justified. It’s interesting because we get a lot of acronyms for these things. People, again, they want to assign a problem to this. It’s ADHD, it’s OCD. I’m not saying that Joran doesn’t have ADHD or that Chris maybe doesn’t have OCD, but that’s not relevant. It’s not necessary to pathologize it, nor is it necessary to celebrate it. It just is.

John: Yes. You can acknowledge it without pathologizing it.

Craig: If you get to a place where you think, “I wish I weren’t doing this,” now we’ve got a thing. Now think about how to stop. If you’re not in that place and if you don’t know how to do this otherwise, I think I’ve mentioned on this show before, if I lost my hands, I probably would have to quit writing because I think through typing.

John: You think with your fingers.

Craig: That’s how I write, through typing. I can understand this limitation that people feel.

John: I want to just acknowledge the synchronicity, the rhyming between justify and justify. These writers want to justify their margin, but they also want to justify their actions.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: That’s a theme.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: Let’s wrap up with Olivia here.

Drew: “I sincerely enjoyed Episode 716. However, I did want to flag something that kept coming up. Being OCD was said at several points during the podcast when referring to the look of a screenplay page. As a writer with OCD, I feel an obligation to speak on this. OCD is a deeply debilitating mental illness without treatment. For someone with OCD, the idea of needing a script page to look a certain way would feel like a life and death decision, not just an aesthetic choice or process preference.

Also, there is so little accurate OCD representation in the media that I feel it is incredibly important for writers listening to be aware of how something like I’m so OCD or you’re so OCD can come off. Not trying to censor anyone, but I think it’s a conversation worth having.”

John: I want to first acknowledge where Olivia is right, is that per the DSM, OCD can be a debilitating, pervasive life or death situation. It can feel like it is a life-or-death situation. That’s not quite what Mike was describing there in the experience. I don’t want to diminish or trivialize a person who has a diagnosis of OCD, and that was never our intention behind this.

Craig: No, but nor would any reasonable person think so. I say this as somebody who has a kid with actual diagnosed OCD, medicated, and so on and so forth. OCD is a pretty broad diagnosis. For a lot of people, it’s the O that is far more common than the C. We think of compulsive behavior as a hallmark of OCD, but obsessive thinking, cycling thoughts, is just as prominent, if not more so. There are people that have very severe cases and people who have very mild cases.

It is a useful term to describe behaviors that we feel we are not necessarily in control over, or thoughts that are pervasive and unwanted, or cycling. There is no value. I say this as somebody who is deeply invested in promoting both the destigmatization of mental health issues and support for mentally ill people. I say this as a parent who’s gone through this. This doesn’t help. This whole thing of, “You’re not allowed to call yourself or your problem this, you have to be as sick as I am to call yourself that,” does not help.

There are people who have mild schizophrenia. It doesn’t help to tell them you’re not, or to even say, “Stop saying schizophrenic when you really mean splt–.” It doesn’t help.

John: It’s a whole different podcast to go into when it comes to the DSM and things that are in there. Whenever you talk about there being a spectrum of something that always creates an issue where resources are being directed towards people who have very mild occurrences of a thing versus severe occurrences of a thing, that’s way beyond the scope of this podcast. We are a podcast about words and language. I want to talk about the words and the language here because, really, what I think we’re getting into is that there’s a DSM definition of OCD, but there’s been semantic drift.

The meaning has changed and broadened, which is a very natural thing that happens in language. The word nostalgia used to mean PTSD. It used to mean–

Craig: The pain, algia, is pain.

John: Yes. That changed over time. Nostalgia doesn’t mean that same thing anymore. It’s understandable why the term OCD, which had a stricter clinical definition, has broadened to mean picky, fastidious, that kind of thing. It’s in that same space as that original idea, but it’s not that same original idea.

Craig: Exactly. I don’t think it would be helpful for somebody with clinical depression to hear someone go, “Oh my God, I woke up today, the weather was so bad. I was so depressed when I saw the weather outside.” It would be unhelpful for them to scold that person and say, “You’re not depressed. This is what depression is.” We all know. We actually know. We know the difference. The thought, I guess, is that somehow your validity as somebody suffering is being diminished or stolen, like stolen valor. It is not.

Nobody is diminishing anything by this. That’s why, by the way, you see what I just did? I used the phrase clinical depression. We figured out a way in language to discriminate and get it back. Clinical OCD might be a nice way to describe what you have if you have diagnosed, serious obsessive compulsive disorder, per the DSM, per your psychiatrist, maybe you’re on meds, as opposed to somebody who’s like, “I just get very OCD when I see a pillow out of place on the bed.”

Olivia, I hope you don’t think I’m being too hard on you here. This is important because I actually want people to feel free to share their understanding of their mental health without feeling like they have to hit some target that someone else is setting. I don’t think you would want somebody with even more severe OCD than you telling you, “You’re not really OCD.” That’s the problem. Anyway, I’m going to suggest the use of the word clinical.

John: Clinical is very helpful here. As we’re having this conversation, I’m realizing that over the course of these 15 years of doing this podcast, there have been terms in which we’ve been such sticklers on trying to defend, like begs the question, where we feel like, “Okay, we’re losing the actual meaning of begs the question by–”

Craig: I will never, ever, ever quit.

John: I hear that there is something inconsistent in our approach to certain terms that we’re trying to do that.

Craig: That’s just fun.

John: That’s just fun.

Craig: That’s just fun. Did you see BJ Novak? I don’t know who it was that he corrected. Maybe it was Andy Cohen. He was on a New Year’s Eve broadcast or something, and I think it was Andy Cohen, said something about there are going to be less rats in New York and [crosstalk].

John: He said fewer rats.

Craig: It’s just gorgeous.

John: It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Way to go, BJ.

John: Another term which occurred to me was that narcissist used to have an actual definition.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: If we can’t say narcissist– you could say clinical narcissist. Someone who has a definition of narcissist, so helpful for distinguishing between just behavior we find [unintelligible 00:15:02].

Craig: Now that I’m thinking about it, we do this with every single mental illness diagnosis. We call people schizophrenic when they’re not, depressed when they’re not, anxious when they’re not. PTSD is now thrown around wildly, wildly. “I went to a restaurant. Oh my God, I saw PTSD from that waiter. He brought me the wrong thing.” It is analogizing. It’s instantly analogizing, because it’s talking about extreme forms of everyday mental processing. Yes, narcissistic, histrionic, dramatic. I’m now struggling to think of one that we don’t use.

Drew: Hysterical.

John: Hysterical.

Craig: Hysterical. You’re really not supposed to use that one. All of it. Every single word.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes, too. There’s a sociologist, Nick Haslam, who coined concept creep, which is basically how you have a concept that just the edges of it bleed out into ways that– Trauma is one of the things he talks about there, which had a definition, which now we understand it’s broadened.

Craig: [laughs] Every time someone says trauma, I now think of the Jamie Lee Curtis supercut of her saying trauma. Have you seen this?

John: I know. It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: It’s from Halloween? Where was it from?

Craig: It was from Halloween. When she was doing the press tour for Halloween, she was talking about how her character had to deal with–

John: Such a choice to tip to you and the trauma.

Craig: Yes. She went, “Trauma,” and then it’s just her saying the word trauma in 80 different– It was the Madame Morrible Wicked Witch of its time. Do you know what that is?

John: No, I don’t know Madame Morrible Wicked Witch.

Craig: Oh my God, you know what this is.

John: Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Just incredible. Love it so much. Let’s get to our marquee topic here. We can turn away from formatting on the page to the actual words themselves because so often on our show, we’re talking about getting things just right and making sure everything’s perfect. We do the three-page challenges where we’re really obsessing about the word choices, how we’re seeing the world through the words you’re choosing to put on the page.

Craig, last week, you were talking about there’s times where you will hold off delivering something because something’s just not right. You know it’s not right, and you don’t want it out there in the world when it’s not right until it meets your goals and expectation. I think the expectation there could be that in a perfect world, everything you write would be flawless. You would give them a flawless version of everything. That goes from the senior shooting this afternoon to that email to your landlord, but it’s not a perfect world. There’s not a limited time.

In many cases, it just doesn’t matter whether it’s the perfect version or not. I want to just try to find a rubric for figuring out when is it worth perfecting a thing, to finalize a thing, to polish a thing, and when is good enough, and making those choices.

Craig: I’m going to use a word now for mental health.

John: Which is?

Craig: Triggered.

John: Oh, sure. Yes.

Craig: Which I am not. Extending the use of that word, I have perfectionist issues.

John: I think you do.

Craig: I struggle with this all the time. I do know the difference between there’s something fundamentally wrong with this, and this is in a place where it’s on the putting green. It’s going to get into the hole, but I actually want people now to look at this, to gather opinions and thoughts, because it’s generally what it’s going to be. I do know the difference between that, but I will struggle writing emails, texts. I can’t leave the broken word in there. It’s a problem for me.

John: I hear you. I want to go to your process here because you talked about how Jack, who works with you, she’s your accountability buddy. Basically, you’re sending her pages. My expectation is, you have a relationship where you can send her things knowing it’s not quite perfect, because it’s part of the process is her looking at it to make a thing better.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Same with Drew for me. It’s like, I will send stuff to Drew so he can take a look.

Craig: I won’t read the editorial commentary, but a few typos. Page six, you write in here twice in one sentence. Page nine, bottom. “Aileen about putting the bandage.” That doesn’t make any sense. Aileen. Bottom. She with two Es. Bottom, “Tracking the sound as rises up the–” That’s horrible.

John: Yes. She’s a safe person for you to share it with.

Craig: I don’t proofread for typos. It’s actually not bad for– It was about 16 pages.

John: Sure.

Craig: Actually, a typo here and there does not flip me out. For scripts, it’s more about a quality thing.

John: Yes. Example from my own life. My daughter’s in college, and so she’ll sometimes send me a link to an essay she’s written for her class. I’ll read through it, and it’ll be good. It’s solid. She’s gotten to be a really good writer. It’s fascinating to watch how much better a writer she is year after year after year. It’s a huge improvement. I’ll notice that, “Okay, you missed this argument, or that point didn’t really land, or that conclusion’s not entirely supported.” She’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” and I was like, “But does it actually matter? Because one person is going to be reading this essay.”

Her instructor’s going to be reading this essay, and no one’s ever going to read the essay again. At some point, you have to make a decision. Is it worth the extra hour of time to improve this essay on a thing you don’t care about that no one will ever actually see again, or should she be doing her work on the other nine assignments she has? Those are choices a person makes in their real life, and a person who was so perfectionist and obsessed about making every last little thing as perfect as it could be would drop other balls because they’re spending too much time on one thing.

Craig: That’s the real problem. There’s a livable, supportable, quasi-perfectionism because there is no perfectible you, as Dennis Palumbo says, where you value doing your best. I would put it under that category. Yes, if I can take another 30 minutes, and I have 30 minutes to make this better, I should. That’s a good value to have. If you find yourself incapable of letting something go to the detriment of other things, well, then you really aren’t involved in modest perfectionism. You’re just doing poorly because a bunch of things aren’t going to get done or aren’t going to get done well.

What is very hard for me, I will tell you what makes me panic the most, and I have explained this many times to the people I work with, and it is particularly an issue when I’m directing. If I feel like I don’t have a sufficient amount of time to do my best work, I then start to feel like I’m dying because the gap between what I can do and what I’m allowed to do is too big, and I feel sick. If I have the time I need, and it’s not an unlimited amount of time, hit my satisfaction thing, and I can’t explain why that is. Probably has to do with some trauma [chuckles].

John: Yes, but you also have 30 years of experience of knowing yourself, knowing your habits, knowing how your work gets done. That’s reasonable. I get that, and I feel that too. There’s times where I’m not panicking because I know I can actually do this in the time, and if the time suddenly becomes too short, then I do start to worry.

Craig: It is also interesting how if you know going into something, before you even start contemplating what you want to do, that there’s only this much time. That’s great.

John: Weekly assignments. We’ve definitely done that, where it’s like, “I know I can’t fix everything. I can move this from this to that.”

Craig: Then it’s just, “Hey, let’s do– Everything’s getting better. We’re just making it better as we go,” and everyone will be shocked by how much you can get done anyway. I don’t panic over those situations, but this is a hard thing to figure out. I wonder whether it’s, “Okay, is good enough good enough,” or is it really about learning how to manage and prioritize the time you have to deliver the quality you can?

John: Yes, that’s fair. Let’s talk through some– I call it a rubric, but basically some decision points you’re going to have about whether you’re giving everything you have to this thing or you don’t need to be doing that. Audience, public versus private. We just went through this with Jack because it’s a private audience. You’re not embarrassed by typos in anything you’re sending to Jack because that’s the relationship you have. She’s meant to be looking at that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: If you’re sharing it with one close friend, you may be a little more concerned about those typos, but you’re not going to obsess about them. If something is public, it really does represent you out there in the world. We’ve often talked about how this is the manifestation of you out there in that space, and you want to make sure that it’s the best version of that. That’s why we encourage people to put their work out there so people can read it and do stuff. At a certain point, if you have older stuff of yours that isn’t really you now, pull it away.

Craig: Yes, if you can, and if you want to. We’ve talked about the illusion of intentionality before, the presumption that everything we see on screen is there because it’s exactly what we wanted to be there, when in fact, half the time, it’s what we got. That can haunt you because if you do put something out and you just didn’t have enough time and it wasn’t quite what you wanted, no one will know or give a damn. They will assume that’s exactly what you wanted, and you will be judged by it, and it will last until the end of written history. [laughs]

John: One of the actors, when he had a rivalry with Connor Storrie, there’s videos that came up. He became famous very quickly.

Craig: I saw this video.

John: He was a kid. It was this young little kid who’s like, “I’m an actor boy, da, da, da. I’m going to be famous and all that stuff.” What I appreciate about him is that he’s like, “Yes, I could have taken him down, but I’ve learned to love that kid.”

Craig: That’s the most healthy thing of all. By the way, that video was adorable. Of all the videos that you could make as a– he seemed like what? Maybe he was 14 or something.

John: Yes, or even younger, maybe.

Craig: Yes, 12. Of all the videos you could make of yourself at 12 or 13, that was the least objectionable, most wholesome, cute, and correct prediction of what you might be when you grow up. Oh my God, I’ll tell you, that hockey show, now my wife is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: Of course.

Craig: Jessica is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: My one cool thing that’s a spoiler, let’s just say there’s a woman who goes through and does– She’s a cinematographer who does breakdowns of it, and it’s phenomenal.

Craig: This hockey show is–

John: It’s great.

Craig: I’m putting it on my list.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say–

Craig: I’m just thinking about them listening to this, going, “Hockey show?”

John: Hockey show.

Craig: “Hockey show, Craig? There’s a name for it. It’s a phenomenon.”

John: The hockey show.

Craig: “Dude, we didn’t call your show Mushroom Show.” Sorry. What’s it called again? He did Rivalry.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s a hard thing to say.

Craig: Rivalry is a tough word.

John: It’s a hard word.

Craig: Rivalry.

John: English doesn’t do that a lot.

Craig: L to R is tough.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say, what stage is it? Is it a proof of concept versus a final? One of the things I admire so much about Mike Birbiglia, and this is true of a lot of stand-up comics, is they will just test and try material all the time. He’s going out, and he’s doing a stand-up, he’s trying new jokes, he’s seeing how they work, he’s recording the show, and he’s hearing, “What did I do? What was the reaction?” That is so important.

He’s not afraid to try a joke that’s not really formed, so he can figure it out. Even today, we have video cameras up here because we are testing a proof of concept to see how we’re going to do this show on video, if we ever decided to do it on video. No one’s ever going to see this. This is just a proof of concept.

Craig: Great.

John: I love that.

Craig: I didn’t put my face on this morning.

John: You didn’t have hair and makeup this morning.

Craig: My grandmother used to say that. “I have put my face on.”

John: There’s a product we’re launching next month or two.

Craig: Cosmetic?

John: Exactly, a cosmetic product. This is for you.

Craig: It’s a concealer.

John: It’s a software thing we’re launching. In trying to figure out how to do this, we were really clear about what is the scope of the minimum viable product. What is the simplest version of this that is useful, that we can see, that we can test, because we know that there’s things we’re not going to understand until we actually have a thing that we can try.

Craig: It interacts with the people on the other end of the relationship.

John: Third criteria here is context. What is the expectation of the person getting the message, or on the other side of this thing? I would stack this up from lowest expectation to highest expectation. A text message, your expectations of perfection in a text message are not as high.

Craig: They’re incredibly high.

John: For you, they are. For an email, incredibly high.

Craig: Incredibly high.

John: A tweet or a social blog post.

Craig: I don’t do those anymore.

John: A script, much higher.

Craig: The highest.

John: I would say for a book, even higher, higher, higher, because the number of times we had maybe six different proofreaders of the book and different editors going through it, we still missed the Star Trek deck versus bridge, but we got rid of so many typos. People who have the galley copies, even after we went through a bunch of those things, we still found typos in those.

Craig: Those will be worth more.

John: Absolutely, collector’s items.

Craig: Yes.

John: I think as you go up this chain, unless you’re Craig, the expectations of perfection increase.

Craig: Don’t be like me.

John: Don’t be like you.

Craig: Don’t be like me. I do think about this sometimes, how it is a waste of time, but also it makes me feel good.

John: Yes, I get that. After we get through the criteria, I want to go through the pros and cons of maybe you should obsess a little bit. I don’t know. Obsess is a loaded word, but maybe you should focus in on a little–

Craig: No. We can use these words. I’m giving us permission.

John: Focus in on these things. What we’re reading off of the Workflowy has a very low expectation of polish. There’s just typos all over it, which is fine.

Craig: It’s pretty darn good, though. I have to say the Workflowy generally is really good.

John: Some of those words missing. No one’s going to read it other than we’re going to look at it.

Craig: Right. I never look at this and think, “Oh, John doesn’t care. It’s sloppy. Drew doesn’t know how to spell.” It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s an outline.

John: It’s an outline.

Craig: It’s fine. I think this is a perfectly good way of doing things.

John: You just said, “Is it worth it?” That, I would say, is the cost-benefit analysis. If you were to refine and optimize this thing, is the value you would get out of that time and effort really worth it for doing the work? The flip of that is you might satisfy this. You might compromise if the expected outcome is lower than what you would have put into it. It’s basically like you’re spending mental money to do a thing or time to do a thing, and is it really worth it to try it?

Craig: One of the interesting things about our brains is that we apply values to these things that are actually disconnected from reality.

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: I think, “Okay, I look at an email, it’s a mess, it must be correct to a point that I decide, ‘Ah, this is good.'” Somebody else out there would look at it and say, “Oh, no, there’s 12 more layers of good that need to occur. To that person, my value system is broken, and also, I just don’t care enough. When I got to the point where I thought it was correct, I believe that I indeed had exhausted everything. I’d done everything I could to make it great, and neither I, nor the person who wrote the shabby email, nor the person who wrote the hyper-perfect email are correct.

It is all disconnected from any metaphysical value. It is just perception. It’s just what makes our minds go click happy. There are people whose minds never go click happy when they correct a typo, ever. Most people commenting on YouTube videos don’t seem to care.

John: Absolutely. Mashing keyboard, yes.

Craig: Yes. What’s the famous one? How is Babby Made? Do you know that one?

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: How is Babby Made? Here’s how babbies are made. I try to just keep it in the realm of either I feel good, or I don’t feel good. I don’t really understand why my feel-good is set where it is. I assume it’s some combination of just innate mannerisms and trauma. I’d love that.

John: There are times where I realize I have spent half an hour on this email that a person will spend 10 seconds reading.

Craig: Oh, yes. I don’t care because that time feels good. It feels good. Yes, there’s just something about it, but that’s why we’re writers.

John: That’s why we’re writers.

Craig: Honestly.

John: We shouldn’t put everything down in the trivial email category. On this show, I think we’re constantly talking about how important it is actually to perfect and polish the scripts that you’re doing to deliver. That’s why we obsess of the three-page challenges. Yet there are still things, even in the course of a 120-page script, that are probably not worth obsessing over and perfecting to a degree that there may not be any benefit to that tertiary character who appears in one scene.

Is that exactly the right name for them? Is it a name that we’re not even going to actually hear a person say aloud? We could spend another hour figuring out the better name for it, but is it going to improve the final product?

Craig: Things like that come down to, “All right, this is the tiniest pebble in my shoe. Do I need to unlace my shoe, take my shoe off, get it back on?” No, unless I’m about to walk a long time, in which case it’s going to make me insane. Sometimes a name is like a pebble. Then I’m on page 30, and that person comes back, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m typing this stupid name again. I can’t. This name is not right. That’s not who they are.”

We can only do what we can do because what we do, as writers, creative artists who are building stuff out of nothing but words, is a mental exercise that is deformed and then beautifully reformed. It’s a mess in there. It’s a mess. If the biggest problem we have is justifying the margins, dwelling a little bit too long, I guess what I’m saying is, if it’s bothering you that it’s not good enough, fix it. If it’s not, don’t. I think that’s really what it comes down to.

John: I’m going to put an asterisk there because if a trivial thing is bothering you so much that you’re not getting work done, that you’re actually not going to be able to be a screenwriter, then there’s something to change there.

Craig: Then you need therapy. It’s not going to happen because you go, “I shouldn’t be bothered by this.” Yes, you shouldn’t be.

John: John’s the wrong name for this character.

Craig: Yes, but you are. What are you going to do?

John: Last criteria, I would say, which is closely related to cost-benefit, but stakes. How much does it actually matter? If it’s the best version, the worst version, does it matter at all? What is the upside of success? What is the cost of failure? For a lot of things, it’s incredibly low, and yet some emails actually are very high stakes. You understand why you’re putting all your effort into it. A text to my brother, it’s just like the stakes aren’t that high.

Craig: The stakes are not that high. I think sometimes of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is worth rewatching. It’s one of the greatest pieces of video that exists, as far as I’m concerned, because it is a living document of a moment that changed the world. It’s a presentation. Basically, it’s just a big PowerPoint, is really what it is. It’s a fancy PowerPoint, and it’s spot on. When he needs something to pop up, it pops up. It has been timed out. He has planned it out. He has his stuff memorized.

It is thought through down to the tiniest bit, and it works great. Then, if you would, after you watch that, watch the video of Elon Musk introducing the Cybertruck in which he insists that the glass is shatterproof and bulletproof, and has a guy throw a heavy weight at it, and it absolutely shatters the glass.

John: That is incredible.

Craig: Did they not try that first? It is so sloppy. When the stakes are high, perfect it.

John: Let’s talk in that general sense of over-optimization or over-satisficing. Satisficing, I’m using this being like, “It’s good enough.”

Craig: What is satisficing?

John: Satisficing, you never ever heard that term?

Craig: No.

John: Satisficing is basically choosing the first acceptable alternative.

Craig: Oh, it’s a blend of satisfy and suffice.

John: Oh, you hadn’t heard of satisficing?

Craig: No.

John: I think satisficing is a really good word. You do it all the time without realizing it. It’s like, “Which chips do you want?” “The first one that works, do.” I’m often doing that on a menu at a restaurant.

Craig: You’re satisficing.

John: I’m like, “That’s good enough. I’m going to be happy with it.” I might be happier because I didn’t spend a bunch of time worrying about the choice.

Craig: Got it. Satisficing, I like that.

John: I think there’s a danger to satisficing when you shouldn’t. Let’s talk about over-optimization first. This thing’s all what I’m thinking, but you can add to it. We said you might miss opportunities because you’re so busy futzing with something. Basically, you’re not doing other work. You’re missing out on other chances.

Craig: If you are in a spot where, think of the time you have, think of the goals, think of the stakes, plan it, you know you need a certain amount of time to do this, and this is really important, don’t eat into that time.

John: No.

Craig: If you have extra time and you want to sit there and–

John: Love it.

Craig: Great, go for it, but you got to know your time.

John: You may simply never finish it. Time may just extend out forever. You can also burn out on a project because I feel like you have a certain amount of time in which your brain is willing to commit itself to a project, and if you’re just stuck in the middle of it for too long, you can just burn out.

Craig: It’s true. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show. Alec Berg and I were talking once. He was cleaning out his place when they were moving, and he found this box of these old scripts that were printed out from when he had just started in the business, so 1991. It was like he didn’t remember any of it. He was reading another him.

John: That’s great.

Craig: He read it, and his thought was, “This is not anywhere near as good as I am now. There’s a freedom to it. It is unburdened by the curse of knowledge, self-expectation, perfectionism, the echoes of failure.” Until you get burned, you don’t know what burned is.

John: There’s a self-defense you can write into your things because you know all the things that are coming, so you’re anticipatory doing stuff.

Craig: Yes, and because you know what it feels like to write something that wasn’t good enough, so you can’t let yourself do that. If you go too far down that road, then you can paralyze.

John: I think one of the real issues with over-optimization is you can get locked in on a bad idea. You might have written a scene so beautiful and so perfect that you can’t touch it again when a note comes that you actually do have to address. You wrote this thing for a location that you no longer have. It can be so tough because you’ve spent so much time and energy on it. You’re so invested in this one version of it.

