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: Okay, so. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 688 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a seven-time guest.

Craig: Oh.

John: He is a comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster whose new special, The Good Life, debuted this week on Netflix. It is the legendary Mike Birbiglia. Welcome back.

Mike Birbiglia: Hey, guys. This is my favorite podcast. I, on the flight here, listened to the Taffy Akner Moneyball episode. As a fan of the show, I request-

Craig: More?

Mike: -more breaking apart a movie.

John: Oh, yes. The Deep Dives? Yes.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: I think he’s right. I think he’s right. We don’t do it enough. I guess what we do do enough, or maybe too much of, is having Mike Birbiglia on the show.

John: No.

Craig: Seven-time host. We should give you the jacket, the robe that SNLers get.

Mike: The Seven Timers Club.

Craig: The Seven Timers Club.

John: Here are the episodes he was on. First was in 2013 for My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Screenwriter. That’s way back to your first film. Then, Austin Forever in 2014. That was an Austin Live show, which I had forgotten that we actually– that’s where you first–

Mike: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Special. Then, what was it? We talked about Sleepwalk with Me, the movie? My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend wasn’t a movie.

John: It was number two. Yes, okay. That was a special, wasn’t it?

Mike: That was a special, yes.

John: That was a special, right. I think I first saw you– Joss Whedon interviewed you at the Writers Guild Theater for Sleepwalk With Me.

Mike: For Sleepwalk With Me. 2012. Woo.

John: 2014, Austin Forever. 2016, Don’t Think Twice. Your movie, which we all loved.

Mike: Thanks.

John: It was so early on the dissection of how comedy groups work and how improv works and all that stuff. It’s held up really well.

Mike: Oh, thanks.

John: We had you on in 2019 for The New One. We had you in 2020. You were part of a big episode with What We’re All Up To during the pandemic. We checked in with you there. I was a guest on your show, which we also aired on this very podcast. Your show called Working It Out, your podcast, is phenomenal. I recommend it to–

Craig: I have seen it. That’s the thing. That’s why I like the idea of maybe putting this on video because I like watching you-

Mike: Oh, wow. Thanks.

Craig: -more than I like listening to you.

Mike: That’s fascinating.

Craig: I actually turn the sound off.

Mike: Oh, you turn the sound off?

Craig: Yes. I just watch you.

Mike: I’m like a silent film podcast star to you?

Craig: I blow it up and I just look at you mouth. Yes, Sexy Craig likes your podcast.

Mike: Oh, I’m so glad that we’re recording this.

John: Recently on your podcast, you had Gary Simons, who works with you on that podcast.

Mike: Yes, true.

John: He’s also a stand-up comic. You were talking through the process. It was so good in terms of answering questions about what it’s like to get a career started as a stand-up comic in the way that I think we’re trying to answer those questions for aspiring screenwriters. It was just so, so smart.

Mike: Thanks a lot. It’s funny. There were two episodes back-to-back that were Scriptnotes-esque but in the comedy space. The Gary Simons episode, which we basically speak to what do you do in the first three to five years of trying to be a comic? Then the week before Ira Glass comes on and decides, “Hey, I want to try to do stand-up comedy.”

Craig: I was impressed by this. I really was.

Mike: It was like, “Well, what happens if you’re not a stand-up comic? You want to try it. I perform 10 minutes. What is your critique of these 10 minutes? It’s not unlike the three-page challenge.

John: What I’d like to do with you on the podcast today is talk about how you write a joke for the stage, for a sketch, or for a scene. We have some scenarios. It’s like how would this be a movie, but how would this be a joke? We have some scenarios we’re going to talk through and figure out what is the comedic premise for each of these types of writing and how different they are. A joke you tell on stage versus a sketch versus a scene, they’re really different needs even though they are all potentially finding comedy in a situation.

Mike: That’s great.

John: Cool. We’re also going to answer listener questions on breaking a story, using an idea, TV remakes. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about video and social and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and stuff, because you and your team do an amazing job with video for your podcast, the marketing without making it feel like marketing. You must have email lists that are managed. I’d just love to know what all that’s like, because it’s just–

Craig: Because we want to beat you.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Teach us your ways so that we may overcome you.

John: I just want to know more about that.

Mike: That seems great. I love that.

John: Cool. Drew, we have some news.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We realized that Spotify had comments on the podcast episodes.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: No idea.

Drew: So we turned them off. Oh, we have yours too.

John: The Spotify comments we were getting on Scriptnotes episode, and the reason we turned them off, they’re all about The Last of Us, Craig.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: Great. I’m sure the people that take time to leave comments on Spotify love the show and all the decisions we’ve made.

Drew: Very measured feedback.