Craig: Yes. I get caught in loops sometimes. Recently, I got stuck in a loop on something and wrote and then realized, “Okay, this doesn’t belong here. I’m moving it to a different place,” for an episode, in fact. I was lost in that loop for a while. There is a slight panic that kicks in of, “Uh-oh.”

It’s like driving across country. You have plenty of time. Let’s say I’m going to give you a week to drive across the country. On any given day, you can either drive all day or you can not.

Along the way, you have to sometimes experience those days where you pull over, and you don’t drive much. Then you just know on some other days, “Here we go, wake up, don’t stop.” That’s part of the sweet misery of what we do.

John: This last point with over-optimization, I’d say it’s really perfectionism in general. You may be trying to control things that are out of your control. I definitely see that with screenwriters. They will make something so flawless and perfect because they actually want this movie that’s in their head to exist in the world. You have to recognize that that’s not within the scope of your power. You’re doing everything you can to communicate what this vision is you have for the movie, but you cannot will it into existence just through the words you’re typing and through all the refining you’re doing there.

Craig: It’s absolutely true. There’s two mes. There’s the me that writes the script, who is fastidious and a perfectionist. Then, when I’m directing, at some point, I’ll go, “Why don’t we do this?” and then the script supervisor will say, “Just in the script.” Then I’ll say, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Actually, that would be better because I’d already–” but the me there, it’s like I didn’t write it. It’s a disconnection.

John: Director Craig is constantly compromising. There’s always shots that are on your shot list you’re never going to get to.

Craig: That’s so true. It’s so true.

John: I would say give writer Craig a little of that grace.

Craig: No, writer Craig is better than director Craig because writer Craig thought it all through. Director Craig needs to pay more attention, just like all directors do, to the script. That’s really what happens is that I end up thinking to myself, I’m doing the thing that would make me angry that directors would do, where they would focus on everything in front of them and forget about the bigger picture or all the details on the page.

John: Except that director Craig is dealing with not just what writer Craig delivered, but also the realities of what’s in front of the camera and behind the camera.

Craig: That is all true. That is all true. You know what? Maybe Craig should just give himself a break.

John: I think that’s what we’re coming down to.

Craig: All right.[00:39:38]

John: Let’s talk about the dangers of oversatisfying, because, in the initial example, I was talking about how–

Craig: Oversatisfying.

John: Sometimes it’s like, “That’s good enough.” I was talking about how an essay you’re writing for a class that you don’t care about, that you’re never going to read again, maybe it’s actually not worth perfecting. If you were to do that too much, that’s just laziness, basically. You might lose your sense of taste. You’re not used to seeing your best writing, so you might not always be able to hit your best writing. You might forget what your best writing even looks like.

Craig: You may also find yourself getting passed by people that are not faster than you. It’s just that you’re not running as fast as you can, and this will become an uncomfortable feeling. When I say passed, I don’t necessarily mean, oh, they’re going to make more money or something, but they’re suddenly achieving things that you wanted to achieve that you’re not because there is value in pursuing the best you can do. You won’t get there. Pursuing it as a value is a positive thing. If you have the time to make the essay better, even if it doesn’t matter, take the time to make it better. It will make you better.

John: I think that was one of the good things about blogging when I was doing it more often, is that I was basically refining and perfecting those arguments, and it’s learning how to think and how to express those ideas. Writing is exercise, and you’re building mental muscle strength to do that. We’ve also talked about how you might say like, “Oh, it’s private,” or “No one’s ever going to read this,” but you don’t really know that. Things will be out there in the world, and it’s still going to be potentially seen by somebody. I think you’ve stressed this in terms of your collaborations is you are setting an example for everyone else you’re working with. If they see that you’re delivering 75%, why should they give you 100%?

Craig: Oh, boy, is that a thing. I talk to people on the crew about this because they are always working on something. I work on a show. They work on shows. Some of them do say there is a thing where you are on a show, and you can just tell that the people who made it sort of care, then it’s a 70% vibe that they’re like, “It’s a job. Got to do it. I’m supposed to do it. Nobody really cares about the show, but we’re working.” Then you don’t necessarily– why beat yourself up? Why lay it all out there? It’s part of the culture of anything is, “How serious are we taking this?”

John: Now, let’s wrap this up with a conversation about vomit drafts because neither you or I are vomit draft people, but many of our listeners and also friends or colleagues of ours really believe in just like you’ve got to get something on the page first, and then we’ll have whatever you do to get something out, and then you can edit and refine it. I want to talk through the pros and cons and arguments for that, and why people may want to consider it, but also what our concerns were that– the pro arguments for the vomit draft were you just get the thing out as quickly as you possibly can. You don’t censor yourself. You don’t edit yourself. By suspending that internal critic, you’re actually just able to explore, to find out about stuff.

Some people really cannot see the movie until they can have a thing on the page that they can see. They make discoveries along the way. You can’t edit what doesn’t exist. A natural part of the editing process, sometimes that’s writing the whole thing. Kevin Williamson famously vomited-drafted Scream and just wrote it all in a fugue state.

Craig: Awesome.

John: It’s awesome. It’s great. The con arguments I would say is that I watch these videos where, if you’ve seen bricklayer videos or when you’re building something up from the base, if that first foundation isn’t strong and you’re trying to build something up, it gets wonky and crazy, and so it’s going to collapse and fall over. It can compound the fundamental flaws of something is that if you start writing without a plan, without trying to make sure every scene actually really works, it could just go 19 different ways haywire.

Craig: It’s hard for me to criticize people who do this because they must do it for a reason. It’s not how my mind works. I can certainly see the pluses and minuses of the not vomit draft. We’ve talked about a lot of the minuses. It is meticulous. It takes longer. You can find yourself mentally strangulated as you go. You can feel trapped. Sometimes you don’t finish.

John: No.

Craig: On the plus side, though, there is an enormous amount of intention and thought and cohesion. The thing about the vomit draft that scares me is what I would imagine to be just a general lack of cohesion. I’m not sure how you can vomit page 70 in a way that is reflected and made somehow inevitable and yet surprising based on what happened on page 20. It feels like it would be very much and then, and then, and then, and then, and very dialoguey or very actiony. There are dangers there that I can imagine, but I’m only imagining them because I’ve never done it, and I don’t know how to do it, and I’m never going to do it.

John: I’ll say, over the course of the podcast, we’ve talked with alternative strategies that I think are trying to do some of the things that a vomit draft does. When I don’t want to write a scene, I will write a different scene in the movie, but I’ll write a really good version of that, of a different scene in the movie, because I know what the scenes are in the movie.

Craig: Sure.

John: Katie Silverman, she’ll do basically a vomit draft, but with things that are not in the movie, she’ll just have the characters start talking so she can fully understand the characters and what the world feels like. That’s great. Maybe a thing people want to try independent of a vomit draft-

Craig: It’s a good exercise.

John: -is basically just getting stuff, words down on paper. I would say the other thing I noticed about vomit drafts is it’s so easy to fall in love with that first draft. The emotional attachment to the thing you did, and you have a sunk cost fallacy, but also you can fall in love with the temp music. You’ve all run into this, which is just like it’s working and it’s feeling good, and so you don’t want to change anything up.

Craig: Yes. What you do is you attach the feeling of success that you had as you were barfing to the barf, but other people just see barf. They don’t see or experience your feeling of purging and relief. That is important. That’s one positive thing that comes out of the meticulous plan draft is you don’t have that. You don’t get overattached to things. Everything is interrogated, examined, questioned, acid-tested, and so on.

John: I guess my final advice here is with vomit drafts and the good enough, not good enough, is if you’re struggling to get started, if you’re struggling with blank page anxiety, getting words on the page is probably a good first step for you, whether that becomes a full vomit draft or just like the roughest sketches of a scene. Alina often describes it as like walking into the ocean and letting the water get up to your ankles. It’s like, oh, suddenly you’re swimming.

Maybe vomit draft if you are often abandoning projects before you complete them, because I think sometimes we talk about burnout and that perfectionism burnout, like you just– the joy of completing a thing may be useful for you, and so the vomit draft may be the way to get there.

Craig: It’s worth trying, right? If one method isn’t working, try it. What’s the worst that can happen? You stop. It doesn’t work. You don’t get past page 3. I don’t know, but try things.

John: If you’ve tried vomit drafts and you’re not happy with them, I think the reason may be because you’re done with– the vomit draft, you can feel like, “Well, I’m done. I want to go on to the next thing.” You may have green pasture envy where it’s like, “Oh, I want to do this other thing instead.” You never actually go back and edit and finish that thing. That may be a reason why you actually need to scene by scene really do the best version of each of these scenes and really perfect a thing because then you’ll actually have the experience of what it feels like to have a really good script that you’re proud of.

Craig: Maybe people need to try both.

John: Yes. I’m surprised we got you there, Craig.

Craig: Yes. Give yourself a chance to see if– the whole concept of vomit draft is vomit. You’re not being held. It is vomit. Everybody knows this isn’t what we’re shooting. If you are maybe somebody that tends toward that too much, try the other method. Try meticulous planning.

John: I want to acknowledge that this is exactly counter to the advice that Scott Frank gave. It’s like, “Don’t move until you see it.”

Craig: That’s for me.

John: That’s for you.

Craig: That’s how I think. Don’t move until you see it. I know that that’s what works for me. Scott, God bless him. Scott’s way is the way that everybody must do it. I love that about Scott, but I am more interested, I suppose, in results because I know that great writers write differently. I’m pretty sure that– I know Scott and I don’t write the same way because he writes these very, very long drafts that he expects will be cut down.

John: There’s really not vomit drafts, but they’re more expansive than the form will actually allow.

Craig: They are unfettered by the restraints of the medium-

John: Yes, they are.

Craig: -which is awesome because it means that everybody can go through and say, “Okay, story, characters. This moment, this moment, this moment. Now, this is too big. We asked you to build a 12-seat plane. This is an incredible jumbo jet. How can we get all the best parts of the jumbo jet into the 12-seater?” and then he does. Point being, we all have our ways there. Find your way there. If your way there currently is not working, try a different way there.

John: Let’s answer some of your questions. We have one here from Alan.

Drew: ”Back in 2019, there was a huge fight between the WGA and the talent agencies over packaging. After everyone fired their agents, the agencies eventually signed an agreement that went into effect in June of 2022. Now, two and a half years later, has there been any real on-the-ground change, or have agencies found ways to work around the agreement and still offer packages to studios?”

John: Craig, I’m curious what you think about what has happened in two and a half years.

Craig: I don’t think that the agencies have found significant ways to work around the agreement. Here’s what happened. It definitely accelerated the shrinking of the number of agencies available to us, so conglomeration occurred.

John: Do you think that would have been different without the agency deal?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you think there would have been more small agencies or what would–

Craig: Oh, I think ICM would still be there because what happens, once you took away a big part of what their income was, they were now exposed and vulnerable. We lost some diversity of agencies. CAA and WME arguably got more powerful. It’s almost like we were in a fight over what a beach should look like, and then a tsunami came, so it’s hard to tell.

John: There’s no counterfactual. We can’t know what the world would have been like if the agency campaign hadn’t happened. If agencies could still package the way they were packaging before, which we see, for newer listeners, we don’t understand, packaging is when you put together a writer with their script and a director and maybe some stars and sell that to a TV production company, sometimes a movie studio, but really it’s a TV thing. Agencies would do that, and then they would take a fee, and rather than charging their clients commission, they would take a percentage of the budget on every episode of a thing.

Craig: Which meant that they were essentially incentivized by the companies, not their own clients, and that was part of the problem.

John: Packaging still happens, but now they only get the commissions on their clients rather than a fee.

Craig: What we were hoping would happen might have happened, but shortly after that, the streaming wars accelerated dramatically. The massive television bubble began to burst, and huge tectonic changes occurred in our industry to the extent that I don’t know what this did because, like I said, it’s been tsunamied over by–

John: It wasn’t the biggest change in the industry by far.

Craig: No.

John: Much bigger things affected stuff, and so we can’t know quite what’s there. Also, the agencies themselves, we talk about CIA and WME, they entered into a lot of different spaces, and they were already starting to move into different things, representing sports, music, and other things, but just stuff that seems to have nothing to do with us. I think one of our concerns going into the campaign was that they weren’t prioritizing the actual needs of their clients, and the way they make their money isn’t off of us. That’s the big agency that is still kind of true. The money they’re making in the entertainment industry is off of us.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s good.

Craig: That’s why they fight over clients tooth and nail. They would certainly argue that we are valuable to them.

John: I would say that as we started in the industry, the fighting over clients was a much bigger part of the story and drama of Hollywood, and it really isn’t a big deal now.

Craig: Well, because people don’t go anywhere because there’s fewer places to go.

John: There are fewer big places to go. It’s true.

Craig: When we started, there were CAA, UTA, ICM, William Morris, and there was Endeavor, and there was Gersh, which still is in Paradigm, and– what’s the artists and whatever? Anyway, and now it’s like there’s WME, CIA, UTA, then there’s a tier below, and then there’s nothing, and you don’t get moved around a lot because you don’t move– Even the agents don’t move around a lot anymore.

John: The other thing which changed, which had started before this, but certainly accelerated during it, is writers and directors and actors who just have managers who don’t have agents at all anymore, or who are also British people who have their UK agent who’s really up-prepping them in the US as well. I’ve seen that change happen.

Craig: Yes, the management thing is a big one, and management is worse. We were fighting the agencies over packaging. That’s all managers do. That is literally what they do. They exist to be producers on projects, which you can’t be as an agent, to not charge their clients commission, instead get all their money from the production. I don’t understand why–

John: As you’ve talked about, coming out of this, I signed a manager for the first time, and what’s been helpful as a highway manager is to have a person who can talk to anybody, who can call anybody because there’s no vested interest in their own agency. They have relationships that are different, which has been really, really helpful.

Craig: Yes, it really just comes down to who do they work for in the end.

John: Then they’ve been working for me.

Craig: That’s good.

John: The other thing which did change in the agency campaign, which is worth acknowledging, is that agencies now have to send every writer’s contract through to the guild, and so the guild has so much more information about every writer’s deal. To know how many weeks was this writer employed in this room, how many one-step writers have deals, that’s actually been helpful, even though, theoretically, all writers were supposed to send in–

Craig: We were supposed to per– yes. My question is, what are we able to do with all that data, exactly, other than look at it?

John: We can make choices in the negotiating cycle about what we’re going to do for things. The other thing we’ve done is WJA enforcement, contract enforcement, which is something I don’t know you like. We now know this writer had a guaranteed step and was not paid for this step. What happened here? We can actually proactively investigate these things.

Craig: I’d love to ask their lawyer, first and foremost, “Hey, why didn’t you do your job?”

John: Exactly.

Craig: That’s kind of crazy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I guess the long answer, short, Alan, for me is hard to tell what impact this has had. I think there have been positives and negatives. I do know that quite a few people were upset because, once this ended, and you could go back to your agent, their agent said, “No, we’re good. We don’t want you back.” I think a lot of those people were not being well-served by that agent to begin with, at that point, then.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I think they were just hearing from their long-distance girlfriend that it was over and that it was better because now they needed to find a representative that actually cared about them.

John: I think the overall goal of aligning incentives on a purely logical level happened, but what impact did that have on individual writers’ careers? Harder to say.

Craig: You know what? It just occurred to me that, maybe, the real value that we got out of that was that, regardless of what the companies thought of what we did, it appeared that we were committed to doing stuff, and that there was a unity there, and there was some sense of aggression. Now, did that ultimately matter? No, because then they said, “Fine, go on strike anyway,” and then we did. Maybe it was just even for our own internal sake that we thought, oh, we could do a thing and not fall apart, [unintelligible 00:58:19]

John: Then after that, we did the strike, and we did not fall apart.

Craig: We did not fall apart, yes.

John: Let’s answer one more question on bleeping. Moose has a question about bleeping.

Drew: Moose writes, “I’m an audio professional. I noticed that in episodes where someone drops a naughty word, you have the disclaimer at the beginning, and I’m wondering why you just don’t bleep out the offending words.”

John: How the sausage is made here, Craig and I don’t swear on the show if we can help it. We won’t–

Craig: I did today once.

John: Sometimes, if it’s a very easy lift, Matthew just snips it out, and you never notice it was there. Especially when we have guests on, and they swear, it’s just hard to take that stuff out. We want it to be authentic to what the experience was to have it in person.

Craig: We’re adults.

John: We’re adults. We’re making this podcast for adults, but also, your kids can be in the car, and so we’re just mindful of that. That’s why we put the little warning on, if there’s going to be some bad words.

Craig: Just culturally, it is so much different now than it used to be. When we were kids, saying the F-word was like, “Oh my God.” You would get sent to the principal. No one seems to give an F anymore. It’s like we have friends with younger kids.

It’s like language is not– because of the internet, I think, it’s just become less taboo. Context. There are words that we used to throw around that you wouldn’t get sent to the principal for, that now you do get sent to the principal for.

Also, context, if you’re using words in a sexual manner or something like that. Bleeping sounds stupid, mostly, is the answer.

John: I always notice bleeping. It’s not actually a big tradition of bleeping in podcasts. It’s not really a thing.

Craig: No, because we’re not on the air at CBS.

John: No, no.

Craig: It just doesn’t make much sense.

John: No. I agree. Let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing I mentioned earlier on, it’s a cinematographer. Her name is Valentina Vee. She is an L.A. or New York-based cinematographer and director. The thing she’s been doing recently is going through a show, in this case, Heated Rivalry, and talking about the specific choices that the director and cinematographer are making as they’re composing scenes. Things from blocking to locations to camera placement. Going through this, this is the sense I had while I was watching the show, but it’s really clear.

They have no coverage. There’s basically not a shot that they shot that’s not in the show, and so often, they’re basically just staying on one side. The camera’s never coming around to the other side, which is because they had an incredibly limited budget, and they had to maximize the value that they got out of that. These are directing choices, lighting choices, but fundamentally, they’re also writing choices.

That’s why I really encourage people to watch these videos that she does because, again, you’re seeing that the scenes are written in a way that they can be shot from one side, that it’s really about one character’s perspective. Therefore, it’s not important that we see the other people who are talking off the screen because it’s really about this one character’s reaction to what is being said.

Craig: One of my favorite things to do. I try very hard to cover things. I like options. I love an option, but as I talk about with my editors all the time, just because we have it doesn’t mean we have to use it. We don’t have to use any of it. We can just use one shot if we want, if it feels great, and we just want to stay there. Staying with somebody is terrific. Editing too much just because you have it, it just turns into ping pong, tucking head theater, and there’s no pace to it.

The question is, who do I want to be with right now, in this moment? Who do I want to be with? Who do I want to be looking at? If you know that you have limited time and limited coverage, get one shot right, and then just nab something fast just to give yourself some little hinge bit.

John: My suspicion is they didn’t even have time for [unintelligible 01:02:08]. In some cases, they’ve really boxed themselves in where they had no choice other than the master that they had, and it works really well.

Craig: When we’re shooting things in tight situations, there’s a shot that she does here where she has the two of them. They’re sitting in profile, sort of a mini master kind of thing, so we can see both of them. They’re looking at each other, and they are sitting against a mirror, which creates depth that isn’t there. If you put them against the wall, it’s a dead shot, but that creates depth. The problem is the mirror will also see the camera. Well, that’s an easy one for us. As long as they are not moving in front of the camera, you can paint it out, especially if the background sort of drops away.

If you have money in post to get rid of these things, getting the camera– I will tell you that because we’re a handheld show, the amount of times we have had to paint out one little bit of camera as it bobbed in because we really liked this shot, it’s just that as they were moving, A camera saw B, and then B goes, “Oh, shit,” and gets out of the way, but that’s okay.

John: It’s fine.

Craig: That’s okay. We do split screens. We do paint outs. We do blow-ups. There’s a billion ways to handle it. It’s more important to get the work in than it is to– and this is actually good enough, “Okay, do we have an eraser to erase this thing later? Then don’t worry about this. Just get this,” right?

John: Because the priority is, are you getting the performance or getting the shot overall? You can fix the other stuff.

Craig: Performance, shot, feeling. If I love it, if I feel something, if it’s making me cry, I don’t care if I can see the reflection of a crew person over there, I’ll get rid of it. One way or the other, I’ll get rid of it. It is so worth it. That is what people connect to. Obviously, people are connecting to Heated Rivalry, AKA the hockey show, in a profound way, and that means they did a great job with the time and resources they had.

John: What I like about this, she was not the GP on this show. She’s just breaking down shots she’s seeing from it, so she’s able to scribble on the screen and show where a camera was and stuff that was happening. It’s such a good example of a thing you can do in video that we just can’t do as well in audio because you were just describing a thing, but in a video, to actually draw and show is just so much more helpful. I just like that people are out there using the medium in ways that we don’t know how to use yet.

Craig: Yes. I think people are interested in the silly tricks. I think there’s probably a good video that I should do. After this season, I think what I’ll do is take a little time with one of my editors, Tim Good, and we’re going to put together a video called All the Tricks We Use because the tricks that you can use in editing are incredible and so helpful, and very helpful to know when you’re shooting because there are times where I will watch a take and think, with trick number seven, I can get rid of the flaw in this take because the rest of it was great.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Knowing what you can do is a big part of it.

John: It’s not all just VFX. An example that she points out is that there’s moments in the show where they just go to silhouette and where you’re not seeing actors’ faces, but it’s not important for the scene because it’s a physical comedy, but you don’t actually need to see the faces for it to work. By going to silhouette, there’s no crowd. The amount of extras they have is incredibly limited. They’re making shots so you wouldn’t see those people out there.

Craig: Yes. When you look at sports movies, always look in the stands, look in boxing, who’s out there. Boxing, in particular, it’s a ring that’s overlit and then a crowd that is underlit in total shadow because there’s no one there.

John: If the audio is creating the crowd.

Craig: When you watch actual boxing, the entire place is lit up like a Kmart. No one knows what a Kmart is. Walmart. It’s lit up like a Walmart. In movies about football and baseball, you’ll get a couple of select shots where they’ve either licensed the footage or they’ve done some CG people. Then it’s just 18 people at a time and in close-up.

John: The mastermarks are still good.

Craig: Yes. Everything. It’s all the product of many meetings.

John: We love it. Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a game, as it often is. This is for– well, I played it on iOS on my iPad. I’m a big fan of the Rusty Lake games. One of the things about those games that I love is how freaking weird they are, sometimes deeply disturbing.

John: They’re specifically weird, yes.

Craig: Yes, they’re very strange, surreal. I came across a game– there are a lot of knockoffs. I thought for a moment, “Oh, I think maybe this is going to be a Rusty Lake knockoff. I’ll play a Rusty Lake knockoff. I don’t care.” It was not a knockoff. The game is called Birth! It is made by an independent game designer named Madison Karrh. That’s K-A-R-R-H, which already I love. That’s because the spelling is gorgeous. What she’s done is made a fairly satisfying puzzle game. The puzzles are sometimes too easy, sometimes they’re tricky, but they’re beautiful-looking and so deeply weird. The entire thing is so deeply weird. When you get to the end of it, it’s also so sweet and satisfying. It’s art. It’s art. It’s a lovely game and also fun.

I run into a lot of these things. I’m just going to whisper about this because I don’t want the people that make these games to hear it, John.

John: All right.

Craig: There are like 5,000 games that you can get for your iPad that are about grief. They’re not really games. They’re just somebody talking about– it’s just a very obvious metaphor for grief. They’re games, and they’re not fun.

John: Same way that there are joke aways. There are things that have the structure of a joke, but they’re not actually funny because they’re like– you know.

Craig: Yes, they’re really just trading on sadness or whatever. This is a game.

John: Good.

Craig: It’s fun to play. She did a great job. Excellent work, Madison Karrh. Birth! Well worth playing.

John: Very nice. That is our show for this week. The description is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll get those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the 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 to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who’ve just signed up new for the holidays or new for 2026. Thank you. 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 26 for 26.

Craig, thanks for a perfect discussion of perfectionism and when good enough is good enough.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, in the outline here, I have a blog post I did called What I Did in 2025. I thought we might just review that first because I recognize that I’m not a person who remembers things. I don’t remember when things happened. Mike knows all that stuff. He can remember exactly what happened when and how things worked. I’ve been better at journaling this year, but I took a day and actually just went through what did I actually do in 2025? It was a lot.

This was the year I went to Egypt, Jordan, Dubai, and Mexico. We had the Big Fish 29-hour reading in New York City. We released Highland Pro. I got third place in Rachel Bloom’s Spelling Bee.

Craig: Pretty good.

John: It’s pretty good.

Craig: That’s a big deal.

John: We had two No Kings [unintelligible 01:10:43] tests, I did a half-marathon, went to Australia. I would say, overall, 2025 was a very shitty year for the world, but I had some good, fun things happen locally and personally, which was nice.

Craig: You say I never do this.

John: It’s the first time I’ve ever done this.

Craig: I just don’t look back. I mostly have feelings. I think about the feelings and moments and things, and there are these moments that stick out. I don’t really look back much. I’m all about right now and tomorrow.

John: I’m not generally a looking-back person, but I’m also a forward thinker. The second part of this conversation is, the last couple of years, Mike and I would do a 24 for 24, 25 for 25, 26 for 26, where we would basically share note and–

Craig: You know this is going to get tough. You see where this is going. This is going to be hard for you guys.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: The older you get, the more crap you have to do.

John: Yes. It’s a lot of stuff. This year, we had to find one extra thing, but it’s going to be a creep every year. It’s a fun thing. Basically, we have shared notes in Apple Notes. It’s like a checklist of things we mean to do over the course of the year.

Craig: I like that.

John: What’s different about this than a New Year’s resolution is they are specific things you want to do, and they’re not all laborious chores. We’ll go through some examples here. One of the things we need to do this year is sort and rationalize what we’re going to do with all our CDs and DVDs that we’ve not looked through in years. Do you still have all your DVDs and CDs?

Craig: No.

John: What did you do? You just got rid of them?

Craig: I have no idea where they are. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone. It’s gone. It’s over. They may exist somewhere, but I don’t know where.

John: Drew, do you have physical discs?

Drew: I have DVDs and Blu-rays. I have some CDs, but they’re just left over from when we bought CDs. I don’t even think I have the ability to listen to it, actually.

Craig: You can listen to it through your DVD player.

Drew: Probably.

Craig: I think so.

Drew: For a minute, my DVD player was broken, and I had a, “Do I just get rid of everything?”

Craig: I have a DVD player. I never use it.

John: For a while, we were playing Blu-rays through our old PlayStation, but then that gave up the ghost. Stewart gave our daughter some Blu-ray DVDs. She wanted to watch them. We didn’t have one, so we had to get a little cheap Blu-ray player, and then she didn’t remember to watch them.

Craig: Children.

John: Basically, we divided things into three categories; stuff around the home, stuff around L.A., and stuff that’s out of town [unintelligible 01:13:13] anywhere. We were revamping the room that we’re currently in, which is going to be our reserve recording studio. We already did the soundproofing. The wall behind you, Craig, looks crappy on camera because it’s just too blank and bare, so we’re going to introduce different stuff to that.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: I’m not sure. We’re going to bring in somebody to help us figure that out.

Craig: You know I’m not going to be here, right?

John: No. When do you come back from–

Craig: Okay. My heart stopped for a second. I’m like, “Wait.”

John: While you’re gone, some of the time, there’ll be famous people who’ll come in. We’ll record some of that stuff.

Craig: Love famous people.

John: While you’re gone.

Craig: They’re famous for a reason, you know.

John: We’ll do three game nights. We love having people over for game nights.

Craig: Amazing.

John: You love game nights.

Craig: We love game nights.

John: We’ll do some pool parties. Around town, three restaurants in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Often, our food-related thing was three new cuisines, like ethnic cuisines, but we basically run out of ethnic cuisines. We got to Bangladeshi, and it’s like, “I think we’re good here.”

Craig: Near the end.

John: “We’re near the end.” Two escape rooms. I need to make it back to Catalina.

Craig: Sorry, you said two?

John: Two.

Craig: No, no, no, no, no.

John: Got to do more than two.

Craig: Got to do more than two.

John: We only did one escape room this entire year. We did the new one as– the downtown.

Craig: Here’s an extra one cool thing for you. Melissa and I did this with our friends Cle and Mia. There’s an escape room up in Santa Clarita.

John: I’ve heard. They have a–

Craig: It’s called Appleseed Avenue. Fantastic. Must do. Must.

John: Drew went with us to the one we did this last month. What was it called?

Drew: It was The Lost Cat?

John: It’s downtown. What I liked about it, the general concept is this old woman has lost her cat, and you find her cat.

Craig: Did it.

John: Did it. Good and solid.

Craig: It was cute.

John: Cute. Good time.

Craig: It was cute when the stuff fell down. That’s fun.

John: Love it. Then some out-of-town stuff. We’ll do another half-marathon. We’re going to visit one new country and then see some concerts and some shows. What I’m stressing here is that some stuff is work. We’re basically dealing with our CDs, DVDs, repainting the kitchen chairs, tuning the piano. Most of it is just like– inertia will just keep you on the couch and not doing a thing. Their challenge is for yourself to actually just get out and do your thing. It doesn’t feel like work. It scratches that check-off span of the list to actually like, “Okay, we’ve got to see a concert. What concert are we going to go see?”

Craig: I love doing nothing.

John: You love doing nothing.

Craig: Oh, my God.

John: You love playing a game. You love playing a little rest-your-leg game.

Craig: Doing puzzles, playing games. It’s just joy. That’s the thing. Follow your heart. I’ve never been a checklist person. I’ve never been somebody who’s like, “I should do blank.” If I hear the word should in front of something, I’m like, “Do I want to?”

John: You’ve got to recontextualize. “I want to do this thing. I want to remember that I want to do this thing.”

Craig: That’s the thing. Do I actually want to do this thing? I’ve really gotten it down to, I just do the things I want to do, and I don’t do the things I don’t want to do.

John: You prioritize D&D, which is nice.

Craig: Because I want to. That’s the beautiful part.

John: Looking at the blog post here, I misspoke in the main episode. We actually played 39 sessions of D&D because I did miss a few.

Craig: 39. Solid.

John: It’s a lot. Craig, you are going to be off shooting a new season of the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: What other, I don’t want to say goals, but what else do you envision for your 2026? What do you think would, at the end of 2026, just like, “Yes, that was a good year.”? What are some things that would have happened?

Craig: If I am alive at the end of 2026, I will feel great. This is going to be a difficult production because of the size of it and the things we have to do. It’s going to be tough, and the length of it. My goal is alive. I want to try and make sure that my blood sugar stays– my big task is keeping my blood sugar at a healthy number, which I’ve been able to do. I keep my eye on that, and I continue to reflect on some of my mental health pluses and minuses.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m looking forward to working with the people that I have worked with before that I love, and some new people that I know I’m going to love that I’ve met, and I’m very excited about. Then there’s just the adventure aspect of it. It’s an adventure. That’s the thing. This list of doing stuff, I’m going to hike, stay up all night, see a forest fire, do this. There’s going to be 200 things that I’m going to do because of the show that’s like, “That’s my living.” When I say see a forest fire, we don’t actually have fire. I don’t know why I said that. We’re not lighting a forest on fire, don’t worry, but we are going to do some crazy stuff. That’s where all the living comes in.

That’s my big goal, and to keep playing D&D throughout it all because–

John: Absolutely. You’re starting a whole new campaign for it, so I’m excited.

Craig: Starting a whole new campaign. It keeps me sane. It’s my thing. It’s what I’m allowed to do for me. Everybody knows it. You got to carve out some stuff.

John: You’ve got to carve out some time.

Craig: You’ve got to carve out time.

John: Basically, be yourself. One of my nervous breakdown during my TV show is basically I existed only for the show, and I was stuck in this impossible place.

Craig: I exist almost entirely for the show, and then I carve out a little bit.

John: Nice. Craig, felicitations on this past year.

Craig: Likewise.

John: I hope it’s a great upcoming year.

Craig: I think it’s going to be a fine year for the two of us.

John: I hope so, too.

Craig: Drew, Happy New Year.

Drew: Happy New Year. I thought you were going to say, “Maybe not for you.”

Craig: What a horrible way to start 2026.

Drew: Good luck.

Craig: For Drew–

John: You’re fired.

Craig: Yes, you’re fired.

[laughter]

Drew: I knew it was coming. Thanks.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• Jamie Lee Curtis says “Trauma”
• Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
• Young Connor Storrie on YouTube
• Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone
• Elon Musk announces the Cybertruck
• Valentina Vee on TikTok and Instagram
• Birth by Madison Karrh
• John’s What I Did in 2025
• 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
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]
[applause]

Craig Mazin: Look at this beautiful crowd.

John: It’s lovely.

Craig: Beautiful.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Scriptnotes, a podcast and now a book about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

John: For folks listening at home, we are at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles. It is our book launch party. Craig, how are you feeling?

Craig: I feel very grateful because I believe everyone here is here because they bought a book.

John: They got a book.

Craig: Thank you.

John: This is the most books you’ll ever see in one place for Scriptnotes. Everyone has an orange book in their hands.

Craig: Yes. Cut to 400 years from now-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: -and our book is The Constitution of the New Country.

[laughter]

John: It’s the new Bible.

Craig: Yes. It’s Little Red Book.

John: Little Red Book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We have an amazing show for you today. We have Julia Turner here. She’s going to interrogate us about the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Yes.

John: We’re also going to talk about Craig’s favorite topic, which is criticism.

Craig: Yes, I love it.

John: Love it.

Craig: Love it.

[laughter]

Craig: Can’t wait to talk with her about that.

John: Ashley Nicole Black will help us make a meal of leftovers.

[applause]

John: We’ll have audience questions. Craig, just this morning, you worked out a whole new game.

Craig: Yes. I love a little Christmas quiz. It’s a brief one. We’ll do it in between Julia and Ashley Nicole, I think. Just a little trivia quiz. I believe we’re going to need three contestants.

John: We’re going to need three contestants. You are already contestants. You just don’t know it yet. If you have a book in your hands, open it to where we signed it. If you have a star on that page, you are a contestant. Raise your hand if you have one of the starred books.

Craig: There’s a starred book.

John: There’s one. We have one.

Craig: Oh, there’s two.

John: There’s two. First, Craig, let’s have a seat.

Craig: Great.

John: The Scriptnotes book is finally out in bookstores. As people are hearing this episode, they will have gotten their preorders. They’ll be able to buy it at their local bookstore. We often talk on the podcast about starting a new project, but we don’t often talk about finishing, and just being done with a thing, and saying goodbye to a thing, because the Scriptnotes book is now done, it’s out.

Craig: It’s out.

John: We’re finished.

Craig: Yes.

John: Talk to us about how you feel about finishing a project, finishing a movie, saying goodbye to something.

Craig: It’s always sad. I get sad. We throw the term postpartum around, which I think is a bit insulting to people that actually go through postpartum depression. That’s a very serious thing. There is a postscriptum depression. There’s a thing that happens when it’s over because it’s been in your mind for so long, and when it’s done, and I mean done done, not necessarily like, “Oh, we’re on our third revision,” or something, you do feel like you’ve sent your kid off, and now it belongs to everyone. You just have to let it go, and it’s not yours anymore.

John: Yes. With movies, once you go to a premiere and it’s like, “Oh, it’s so exciting.” You’re seeing all this stuff. You’re doing press. Then at a certain point, it’s just its opening weekend, and it’s there. It’s no longer your movie, it’s the world’s movie. Their reaction to it is what’s going to keep it going or not going. I’ve had a bit of this experience with the three Arlo Finch books because I had the launch of the first one, great, but there was always a second one, and then the third one, and eventually, like, “Oh, wow, I’m no longer the person writing Arlo Finch books.”

It’s a weird thing to be done with it. It’s nice that it’s actually physically a book, that it’s actually a thing that sits on a shelf. So often we talk about scripts we write, and they get pretty fantastic, but if they don’t, all that energy, all that effort is just trapped in 12 Point Courier.

Craig: Yes. In a way, I think psychologically, I prefer that. There’s a world where the best outcome is you write a script, you perfect it, and then you encase it in Lucite,-

[laughter]

Craig: -and it is never read by anyone.

John: No.

Craig: It will never be tainted by their dirty eyes.

[laughter]

Craig: I love that, but the postscriptum that I’m really fearing is when I eventually get to the end of The Last of Us because we’re talking about years and years at that point. Now it’s like, “Hey, that’s a chunk of your life, and that’s going to be interesting.” I will either be terribly, terribly sad or wonderfully, wonderfully happy.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m rooting for the second, almost certainly the first.

John: A question people ask, like, “Oh, do you go back and read your Arlo Finch books?” Like, “Oh, God, no, I’m not going to read that.” People ask, “Do you watch your movies?” The answer is I really don’t. Unless I’m doing a special event for something, I don’t go back and watch old movies. I can understand why people would think you would because, “Oh, aren’t you so proud of it?” It’s not like your kid is going out to college or something.

[laughter]

John: It’s just like, “No, it’s there. It’s for other people. It’s not for me anymore.”

Craig: I can now watch clips online that occasionally go viral for the weirdest reasons from Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

[laughter]

Craig: We’re talking about whatever, 20 years. A couple of decades go by. Yes, I’m watching it like anyone else now. It’s gone. I can do that. I’m going to have to wait about 20 years per thing, and then I feel, yes, I could look at that.

John: The Scriptnotes book isn’t quite cold yet. Because it’s so awkward for us to talk about a book, we thought we’d bring on somebody incredibly smart to ask us questions about that. Our first guest is a longtime co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest. She’s also a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. She’s also plotting some new media thing we’re not supposed to talk about.

Craig: Yes. Apparently, she’s got a scheme.

John: She’s got a scheme.

Craig: -to launch some sort of new digital journalism thing. It’s going to be based here in LA.

John: There was a Vanity Fair article about it, though.

Craig: I think a squib.

John: A squib.

Craig: A squib in Vanity Fair. I’m curious. We asked her backstage what it was called, and she said, “Fuck you, I’m not telling you.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Which I think is a brave title.

Craig: Amazing title.

John: I think it’s really good.

[laughter]

John: I’m going to have dinner for that.

Craig: Very catchy.

John: Welcome back to the program, Julia Turner.

[applause]

Julia Turner: Hello.

Craig: Hello.

John: Julia Turner.

Julia: Hi.

John: Oh.

Julia: Hello, everyone.

John: Hi. Before we fully hand over the reins to you, people may remember you because you hosted a conversation with us for our 10th anniversary of the Scriptnotes Podcast, which is excerpted in the appendix of the book. This is very meta to have you back here to talk about us.

Julia: Very full circle. I’m going to ask you mostly about that appendix.

[laughter]

Julia: How’d I do? Can we just stipulate that I’m the official journalist of Scriptnotes, I’m your official interrogator?

Craig: I have no problem with that.

Julia: All right.

John: 100% endorsed.

Craig: Your competition is literally no one else.

[laughter]

Julia: It would have been really embarrassing if you said no-

Craig: Yes, it would have been rough. [laughs]

Julia: -you need to think about it. [laughs]

Craig: Yes. Oh. Yes, we’ll take that under management. All right, official journalist of Scriptnotes, lay it on us.

John: We cede our control to you.

Julia: Okay. Let’s see where I can take this. I have listened to your show for more than a decade. I have spent so many hours in both of your company, mostly nodding in agreement, marveling at your stage wisdom, deeply amused, occasionally shaking my fist at you.

Craig: That’s me, right?

[laughter]

Julia: Both of you.

Craig: Okay.

Julia: More you. We’ll get to the part that I shake-

Craig: Yay.

Julia: -my fist at later. I have also heard you say many, many, many times that script-writing books are a crock and no one should buy or read them.

Craig: Correct.

[laughter]

Craig: I am consistent with that.

Julia: How did we get here? [chuckles] What made you want to write this book?

John: Yes, let’s talk about that.

[laughter]

John: Craig, have we changed our opinion on books about how to be a screenwriter?

Craig: No. I have not changed my opinion at all because, as far as I can tell, the only book that exists about how to write screenplays or write for movies and television that is written by two people or a person that has repeatedly done that job for decades is this orange book. It is unique. I don’t know of any other book like that. Most of the books are by people that did it once, or never did it, or were more analysts. I don’t think of this as inconsistent with my belief that screenwriting books are a crock. I think this book is a refutation of other screenwriting [chuckles] books.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: I hope that people do find it useful. That said, if they don’t, then we’ve just added one more pile of the crock.

Julia: [laughs]

John: Another thing I’ll say is that the subtitle in the book is A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters. It’s a book about screenwriting. It’s not a how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It’s about the craft and profession of screenwriting. It was a chance for us to share everything we talked about on the show, but also for the 25 interviews with other screenwriters in there talking about how they do their work. That, to me, felt like a valuable addition to the literature on screenwriting.

Julia: Yes. There’s a lot of expertise besides just the two of yours in there, but there’s a lot of the two of yours as well. I’m curious, when you first came up with the idea to do this book, were there particular moments from the show that you remembered that you thought, “That has to go in? I don’t care what else is in, but we’ve got to make sure this part is in there.”

John: Craig has a standalone episode called How to Write a Movie, which is such a pretentious title for an episode.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s him giving his lecture on what writing a movie is like to him. It’s so specific to his point of view that it became pretty clear that’s just a chapter in and of itself. Literally, it’s the text of that episode. Very lightly edited, it becomes that one chapter. To me, it was talking through pushing back against the idea of what structure is, and that structure is something you impose upon a story. The structure is really instead something natural that evolves out of story. The structure is characters doing things.

Those conversations we kept coming back to about specificity, about pitching, about notes, and trying to make sure that the book was full of the kinds of things we talked about on the episode, but most of the chapters are not the one episode we did about that topic.

Craig: Right. I think that as, honestly, John and our excellent team did the vast majority of curation here, there’s, I think, a really good job of gleaning out those very practical moments from the podcast over the years where we’re like, “Okay, here’s something just about transitions from scene to scene. Here’s what conflict, different kinds of–” those things are very useful to people, I think, particularly useful to people who are good enough to be screenwriters.

Ultimately, you’re writing a book for people that are interested in screenwriting and screenwriters from a objective point of view, or who want to be and will be. It hopefully would help them along, but I also love the choices of the interviews with the guests that we’ve had over the years because it’s quite a startling group of people when you look at it in the aggregate.

Julia: When you guys read the early drafts, I think you’ve spoken about this, Craig, that one of the joys of podcasting is you can just talk and talk and talk, and it’s not quite the same as writing something down. It doesn’t have quite the same weight. You can be more exploratory. You can be more conversational. Also, at least in my experience as a long-time podcaster, sometimes you just forget what you said. You’re talking into the ether.

Craig: I forgot what we said when we got out here.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: Yes, you remember nothing.

Julia: Was there anything that surprised you when the corpus of your work was brought back to you with the help of your assistants? Were there any things that you had said or that each other had said that you were like, “What the hell? I don’t believe that at all.”?

Craig: No, I don’t think there was anything where I was like, “Oh, no, John,-

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: -I never said this about the Holocaust.” It was nothing like that.

[laughter]

Craig: It was amazing to go through it and read it and think, “These guys sound pretty good.”

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: It’s impossible to remember those moments. There’s so many of them. We’ve done a game where Matthew reads us quotes of things we’ve said. I think we did it at Austin, and he’s like, “Which one said it?” We don’t know.

John: [chuckles]

Craig: It’s how many years?

John: Yes, about 15 years.

Craig: 15 years of talking.

John: One of the real decisions we had to make with the book was, clearly, it’s not going to just be the transcripts, but are John and Craig going to speak with individual voices in it, or is it going to be one collective voice? We tried it with some breaking into John says a thing and Craig says a thing. It just did not work at all. We had to go through and strip all that out and make it just one consistent us voice throughout it.

What was good about it is that even though Craig and I will disagree some on the show, mostly it’s a conversation, and mostly we’re rowing in the same direction. There’s a lot of times where it’s a paraphrase of something Craig said or I said, but it makes sense as one’s collective voice in the book. It was challenging to make it read right, but it wasn’t challenging to make all the opinions fit together the right way because,-

Craig: We tend to agree.

John: -yes, 90% of things about the process of writing, we agree on.

Julia: It is interesting because it does feel new. As someone who’s listened to all these episodes, it’s fun to encounter this synthesized voice. I’m curious. I’ve heard you say that before, that the back and forth didn’t work. What didn’t work? What was bad about it?

John: It was jarring to get halfway through a page, and then Craig says a thing, and then John says a thing, and then we’re back. Whose voice are we in when we’re back? It just felt really, really strange, and so it didn’t work. It was nice visually on the page to break stuff up, but it never worked quite right. We had to either do a lot of it or do none of it. We just took it all out.

Craig: It’s also transcript-y and we provide transcripts. In a way, you’d feel like you just are selling me the transcripts.

John: The only section in the book that’s still transcripts is the section with you at the end.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: It’s the appendix.

Craig: And the index.

John: Then, when we did the interview chapters with our guests, we basically cut ourselves out of it, so it was just their words and did that light passage. It feels like it’s just them talking. Occasionally, you might see me or Craig pop in there to pull a point out, but it’s not really that feel.

Julia: Do you guys think that if you had read this book at the beginning of your careers, it would have changed how you approached anything, saved you from any mistakes or follies?

Craig: Absolutely.

Julia: Which ones? How so?

[laughter]

Craig: This is all I had when I started. Really, the answer is all of it because all I had was a line graph from Sid Field that was 30 pages, first act, 60 pages, second act, 30 pages, and then midpoint. What the fuck good is that? I remember sitting there. There’s 21-year-old Craig sitting there, wherever, on a park bench, making lines for these ideas I had. It’s useless. I didn’t have anything like, “Okay, let’s talk about dialogue, let’s talk about conflict, let’s talk about scene work, let’s talk about transitions, let’s talk about structure as a function of relationship, dramatic argument,” any of that. All of that just had to be instinctive and then learned. I do think it would have helped me dramatically.

John: Craig and I both came up as solo screenwriters, essentially. Craig had a writing partner for a while, but essentially, we were just doing all the work by ourselves. We weren’t in a TV writer’s room where we had other people to bounce ideas off of and see, “Oh, this person tried this thing, this didn’t work. How do we make this?” We didn’t have that back and forth to see how it feels to grow a story.

We just had these bad books to start with, and screenplays to read, but there weren’t as many available screenplays for us to read. It was harder to get up to speed. Hopefully, this gets people up to speed and makes people think, “Oh, okay. Now I get what it would be like to be a screenwriter.” Hopefully, a lot of them will say, “I don’t want to be one,” and then they can move on to something else.

Craig: Perfectly fine.

John: Absolutely fine. If it scares you away–

Craig: That’s actually an incredible outcome.

John: It’s a gift.

Craig: Saved you a lot of time and misery, and you can proceed forth to cure cancer, which is what you’re supposed to do.

John: [laughs]

Craig: If you are only interested as a student of film, then I just think it’s interesting without being practical.

Julia: Speaking of all the people who should not become screenwriters and go cure cancer, I’d be curious to hear you guys talk about the moment that we’re at in Hollywood right now. I feel like the vibe in this town,-

[laughter]

Julia: It’s a little like, “Are we Detroit?”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Julia: Is this going to still happen?

Craig: Detroit’s doing better, I think, currently.

Julia: Detroit has a long and beautiful trajectory. I spent a lot of great time in Detroit, but I think you know what I mean.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: I’d be curious to hear you guys– I have this, too, in journalism. Sometimes young people come to me and say, “Oh, how do I become a journalist?” I wonder, is the only responsible answer to give them run for the hills?

I’d be curious to hear you guys both talk about how the industry feels to you right now as compared with your previous decades working, and what it means to publish a book that’s inviting people into this trade at a moment like this.

Craig: What an insinuation.

[laughter]

John: We were very mindful of the fact that this book, we want it to feel eternal. Even though it’s capturing this moment, it’s not really so specific about the US film and TV industry as it stands right now. That it should hopefully feel like if you’re writing scripted entertainment, if you’re writing narrative with characters who are doing things, this should still apply. A lot of these lessons would apply for theater and for other kinds of writing.

I do think that we’re probably at a transition point where this next generation that’s rising up is going to make a new, different thing that is as different from the existing film and television as what the ’70s were in terms of how they upended our film culture, just because the gatekeepers are not letting them make the things in their system, so they’re going to make stuff outside of their system.

That new generation will find a new way to do stuff. Hopefully, some of the stuff that we’re talking about here in terms of thinking about how characters are driving the story, thinking about how theme emerges from conflict, those should hopefully be universal ideas that will continue.

Craig: Goes back to the Greeks. So far, so good for that. Yes, Hollywood has its ups and downs, and it also has chaos, and it has always been hard to break in as a writer. If it is twice as hard now, you’ve gone from a 0.02 chance to a 0.01 chance, it doesn’t impact you. I guess this is the message that I would give to people is don’t be disheartened by the chaos of Hollywood. No one knows who will own Warner Brothers next year. No one. It’s madness out there. Also, continue to make an enormous amount of television, they continue to spend a lot of money on content, billions of dollars every year. The chaos of them is theirs.

We don’t run Hollywood. We don’t own it. Not my problem. My problem is to do the thing that people like us have been doing forever for audiences, which is to entertain them. That’s what we do. The people who run this business, whether they are hair on fire, falling down, selling to each other, falling apart, and yet the audience will still need to watch stuff and to experience things. I guess the answer is it doesn’t matter. As long as people want to continue to watch things, then the people who write them are fine. It’s the people sitting in the boardrooms that, “Hmm, that must be fun these days.”

Julia: I think one broader question out of that that I also would love to hear you guys on is, why should people be screenwriters? Why should people do this thing that people have been doing since the Greeks, and probably before?