John: Mike, yours are still on. You may not realize this, so we have a sampling of some of the comments on your Ira Glass episode.

Mike: Amazing.

John: Rory wrote in and said, “Maybe the best episode of the show feels like the core of what this podcast should be about.”

Mike: Oh, wow.

John: String of Numbers says, “Props to Ira for being open and vulnerable in his work. It was interesting to see Mike pointing out where the punchline should go and Ira being less sure how to approach that.”

Mike: Sure. All right.

John: Elise says, “Love this show but “Hiking is walking” is a joke made on Sex and the City-

Mike: Oh.

John: -by a character played by David Duchovny 20 years ago. It’s not original.”

Mike: Fair.

John: Then we also looked at the YouTube clip for that and it said, “You don’t know this, but in my brain, you’re my dad.”

Mike: Me or Ira?

John: Yes, to you.

Mike: All right.

Craig: You wanted it to be Ira, didn’t you?

[laughter]

Mike: He is in some ways, I said this on the episode. He in some ways feels like my dad.

Craig: He’s a very paternal.

John: He is, yes.

Craig: Yes, he gives that vibe.

John: Yes, but I think there’s a lot of dad energy in this podcast right now. We’re all very in that dad–

Craig: Even you. Even you, Drew.

John: Yes. He’s a young dad. Young dad. He has a young child.

Mike: Oh, you have a young child?

Drew: I don’t. No.

Mike: Okay. Perfect.

[laughter]

Craig: Because he seems so ambivalent about it?

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I know I have five kids, but I don’t know if I’m real.

John: Drew looks like he could be pushing a stroller, though.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

Drew: I’m going to take that as a compliment.

Craig: Drew, are we allowed to ask you how old you are by law?

Drew: I don’t think legally, no.

Craig: Okay. I’m not asking you. If you volunteer it, I’m just curious.

Drew: I’m 35.

Craig: I already had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by that point. I would say yes, he’s stroller age.

John: Final comment on your YouTube. Why do I just now realized Mike looks a lot like Matt Damon? Do you get the Matt Damon comparison?

Mike: Yes. Cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Oh, wow. That’s it.

Craig: I would adjust that to just Bill O’Reilly.

John: Now, once it, you can’t unsee it. It’s crazy.

Craig: You are young, kind Bill O’Reilly.

Mike: Every time– so over the years, I get Paul Rudd. The one I got for years was James Van Der Beek.

John: [crosstalk]

Mike: When I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers once, and James Van Der Beek was there, I was like, “People tell me I look like you.” He was just like, “I don’t see it.” Anyway. Now I never say what people compare me [unintelligible 00:07:02]

Craig: The next time you’re on O’Reilly, you should bring it up.

Mike: Oh, God.

John: Where is O’Reilly now? Is it a podcast or is it a video? I don’t know. He’s not on a network anymore.

Mike: I think it’s probably some a self-release thing, right?

Craig: Podcast thing. From his bunker.

John: Yes, it’s wild. Mike, talk to us about this special. I saw versions of this along the way. I saw you had Mike Birbiglia and Friends, where you did some of the material in this. Then I saw the full thing on stage, and I saw it last night in its finished Netflix form. I think we’ve talked on previous episodes about your process, which we can see as a bunch of note cards up on a board.

Mike: Sure.

John: What was the inception of this, and when did you find the pieces fitting together?

Mike: The inception of it was two years ago when I finished The Old Man in the Pool, which was at Lincoln Center, and we filmed it for Netflix. I always talk on my podcast about this concept of obsession. What is the thing you’re obsessed about, can’t stop thinking about? As a writer, it’s like, “Well, just write that. Just free write on that. This Is My Journal, it’s like I’m free writing on that at breakfast this morning.

Two years ago, it was just like, “Oh, this is weird. My daughter is eight years old now, and I don’t know a lot of the answers to the questions, because kids just always ask so many questions. I was knocking it out of the park till age eight. Then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, these are tricky questions.” I just went– my first thing is always like I go to the comedy cellar. I go to small 100, 200 seat comedy rooms, try out a ton of jokes. Those jokes eventually become stories. At a certain point, I start to form the stories into having, similar to how you guys talk about it all the time, of so-then causality versus and-then lateral movement story-wise.

About a year into the process, my dad had a stroke, and so much of my life became about taking care of my dad. I started to think in relation to, “Okay, what if the show was about how do I explain things to my daughter?” and also, “What is my relationship with my own dad?” It becomes this– the title is The Good Life, but it becomes a meditation on the question that my daughter asked me when she looked up at a smoke shop called, The Good Life, “Dad, what’s the good life?” It opens the special with an existential question, “What is the good life?” It makes the audience wonder that. Then I go through a lot of stories with my daughter and with my dad, and then it arrives at a thesis at the end of what is the good life.