Craig: Don’t think should is the right. The problem is you need to. People who end up doing what we do do it because they have to do it. It’s a compulsion. It can’t possibly be a choice. If you have to choose every time, you’re actually going to choose no every time in a row because it’s hard at all phases. I don’t know why people become stand-up comedians, but clearly they must be compelled to do it because it is brutal. Brutal. That’s the best answer I can give.

John: I’d say that there’s–

[laughter]

Craig: You’re trying to figure out why you do this?

John: I’m trying to think why I should try it.

Craig: Quit.

[laughter]

John: I’m allowed to stop?

Craig: [laughs]

John: I think there’s a compelling– Craig and I often talk about how we were the kids who just sat around in our rooms and just imagined things all the time. I get paid just to imagine stuff and write those words down. That happens. It’s exciting that that’s my job, just to imagine whole worlds of things. There’s always going to be folks who are skilled at writing, who are skilled at sitting down and creating something new that wasn’t there before.

What’s different about screenwriting is that you’re doing it as the first step in a plan that is going to involve hundreds of other people to make a thing. The mechanics behind that will probably change, and they have changed a lot over the years, but I think that’s still a very universal idea. I think if you’re a listener to the show or someone who’s reading the book who says, “Yes, I want to do that thing because I have that drive,” there’s still going to be a way to do that no matter what happens in this crazy structure we have.

Julia: I have a question for you about AI.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: This book does not encompass AI. Makes sense.

Craig: Written by AI.

[laughter]

John: It was not written by AI.

[laughter]

John: Wait. I was very mindful as we were finishing up this book, like, “Oh, shit, a year from now, could an AI take all of our transcripts and generate something that’s–”

Craig: A year from now? Oh, that shit’s happened already. That boat sailed, yes.

Julia: Yes. I was going to ask, actually, if you had AI alongside your assistants scrape the corpus and see what it thought was important.

Craig: No.

John: Really, the scraping of the transcripts happened three years ago. If it were happening now, of course, you would throw it all into Gemini or something and say, “When did John and Craig talk about this topic?” It could pull up all those references. Instead, it was Drew and Chris and our amazing interns just googling our transcripts to find out when we talk about those things.

Julia: You guys, I think of you both as being technophiles and tech curious, not being Luddites, not being avoidant. Also, I feel like I’ve observed you both, even Robot John, being repulsed by some of what AI is bringing us. I feel like in my own life, I’ve seen, I don’t know, two different paths. I feel like there are people in my life who are like, “I’m never going to try it. I’m not using it.” Then I feel like the people who start to play with it. “What feels right? What’s the right way to play with it? What’s the wrong way?”

I’m curious, if this book is the staple of screenwriting schools that you hope, I assume it will be, and you’ve got to re-release it in four or five years with a second edition, what would the chapter about AI say? Are you guys AI curious, AI loathsome?

John: I don’t think a second edition would ever have an AI chapter because it would be automatically out of date. There’s no way to keep up to that level.

Craig: That’s just an apology to our AI masters.

John: Absolutely.

[laughter]

John: Will an AI ingest this book? Absolutely. It already has ingested this book, I’m sure, because the e-book will be out there someplace. You’ll ask questions. It’ll have some of our answers in there mixed into it. That’s also just culture. It’s just everything does get recycled and repurposed and put back at you. It doesn’t happen at the speed that we’re used to with it now.

Craig: I just find it gross. I don’t turn away from AI because I’m a technophobe. I love technology. I just find it to be crap. I think it’s crap technology. I think it’s boring. When I look at what people will show me that AI has done, I find it boring and flat and dead. That’s not surprising because it’s entirely built on the bits and pieces we’ve put out there, or in the case of language, just language. Not the stuff that language emerges out of, just the language.

I think I’ve shied away from it because it’s like, “Okay, I’m a carpenter. I like working with my hands and building something that’s beautiful,” and own the road, there’s a factory that just goes stamp, stamp, stamp, smash, smash, IKEA table, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with IKEA tables. God knows I’ve attempted to build so many of them.

[laughter]

Craig: My prior fear about AI, which is that it was just going to swamp our humanity and take over everything, new fear about AI is that it sucks, and our economy is about to take a huge dump because it has been built around the idea that it doesn’t, except I think it does. We’re going to find out, everyone.

[laughter]

Craig: Either way, we’re fucked.

John: Coming back to you,-

[laughter]

John: -the word we say way too often on the show is specificity, and specificity as in how is something unique to the writer’s own experience. That’s a thing that an AI just is never going to have. AI doesn’t have a point of view on anything because it doesn’t have any internal logic. It’s never in a space. It’s never in a body. It’s never that stuff. That’s why Craig and I were talking about doing a New York Times editorial and stuff, and we decided against it.

The thesis would have been screenwriting will survive AI, if anything. It survives AI because our job, weirdly, is to imagine a place, put ourselves in it, describe what we’re seeing, what it feels like, what’s actually driving, to be inside those characters, and that’s a uniquely human experience. Will there be AI-generated screenplays? Of course. Will there be good art made out of this? I don’t think so. I do feel some safety just because of the things that these systems are designed to do. I wanted to turn back a little bit towards you. Now, I do want to have a little discussion about cultural conversation and criticism.

Julia: Who will say in the future if the art is good? Segue man?

John: Absolutely. Oh my God, she stole the segue from me.

[laughter]

Craig: Dude, listen to the show.

John: Absolutely, as critics, on Slate Cultural Gapfest, which everyone should listen to. It’s phenomenal. By the way, Scriptnotes is completely ripped off from the Slate formula where they have–

Craig: We are?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I gave you so much credit for this.

Julia: [laughs]

John: They have endorsements. We have One Cool Thing. The idea.

Craig: Oh my God. We stole it all?

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: It’s really very similar.

Craig: The credits work the same.

John: The setup of what we’re going to talk about on the episode.

Craig: My innocence.

[laughter]

John: The fact that we have some structure and it’s all not just one rambling conversation, that comes from Slate.

Craig: Thank you, Slate.

Julia: Slate invented it. No one else had ever done it before.

John: Every week, though, you have three topics. You’re picking what things in culture you want to talk about. Is it harder now? In the age of this infinitely generated artificial stuff, has it changed?

Julia: I don’t think we are yet beset by actual AI content. The content, the art that we’re talking about, the movies, the television shows, is written by humans for humans. I feel like one of the things that is a perverse possible upside of the rise of AI is that it forces us to really think about and understand what it is to be human, and what the point [chuckles] of it is, and what’s amazing about it, and to seek out and value the best part of it.

That’s what I love about art. I feel like most art is grappling with the question on some level of what is it like to be human, and some aspect of that, and some subset of that. The opportunity to consume it every week and talk about it with smart critics and try to understand what it means, and whether it’s good, and if so, why, and if not, why not, it feels like a real privilege and really fun.

John: Craig, you classically are not such a fan of-

Craig: Criticism.

John: -criticism. Talk to me about when Julia says that they’re grappling with, is this good? Is it resonating? What does it mean?

Craig: It means they’re figuring out if they like it or not. Who cares?

John: Isn’t there some meaning in how this fits into the larger picture of the art form?

Craig: Yes, there is. What you said that made my heart sing was, in a world where there’s a bunch of AI crap, maybe it’s going to make us appreciate the fact that all these things that are made by humans, there are things about it that are good or striving for something. It’s essentially looking for the positive impulse. I think a lot of times people presume that the only impulse behind certain things would be make money. People are like, “Cash grab.”

Somebody, the writer, almost certainly was really trying, even when other people were like, “Hey, we’re offering you a job, and you got to pay your bills.” That person tried to do something good. I think following that is a wonderful thing. My issue with criticism really does come down to the notion that some people have a privileged opinion. Really, it just means if you like something or not. If you do, you do.

I like watching critics fight with each other because I’m like, “There. There it is. There. They don’t agree.” In short, what is the purpose of it? Now, the purpose may be to find people that if you articulate a point that I agree with, that’s fun. Especially if I don’t like something, it’s disturbingly fun to watch somebody else beat up someone you hate, but it certainly doesn’t help the artists, I know that much. It has created a culture where everyone is now Roger Ebert. Everyone is looking for that fun thing to put on Letterboxd, and usually it’s a dunk. I don’t think that’s good for us.

Julia: Okay, wait.

Craig: Sure.

Julia: I have been having this argument with you at home by myself for a decade, Craig.

[laughter]

Craig: Here’s your chance.

Julia: I have to say, I really value your opinion so much. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I used to take homeopathic medicine when I thought I was getting a cold, and I don’t anymore-

Craig: Yes.

Julia: -because of how laceratingly, how viscerally, how trouncingly you demolished the idiocy of homeopathy.

Craig: I am okay with criticism now.

[laughter]

Craig: Honestly, that’s a huge win for me.

Julia: Generally, I find you so persuasive and right. Then, on this, I find you so wrong. Obviously, I have a stake in it because I am a critic, or at least I play one on a podcast. I think the thing that strikes me about your take on it is that you seem much more focused on the verdict.

Craig: Yes.

Julia: The idea that the point of criticism is a verdict, good, bad, up, down. To me, the point of criticism and the value of it, both as a practitioner and as a reader and follower of criticism, is the dialogue, is the conversation, the interpretation, the search for meaning. I think criticism is important because art is important. It would be weird if there was Congress and no one covered it, or said what was happening, or said if it was good, or bad, or surprising, or new, or breaking a norm.

Craig: We have too much of that, I think, as well.

Julia: [chuckles]

Craig: I understand what you’re saying, and you’re right, I do focus on the verdict, but the reason I do that– First of all, there are critics who are smart and thoughtful, and you are one of them, whether I agree with you or not.

Julia: Have you ever listened to my podcast?

Craig: Not your podcast.

[laughter]

Julia: You just presume it because I seem like I’m going to be in conversations. That’s fine.

Craig: I’m a little bit of a transcript reader.

Julia: [laughs]

Craig: The listening takes too long. I can read so fast. There are critics that I respect in terms of their analysis and stuff because I think they’re really thoughtful, whether I agree with them or not. Walter Cha, for instance, has written things about movies I’ve done where I’m like, “That’s amazing,” and he loves it, and also, “That’s amazing,” and he hates it.” That’s an interesting thing.

The reason I focus on the verdict is because that’s what the rest of the world focuses on. I think critics can say to themselves, “Oh, it’s all about everything right up to thumbs up, thumbs down,” but no one else is really listening. They’re going for thumb up, thumb down, and then they’re combining that into a huge tomato.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s the only thing anyone looks at. That’s what’s happened.

Julia: You are judging criticism by the worst commercial output of it and not what the critic is doing, which is engaging with the work.

Craig: That’s how gun manufacturers talk a little bit.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I’m serious.

[laughter]

Julia: God damn it.

Craig: You can’t ignore how the product is used.

[laughter]

Julia: It’s interesting, though. We are living in a world with less and less criticism. Alan Sepinwall isn’t at Rolling Stone anymore. There will be fewer paid television critics reviewing season three than season two, and season two than season one.

Craig: I’ll miss Alan, whether he liked season one better than he liked season two.

Julia: He’s a great critic.

Craig: He’s a thoughtful guy. I read all of that because I was interested in his–

John: Wait, Craig, you read it?

Craig: Yes. There are a couple of people I read. I’m very specific about it. There isn’t less criticism. There’s less paid criticism. The critic industry almost orchestrated its own demise by propagating and popularizing the verdict. Now everyone’s a critic.

Julia: That’s just opinions. That’s not criticism.

Craig: Oh, well, tell that to all the people that are opinionating.

Julia: Don’t pay attention to them. I have no desire to be a screenwriter, thank God.

[laughter]

Julia: If I were making art in the way that you guys make art, the good critics would be important to me. I feel like not following them or reading them would be like making a phone call and having no one pick up on the other end of the line, which is not to devalue the experience of the audience, which is they’re moved by your thing, and they take the ride of your thing, and they have feelings about your thing. What the good critic does is assess why it moved you and how it did that.

Craig: Or why they hate it, and why it’s stupid, and why it shouldn’t have been made.

Julia: You’re just not reading the right critics. It’s so beautiful.

Craig: That’s not beautiful, I assure you.

[laughter]

Craig: The experience of reading, sometimes it is so personal, and so mean, and such an exercise, and, “Hey, let’s just be a dick.” It really is. I understand that you practice a different sort.

Julia: Or advocate for, at least. I wouldn’t put myself up with the truly great critics of our age.

Craig: Some of what we call the truly great critics of our age, I can do a nice tight 40 on why Pauline Kael’s most overrated voice in cinema history and should have never been listened to by anyone.

[laughter]

Julia: [unintelligible 00:35:51] 40 minutes of the show.

Craig: [crosstalk] That’s the tightest 40 minutes I could do.

[laughter]

John: My natural instinct is to be the peacemaker who makes everyone happy at the end, but I’m not going to do that now because I’ve learned in this book that conflict is good.

[laughter]

John: I thought we don’t have to.

[applause]

Craig: So good.

John: Yes, we don’t need to resolve this thing-

Craig: Damn, this is good.

John: -because this is an open, ongoing fight between love-

Craig: [unintelligible 00:36:14]

John: -and is a perfect time to segue to something that Craig likes much more than rallying on critics, which is a game.

Craig: A game.

John: Craig has a game.

Craig: I have a game.

[applause]

John: We have at least two people out there who have starred books. Raise the house lights if we can. Did the third person find their star?

Craig: Yes. Great.

John: We’ll have the three people with stars come up these stairs.

Craig: Come on up these stairs here or those stairs there-
John: Is there a stair there? Yes, any stairs.

Craig: -and join us on stage.

John: [unintelligible 00:36:39] over here. Drew has a stool.

Craig: Ah. [crosstalk]

John: Hello. What’s your name?

Kayla: I’m Kayla.

John: Hi, Kayla. Hi.

Kayla: Hi.

John: Kayla, take a step by the stool. Hi, Kayla. And?

Valeska: Valeska.

John: Valeska. Valeska, very nice to meet you and hi. Sita. Oh my gosh, we have an amazing– All right.

Craig: Right.

John: Craig, you guys are going to be gathered around this one stool.

Craig: Gather around the stool.

John: This stool.

Craig: You’re going to want to be close to that bell.

John: If you have the answer, you are going to hit that bell.

Craig: Let me ask you a question, guys. How are we with Christmas movies? Okay.

[laughter]

John: As a reminder to our audience, don’t shout out the answer if you know it. Craig will tell you the answer at the end.

Craig: Yes. If you guys don’t have it, we can open it up to the audience. It’s no big deal. I’m just going to read. There are five quotes from Christmas movies. Each quote is from a real Christmas movie. It is exact. They’re a little odd in their own way. They’ll go from not so odd to odder and odder. If you know the name of the movie that this quote is from, you hit the ding dong. All right? Do you want to practice?

[bell dings]

Craig: So gentle.

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Craig: Even gentler.

John: Yes, absolutely.

[laughter]

John: You can hit it hard. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: Yes. Find the inner winner, the person that wants to take the other two down.

[laughter]

Craig: First quote from a movie. “Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: Polar Express.

Craig: That is correct.

John: Nicely done.

Craig: Way to go.

[applause]

Craig: We won’t have an 0 for 5 situation. This is great.

John: They got it.

Craig: Here we go. Next one. “If this is their idea of Christmas, I got to be here for New Year’s.” We’ve got some people who know out there.

John: I’m going to give you a hint. This was the subject of a Deep Dive episode.

Participant: 500 episodes. [chuckles]

John: [chuckles] Absolutely.

Craig: Fair point.

John: It’s in the book as well.

Craig: I’m going to turn to the audience.

John: It’s in the book.

Craig: You want to guess one? Then I’m going to go to the audience.

[bell dings]

Valeska: Die Hard.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, Die Hard.

[applause]

John: One and one.

Craig: This one’s really weird. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Kayla: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Craig: No.

John: Ah, [unintelligible 00:38:52].

[laughter]

Craig: No.

[laughter]

Craig: No. It’s a hard one. “Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all.”

[bell dings]

Valeska: The Grinch.

Craig: No.

Kayla: Nightmare Before Christmas.

Craig: No. Now we’re just saying titles.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: I’m going to turn it over to the audience.

Participant: Miracle on 34th.

Craig: That is correct. Miracle on 34th Street.

[applause]

John: We’re still tied one and one.

Craig: Yes. I love this one. Ready? “Come here, little one. Papa wants to see you.”

[laughter]
[bell dings]

Kayla: Elf.

Craig: Yes, it is Elf. Last one. Longest one. My favorite one. Many of you are going to know it. Don’t say it. “Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue steel beauty, the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received–“ I’m registering that. You can ring it, and I’ll finish it. Yes.

Valeska: Christmas Story.

Craig: It is Christmas Story.

John: Christmas Story.

Craig: “Gradually, I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots. Hip shots-“

John: “Hip shots.”

Craig: -are the last two words of Christmas Story. Now–

John: We’re going to tie two and two, so we’re going to do a tiebreaker.

Craig: Okay. Well, the tiebreaker question is, what interesting fact unites all of these quotes? They all share one thing in common. It’s not that they’re in Christmas movies. Yes?

Audience Member: The writer’s Jewish?

[laughter]

Craig: It’s a good guess. It’s a callback, and I like that a lot. That’s a very good guess. I wasn’t going to do that two years in a row. That said, probably yes. No, I don’t believe the writers were all Jewish.

John: Did you have a guess?

Audience Member: Were they all men?

Craig: Oh, hey. Maybe, but that’s not what I was looking for. We’ll go past white, male, Jew. No, something about their connection to the movies themselves, the context within the movies themselves. They’re all doing something similar in their movie. Yes?

Audience Member: They’re all said by the protagonists?

Craig: No.

John: Oh, I think I know the answer.

Craig: Okay, don’t say it. I’m going to give you three one last chance. One last chance. Yes.

Audience Member: The last lines?

Craig: The last lines of the movies. Each one of those was the last line of their movie. You know what? Good job, you guys. I think they did great. John, tell them what they won.

[laughter]

John: All right. Often when you’re putting out a book, you are creating extra merch for the book. For the Scriptnotes book, we have Scriptnotes stickers, but the stickers were there on the table as you came in. I have done three books before this. I did Arlo Finch merch, which I still have sitting on a shelf. You guys get Arlo Finch merch. As the winner, you get to pick your pick of these three things. Tell me what you get.

Craig: I got to tell you, you can’t miss on these. Each one of them, life-changing. First, we have an Arlo Finch neckerchief. Yes. Everyone’s Christmas dream. An Arlo Finch towel. By the way, I wish people could see their faces. They are either crying with joy or deep disappointment. Finally, an Arlo Finch water bottle because you can never have too many big, dumb water bottles.

John: Which would you like?

Audience Member: I’ll do the water bottle.

Craig: Yes, there you go. Congrats.

Audience Member: I want the towel.

Craig: Hey, that’s good news. You got the neckerchief, the one you wanted. Thank you, guys. Thank you for playing. I was really surprised by the writers were all Jewish, and I don’t know why. I should have seen that coming. All weird last lines. Maybe I didn’t do such a wonderful thing after all as the last line of Miracle on 34th Street. It is the subject of debate to this day. You’ll see a lot of threads on Reddit. Why does he say this? What does this mean?

John: What does it mean?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: I thought they were all voiceovers. They’re not voiceovers?

Craig: No, they are not all voiceovers. Our next guest I’m so excited for, she’s a writer, comedian, performer whose credits include Ted Lasso, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Bad Monkey, and Shrinking. Welcome back to the program, Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

Craig: Hey. I hope you enjoyed watching Julia and I beat the fuck out of each other for about 10 minutes there.

Ashley Nicole Black: It literally took everything in me not to run out on stage and join the fight.

Julia: On which side?

John: Whose side did you fight on?

Ashley: Mostly Craig’s.

Craig: Oh, wow. All right. I’m so happy about that, but I would have been okay if you had gone– I mean, I like fighting.

John: Ashley, we’re in the Thanksgiving weekend. This episode will come out later on, but this is the Thanksgiving weekend, and often there are people gathering together, but there are discussions, debates around the dinner table. It can get a little bit heated. It’s not uncommon to have some heated words there.

Craig: Thanksgiving drama.

John: Did you have a good Thanksgiving, most crucially?

Ashley: I had a great Thanksgiving. I’m from here, so my whole family’s here. It’s really the best. I lived in Chicago and New York for a long time, then I would see my family once a year. It’s such a treat to be like, I can just see them whenever I want. Me and my uncle can get tacos. It’s pretty cool.

Craig: I love that you love your family, and you became a writer even though you–

Ashley: Well, my family is Black, and I do think that it’s a different thing. I think there is the stereotype of a writer as like, I was so sad and my parents didn’t talk to me. I just wrote in my room. I think Black people are just like, yes, I had cool shit to say. I wrote it down.

[laughter]

Ashley: Our problems are external for the most part.

John: Ashley’s book is going to be so much better than ours. It’s like, you have funny shit to say, write it down. It’s a simple book. She sold it.

Craig: I’m just terrified at how accurately you summed up my childhood with that mean voice.

Ashley: I work with a lot of writers.

Craig: You were tortured. Uh-huh. Well, all right. Congrats.
John: Ashley, you have your own chapter in the book. Thank you again for coming on the show. We are now a chapter in the book where we talk through your stuff. When you first came on the show, I remember dropping off with Mike at your apartment. Meeting your great dog, Gordy. Now you have a house. You’re a homeowner yourself. You’ve kept chugging along, series after series.

I’d love to talk to you about being that middle-of-your-career writer because so often we have the writers who are just starting out. You are consistently working on show after show. What is your life like? As you’re on a show, do you always know what the next thing is? What is it like?

Ashley: It’s so weird because when you’re young– and I was cute. I was so cute.

Craig: You were so cute?

Ashley: I was so cute.

Craig: You were cuter?

Ashley: You’re on set, and you’re a baby producer, and you’re like, oh, my God. This wallpaper, it’s not right. Oh, my God. The showrunner’s going to kill me. Do you mind changing it? They’re like, “Oh, you’re so cute. We’ll change it.” Then you get to a certain point, and you just have to be like, so this doesn’t work, and it does need to change.

I can’t blame it on anyone else because I’m a VP, and no one would believe that my boss was going to kill me at this point in my life. It’s just such a weird thing to be like, I have the answer to the question, and I am going to have to say it. People don’t like it when that happens to women, but I have to say it. It’s just such a weird position to be in.

Craig: The boss.

Ashley: But not, right?

Craig: Right. Sort of the boss.

Ashley: Yes. Sometimes you’re in meetings, and you’re like, oh, it should look like this. Then, “Oh, well, we’ll see what Bill says.” It’s like, I said it.

Craig: We don’t need Bill.

Ashley: I did it.

John: Since we’re coming out of Thanksgiving, we’ve been answering a lot of questions for the book, and we have a lot of leftovers. I thought that because we’re in leftoverville, you could help us answer some questions that came from our Reddit AMA and from other times where people were asking us questions online. Your answers are just better than ours.

Ashley: Do I answer as if I were a woman, correct?

John: No, we want your real answer here.

Craig: Wait, that’s an option? Kind of.

John: This is a question from Jeff A. When was there a time that has held you back from writing, from sitting in a script, going to a meeting? How did you get over or not get over that fear?

Ashley: Wait, say that again?

John: What was a time that a fear held you back? And what worked for you?

Ashley: I would say not a meeting or writing, but as an actor. A lot of times you come onto set. We were talking about Vince. The first scene that I shot on Bad Monkey, I literally had flown, arrived, put my things in a hotel room. Then we shot that scene at two o’clock in the morning, and it’s me and Vince.

You’re a very low-level actor who hasn’t slept in 48 hours, and you’ve never been on this set before. You’ve never met any of these people. The first thing you have to do is try to be funny next to Vince Vaughn. I would love to meet the sociopath who’s not fearful in that moment. I think the way you get past it is just to act as if it’s already happened.

A weird thing about being an actor is you can get fired at any time. It’s not like, oh, I got the job. I deserve to be here. No, you can get yanked literally at any point. It’s like, “Your manager’s on the phone.” Oh, did she want to congratulate me? “No.” You just have to go in and be like, we are in this scene together in this moment, so I’m going to act as if we are both top-level actors, and this is what’s supposed to happen.

I will say the great thing is that most of the really crazy high-level actors I’ve worked with will do the same thing. Just be like, “Yes, we’re supposed to be in this scene together. Let’s go.” You just do that until you get past that initial moment, and then do it.

John: That’s great advice for anybody going into a room to pitch, or you feel like you’re not supposed to be in this place. This is beyond where you’re supposed to be at. You just say, no, of course I’m supposed to be here. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

Ashley: Yes, I am here.

John: You are here, so change the fucking wallpaper because I’m in charge.

Ashley: Wallpaper was the worst example. It was the hardest thing to change.

Craig: It really is hard. Yes.

Ashley: He’ll say curtains.

Craig: Easier.

John: Haley Huang had a question. What is your favorite genre to watch, and what is your favorite genre to write? I’m curious if they match up for you or not.

Ashley: No, my favorite genre to write is comedy, hands down. I really got into this to make people laugh. I’m really curious about how drama writers work because what is the point of a scene if not to get a laugh? I will say that I watch a lot of drama and crime, and I probably watch a lot more of that than comedy.

Craig: I think I’m probably the flip. I like writing drama because it means I don’t have to worry about the punchline, the button, any of that misery. Did it. Don’t want to do it anymore. Watching comedy to me is– that’s what’s fun.

John: I love watching comedy. We’ll do our third rewatch of 30 Rock, and it’s just so amazing, but I just could never do that. I just don’t have the stamina or the brain that creates that level of joke density. I just can’t do it.

Craig: Kind of why we enjoy it, right?

John: It feels like magic.

Craig: Probably is why all the Oscars should go to comedies.

Ashley: Also, by the way, no one does. In a room of 10 people who are creating that joke density, no one person does that.

John: Again, I feel like I should be able to do it. I feel like Tina Fey could do that. I’m, of course, comparing myself to a team of experts who spent years doing it. Noah L. asks, when you were first learning how to screenwrite– Screenwrite as a verb is just weird. No, don’t like it.

Craig: Do not like it.

John: Who were the writers you looked up to and whose voices really inspired you? Ashley, any screenwriters inspire you as you were coming up?

Ashley: Yes, Shonda Rhimes, for sure. I think Grey’s Anatomy came out when I was in college, and it was the first show that looked like the world that I lived in. When I was younger, Kevin Williamson, I loved Scream and Dawson’s Creek, and those just highly verbal, Aaron Sorkin, very writerly writers, and I still have the issue of overwriting to this day, thanks to my love of those writers.

John: Craig, did you have any screenwriters you looked up to?

Craig: I definitely remember seeing Ocean’s Eleven and saying, okay, I need to know who this Ted Griffin guy is. I remember seeing Out of Sight and thinking, I need to know who this Scott Frank guy is. I read the script for Jerry Maguire, and Cameron Crowe blew my mind, even more so than he had already blown my mind prior with Fast Times, and then also Sorkin. I think a lot of people giggle a little bit because he’s so prolific, and because there’s that super cut of him reusing dialogue and stuff, but it’s great dialogue.

Ashley: Our legs went all the way up to here.

Craig: Yes, exactly, but it’s great dialogue, and he’s written– that whole A Few Good Men thing, I just– Oh, my God. Yes, so good.

Ashley: I think it’s also– maybe because you said A Few Good Men, it’s very theatrical in the sense that as someone who started as an actor, I like it when characters are trying to get a response from the other one. It’s so weird to me in comedies where the actors don’t laugh at the jokes. In real life, like I’m in a room here with you, I would like to make you laugh, and you know that that’s my goal. It’s weird to pretend that characters aren’t trying to get something from each other.

I feel like Aaron Sorkin’s characters are always directly pursuing tactics in a way that–

Craig: The whole opening of Social Network, just watching that ping-pong. Apparently, I think it’s true that scene was, I don’t know, 14 pages long. Fincher was like, “Aaron, I can’t open a movie with 14 minutes of two people talking.” Sorkin was like, “No, it’s four minutes. You’re reading it too slow.”

[laughter]

Craig: Fincher was like, “Okay, record it for me at the pace you want it to be.” He did, and Fincher, apparently on the day, was with the script supervisor, like, “Are we on pace?” Then when you watch it back, the clip is insane. Oh, so good.

John: In answering this question, I would say there’s always movies I admired, and eventually at some point I realized, oh, people wrote those movies. I didn’t know that people had wrote those movies.

Craig: They screen wrote them.

[laughter]

John: Once you actually start reading screenplays, which are so much more available now. I remember reading Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers and going to the last page and like, holy shit, and going back to page one and re-reading it again. You realize like, oh, that’s what you can actually do on the page.

Reading James Cameron’s script for Aliens. It’s like, oh, that’s what a movie looks like when it’s in courier. It was just so revelatory. That thing, I think, is so much better now is that because of the internet, you can just read all the scripts, and you need to read the scripts and not just watch the movies. Let’s do one more little side dish of a question here. What do you got, Craig?

Craig: This is a multi-parter from Clara A. “I’m an extremely long-time listener who, by happenstance, has found herself in a weekly writing group with local sweetie Megana Rao for the past couple of years.”

John: Megana’s the best.

Craig: “My question, what is your favorite thing about Megana?”

John: She’s not even here to defend herself. She’d be so embarrassed.

Craig: “Alternatively, Craig, do you still love millennials?” I don’t remember professing that.

John: Yes, I think you’ve said it on certain transcripts.

Craig: I do. Well, let’s talk about it. I’ll do another question because I don’t know if you have a favorite thing about Megana. That seems unfair.

Ashley: I feel like she’s got great hair.

Craig: She does have great hair.

John: Great. Absolutely true. Yes, we’re incredibly thankful for Megana, but it’s a very specific–

Craig: Yes, the kindest and most positive person around. Just such a great person. Yes, I still love millennials. I like zillennials. I think that’s my groove. There you go.

John: We got a few of those.

Craig: If you’re 28, 29, 30, 31, that’s a good crew. Nitzen has a good question.

John: Nitzen has a good question. Do you want to try Nitzen’s?

Craig: Yes, sure.

John: Nitzen asks, “As a beginner, is a credit for a bad movie better than no credit at all? What if that movie involves problematic people? Ashley, what’s your opinion on this? Julia, I’m going to open this to you as well. Do you think it’s better to have no credits or a bad credit?”

Ashley: I’m curious what you guys will say. I really don’t know. I think I would lean towards it’s better to have a bad credit because the people who care about credits are the other people who work in the industry, and people who work in the industry know that the way the movie turned out is not the writer’s fault, particularly when it’s an early career writer.
I think having had the credit and the experience is a good thing. No one’s looking at that going, “Oh, he must be a terrible writer because the movie turned out bad.”

John: Absolutely correct. Julia, do you think about credits? As you’re talking about something on, say, [unintelligible 00:56:32] are you always mindful of the things they’ve written around it or are you just looking at that one piece of work, generally?

Julia: Well, a professional critic with some expertise would look at what the person has made in the past and think about how this fits into the history of their career and the genre and the actors. There’s different levels of comprehensiveness in that. Yes, I don’t think you would look at an early credit and be like, and thus everything they make from there on must also be bad. You take the work on its own terms, but I think the rest of the surrounding history is context.

Craig: What about this idea, what if the movie involves problematic people? That doesn’t seem like something that I would– It feels like writers really don’t get– We get blamed for things in reviews that weren’t our fault all the time. Of course. These actors did the best they could with a bad script. I’m like, oh my God. No, they didn’t.

It doesn’t feel instinctively like when you see movies that come out and there’s hints of some problematic people involved, does it taint the whole thing or–

Julia: We’re going to do art from the artist, the whole thing, right now?

Craig: Sure.

Julia: Yes, I don’t know. Yes, I think problematic is a word that can do a lot and go a lot of directions there for this question, but yes, I think you take the work as the work.

Craig: The work as the work.

Julia: I think also people know that writers don’t get to choose who’s in the movie. It’s really interesting because we do get blamed for things that we didn’t do or don’t have any control over, and then we also don’t get credit for the things that we do.

Craig: Unerringly.

Julia: The number of people asking a director, when did you guys decide when the character would do this in this episode? It’s like, he wasn’t hired yet. What are you talking about? We never met that guy when we made that choice.

Craig: There’s a whole booklet that tells him what to do. It is amazing.

John: He followed the instructions well.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right. Those are some questions that were leftovers. Thank you so much for helping us out with the leftovers. It is time for our one cool thing. All right. Julia Turner, do you have one cool thing to share with us? I will say this is completely stolen from the Slate Culture Gabfest because they do their endorsements.

Julia: I do and I’m going to say it on this show instead of on my show. Okay. I hosted Thanksgiving this week. I had some beloved family over. We made some pies. They brought some cakes because there were also some Thanksgiving week birthdays. One of the cakes they brought was the Tom Cruise coconut cake.

Craig: How does everyone know what this is?

Julia You don’t know about the cake? Has anybody here eaten?

Ashley: I’ve tasted it.

John: I remember hearing about this, but I don’t know what–

Craig: I feel so alone right now.

Julia: My knowledge of this comes from Matt Belloni, who to your point about specificity, he has such a good eye for the detail that makes you feel like he was inside a room that you weren’t. Although he’s very clear that he also is not on the list of people to whom Tom Cruise sends a particular white chocolate coconut bundt cake for Christmas every year. Has anybody in this room actually from Tom Cruise received this cake?

Craig: Yes, there’s not going to be a big chance of that.

John: For [unintelligible 00:59:53] it’s just in case.

Julia: I’ve gone down to Rabbit Hole. They send it to the whole staff of–

Craig: I think they’re still raising more lights like I know there’s one person. No, weirdly none of us got the–

Ashley: Tom Cruise repels in.

Julia: I’d heard about this. I never tried the cake. It’s from a bakery called Dones in Woodland Hills. Apparently, legend has it– This anecdote does not meet my journalistic standards of rigor. It comes from a light Google. According to a light Google, apparently, at one point, Katie Holmes and Diane Keaton proposed a contest where they would each present Tom Cruise with a cake, and then he would pick which one he liked better.
Diane Keaton brought him this cake from Dones in Woodland Hills, and he chose Diane Keaton’s cake. Now he sends it to everybody for Christmas, and you can get it on Goldbelly. Ashley Nicole, you’ve had it. What do you think of it?

Ashley: It’s really good. It was so good. Everybody says it is, and you’re like, oh, yes, well, you got a cake from Tom Cruise. No, it actually is really good.

Julia: Also, white chocolate is a big no-no for me. You tell me white chocolate is in something, and I’m like, forget it, I’m not a bunch.

Craig: You liked it.

Julia: This cake is delicious.

Craig: Wait. It’s not called Tom Cruise Coconut Cake, I assume.

Julia: It is called White Chocolate Coconut Bundt Cake, and you can either go get it at Dones in Woodland Hills, or you can order it on Goldbelly. It’s excellent. We were talking about things with problematic auspices, but I just can’t lie, this cake was excellent.

John: D&D next week, we’re having the– yes, absolutely.

Craig: Yes, I got to get on this right away.

John: I’m a big believer in, you’re making a feast, you’re cooking all the entrees, the sides, buy dessert. Desserts are delicious.

Craig: Oh, yes. No one’s upset with you when you show up with dessert.

John: You’re not going to be able to top that pie.

Craig: Melissa just texted me. Thank you, Melissa. We have gotten one of those cakes.

Julia: Oh, from Tom Cruise?

Melissa: I don’t know if it was from Tom, but it was from Dones.

John: All right. We have live updates. Craig’s wife, Melissa, is here. She reports that that cake was actually eaten in the Mason household.

Craig: Did I like it?

Melissa: It was delicious.

Craig: Of course it was. Well, that’s a little insight into how my life goes. I’m like, “I’m alone.” And I’m the only one here that ate it.

John: Yes. Ashley Nicole Black, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Ashley: Yes. I may have shared this on the pod before, but I’m on a board of a charity called Letters to Santa. It is Christmas time. Every year, we raise a bunch of money and we buy kids their Christmas presents, but we also give grants of substantial amounts of money to their families. We also did letters to Altadena after the fires. Our idea is that the solution to poverty is money, so we just give people money.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: We’re going to send some money to the charity. Yes.

Ashley: You can go to letterscharity.org and just donate money if you want to do that. Then closer to Christmas time, I will be posting wishlists of the kids. There’s nothing more pleasurable than having a glass of wine and buying a kid you’ve never met a bike. It’s the absolute best. Follow me, I’ll be posting those wish lists, and you can buy kids their presents if you want.

Craig: You’re a good person.

John: That’s a good person.

Ashley: It’s the one thing.

Craig: It’s a big thing though.

Ashley: Then I’m just walking through the streets, sticking out my foot, and tripping people.

John: Ashley and Nicole Black, we should all follow you on Instagram, which is where I follow you, and because we both follow the same person on Instagram, I can see when you’ve liked a post. We need to talk about Simon Sits.

Ashley: Oh, my gosh.

John: We’re both going to start crying now.

Ashley: I cry every morning now.

John: This is a woman who basically fosters dogs and has the most charming stories, but then she adopts them away. You’re like, but what’s going to happen?

Ashley: Oh, no. Then I follow those dogs. I now follow those dogs in all their new homes. Everybody’s doing great.

John: Everyone’s doing great. Simon himself has a disorder, but it’s hopefully going to be okay. Craig, what do you have for a wonderful thing?

Craig: I’m going to go with a little nerdery.

John: I love it.

Craig: This fall/winter, as I often do, I am working with some friends to solve Puzzle Boat, I think it’s Puzzle Boat 12, which is put out through Panda Magazine. If you love very hard puzzles, go subscribe. One of the puzzles referenced something called Day of the Tentacle. There we go, dork. Okay. You’re my kind of nerd. I actually was not familiar with it because when I was growing up, I didn’t have a PC. I just had Macs. There were a world of games that were just PC only, the pixely games that I missed out on. One of them was called Day of the Tentacle. It was published by Lucas Arts, sort of by the same team that was famous for Monkey Island and so forth.

Well, turns out you can play Day of the Tentacle now on everything, including your iPad. Writers Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert, Gary Winick. It is adorable. It’s a lovely concept that involves you three different friends who are sent into three different time periods, who can send stuff back and forth to each other through their little time thing. It’s dork funny, nerd funny, which I love. It actually looks really good. I think they updated the graphics for the iOS version. If you’re looking for something, I don’t know, probably costs like $6 or something like that, and you like that kind of point and click classic ’90s adventure, check out Day of the Tentacle.

[applause]

John: My one cool thing is actually the very back page of the Scriptnotes book that you all have in your hands right now, which is the thank you page. So often you read through a book and there’s the thank yous at the end and you’re like, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know what they did. We try to be very specific about who these people were and the work they did that made the Scriptnotes book possible.

That, of course, starts with our incredible producers over the years who not only made the show happen, but also got our transcripts together, which without the transcripts there was never going to be a book. The whole team at Crown was fantastic from buying the book in the first place, but getting it through all the stages of production and getting it into your hands.
Jody Reimer, who sold the book for us, is incredible. We had just amazing people the whole time through. Including our audience the whole time through. If we didn’t have people who were writing in every week and providing questions for us to answer, letting us know that it was actually worthwhile for us to be doing this for 15 years, there wouldn’t be a book either. That’s why I think the final thank you is really to our whole audience for making Scriptnotes possible.

Craig: Without you, we’re nothing.

John: Thank you very much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you very much. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our intro or our outro this week. Thank you to Raven up in the booth, Mary, Dax, Brenna, Dan, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you, Pamela Christlieb, Patty Lombard, and everyone at Chevalier’s Books, our official bookseller for this event.

Chevalier’s Books is on Larchmont, and we signed some extra books. If you’re listening to this podcast at home and you’re like, man, I wish I had a signed book, they have some there at the large font location of Chevalier’s Books. Thank you to Matt Inman, Mary Motes, everyone at Crown Publishing for making tonight possible. Thank you to Julia Turner and Ashley Nicole Black.

[applause]

John: Who out here is a Scriptnotes premium subscriber? Any premium subscribers? A little over a hand. Thank you so very much. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. Thank you all very much for coming out this afternoon for our live show. Thank you.

Craig: Thanks, folks. Have a great Sunday.

[Bonus Segment]

John: We have an audience full of people who may have some questions here. We’re going to bring down a little microphone or raise some house lights, and I’ll answer a couple questions from our listeners now. If you want to ask a question, let’s have you line up in this isle here.

Ashley: These people got up fast. These questions are burning.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name and what your question is?

Jonathan: Hi, my name is Jonathan. My question is, if you’re working on a script that overall is serious in tone, say like a grounded action thriller, but you have an opportunity to inject some humor into a scene, how do you use your internal barometer to know when you’re keeping it engaging and realistic versus when it’s overall messing up the tone of the overall project?

John: It’s a great time to also bring up the observation that we don’t make comedies anymore, but all the movies are funny. Everything has to be funny, but we just don’t actually make comedies anymore. The Marvel movies are full of comedy, but they’re not supposed to be comedies. Craig, what’s your instinct when you have, there’s an opportunity for a comedy moment, but it’s not the overall nature of the–

Craig: Ideally, if it’s the sort of thing that someone’s going to say something that’s funny, you want that person, that actual character to be witty enough or naive enough or proud enough or whatever their specific characteristic is to actually say that thing. The worst situation is what I just call quipping, where people are just constantly quipping at each other, and nobody believes that.

Things that emerge naturally that make you laugh, that’s a good sign. If you’re manufacturing it and there’s some sweat coming down your head because you’re trying to figure out how to engineer the plumbing, probably not a good situation.

John: Our next question.

Santiago: Thank you. My name is Santiago. I teach filmmaking to high school students. Going back to what you guys were saying about AI, I’m sorry, everyone. I guess part of my job is to introduce these students as they’re learning how, from script writing all the way to editing and the full production, how to involve technology and everything in their work and I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on that because as it changes, it’s definitely something I’ve been thinking about.

John: Santiago, thank you for the question. Thank you for teaching. Teaching is great. You obviously have students who want to learn about film and filmmaking, and the technologies will keep changing. I think there’s that uncomfortable line between where you’re using the tool that helps you do the thing, like an online editing software, that’s not cheating.
If it’s generating scenes or cutting scenes for you, that feels like, oh, are you really learning how something works? That’s the uncomfortable thing.

Craig: You know how we had to learn how to add and multiply, then they gave us calculators? If you just start with the calculator, you are missing some fundamental education. Maybe, considering I’m sure that Santiago, your students are very interested in using these things, to use them in a way where you can talk about after they used it, what pleased them? How did this thing deliver what they hoped it would, and how did it fail to deliver what they hoped it would?

What could they do that would, in their hearts, be better than what this thing did, so that you can put it in some context?

Ashley: I would say no. I taught for a long time before I started doing this. For me, one of the jobs as a teacher is to create space to be uncomfortable because learning is so uncomfortable. Writing a bad script is so uncomfortable. Wanting to do good acting and then watching the tape back and finding out you’re trash is so uncomfortable, but that’s part of the learning process.

You can’t become a better writer until you’ve written a lot of bad scripts and you’ve sat in the discomfort of the distance between the movie you see in your mind and the movie you’re currently able to create. If the idea of AI is that it’s going to close that distance, then where is the learning if you’re not sitting in that space?

[applause]

Ashley: The feeling of like, oh, I can perfectly picture this moment in my mind. I have to figure out how to write it properly, I have to figure out how to describe it to all the department heads properly, I have to figure out how to make it work on the bodies of the actors who are their own individual people. Gosh, I wish I could just push a button and get the scene out of my brain.

That’s the work. The work is all of that communication. I would err on the side of–

John: What Ashley said is exactly right. Hopefully, you’re teaching your students how to write a scene, which is what she’s describing, and not a prompt. It is so hard, it’s uncomfortable when you’re having conversations, but the things that we’re talking about in the book and in this podcast are about, well, who is in it? What is the conflict? What are they trying to do? Those things are not AI-able things.

Those things are great discussions to have and then figure out what tools you need to actually use to generate anything out of that. The scene is still the crux of everything.

Ashley: There’s also the discoveries of the process. We’re shooting a scene, and two of the actors went to walk out the door at the same time and bumped into each other. It was so funny. Then it just informed the annoyance these characters have with each other. It’s like a moment that you discover that changes the scene because you’re doing the process of doing it.

John: A question.

Katie: Hi. My name is Katie and because things have been too peaceful, I have a question about critique and film criticism. I wanted to know your thoughts on the difference or the line between criticism and analysis. If film criticism brings out, maybe evokes more personal feelings than other genres like books or just anything else that involves empathy and projecting yourself onto the script.

I was wondering if there were any parameters that could help maybe delineate where those lines between analysis and critique comes into play, just like journalism and yellow journalism. Is there a way that we could delineate between opinion and critique or analysis?

John: Great. Thank you, Katie. Some of what you’re asking there is my instinct was, oh, I need to try to make peace and sort this all out and define, oh, no, you really have more overlap and agreement between things. I’m going to see if I can do a little of this. Analysis, someone who’s taking, oh, let’s look at the films of the ‘90s and what the patterns are that emerged from that.

Who were the filmmakers and where things go to versus a thumbs up or thumbs down on this movie. Craig, I think you feel– is that analysis worthwhile potentially?

Craig: Certainly. I’m curious to hear what you think about this because in my mind, under your question, I wonder if there’s this sub-question of how do we delineate what you guys do, which is what I would call thoughtful, qualified analysis/critique versus other people who just saw a movie, hated it [onomatopoeia].

Julia: The sound effects are very crucial, I think, there. I think all good criticism is analysis, contains analysis and interpretation and judgment. To be making art today and have the possibility that Wesley Morris at the New York Times might look at it and think about it, he is such an extraordinary critic and you should listen to his new podcast, Cannonball, which is excellent.

It seems much more fun to make art with that potential wise, deep, empathetic, generous, knowledgeable, interpretive audience in mind. To me, all good criticism contains analysis and soul. I think maybe Craig’s just reading the wrong stuff. I think thumbs up-thumbs down, here we are in the Coliseum, everybody go kill that guy, that’s not criticism to me.

Craig: Literally, the most famous film critics did that. Literally.

Julia: Okay, but when we go see– Yes, that was the schtick for their show to get an audience, but if you go back and read all of Ebert’s old reviews, we can argue about Pauline Kael later, I’m not a particular Kael stan, but when we go see stuff at the Arrow or the New Beverly, to go back and read the contemporary reviews, often from Ebert himself because he wrote about everything, it’s so fun.

It’s fun because sometimes he’s really brilliant and smart. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to have gotten it and it isn’t that useful. Nobody bats 1,000 and you get a sense of how it landed at the moment. It’s also a record of how the stuff was received. That criticism of the past is valuable to me and so is the criticism of today.

John: Thank you for your question.

Ashley: Thank you.

John: I’ll take one last question here. What is your question?
O’Neill: Hi, my name’s O’Neill. I have ADHD, not the fun kind, but the kind that’s very debilitating. My mind moves a million miles per second, but I write very slowly. I’m about a page a day-er. My question for you is how should I manage all of these thoughts when my physical typing limitations are so slow?

Craig: Okay, we have something for you and it’s called learning how to type. Now, that in and of itself may be an arduous task, particularly if you have a debility or a neurological disorder, but learning how to type will speed you up dramatically because I also think fast and I type fast. I think if I could not type, it would be a real problem for me.

I feel the pain. Learning how to type is worth it. There are a gazillion ways to do it online. It will be uncomfortable. The learning will be uncomfortable.

Ashley: Oh, no. You get a Mavis Beacon who says she taught me good.

Craig: By the way, you know that she doesn’t exist, right?

Ashley: I know. They don’t teach kids to type anymore.

Craig: No. There is no Mavis Beacon. They invented Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: Oh, I know.

Craig: I didn’t know that. I believed in Mavis Beacon forever and then he told me and I was like, oh my God, and what else are you going to take away from me?

Ashley: Will you guys make the Mavis Beacon movie?

Craig: There’s no Mavis Beacon.

Ashley: There’s a documentary.

John: Crucial IP that’s being underserved.

Craig: See, by the way, whatever works for you, it will be annoying and frustrating. Give yourself because it’s magic. When it finally starts happening, you can’t believe it. It’s magic and it will make a huge difference for you.

John: I fully endorse the typing of it all. We did a Reddit AMA yesterday and we were answering a ton of questions. Craig was typing as fast as he could, but I could answer faster because I was dictating. The dictation software has gotten really good right now. It’s worth trying it. Again, it’s uncomfortable at the start because you feel like I’m talking to myself and Drew’s hearing me talk to my computer a lot.

For things like emails and stuff like that, it’s much faster. I can’t use it for real screenwriting, but for getting all that shit out of your head and onto a screen, it’s really good. It’s good for generating material, but also just silencing some of that noise could also be really helpful for you.

Craig: Which do you use?

John: The one I’m using right now is called Aqua Notes. It’s Aqua Voice.

Craig: They’re listening to our voice. They know.

John: I’ve been trying to Google it myself.

Ashley: That’s a level of fandom that is frankly a little scary.

Craig: Also dissapointing like Aqua.

John: I think it’s worth– in addition to typing, because I think typing is really important software to help just get stuff out of your head. It’s going to be really helpful as well.

Ashley: I would say also, do you outline? For me, because I have ADHD also, I do so much writing before I start writing. All that stuff that’s in my head, I just write it all down in a Notes app, anywhere, just to get it out of my head and then outline. Then it’s like you’re just getting more and more specific up to the point of actually writing the script.

Then I think also it’s working with your brain the way it works. Sometimes I write the punchline before the setup. I was in a writer’s room once where I was up on the screen. They were like, “Did you just write the punchline first?” I was like, yes, that’s how my brain works, so I have to get it out in time.

I think instead of feeling like you have to start at the beginning of the first scene and work your way through the script, write what you know, write the punchline, write the last line of the scene if that’s what you have, and feel free to go back and fill in.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you for the great questions.

Links:

• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Julia Turner
• Ashley Nicole Black on Instagram
• Arlo Finch series
• Slate Culture Gabfest
• Episode 516 – 10 Year Anniversary
• Dynasty Typewriter
• Bad Monkey
• The Tom Cruise coconut cake from Doan’s Bakery
• Letters to Santa
• @simonsits on Instagram
• Day of the Tentacle
• Chevalier’s Books
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Mathew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids: there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 712 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we welcome back one of our favorite guests and guest hosts.

Craig: Yes.

John: Dana Fox is a writer and showrunner whose credits include, taking a breath here, What Happens in Vegas, Couples Retreat, Ben and Kate, How to Be Single, Cruella, Home Before Dark, The Lost City, Wicked, and the upcoming Wicked: For Good. She’s also my former assistant and one of my very favorite people. Welcome back, Dana Fox.

Craig: Ta-da.

Dana Fox: John and Craig are my favorite people. I have to say it right away. Get it out of my system.

John: We’re recording this in our office on a very rainy day. Behind you is the couch, which you would often take naps on.

Dana: I assume you were going to have it bronzed, but it’s just the same couch. It’s still here.

John: The same couch. Lambert is now taking a nap on your couch.

Dana: I saw it, and I had a Pavlovian response to it. The second I saw it, I thought I was going to fall asleep on it.

Craig: The gravity just takes you in, and you just want to lie down and not work.

Dana: Hold me towards it and made me disappoint John because I wasn’t awake to answer his phone.

Craig: Look at you now.

Dana: It’s because he let me nap that I think I did so well in the business.

Craig: [laughs] Okay. Well, something has to explain it.

Dana: I just needed to sleep a little bit. I was so tired. I needed to prep.

John: Look at you now with those headphones on. As Craig said, you do look like Princess Leia.

Dana: Thanks, guys.

Craig: Exactly like Obi-Wan, you’re our only hope, Princess Leia, because you’re wearing a Princess Leia–

Dana: She was a real hero of mine, so thank you for that. I really wanted to be her.

John: Carrie Fisher, of course. Incredible.

Dana: Oh my God, she’s incredible, and the most amazing writer.

John: Did you ever meet her?

Dana: No, I never did. I would have lost my mind.

John: I went to a birthday party for a friend that was at her house. She was exactly as cool and weird as you would want her to be.

Dana: A dream.

John: A dream. An absolute dream.

Craig: Nice.

John: Today, with you on the show, I do want to talk about Wicked, obviously. I also want to talk about character suffering, whether the ’90s were really a great movie decade, or whether this is all just our nostalgia. We’ll get into that.

Dana: Amazing. Am I the character who’s suffering or characters that I write?

John: You will be. There’s a listener question about character suffering.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about me. I was like, “I’m now suffering.”

John: Well, we’ll get into suffering because in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the promo circuit because you’re on the promo circuit right now, and Craig’s been through the promo circuit. It’s just exhausting.

Dana: It’s intense. I’m really tired.

John: It’s a mark of success that you have to do the promo circuit, but it’s just it’s a lot.

Dana: Yes, and you became a writer because you enjoy pajamas and glasses and never doing your hair, and then you’re on–

John: Not being looked at, basically.

Dana: Never having a single person look at your face.

Craig: Yes. That’s my favorite thing in the world.

Dana: Craig, that is the best thing in the entire world. Then you’re on the promo circuit and all the wrong things are happening. People are looking directly at your face.

John: Sitting next to you is the Scriptnotes book, the Hardcovers, which just came in. We’re so excited to hold them. Craig, have you gotten yours up in Canada yet?

Craig: I have not received it in Canada yet. I don’t even know if you guys have my address in Canada.

Dana: You guys, it’s so beautiful. I can’t wait to read it. It’s so gorgeous. Just to say, if I may, John and Craig are the people that I call whenever I don’t know how to do anything. I’m always like, “Hey, guys, I’m sorry.” Let’s say I started with a voiceover, and then I have to do a fade-in. “Where does fade in go on the page?” Nobody knows. It all looks weird.”

John: Basically, non-creative questions then.

Dana: No, that’s not true. I call you guys with every question I have. Now I just have the book, so there’s no excuse that I’m not allowed to call you anymore. I have to look at the book.

Craig: It’s true. Dana sometimes calls. She’s like, “But is 1 also a prime number?” It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. It’s about anything.

Dana: It doesn’t even have to be about screenwriting. Totally.

John: One of the goals with the Scriptnotes book, as you remember, is that we wanted a book that if you were to throw it across the room, you could hurt a person. I’ll say that the book has some sharp edges to it, which is nice, but it’s actually lighter than I’d expect. Isn’t it lighter in your hand?

Dana: It’s looking wild. It looks like a trompe-l’oeil. Is it a cake? You know that show?

Craig: Absolutely. It looks like it could be cake.

Dana: Is it cake?

John: It could be cake.

Dana: Yes, because you pick it up and it’s like, “Ooh, no problem,” but it looks substantial.

John: If you throw it in your backpack, it’s not weighing you down, but it is a substantial book. Also, it lies flat, which I didn’t know was going to happen, but actually it’s nice.

Craig: Oh.

John: You can actually open up it.

Dana: [gasps] You’re right. I’m doing it. Reader or listener, I’m doing it. This is great.

Craig: You called the podcast listeners readers.

Dana: I don’t know how to do this, you guys. I’m so bad at stuff. I called my phone the internet before to John. I said, I just kept pointing at it and going, “I have to internet it later.” He was like, “What is happening with you?”

Craig: Oh, Dana Fox.

Dana: I love you guys.

John: Thank you to everybody who sent in the pre-order receipts to Drew at askajohnaugust.com, because we love those and they’re a way for us to know how many people are actually buying the book. This past week, Drew, you sent all those folks a bonus chapter. How did that go?

Drew: Really well. People were really nice about it and sent glowing emails back, which felt nice to read.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing. Am I allowed to say this?

John: Please.

Dana: I’m going to do a thing on my ‘internet’, which is my phone, on Instagram. My handle is @inthehenhouse. I’m going to give away 20 copies. I’m going to send them to people.

Craig: What? Really?

Dana: To young people, students. If you’re a student, if you’re trying to be a writer, I want to send you one of these books because these men, Craig and John, are the greatest people of all time, that they’ve spent their time trying to help other writers be better. They believe ‘rising tides raises all boats’, and they’re generous with their time. I love them. I want to send 20 books to whoever needs one.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I have never felt anything doing this podcast until this moment.

Dana: DM me on my internet.

Craig: I’m having feelings.

Dana: Are you having feelings, Craig?

Craig: I’m having feelings. That was beautiful. Thank you.

Dana: It’s the least I could do. I just think you guys are amazing.

Craig: That’s very sweet, and it’s very generous of you, unless you’re stealing the books. If you’re stealing the books, it’s not generous.

Dana: No. I’m buying the books and giving them away.

Craig: Oh, okay. That is generous.

John: The bonus chapter we sent out is on getting stuff written. It was a chapter that was originally going to be in the book, and the book was just 600 pages, so we had to make some beautiful cuts [unintelligible 00:05:46]. We cleaned it up, we’ve formatted it nicely, and we sent it to all the people who had pre-ordered the book and sent the receipts in.

Dana: It’s amazing.

John: We’re still going to send it out. If you pre-order it now, we will send it to you. Drew will send it to you today. If you want this bonus chapter, it turned out really well.

Dana: Great. I’ll take the bonus chapter. Can I get some bonus chapter later?

Craig: Absolutely.

John: She needs to get some stuff written. One of the questions we get frequently is, are Craig and I going to do the audiobook, or are we going to read the audiobook for the Scriptnotes book? The answer is hell no. We are not doing that. That is a job left to a professional.

Dana: Correct.

John: I’m so excited to introduce the professional who actually did read the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: Woohoo.

John: Graham Rowat is an actor, a narrator whose talents span Broadway stages, television screens, audiobook recordings. You’ve seen him on Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen, Sunset Boulevard, Mamma Mia!, Guys and Dolls, Beauty and the Beast. He’s also a friend and a longtime Scriptnotes listener. Graham Rowat, welcome officially to The Scriptnotes podcast.

Graham Rowat: Thank you for having me.

Dana: Listen to that deep voice, guys.

Craig: You can hear the Broadway right in there.

Dana: Listen to–

Graham: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Craig: It’s so good.

Graham: [chuckles]

Craig: So good.

Dana: Get out of here. Your advice just got better. Everything you guys wrote in the book is better. Just look at that.

John: Come on, the gravitas of that?

Dana: Intense.

Craig: These shows that you’ve been in, just one great show after another. Congratulations. That’s amazing.

Dana: I know. Incredible.

Graham: I thought to myself, I know John gets to Broadway shows. How about the other guests on the pod today? Does anyone get to see Broadway that often?

Dana: Funny story.

Craig: Not as often as I’d like to. I live in Los Angeles, and now I live in Canada.

Graham: For sure.

Craig: I do see shows pretty frequently once they make their way to the Pantages or something like that, or I go to the bowl. I went for Jesus Christ Superstar, and I went for Into the Woods.

Craig: That’s great.

Graham: I love a show.

Dana: That’s great.

Graham: What can I say?

Dana: I love a show.

Graham: I love a show.

John: We mostly love that your voice is our book because when the topic of the audiobook came up and Graham graciously asked, “Hey, do you or Craig want to do it?” It was like, “Oh, it’ll be like four days in a recording studio.” You’re like, “Absolutely not.”

Dana: No.

John: I wanted somebody to do the book who knew the show, knew the voice of the show, had a sense of what this was like. I asked Graham who would do it, and they figured out how to make a deal for Graham to do it. Graham, I’m curious, what is it like to record this? Because the book is not Craig and I back and forth. It’s just, it’s a we voice behind it. What is your process? What is your instinct going into try to read this book?

Graham: Well, the first thing I did was I wanted to listen to every one of the episodes that featured the guests that are quoted in the chapters. It’s tricky because I want to find a neutral voice, but I hear you and Craig when I’m reading the book. There are distinct moments, too. There’s a chapter, the Die Hard chapter, where it is the two of you having a discussion.

Craig: Yes, it’s true.

Graham: The neutral voice is pretty much me. That’s always the easiest thing to work from and go back to. Then, when the two of you step out and actually are John and Craig, for example, there’s Craig’s whole chapter where he presents his approach to screenwriting, I tried to stay true to the Craig persona.

Here’s the thing: it’s a matter of very subtle changes because one of the very first things they teach you when you’re learning the old audiobook stuff is that anything too broad, that’s what the audience is going to be listening to, especially accents. They’re going to be sitting there thinking, “I don’t think that’s a very good accent.”

Dana: You decided not to do the Australian accent for Craig?

Graham: I didn’t. I gave him sort of the Maverick Ed McMahon energy.

Craig: Nice. Good.

Dana: Hot. Yes, sexy.

Craig: Not hot, no. McMahon, no.

Dana: Oh, I thought what the Ed McMahon energy was. I always thought it was really sexy.

Graham: No, young Ed McMahon. A real young, dashing Ed McMahon.
[laughter]

John: Graham, a question for you. We’re talking about the chapters that are interspersed with all the subject chapters are interview chapters. Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, for example, we try to do a light edit on them so you can still feel their voice and how they speak. What was it like for you to figure out how to make them sound on that? They read differently on the page, so how was it actually articulating those?

Graham: Thankfully, and listening to the episodes and listening to the interviews allowed me to have an image in my head so that when I got to Greta’s chapter, I could make a very slight adjustment vocally. It’s more about the conversational tone that was a part of their interviews. If I can inject? A little bit of a more casual conversational tone in their chapters, I feel like that makes it more distinct. If I am doing a Greta, I have her in my head because I’d listen to her, so if I make a slight pitch adjustment and I just make it a little more casual, I feel like I’m doing her justice, and I’m making enough of a shift away from the neutral narrator.

Christopher Nolan was the tricky one because he’s the very first one up. I thought if he had been ninth or tenth in your list of guests and I’d reached him, I probably could have gotten away with a very subtle English accent. I think the listener would have been okay with that because they’d be like, “Well, he’s used up all the other textures. We can give him a break.” But because he was the first one up, I had a conversation with the producer when I recorded this; he was Chris [unintelligible 00:11:14] was patched in from Texas. I said, “Should we do it?” and we came down on the side of not doing an accent for Christopher Nolan.

Craig: I think that’s fair. I think it’s a smart idea, given the fact that it starts it off because some people who haven’t heard Christopher Nolan speak might think, “Oh, this entire thing is going to be read in an English accent.” Also, Christopher’s brother Jonah has no English accent.

Graham: It’s so fascinating how different they are.

Craig: I feel like the Nolan family, you’re allowed to do either English or American. You’re fine.

Graham: That’s a relief.

Craig: Yes, you’re good. They won’t be coming after you.

John: Well, Graham, we are so, so, so appreciative that you did the book. Thank you so much for reading it. For folks who want to hear Graham read it, it’s December 2nd, just like the main book is out. It’s available everywhere. It should be on Audible, but every place you can buy audiobooks will have it.

Dana: I have 42 Audible credits I need to spend. I’m going to use one of them on this.

John: This is the perfect thing. It’s also going to be fun for people who’ve listened to the whole show to hear our words and just a different person saying it, which is great.

Dana: Different way.

Craig: Love it.

Dana: That’s so great. I’m so excited. There’s no one I trust more for advice about screenplay writing than you guys. This is amazing that you’ve done this book.

Craig: Thank you, Dana. Whatever content we provided, plus Graham’s magically resonant voice, should be very effective. Everyone should write better after this. We don’t know what else to do, honestly.

John: Graham, thank you. Thank you so much.

Dana: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

Graham: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Graham.

Graham: Take care.

Dana: That’s a chill voice right there, man.

Craig: It’s a good voice.

Dana: My thing is I usually listen to voices like that to go to bed at night. I’m having an ‘all right, all right’ moment from just talking to him. I’m ready to snooze it up on that couch over there.

John: Do you listen to any of those sleepcasts where they just talk about nonsense that just goes on, it just melts away?

Dana: Yes, 100%. I like a little patter. I like a sleep timer, and then boom, I’m out.

John: We have some follow-up to get to. Drew, could you start us off with some follow-up?

Drew Marquardt: Martin writes, “I recently listened to John’s appearance on the Birbiglia podcast, and I was fascinated by his method of writing his screenplays in Las Vegas hotels. I wonder if John is aware that this technique of literary production was invented and/or perfected by one of the most successful writers of all time, Agatha Christie. I saw an image making the rounds last year, clearly a scan of an actual book, but I don’t know what book. The quote is attributed to an author named Christiana Brand, and here is the quote.

‘Agatha Christie once described to me her own particular method of getting down to work. She mulled over a book in her mind until it was ready. She said, ‘Well, we all do that.’ She would then repair to a very bad hotel. In a bad hotel, there was nothing to do but to write and plenty of time to do it in. The beds were so uncomfortable that you had no inclination to retire early or to get up late. The armchair’s so unyielding that you wasted not a minute in idle relaxation. The meals were so bad that there was no temptation to linger over them.
Any guests who would put up with such conditions must, of necessity, be so stupid that you couldn’t possibly make friends and spend precious moments in desultory chat. The book would be done in a matter of weeks, and you could pack up a few dull clothes, which were all you needed to bother to take with you and go off triumphantly home.'”

John: Dana Fox, this thing of me writing in hotel rooms, I think I did that while you were my assistant. Was I ever faxing you pages? Do you remember that?

Dana: 100%. A fax machine was involved at some point. I think, also, you did a thing involving trains at one point.

John: I took the train from LA to Seattle and wrote on the train, and then I faxed stuff back from the train. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has written this, except that this last April, I was in Aswan, Egypt, where she wrote Death on the Nile, and I was at the hotel where she wrote Death on the Nile. It was the Old Cataract Hotel. By the way, it is a luxury hotel.

Dana: Yes, she’s full of shit.

John: Maybe at this point, she was actually like-

Dana: The armchair was amazing. The desultory conversations occurred constantly.

John: We were able to tour the room where she wrote it. It’s like a three-room thing with a walk-in closet.

Dana: Fantastic.

John: Then a patio. So she’s kind of flying.

Dana: Yes. [chuckles] It’s kind of amazing.

John: That’s what I’m hearing.

Craig: Thank you for writing in about this. I’m not surprised that Agatha Christie has done this. Let’s move on to follow up on weirdness. Mike has a recommendation for a good, weird movie.

Drew: “You Want Weird? Friendship from Andrew DeYoung. My wife called it the worst movie she’s ever seen. I thought it was brilliant. We’re still married.”

John: I really liked Friendship, by the way. It should have been one of my One Cool Things. It’s a movie with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. It is just really, really strange in a way that I loved.

Dana: I remember seeing that and thinking, “I’m going to like that,” and then never seeing–

John: You’re going to watch it on the plane when you fly home?

Dana: That’s right. That’s a plane movie.

John: It’s a plane movie.

Dana: I like to cry on planes, too. Can I cry in that or not?

John: No. You will laugh and feel unnerved.

Craig: You can cry.

Dana: I like to cry, if possible.

Craig: At the end, if you feel like a good cry, just force it out. It’s funny.

Dana: Just force it out of you.

Craig: We were on a plane recently and–

Dana: Yes, we were on a plane recently.

Craig: I feel once we stopped talking to each other, we started to cry.

Dana: My daughter, who is 11, bought me a sweatshirt because she knows how much I like to sleep. I feel like this is the only thing I’ve talked about on this podcast is sleeping. She bought me this sweatshirt. It’s called ‘Comfrt’ but it’s missing a letter-

John: Of course, it has to be.

Dana: -because you couldn’t name it that.

Craig: ‘Comfrt’.

Dana: ‘Comfrt’. It’s so soft. Then you put the hoodie over your head, and you pull down an eye mask that’s inside the hoodie that clutches to your face. I was like, “Charlotte, this is crazy. I can’t wear this. It’s hot pink. I’m like an adult woman. This is crazy.” It’s got zippers all over for all sorts of things. It’s extraordinary.

John: Yes, life-change [unintelligible 00:16:50] [crosstalk]

Dana: Literally, there’s never been a better. It was absolutely life-changing. I’m asleep inside of it. I wake up, and I whip up my little eye things. I see Craig Mazin standing in front of me, going, “Dana Fox, what are you doing here on this plane?” We talked for so long on the plane. It was adorable. Everybody around us got involved in us. It was very cute.

Craig: You know what? You looked like a cute little Jawa.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Now you’re Princess Leia. Then you were a little Jawa.

Dana: I’m doing the whole series. I’m doing all of Star Wars.

Craig: If you want adorable, find Dana Fox in her slanket on a plane.

Dana: It’s pretty slankety. I tried to sell it to your wife. I was like, “I get kickbacks on every sale.”

Craig: I’m buying her one. I’m buying her a slanket.

Dana: It’s amazing. I was going to get it for you, but I learned about Craig that he doesn’t like sweatshirts that don’t have zippers. Good talk.

Craig: I need the pull-down. I can’t be trapped.

Dana: You need to get in and out of it that way. Are you the same way?

John: Yes. I really like a zip-up hoodie.

Dana: Are you claustrophobic at all?

John: Not especially. A sweater’s fine. I don’t like a pull-over sweatshirt.

Dana: Interesting. I don’t have many pullover sweatshirts either, unless they have an open neck, in which case I’m fine because I know I can escape.

Craig: That’s what you needed to know about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

John: Let’s just cut right to the heart of the matter. Let’s get right onto the craft and do some follow-up on cuck chairs.

Dana: What’s that?

Craig: Oh, cuck chairs.

John: In episode 710, we were discussing cuck chairs. I’m not even quite sure how we got to the–

Dana: That sounds like a swear word, like 100%.

John: Again, this is why we have a not safe for work warning on this episode. The cuck chair is the chair next to the bed for when the husband has another man sleeping with his wife, so he can watch a cuckolding.

Dana: It’s like an intentional cuckolding.

John: Yes. The cuckold sits in the cuck chair.

Dana: Oh, God.

John: You know the standard corner of the hotel room chair.

Dana: Yes, but the fact that it happens so much in this story that there’s a whole chair for it, as if so many intentional cuckolding situations where people are accepting the cuckolding is happening.

Craig: I got to say, this is a very popular thing.

Dana: Is it really? No, stop it.

Craig: No, no. The cuck chair itself, I don’t know if that’s particularly– This whole cuckolding thing, it’s massive.

Dana: I literally cannot think of anything I would like less than all of this. I have always wanted to be the kind of gal that gets invited into a three-way. I have had so many people invite whoever I’m with into the three-way in front of me without me. They’re like, I would love to take your boyfriend or husband into a three-way with me and mine. I’m like, “I’m standing right here.” I think they can tell I would be very annoying, and I would want to talk the whole time.

Craig: What? No.

Dana: Nothing sexy. I’d be like, “You guys, this seems complicated. I feel like we’re going to all have feelings later that we need to talk about.”

Craig: Actually, it feels to me like the cuck chair might be made for you because it’s not a three-way. You’re not involved.

John: No, so you’re just watching.

Craig: You’re just watching.

Dana: I’m the husband in the chair? Oh, okay.

Craig: Or the wife.

Dana: Well, then, all right. Maybe. Honestly, maybe.

John: You could [unintelligible 00:19:49] have enough.

Craig: You could spend your Audible things.

Dana: Can I put the little eye mask over my face while it’s happening so I don’t have to watch it?

Craig: If you’re not watching, is it really cuckolding?

Dana: I would like to hear it, honestly. Just not see it.

Craig: Oh, that’s fun.

Dana: I feel like that would be sexier.

John: I’m not sure if I mentioned it, as we first discussed in episode 710, but there is a great episode of Decoder Ring, which is specifically about the cuckold chair and cuckolding in general, which goes back to the history of where it came from in Elizabethan times to now, it’s where it all came from. We have some more specific follow-up, including previous guests who’ve done work in this area. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Yes, comedian Sarah Schafer is selling miniature cuck chairs. It’s not inflatable like we talked about, but I still feel like she beat us to the punch.

Dana: I love her. I’ve met her.

John: She makes miniature models, so she makes a miniature hotel cuck chair. We also talked about on episode 710–

Dana: How is this a thing, guys?

John: -that my other company needed to make an inflatable cuck chair. You just put it there when you need it, but when you don’t need it, you can just put it away.

Dana: You have a company that makes sex stuff?

John: No, not at all. I said we would never do that.

Dana: Oh, okay. I thought you said ‘my other company’ has to make it, like my already established sex chair company.

Craig: John has an entire sex toy company that he hasn’t mentioned.

Dana: I thought that’s what you were saying. It didn’t seem like that far of a stretch. I was like, “Oh, he does technology and sex chairs and stuff.”

Craig: It does seem like a stretch, Dana. It’s a stretch.

John: It’s a stretch. We do have Scriptnotes barware.

Dana: Okay, that’d be cool.

John: It turns out, on Amazon, we found two inflatable chairs that feel exactly right for this purpose. We’ll put the links in the show notes there. Craig, do you want to click through and see these? This is one inflatable chair. You see, it looks like a side chair at a hotel, but it has a logo on it.

Dana: You can carry it in the bag.

John: Absolutely.

Dana: Nobody has to know. Did I ever tell you about the time I checked into a hotel, the only time I’ve ever changed my room? Because I don’t think I’m good enough to get into a hotel room and change it, and say like, “This isn’t good enough for me. I need a better room.” I don’t believe I deserve that. One time, I checked into a room and I opened the minibar and there was a half-eaten sandwich and an open box of suppository laxatives.

Craig: No, you’ve got to move.

Dana: I was like, “I got to go.” I was like, “I love you. I can’t. I support whatever happened here. I’m open to it, but I got to go.”

Craig: Did you write the scene, though? That’s a great scene prompt. Half a sandwich, laxatives. What went wrong here?

Dana: I think you guys should make your listeners write it because I couldn’t figure out what had happened. It was like a murder scene.

Craig: Sandwich and laxatives at the same time?

Dana: To me, it was the sandwich that was so confusing. It was a half-sannie. Anyway, why are you eating if you’re sopped up?

Craig: Yes, that’s the one that’s really tripping me up. Well, I got to tell you, John, you found a great product here if you’re a cuckold. The only issue, as I can see, is that the recommended maximum weight capacity is 200 pounds. I got to figure a lot of cucks are going to be two-plus.

John: If you pop the cuck chair, that’s extra humiliating, right?

Dana: That might work for the person who wants to be in the cuck chair.

John: I think the second choice may actually be better because this is the inflatable beanless beanbag chair. Besides the bed, it’s pretty humiliating to be sitting in that. It’s loaded around.

Dana: Honestly, it looks pretty nice to me. I think it looks comfortable, no?

John: It’s also max weight 200.

Craig: Again, there’s a gap in the market.

John: Yes, for plus-size cuckolds.

Dana: Built-in possibility for humiliation seems actually in line with the cuckold chair, so it sort of feels like it works.

Craig: You know what? God bless everyone, by the way. If that’s what you’re into and everybody’s cool with it, who cares? I don’t care.

Dana: That’s how I feel. Do your thing, man. Get your sandwich in your cuck chair, and another thing, and you just eat half the sandwich.

John: 100%

Craig: You just have to recognize. I think it’s fair to acknowledge, we don’t king shame. Some kinks are innately amusing. That doesn’t mean we’re degrading you.

Dana: No, we’re happy for you that you found a thing that you like.

Craig: We’re not even laughing at you. It’s just the concept is funny. It just is. It’s funny.

John: Let’s bring it back to a more wholesome moment here. We have some follow-up here from Carrie.

Drew: Carrie says, “I wanted to thank John and Craig for being such calming voices. My dog absolutely hates riding in the car. She’ll often tremble the moment she gets in. However, I’ve found that if I have Scriptnotes on, she’s much less likely to be upset and instead settles for mild discomfort. The moment I get in the car with her, I turn on Scriptnotes, and if an episode ends while I’m driving, I’ll immediately rewind and keep listening. If I don’t, the moment it ends, she starts to huddle in the back seat. While I’d like to thank them for their invaluable writing advice, I also thank them for their pup whisperer skills.”

Dana: That’s really sweet.

Craig: Do you know, ‘settles for a mild discomfort’ is probably what the person with half a sandwich and the laxatives is thinking.
[laughter]

Dana: In the cuck chair.

Craig: Yes, in the cuck chair.

Dana: That’s actually amazing. Also, how sweet is that?

Craig: How sweet.

John: That’s really nice.

Dana: You guys, you have nice pup voices.

Craig: We have nice pup– Yes.

Dana: I believe this. You guys are really good dudes. Pups love you. Pups know you.

Craig: I’ll tell you, my dogs do not like driving around. Cookie does the same thing. She’s very trembly. Real me is talking, and that doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Maybe it’s John.

Dana: Not even podcast me. It’s just actual me.

Craig: Actual me does nothing.

Dana: Oh.

Craig: Oh.

John: All right. Enough banter before we get started. It’s the key topic here. Dana, congratulations on Wicked.

Dana: Thank you.

Craig: Woo.

John: Wicked 1 and now Wicked 2. This was a long journey.

Dana: Ooph. Yes.

John: Let’s briefly recap what the history of Wicked is. Obviously, there was once upon a time, The Wizard of Oz. It was a book. Then it was a movie. There was a book by Gregory Maguire called Wicked, which sold to Marc Platt, who wanted to do it as a Broadway show first. It is a Broadway show, correct?

Dana: No.

John: Tell me what I got wrong there.

Dana: I believe the idea was to make it into a movie without music.

Craig: Yes.

Dana: They started it as that. I’m pretty sure they maybe even had scripts. Then Marc left. He was running Universal at the time.

Craig: He was, yes.

Dana: He went to be a producer. He said, “The one project I want is Wicked.” He took Wicked. It was Stephen Schwartz that convinced him that Wicked needed music because, inherently, The Wizard of Oz was so musical. It was crazy to do this idea without music.

John: Yes, makes sense.

Dana: Thankfully, Stephen Schwartz convinced him to make it a Broadway musical first. Universal, weirdly, always owned it because they had originally bought it to make it into a movie. They owned part of the rights to the play. Then they made it as a musical first.

John: That’s right. The musical that Stephen Schwartz wrote the music for and Winnie Holzman did the stage play for was a massive hit. I remember seeing a pre– I was on Broadway but pre-opening with Kristin Chenoweth and-

Craig: Idina Menzel.

John: -Idina Menzel. It was great. You could tell this is going to become a thing. It did become a thing.

Dana: It almost felt redefining, I think, too, in terms of what Broadway was doing at the time. It felt almost part movie, part musical in the sense that it had a big hook.

John: Stephen Schwartz is a Broadway legend.

Dana: A genius. The greatest.

John: You’re talking about Pippin. To have somebody like Stephen Schwartz take something that could be a little bit more in the Disney commercial zone for what Broadway sometimes does, to just do this whole other weird thing that was very original in its own way. The whole thing about Wicked is, it’s not The Wizard of Oz, really at all. It’s such an original show and so weird. It’s a weird show with incredible music.

Dana: Oh, geniuses. A lot of them.

John: Talking story, the stage version makes huge changes from the book. The central concepts come through, but it feels really, really different in story and how stuff is structured. Correct?

Dana: Yes. I never read the book-

John: What?

Dana: -which turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I told my 12-year-old he could read it. Apparently, no way, no.

Craig: No. No.

Dana: Not a great idea. He was like, “Mom, some intense sex stuff happened in this book.” I was like, “Yes, I don’t know what it’s about, but I’ve heard it’s amazing.”

Craig: I don’t know about that.

Dana: The extraordinary Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz got together and took the main idea from it, which they thought was so brilliant, which was like, “What if this story that you knew and you absolutely were positive you knew everything about it, what if the bad guy was not who you thought they were? What if the person that was good was maybe not actually as good as you thought they were? Let’s see what that story looks like.”

John: What if they were best friends?

Dana: What if they were best friends? Interestingly, actually, Winnie told me the other day, which I’d never heard before, originally, Glinda wasn’t actually that big of a part. It was in meeting Kristin Chenoweth and becoming obsessed with Kristin Chenoweth that they decided that it had to be a true two-hander, which I had never heard before. That was pretty interesting.

John: All these things that seem inevitable were not inevitable at the genesis of this.

Dana: Absolutely.

John: It’s that process of discovery. The stage show is a huge hit, tours the world, a bunch of different languages. We all know it and love it, but eventually we’re going to make it into a film. The decision to make it from one film to two films, I’d love for you guys to talk about that process.

Dana: I think Craig maybe was around when it was more choice, actually. He can maybe speak to that. When I got involved, I was brought in by John, too. It was already a fait accompli. It was already like, “We’re making this as two movies. We can’t question it, and we can’t go back. We have to just do it.” Craig, you knew more about that stage and development, right? Where they were deciding to make it two movies?

Craig: No, it was a condition that they wanted me to work on Wicked, and I said, “Okay, but it has to be two movies.”

Dana: See, that’s amazing because you’re a genius. You knew.

Craig: Well, I don’t know about that. I’m very familiar with the show, and I read the script as it existed. What I remember saying to Marc was, “Once she sings Defying Gravity, you have to go home. You can’t stay in the theater.”

Dana: By the way, when you’re at the play, sometimes people made mistakes and we’re like, “Bye, that was the most satisfying thing that ever happened. I’ll see you guys. We’re going to go to dinner now.”

Craig: Right. You can’t. You just can’t. Also, the second act of Wicked, totally, is quite different.

Dana: Correct.

Craig: There’s too much to shove into one movie.

Dana: The songs are so extraordinary because Stephen is such a crazy genius, that you try cutting one song–

Craig: No, you really can’t, and you shouldn’t.

Dana: You were like, “I miss that song. That song’s like a short song. I love it and I miss it.”

Craig: I said, I can outline, I can make two treatments for two different movies, and I can write a script from the beginning to the end of Defying Gravity, and that’s sort of how you, “Aah, boom,” and we’ll see you next time. Marc and the executives at Universal, separately, we’re like, “Not sure Marc will go for that.” Marc’s like, “I’m not sure the studio will go for that.” I basically was like, “Everybody, let’s just do it.” Then they all said yes, and that’s it. That was the last impactful thing I did on Wicked.

Dana: Well, it was very impactful, my friend, seriously, because it’s not an obvious choice. It felt so dangerous at the time.

Craig: It feels so obvious now.

Dana: Well, now it does. Everything feels obvious now, but at the time when we were living in it, it’s like they talk about World War II, and it’s like they didn’t know how it was going to end. Back then, they didn’t know. It might have not worked out. We sort of felt like, “Oh my God, this might not work out,” because, as Craig was saying, it was never the first movie. Whenever people saw the first movie, thank God they loved it; it was wonderful. Everyone kept saying, “Well, it was obviously the right choice to break it into two movies.” I was like, “That’s because you haven’t seen the second movie yet.” I was like, “Hold that thought until–”

John: Let’s talk about this because if the decision wasn’t to make one movie and see how it does, and then make the second movie, the decision was to make two movies at the same time, that was distinct movies that are joined.

Dana: Yes, which means you can’t screw anything up because the first movie has to be a success, because you’ve already shot the second movie.

John: Were they cross-bordered? Were you shooting scenes from two?

Dana: 100% cross-bordered, and this is the brilliance of John and the group that he had around him, all the HODs that were so extraordinary, and the brilliance of Cynthia and Ari, that they would shoot the end of movie one in the morning and shoot Wonderful from movie two in the afternoon. They’re in completely different costumes, totally different hair, different characters. They talk about how they had to use different perfumes depending on which movie they were in because they had to sense things to trigger who they were. They had different playlists for the two movies for themselves to listen to because throughout the day, they had to keep it straight. It wasn’t even just–

Craig: Because it was based on location, basically.

Dana: It was all locations, basically. We had 73 sets, and we were turning over sets constantly. These sets were enormous. Nathan Crowley, who’s our production designer, is a genius. He’s Christopher Nolan’s guy. He’s absolutely extraordinary. I’m obsessed with him. Everybody, go find an interview with Nathan Crowley. He’s the greatest guy ever and totally brilliant. His wife is also extraordinary. Obsessed.

John: You know that you’re making two movies, and we’ll get into this one in the bonus segment where we talk about– The promo circuit is like, last time you had to just talk about the first movie and not acknowledge the second movie.

Dana: This is why they were all sobbing in their interviews, and everyone’s like, “Why are these people crying so hard in their interviews?” It’s like, “Because we just finished For Good. We’re crying about For Good. We’re not crying about Popular. We’re crying about the second movie.”

John: Craig and I have not seen the second movie yet, and I’m excited to see it.

Dana: I’m so excited for you to see it.

John: One of the real challenges, as Craig was alluding to and that you were also mentioning, we remember what happens in Act 1. Act 2 races through a bunch of stuff. If you look at the Wikipedia summary of Act 2, it’s like, “Oh my God,” half a line is given to things, and so you have to make much bigger choices about storytelling.

Dana: That’s exactly right. That was the exciting challenge of it, that the second act of the play is 45 minutes long. This movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes or 14 minutes. We obviously created a lot of new material for the second movie. I always used to describe the feeling of the second act as its own movie. You walked in, you sat down with your popcorn, and you got hit with the two, three-act break, and then you went crazy from there. That’s what the feeling is of the second act, because that was appropriate for the play. Then you’re looking at, “Okay, this is a moviegoing experience. People are used to a one, two, three-act structure.”

John: You’ve got to ramp up.

Dana: You ramp up. You’re a little slow. You’re like, “Where are we now? Who are we? What are we doing?” That was the big fun of trying to figure out movie two is how do we remind people where we are? How do we get them used to how much has changed in the time lapse between the two movies? That was actually a big discussion, was how much time to have passed during the two movies. You’ll see when you see the movie. We landed on something I think is interesting.

Craig: 30 years later?

Dana: Well, no. You know what it was? What I realized with my brilliant friend, Lorene Scafaria, is that the experience of people watching the first movie was so intense for them that it actually impacted how we were all thinking about the second movie as we were working on finishing it, because it raised the bar so much. It was like the expectations got higher and higher every time people were like, “Oh my God, this movie is killing me. I saw it 42 times in theaters.” The press tour of the girls became part of the movie itself. That was their friendship in a weird way because they are friends and they’re so close. Watching them be in love with each other platonically and crying all the time about For Good, which nobody knew, created this intense feeling that we knew we had to have come through the second movie.

Part of the decision of how much time passed was, we were like, “Oh, it should be how much time passed for the audience.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: “It should be a year,” because the movies are coming out a year later. Then Winnie came up with some brilliant word for what a year was, which was like 12 clock-ticks of the–

Craig: Clock moons or something, yes. Yes, that’s it.

Dana: She made up some crazy word for this, but we all know it’s a year.

Craig: 12 monthly [unintelligible 00:35:13].

Dana: Yes. The moon passages of the– Yes.

John: Talk about the writing process on this because you’re writing both movies simultaneously, or did you like, “Okay, we’re going to finish the scripts for the first movie and then start the script on the second movie,” or was it all blurred together?

Dana: I was pulled in by John Chu because he’s my favorite person on planet Earth. I told him, “Anytime you want me to do something, I’m going to say yes.”

Craig: Ouch.

Dana: Oh, no, you guys, I meant that I met after you.

Craig: All right, thank you.

Dana: He’s my favorite person on planet Earth who I met after you two.

Craig: Weird, late clarification.

Dana: In the podcast, we could put that before, as if I said it right before.

Craig: Now people skip.

Dana: Matthew, just swoop it out–

[rewind sound]

Dana: I love John and Craig,

[fast-forward sound]

Dana: Working with John, he’s the most extraordinary director, but he’s so collaborative, also, and he makes me want to be a better man. He’s that guy. I’m like, “I love you, John.” I told him, “I’ll do anything with you,” after he and I work together.

John: I want to back up because you worked with him first because he was a director on your TV series.

Dana: Yes, that’s right. He had shot Crazy Rich Asians, but it hadn’t come out yet, and I needed someone to direct the first two episodes of Home Before Dark, which is my Apple TV series. I met with him and he showed me the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians, which had not come out yet. From the trailer, I was like, “You’re a genius. This is going to hit. This is so universal. This is incredible. I love you. I want you to do this.” I was trying to hire him off of a trailer. I was like, “I don’t need to see anything else. I’m obsessed with him.”

He did the most extraordinary job on the TV show. He brought in Alice Brooks, who is the DP of Wicked, to do my show. He brought in Myron Kerstein, the most brilliant editor you’ll ever meet on planet Earth, to do my show. I got to work with all his people. It was extraordinary.

John: I want to stop you for a second because it’s just such a good reminder of the relationships you form and the trust you form and being able to see what a person is like as a collaborator. You were hiring him, but then he’s actually hiring you because he can see, “Dana gets it. We have a shared vision. I know that she can deliver this thing.”

Dana: Correct. Also, I think John’s very loyal. Once he gets his people around that he knows understands the way he likes to work, he wants to keep them close. I feel so lucky to be in his orbit, honestly, because he’s just extraordinary. I said to him, “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing whenever I’m doing it, and I’ll say yes.” He called me after I finished Lost City. He called me and said, “I have another one for you.” He had done In the Heights, while I did Lost City and other stuff. He said, “Okay, I have another one for you.” He said, “Do you want to know what it is?” I said, “No.” The answer is yes.

He was like, “I’m going to tell you anyway.” I was like, “No, no, no, let’s do a bit where I’d make part of the deal without even knowing what it is.” I thought that would be funny. He was like, “No, I’m going to tell you, you’re an idiot.” I was like, “Okay.” He said, “It’s Wicked.” I was like, “Oh my God, everybody loves– What is it?” He’s like, “Wicked.” I’m like, “Mm-hmm. I also am one of the people that loves Wicked so much,” because I hadn’t seen it. I’m literally the only American human who had not seen Wicked.

Craig: That’s crazy.

John: What did you say when he said Wicked, you’re like, “Wicked what”?

Dana: Well, I knew of it. I knew it was popular and famous and stuff, but I’m not super dialed in. I discovered Beyoncé two years ago.

Craig: I love it.

Dana: I was like, “You guys, we need to talk. This woman’s incredible.”

John: Oh my God, this is amazing.

Dana: This is always me too late on really important things. I started watching Lost in the last season and was like, “You guys, the Hatch.” Everyone was like, “We’re so over the Hatch, we don’t want to talk about the Hatch.”

John: I like, in a weird way, that you weren’t a Wicked–

Dana: I was not a mega fan. I didn’t know anything about it.

John: Sometimes it’s better to not be burdened by–

Dana: Winnie and Stephen now talk about how helpful it was to have me there, being irreverent and not being so precious, because I just didn’t know. It was the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t go to Broadway to see it. I googled everything I could find. I watched the entire play in shaky clips from France, Germany, whatever, blah, blah, put it all together. I was like, “I get it.” I read the play and I played Stephen’s gorgeous music. Whenever the song would come up as I was reading it, I would play the music, and I was like, “Gosh, this is so good. This is so good, the music.” I loved it.

I was, of course, impressed, and also, I had loved My So-Called Life so much. I loved Winnie’s work from that. He said, “We’re going to work all of us together. Me, John, Winnie, Stephen, and you. We’re going to get into Zooms, and we’re going to break both movies together,” which I’d never done before with a director. I was so excited to be able to do it because it felt like every day we weren’t just breaking the story or writing the script, we were making the movie because it was what he wanted to be doing, too. He was telling us about his vision as we were all talking it through. We spent 153 hours on Zoom before we ever started writing. I know it’s a lot. Craig looks so tired from the 153.

Craig: Horrifying, just so much–

Dana: I just looked over at him and he was like, “Girl, eugh.”

John: By the way, the bullet you dodged. All right, yes.

[laughter]

Craig: No, I did not dodge a bullet.

Dana: The bullet hit you squarely.

Craig: Yes, the bullet hit me pretty hard.

John: [laughs] You had all these Zooms before you started.

Dana: Before we even started writing, but that was the ideation period, where we broke them into two movies. We carded them digitally because we were all on Zoom, so we couldn’t see each other. We had digital cards that we had made, and then I started outlining from off those cards. I outlined both movies. Then John basically was like, “Okay, we’re going to split up Movie 1 between you and Winnie, and you guys are going to write it together.” We wrote Movie 1 together as quickly as we could to get it full because we had stages booked.

They were trying to make us feel that pressure. We wrote the first movie, and then I immediately pivoted. While Winnie did notes from John and Mark. I immediately pivoted and started writing the second movie. I wrote the second movie. Then from that point forward, Winnie and I were collaborating, but we were each in a different movie. When I was in Movie 2, she was in Movie 1 and vice versa, but we were still working with each other. It was like I would send her a scene from Movie 2 and be like, “This is hot trash garbage. How would Glinda say this thing, because I’d want her to blah, blah, blah?”

There was a lot of collaboration, but we were in two separate movies. That was how we got the work done. It was super collaborative with John and with Stephen. Then, being a fly on the wall to watch Stephen Schwartz do the two new songs for the Movie 2.

John: It was pretty great.

Dana: It was like childhood Dana lost her mind. It was amazing.

Craig: I have to say that this is a really good example of you’re a good writer. I think I’m a good writer. Some people should be writing certain movies, and some people should not. The thing is, I love Wicked. I love the show, but I was not the right person for that project. You were the right person for that project. That project needed somebody that not only was a writer but also, how would I put it, a clearinghouse, a diplomat, and an ambassador. For all of these people, and also somebody that really enjoys the collaboration of writing with another writer. I’m such a monk.

Dana: Yes, you’re so private. You just want to be in your little room and do your thing.

Craig: This is just a great example. I underscore this all the time, but just in case anybody’s confused, the credits for this movie are spot on accurate. I was happy to support those. I didn’t fight you. [laughs] They’re correct.

Dana: Yes. Winnie had done a lot of work before any of us came on. That’s why she has that solo credit. Only writers will understand that credit, which is Winnie’s solo because she had been working on trying to make this into a movie for 15 years before any of us were involved in the process. That’s why she has that credit. Then AND, which means she worked also with the team of me and her. It’s a weird-looking sandwich of a credit, but it does represent what happened. It was really an amazing experience.

It was very difficult because of all those personalities and all the different things, we all cared so much. Honestly, it was really hard, I think, because we cared so much. We wanted it to be so good. We all felt this profound sense of responsibility to the fans. Then after Movie 1, it was like ratcheted up to a million. The post-process of Movie 2, I would just sit around crying because I wanted to be worthy of people’s expectations of the second movie because it was so important to them.

Then also, the world has gotten even harder. I think people desperately need a time to sit in a theater quietly with their friends and their loved ones and their family and be able to express their emotions about what’s going on in the world or whatever, in a safe place to do that. I know the movie gives you that.

John: As they witnessed the rise of fascism, you see it reflected back in the movie, yes. There’s a potential to triumph over it.

Dana: Of course, we didn’t write it that way because it was five years ago that we started writing it. We didn’t know this was going to be what happened. I just think, unfortunately, the movie is so timely because this is timeless. There are always people looking for power, and they’re going to do it at the expense of the most vulnerable people.

Craig: Steven and Winnie, all the way back when they were first conceiving of the show, and this is something that Mark told me, that there was underneath it a pretty clear allegory for Nazi Germany, for fascism, for people getting disappeared, taken away.

Dana: They were writing it in the shadow of 9/11 and the persecution of the Muslim population in America. That was partly why World War II is so fresh on the mind. If we all remember, right after 9/11, it started to get really off.

Craig: Yes. Wicked, it’s really interesting how it has so many flavors and layers. On the top, it is pink and green, and it’s two best friends.

Dana: It’s floopy, yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s funny and weird. Then underneath it, there’s something bad, something bad coming.

Dana: I think that’s what people are going to love about the second movie, is that it still has all the pink and green and floopy, but it is really about something. It really has a lot of there-there. There’s a lot of there-there for both the consequences within the friendship. The political stuff, of course, is there, and it hits harder now because of what’s happening. The friendship is so beautiful. You feel like you’ve been on this crazy emotional journey. That was another real challenge of writing the screenplay of the second movie was, in the play, there’s all these reprises.

That you’re hearing that you just heard the A side of the reprise 20 minutes ago in the play, but in the movie, you’re hearing the reprise a year later. How do you get the audience to feel the feeling of that reprise the same way they would have if they had heard the A side of it 20 minutes ago? We were constantly thinking about how do we remind them of the things that happened in the first film so that that’s fresh in their minds. A lot of it had to do with planned flashbacks, but also unplanned flashbacks that came out in editing that I think were really strategic and really smart.

Craig: Dana?

Dana: My love.

Craig: What do you think my favorite song from Movie 2 is going to be? I know what it is. I’m just saying, what do you think of this?

Dana: I’m just going to say, I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or not say, but I think that No Good Deed–

Craig: You got the answer. That’s it.

Dana: That’s it. That’s the Craig one. Your brain will exit the back of your head and then come back into it at the end. It’s like the crazy– I lost my mind.

Craig: It’s such a good song. Look, I love For Good. I love it. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. It’s a nice wrap-it-up. No Good Deed is awesome. Having seen Cynthia in Jesus Christ Superstar and watching her turn it to 11.

Dana: You told me about how beautiful that was.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait to see what she does with that.

Dana: I would reference the song you talked about, but there’s a 100% chance I mispronounce it.

Craig: Gethsemane.

Dana: Gethsemane.

[imitating song tune]

Dana: No Good Deed’s going to kill you. Buckle your fucking seat belt for good, though, because it’s–

Craig: Fuckle your bucking seat belt.

Dana: Buckle your fucking seat belt for that one because that’s a goodbye, everybody. I don’t know why. I hope this makes you, too, also feel really emotional when you’re watching it. Part of my emotional experience with the movie is that there is a feeling, a little bit, that Hollywood is dying.

John: It’s a big Hollywood movie.

Dana: This is a big, beautiful Hollywood movie from the old days. You can’t believe this movie got made.

John: They felt the giant sets.

Dana: I have chills. These giant sets that were real, and everything was real. If it’s out of focus, it’s because a person was doing it. There’s no AI. It feels so much like the movies that got us all to be in this business in the first place.

Craig: It’s going to be massive.

Dana: Oh, I hope so. It’s just so beautiful.

Craig: Hollywood is not dying. It’s just that it’s been the months after summer, the months between summer and Thanksgiving. The New York Times once again wrote an article about how Hollywood is dying. They’re like, “Yes, it’s always dying in September and October.” [laughter] That’s what it does.

John: You forget the article you just wrote about what a big summer it was for blockbusters.

Craig: Right.

Dana: Right. That’s a good point.

Craig: Thanksgiving and Christmas comes and kaboom. It’s going to be huge.

Dana: I hope that Wicked puts the paddles back onto the business too, and clear, and it’s like, [onomatopoeia] but the problem is they never seem to learn the lessons from the movies. They’ll go like, “But that’s just Wicked, so it doesn’t count.” You can’t learn anything from it because it’s Wicked.

John: Another musical.

Dana: Nothing’s ever been like this. You’ll be like, “Okay.”

Craig: Nobody knows, but you know what? You guys did a spectacular job, and I can’t wait to see the second movie. John really is a remarkably talented director.

Dana: I do need you to FaceTime me when both of you, after you see it, because I had a hard time talking about it. I was just wandering around the after-party just like a zombie, and crying in front of famous people was basically what it was. It was just so weird. I was just like, I couldn’t stop crying. It was wild.

John: It was the experience of the movie, but also the trauma of making it a movie.

Dana: I had some health issues during it that were really difficult. The narrative I had in my head was that Wicked was what killed me. Wicked is why I got sick. Then I realized while I was watching the movie that, “Oh, no.”

Craig: Oh, no. Here we go.

Dana: I just realized that Wicked actually saved me. It gave me stuff to do while I was feeling so sick. Every day gave me a reason to get up in the morning and try and care and feel something again. It is what ultimately made me feel better. It’s what got me better from the sickness. It’s not what killed me.

Craig: That’s fantastic.

Dana: That was part of why I was weeping around the stupid after-party, like an animal.

Craig: When you were working on it, before it was in production, you and your husband were in Calgary for some reason.

Dana: Oh, boy. That was a– Yes.

Craig: I was there, and the two of us were just–

Dana: That was my breaking point. That’s where I was like, “I might have to quit because I think I’m going to die.” I was like, “I have to.” You were working on The Last of Us.

Craig: On the first season of The Last of Us, which was chaos.

Dana: You were like, “This is crazy.” Yes, and I was like, “Our health might be in danger.” [chuckles]

Craig: Yes, we were standing in a park going, “We’re dying, right? We’re dying.” [crosstalk]

Dana: Yes, and you were so nice to me. I was like, “I think I’m dying.” You’re like, “It’s okay, because I’m also dying, so we could die together.” Then I encountered a bear, and there was a moment where I was like, “Maybe it should eat me.”

John: Wow, it would be a way to go.

Dana: I was like, “This would be a killer story, first of all.”

Craig: How would I identify with that?

Dana: Then I would get out of doing the rest of this work, which is so intense.

Craig: That is what like writing is so hard that a lot of times–

Dana: That you want a bear to eat you.

Craig: I have told my assistant a number of times, listen, at some point today, don’t approach from the front, but from behind, hit me with a hammer as hard as you can on my head, and just end this, so I don’t have to do this.

Dana: I’m so glad you and John say those kinds of things because– John less so because John is just like–

Craig: John’s healthy.

Dana: He’s just too healthy. I can’t talk to you, John. I’ll talk directly to Craig. I’m so glad to hear you say this, Craig, because you’re so brilliant and so talented. I always think of myself as just a really hard worker. That’s why my work is good. Not because I have any innate talent. I’m just like, I just work harder than everybody else.

John: No. That’s an eldest daughter thing.

Dana: I’m the youngest daughter.

John: You’re the only daughter, right?

Dana: I’m the only daughter, yes. I guess you’re right. I’m still the eldest daughter.

John: The eldest daughter.

[laughter]

Dana: Hearing you say that, Craig, I think that helps me, and also all your listeners who are trying to be writers, that you also feel that way is amazing. [crosstalk] I want to die every day. I’m like, “I cannot believe how hard this still feels to me.”

Craig: Yet, every time I have a chance to stop, and I could stop, I do not stop. I never stop.

Dana: Oh, I could stop tomorrow, and I don’t stop. I’m crazy.

John: No. You’ve set up nine more shows and movies. While you’ve been sitting here.

Dana: While I’ve been sitting here, I set up 42 new things. It’s like I have a problem. I literally have a Post-it note on my desk that says, “Say no.” Then I just said yes to all the things.

John: All the things. All right. Let’s answer some listener questions here.

Dana: Yes, please.

John: James in Vancouver wants to ask about torture.

Dana: We just talked all about torture. [crosstalk] We don’t need to talk about torture. James, that was your answer to your question.

John: You guys always talk about needing to make your characters suffer in order to see them go through the maximum amount of growth possible. However, how much suffering is too much? At what point does it veer into emotional torture porn as opposed to genuine trials and tribulations?

Craig: That’s a good question.

John: I think it’s a very good question. Torture your hero is fantastic. If there’s a moment where it’s like, “I don’t want to watch this anymore,” or it feels gratuitous, I’m going to stop. You have to make sure that you are giving your character some victories, some hope along the way. If it’s just despair, if it’s 1984, people are going to stop. Then you’ve failed as a storyteller, I think.

Dana: I also feel like you ask yourself, what do you want to go through? I have to close my eyes when torture is happening, actual torture is happening in things. I feel almost the same way about emotional torture, which is like, I want to stop just shy of that because I just think that’s gratuitous and weird, and I don’t need to see it. Also, we’re in a world and a time where everything feels like torture. I tend to go with what I feel and what I think the rest of the world is feeling because I’m also feeling it. Craig, what were you going to say?

Craig: I definitely like to echo the feelings that we have, but give people a way to go through these things somewhat safely. Torturing your characters has to be purposeful. Remember, you’re not just torturing them, you are choosing what to do to them. Therefore, you have a plan, and the plan is such that the torture must be matched to their ability to withstand it and then surpass it. The real question, James, isn’t how much should I torture them? The real question is, what would make this person’s victory feel really earned and satisfying?

Dana: That’s great.

Craig: That’s all.

Dana: That’s great. Also, for each individual character, the definition of torture is totally different. For my husband, the definition of torture is me chewing food that he can hear. Literally, that could be an entire scene where he’s tortured. He says it makes him want to actually murder me in cold blood.

John: Misthonia.

Dana: Misthonia. Yes, he has that thing. You can calibrate it based on who the person is because torture is something different for each person, but that’s so smart.

Craig: You calibrate it depending on the person, and you also calibrate it depending on the tone. In comedies, torture could be as “torturous” as, “The girl that dumped me is with the guy that beat me up yesterday, and I have to sit here and watch them dance.” That’s torture. It’s not Zero Dark Thirty torture. [laughs]

Dana: Yes, nobody’s strapped to a chair in that story.

Craig: Right, but sometimes you do strap someone to a chair, and that’s–

Dana: To a cuck chair. Bringing it back.

Craig: If they’re only 200 pounds.

Dana: We’re going to make it a runner. [crosstalk] Don’t worry about it.

John: To recap, when you’re thinking about torturing your characters, you’re thinking about what is it that you want. What is it that makes you feel uncomfortable or comfortable? What do you as the writer want? You’re thinking about the audience. Where is the audience in this? Also, crucially, you’re thinking about the character. What is it about this character and their journey that this torture is allowing them to grow and progress and do the things you’re going to do?

Dana: I particularly like what Craig says because that almost reframes it for me in a way that I understand that question even more, which is what will make their victory feel more earned, which is such a smarter way of saying what specific torture is right for this person and what level. If you think about it, in Wicked Movie 1, we realized, like, since it was ending at Defying Gravity, she can’t be defeating the wizard. That was what her I Want song was about, but she can’t defeat the wizard because she can’t do that until the second movie.

What she had to defeat was the part of herself that didn’t believe that she could do it. That led to all these discoveries of she was going to see herself as a child and all these different things. It led to different forms of torture for her in Movie 1 than are the ones that she experiences in Movie 2. It was all about making those victories feel earned and/or the bittersweet ending feel as sad as possible.

Craig: That’s a good question, though. You know what? Vancouver representing.

Dana: I love Vancouver.

John: One other quick question here from Zach. Was the 1990s a great decade for action movies, or am I just experiencing whatever generation thinks that the decade they grew up in has the best media? Some of the films that he’s listing here are The Fugitive, Bad Boys, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Speed, Armageddon, Twister, Men in Black, and many others.

Dana: They’re all perfect.

Craig: Amusingly, none of those movies are even in the top 50 of the best movies of the 1990s. The answer is yes. The 1990s were incredible.

Dana: It’s insane. Yes.

Craig: I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m here to tell you the ’90s were the best 10 years of movies that I’ve experienced in my life. When I look back at what they did there, it’s astonishing.

John: The danger is that we are all roughly the same age cohort and that we were in our young 20s there. You always think about that period of your life as being like, “Oh, that was fantastic.” The way we would test that is we should get younger people to watch movies of the different decades and have them–

Dana: Shouldn’t that be a follow-up question? [crosstalk] Can you ask your audience, to younger people, “Watch those movies and see if they’re bangers like we think they are”?

Craig: I have been showing great hits of the ’90s to my assistants and the office PAs and basically all the kids that are–

Dana: What do they think?

Craig: It’s been just one home run after another.

John: That’s great.

Dana: That’s great. Will you share that list, though? Share that list. Put that list out for me. Give me your top 10 because I want to watch them.

Craig: This list right here, all these movies are fun, but it’s like he’s not even listening. Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Silence of the Lambs. [crosstalk] I can just go on. Fargo. There’s so many incredible movies.

John: He was specifically talking about action in his days. Yes, there are incredible movies. 1999 was a banner year. You look at the movies that came out that year, it was absurd. Yes, you’re right.

Craig: You know what? Fair, Zach. You were talking about action movies. I’ll give you a pass on that. All those were great action movies. The Fugitive is like–

Dana: The Fugitive is a perfect movie. Have I ever talked to you about the movie? Okay, I want to tell. Super quick, though. We may have learned this because we went to the Stark program, so we may have learned this the same. I always learned structure was character, and it was all about how the character’s going through a specific journey. We learned there’s the character’s need and there’s the character’s want. The movie is all about where they start off the movie, where they want something, and they’re making a journey towards needing something.

Wherever they are along the way, those key plot points are always about whether they’re getting what they need or whether they’re getting what they want, that kind of thing. The other thing that I learned was that the protagonist is the character who changes, not the lead of the movie. It’s the character who changes, and the antagonist is the character who causes that person to change. The protagonist of The Fugitive is Tommy Lee Jones, of course. The antagonist is Richard Kimble because Harrison Ford, of course, is the lead of the movie.

Craig: He doesn’t change.

Dana: He doesn’t change at all. He’s like, “I didn’t kill my wife,” in the beginning of the movie. In the middle of the movie, he’s like, “I swear to fucking God, I didn’t kill my wife.” At the end of the movie, he’s like, “I fucking told you I didn’t kill my wife.” Tommy Lee Jones, the whole structure is key to Tommy Lee Jones’s arc in understanding that Richard Kimble is telling the truth.

Craig: Yes. This is all correct.

Dana: That helps me with structure more than anything else.

Craig: Nice.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is sitting between me and Dana. It’s a thing called the Owl, and it’s this little camera device. It looks like a speaker. It looks like a tall speaker, but it has a camera at the top that is a panoramic camera. We’re on a Zoom like we are right now with Craig, and Drew, and Graham. It is showing individual slices, individual shots of me and Dana, so that we actually look well framed in it. It is just a piece of magic. It’s the Owl.

If you’re doing any sort of situation where you have some people in a place and other people are on Zoom, it is a game-changer. When we’ve done other things like this, Scriptnotes, you have to move the laptop back far enough so that everyone can see each other, or there’s a camera up on the wall.

Dana: I’ve done so many things like this, I’ve never seen it work as well as it’s working right now. We’re all seeing each other’s faces. Everybody’s in the frame. It’s amazing.

Craig: It’s really effective.

John: What’s so smart about it is it has the panoramic view, and it shows you at the top, but it’s smart enough to individually slice out when someone is speaking to give them framed as a single.

Dana: I urge every studio to get one of these because all of those Zoom calls I have with you guys, where 27 of you are in one frame, I can’t do it anymore.

John: I was on a Netflix call, and literally, it was like a satellite shot of two executives at a table.

Dana: Yes, satellite, literally, like a Google Earth shot of the Netflix building.

John: It’s hard for me to read it in attention. I’m like, “All right. Do they get it?”

Dana: I was like, “Do they like it? Do they want it?” I can’t tell.

Craig: I’m going to get one of these for the production office. I’m going to get one tomorrow.

Dana: Oh, for the production office. It would kill for that. For production meetings?

Craig: Yes.

Dana: Everybody. Great.

John: Craig, for D&D, when we’re a hybrid, like while you’re up in Canada, game changer.

Craig: Yes. [laughs] John and I–

Dana: Did you just slip in that Craig is doing D&D?

Craig: No, we play D&D together.

John: Play D&D every week.

Dana: Oh, I thought you guys were making a movie together. It’s cute. You guys are cute.

Craig: We are. We’re adorable. We talk about torture. John and I were playing in a game on Thursday evening, where we were subjected to a three-hour pointless combat, where we ended up captured and shoved into a mine.

Dana: Oh, my God. Are you with other people in this story? Who else is in there?

John: Oh, my God. Who’s who? It’s me, and Craig, and Chris Morgan. We’ll talk about it. We’ll tell you after. We’ll sidebar.

Dana: Yes, sidebar. Chris Morgan made it in, though. We all know he was there.

John: Dana Fox, do you have a one cool thing to share with us?

Dana: I would love my one cool thing to be my husband’s podcast, which is called The Most Important Question. It’s mostly about climate change, and science, and all sorts of interesting stuff. Because it’s not a thing, I am going to say my one cool thing is heating pads. Because what it allows you to do is lower the temperature in your bedroom to 55. If you can’t see your breath, you’re not doing it right. Then you get the heating pad so that you don’t die. It allows you to keep the room as cold as you need to keep it. Amazing sleep.

John: Love it.

Dana: Please enjoy.

Craig: That’s good.

John: I also am a big fan of the heated seats in your car.

Dana: Stunning.

John: It can be the middle of summer, but you just want a little–

Dana: Summer? A little back warmer?

John: Yes.

Dana: Heat up that lumbar?

John: Absolutely. Loosen up your back.

Dana: Not getting back pain? Loosen it up?

John: Fantastic.

Dana: Love it. Great story.

John: The new car also has seat coolers, and so it blows air through the seat. Game changer, so you don’t have the sweaty back when you go into a meeting.

Dana: Not to steal another one cool thing, because I totally want to hear one. We also got the ID. Buzz. Let me tell you, this is the electric VW buzz that looks like the hippie thing.

John: You have 19 children.

Dana: We have 19 children. We put them in this hippie bus. We drive around, and it brings so much joy.

John: It’s a beautiful car.

Dana: It’s a beautiful car. We got the peel. People are like, “All right, all right.” Everybody becomes Matthew McConaughey when you drive by. You get peace signs. You get smoking weed signs. We’re in Virginia. We’re in southern places where nobody does shit like that. Everybody is so happy around this car. It’s the cutest thing. My husband got me a little bumper sticker on it. Surprised me one day. It says, “We can’t all come and go by bubble,” on the back of the car. It’s really precious. He’s a great guy.

John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: Yes, please. My one cool thing this week is a set of puzzles, a nice puzzle suite from Eric Berlin, who’s a pretty prolific puzzle constructor. He’s a big participant on one of the big teams in the MIT puzzle hunt that happens every year. This one is actually a great one if you’re thinking about getting into this sort of thing. It’s not far off, difficulty-level-wise, from the one that David Kwong and I ran back in the day at the Magic Castle. This one is called Have Fun Storming the Castle. We’ll include a link for you.

Dana: I went to the David Kwong at the Magic Castle one with you guys. That was great.

John: It was with him.

Craig: Difficulty-wise, it’s right about there. You should be able to get through it. Maybe you might need a hint or two, but probably not.

Dana: I’ve never felt dumber than when I was– I was like, “I’m so smart.” I came in, I’m like, “I’m so smart. I went to Stanford, I’m so smart.” I’ve never felt dumber than that night.

Craig: It’s because you use different skills. This one’s got eight puzzles and then one meta puzzle.

Dana: How do I engage in it? Is it online, or is it on my internet phone?

Craig: Yes, you can pick up your internet, get your internet out of your pocket,-

Dana: Okay. That’s my internet and whatever.

Craig: -turn your internet on. [laughs] Then switch your internet on.

John: Unlock your internet on your face.

Dana: Unlock your internet with my face. Copy that. I know how to do that.

Craig: Exactly. Then follow the link, and it will cost you a whole eight American dollars.

Dana: This is great. That’s a great one cool thing.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by [crosstalk]

Dana: Wait, hold on. Don’t do a thing. I love you guys. You’re amazing people, and I really love you, and I miss you, and you’re great, and thanks for being such great people.

Craig: Dana, you are just a permanent ray of sunshine. I can’t explain how happy I was to see Dana in her slanket on that plane. I was so happy.

Dana: Comfort. One of the vowels is gone. I don’t know which one. I can’t help you get the sweatshirt because I don’t know which vowel disappeared.

Craig: Like 70% of people that I know, if I had seen them on a plane in their slanket, I would pretend to have not seen them.

Dana: You would pretend that you had not seen them. 100%. No, I know. I get that about you.

Craig: I’m on a plane. I don’t want to do all that.

Dana: I felt so touched. I was like, Craig usually ignores people on planes. This is special.

Craig: Then Jack McBrayer just chimed in, and we had the best time.

Dana: We had the best time. I really do love you guys, and you’ve been amazing friends and mentors to me forever, and I appreciate you. Truly, I’m so grateful for you guys. It’s hitting me because I’m here in town for Wicked, and that took five years of my life. There are certain people in your life who just don’t leave and don’t stop being amazing, and it’s you guys.

Craig: I will say, Dana, I don’t know if I’ve been changed for the better, but I know that I’ve been changed for good.

Dana: I’m going to get you something. I’m going to get you a present. I’m going to get you some merch. Don’t worry about it.

Craig: I want merch. I want pink, and I want green.

Dana: I’m going to get you a mirror that has lights on it.

Craig: By the way, that’s how you know that no one’s ever sent me a mug.

[laughter]

Dana: I’m going to do it. I’m going to send you the mug. I’m going to send you the Owala water bottle. Everybody loves these water bottles. They did a Wicked collection. I got 72 of them for Christmas presents.

Craig: Good, because Melissa doesn’t have enough water bottles in her house.

John: No, it’s a huge shortage, yes.

Craig: We have a room that’s called Water Bottle Room.

Dana: By the way, I have 757,000 water bottles, and I somehow don’t have enough water bottles. There’s never the cap. It’s never the right thing.

Craig: This water bottle thing– Anyway.

Dana: They’ve got us by the balls. By the way, if anybody wants to have fun, look up Hugh Grant talking about water bottles. It’s a delight. I have a whole side career where I just watch Hugh Grant do interviews. It’s so fun.

Craig: Second one cool thing. I like that.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To view an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow.

You’ll also find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, but no cuck chairs. [laughter] You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you 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 the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the promo circuit.

Dana Fox, thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Dana: Thank you for having me. I love you guys.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Dana Fox, the reason we get to see you in person in Los Angeles is because you are here doing a promo for Wicked For Good. I just want to talk about the promo circuit because on so many levels, it’s a celebration. Congratulations, you made a movie. It’s out there in the world. You made a series of a new season of television, it’s out there in the world. Then, like, oh my God, you have to just schlep around and promote it. You have to do all the things.

Dana: It looks really fun when people see it, and everybody’s dressed up, and you’ve got all the hair and makeup, and everyone’s like, “You’re great, everything’s great.” It’s so hard. It’s like a job. It’s a real job, and it takes you away from the job you get paid for, which is typing on your computer.

John: You don’t get paid to [unintelligible 01:08:43].

Dana: For months, I didn’t work because I was promoting the first movie, and thank God, we had a lot of people who wanted to talk to us, which was amazing. I felt so lucky, and so I really wanted to take advantage of it. Then it was March, and I realized I hadn’t written a single word for the year. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to pack my entire year worth of work into the next couple of months because the next promo tour is about to start.” That was very intense.

It is a lot of work, and I hate to say that because you imagine normal people with their normal jobs sitting there rolling their eyes at me, being like, “Oh, getting makeup on is really hard.” It’s like I became a writer because I’m terrible at that stuff. I’m so bad at blow-drying my hair. What even is that? It takes hours. I don’t understand it. Then I see the girls, Cynthia and Ari, and I’m like, they look like they’re going to the Met Gala every time they step out. I’m like, that is a lot of work.

John: Hours to get to that place. I remember back when I was in Startup Program, you were just a couple years behind me. There was a writer-director who was talking about, like, “Oh, yes, I do that, but I’m going to have to do the awards season starting for this movie.” Oh, that’s presumptuous. They think that movie’s made up for the awards. He wasn’t wrong. He was just like, he’d been through it before. He knew that, “Okay, those are three months I’m not going to get back.”

Dana: I’m very superstitious, so if something goes well, I have to wear the same clothes. It’s gross. It’s like, I’m that lady. I can’t talk about anything in the future. I’m like, I’m done. The premiere’s on Monday in New York, and I’m going to do that and do a couple more interviews. I’m assuming I’m done because I can’t–

John: You’re not done.

Dana: Ooh, but I can’t say it out loud.

John: Let’s talk about the gendered expectations of this, though, too, because for you need to have a great-looking outfit. Hair and makeup, but also great outfits for things, where Craig and I don’t– We’re just sticking to our suit.

Craig: I got to tell you that [crosstalk]

Dana: No, I was going to say, have you seen Craig lately? Look at his glasses. He looks so cool.

Craig: They send over a stylist who’s a lovely man, and they send over a makeup lady. Now, for me, makeup is, “Can we please make your head not so shiny?”

Dana: That takes a life time.

Craig: That’s really what makeup is. “Can we do something about the eye bags?” It takes about 20 minutes, maybe 30, but–

Dana: I’m in there for two hours and 30 minutes.

Craig: That’s the gendered part, right? That is a big one.

Dana: Can we make her look like she doesn’t have three kids?

Craig: They send over a rack of clothes, and I’ve got to try things on and make decisions. I’m not good at that.

Dana: I think that’s nice that they do that. They’ve done that for me, and I felt so appreciated. I appreciate Universal so much for treating the writer that way in features because, Craig, you’re the writer in a television show, which means you’re like the king of the castle. I’m a writer in a feature movie, which means they’re like, “Who? What’s that girl doing here?”

Craig: They don’t have to do it, and it’s nice that they are doing it.

Dana: They don’t have to. It’s very nice that they’re doing it.

Craig: It’s also a sign of how much they respect and appreciate you. For me, it was interesting hearing you say you had to take all this time off. For me, that stuff happens while we’re in post. It starts happening, I would say, two brutal months, maybe three, and I’m working all day. Then you just have to go and–

Dana: For me, when I have an interview and I have to get glammed, that’s my day. He killed my whole day. Does it do that for you?

Craig: Most of the stuff that I end up doing are interviews. There’s the junket days and all that stuff. The phone interviews or Zoom interviews, I don’t need to do anything. When somebody’s coming for a magazine and they’re doing photographs or you’re going to an event, then, yes. I got to work on a Saturday now because I did this thing on a Thursday.

Dana: Part of the reason that I accepted the whole idea of the stylist and all that stuff was because Franklin Leonard from the Black List pulled me aside and was like, “Writers are always wearing black, they’re hiding, they’re in the background, especially women, and they look like publicists for someone else. Don’t do that.” He’s like, “Wear color, be out front, make yourself look good because that is part of raising the profile of writers in Hollywood.” That’s part of people understanding that we actually work on the movies. We do stuff.

Craig: I have this thing that I think I’ve successfully articulated to the stylist I work with, which is because part of his job is to try and get me to be a little bit more adventuresome in what I wear because I’m not. Where I draw the line is I’m like, okay, but when I’m up there, like we’re doing a FYC event and it’s me and the actors, it’s about the actors. More importantly, I cannot try to even seem like I think I’m as cool as them.

Dana: I’m trying to compare myself to Pedro.

Craig: Exactly.

Dana: 100%.

Craig: I’m Dad. I need to always be Dad. As long as you can keep me Dad, and let the actors have their beautiful aura of coolness.

Dana: As long as it’s clear that I am Ariana Grande or Cynthia Erivo’s nanny, then we’re fine. [laughter] I’m not up there to try to be like them. I do stare at them lovingly during all of the Q&As [crosstalk] and just tear up because they’re just so beautiful and lovely.

Craig: You’re so important to the movie, and John is so important to the movie and the editors and everybody. These events are entirely about the actors. I reiterate this, too. I’m trying to explain this. Because sometimes, especially when we do–

Dana: They do a lot of events where the actors are not there. These are more the craft ones, like the BAFTA.

Craig: Those are fun.

Dana: It’s about craft, and then they really do listen to what–

John: What’s so interesting about those roundtable-y things is that you are having genuine conversations, but you’re done up because you’re taking photos at the same time, and so you’re looking at stuff. I find if I get makeup for something, I feel it the rest of the day, my eyes get itchy, and I hate having it on. I have to scrub it all down.

Craig: What is that? Dana, why do our eyes get itchy?

Dana: It’s the powder in it. Do your eyes get itchy?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. From the–

Dana: You guys are allergic to something. You got to tell your makeup artists that they need to do sensitive skin stuff.

John: I think it’s just the powder that they use to keep my shiny head from–

Craig: I think it’s anti-bald powder. Because like John and I, our heads are bounce cards, basically. Whatever they use for that clearly makes your eyes itchy. Honestly, no man can complain about makeup. It’s just like–

Dana: Thank you for saying that, because I, as a woman, feel that I could have been president of the United States if I had not had to blow-dry my hair throughout my entire life, because that is how much time I would have gotten back. I could be the president right now.

Craig: Really, you should have been.

Dana: I mean, please.

John: Dana Fox for president. Once again, we’ve–

Dana: Solved it all.

John: We solved the problem.

Dana: We solved everything.

John: Dana, we love you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Craig: Thank you, Dana.

Dana: I love you both so much.

John: Bye.

Dana: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• Dana Fox on Instagram and IMDb
• Wicked: For Good
• Graham Rowat
• Friendship
• Comfrt travel hoodie
• Sara Schaefer’s miniature cuck chairs
• Pittman Inflatable Camping Chair
• Inflatable Beanless Bean Bag Chair
• What the Cuck?! | Decoder Ring
• Wicked the book and the stage show
• The Fugitive (1993)
• Owl Labs’ Meeting Owl 3
• Eric Berlin – Puzzle Snacks
• The Most Important Question podcast
• Heating Pads
• VW ID Buzz
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.