John: Yes. Great. When you’re figuring out these pieces, one of these things you get to do as a stand-up comic is just constantly test the material and constantly see what actually resonates with the audience. When we’re writing scenes, we’re writing scenes but they just exist on a page. We don’t hear them. We don’t feel them. We don’t get a reaction. You’re constantly getting the reaction. What was the culling process like of like, “Oh, I think it’s this idea.” How developed are jokes you’re telling in those initial rooms?

Mike: The jokes at the beginning are– they’re developed insofar as I’ve run them by friends who are comics, usually. Our listenerships are similar in the sense of it’s a lot of creative people who are either working as creatives or want to work as creatives. I always say, try to build a community of the people around you. I look around at the people who I started with, and we were all broke and struggling in our 20s. I look around and go, “Oh, they’re doing really well now.” ‘You know what I mean? There is a thing to creating your own community of people who are at your level.

I feel like now it’s like people like Pete Holmes and John Mulaney are people who in my 20s were trying to figure it all out, and we would run jokes by each other. Now everyone has a really good career, but still you run jokes by each other. Then even, I think it was one of those Largo shows that you were at and Mulaney came on and he gave me a joke that ended up in the special. There’s a line where I go, “I’m a comedian. My wife is a poet. Together, we’re a sculptor.” I came off stage and he goes, “What about this?” He goes, “It doesn’t make sense, but what do you think of this?” I was like, “Yes, I’ll try that.” It somehow does make sense in the context of the special.

That’s what it is. It’s like, you start out with, you bounce jokes off friends, which is what my whole podcast is. Then when you figure out something that you think is worth an audience seeing, you put it out there. Then I go on tour, and that’s really instructive bringing it to all different cities because you see like, “Oh, yes, this isn’t just a provincial sense of humor in New York City. This is something that plays everywhere,” or it doesn’t play. I think a huge part of being a comedian is figuring out what doesn’t work.

Craig: Yes, I wish that we had that. Although I suppose what we do– we don’t quite have it on the granular level that you do because I don’t think any of our friends would just go, “Hey, here’s a scene.”

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: It starts on page 37. You don’t know what happened before. We will share scripts, and we will look at– maybe even it’s more common to happen deeper into the process where we’ll say, “Okay, here’s a cut of.” You, actually, you had that testing procedure for your movie-

Mike: Don’t Think Twice, yes.

Craig: -Don’t Think Twice, where you would have a reading and people would there and then discuss it, which was really smart.

John: It’s hard to iterate. Long form writing is just hard to iterate overall.

Craig: It is.

John: You can’t watch this whole thing. When I was doing Big Fish, the musical, we could iterate. Every night, we could see the show like, “Oh, this is what’s working. This is what’s not working.” I can swap out jokes. We could move whole scenes around. In film and TV writing, it’s not really possible.

Craig: Yes, it is a little scary to know that you’re chiseling in stone and then sending it out into the world. What I love about what you’re saying, it’s what– we talked about writers’ groups last week, I think. Part of me gets itchy when people write in and they’re like, “I’m part of a writer’s group,” because I think, “Well, what if all the writers in that group aren’t very good?” because the odds are they’re not.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Then they’re all giving each other advice, and it’s maybe bad. Then I think, “Okay, if you do find yourself hitting a mark, getting a job, entering, to look around for people that are also like you, and what I think has changed, I don’t know if you agree with me, John, when we started in Hollywood, it felt like you were isolated and that, in fact, we were all meant to be in competition with each other. We were like horses in our stall before the gate opens.

I think as the internet brought everybody together, that went away completely and became more like, Okay, I’m going to pick up a phone, “Have you worked with this person?” or, “I have an idea. Do you think this is a good idea?” I love that you can do that with– does it ever hurt?

Mike: Which part of it?

Craig: When you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to try this show. Okay, Mulaney, I’m going to run this by you,” and he just stares at you and he’s like, “No.”

Mike: No, I don’t think that hurts. I don’t say– Look, I think not doing well with a joke with friends, it’s hard in that moment. Not doing well with a joke on stage is hard in that moment. I think you have to, like there’s an imperative to view it as I’m getting feedback for something that will be finished later. It’s like the wisest thing that almost anyone ever taught me is my editor, Jeffrey Richman, who edited this special, he edited both of my movies, he edited Severance, he did Escape at Dannemora, he does a lot of stuff with Ben Stiller. On both movies, I had moments in the edit where I go, “What are we going to do? This is a disaster.”

Craig: Oh, sure.

Mike: He just goes, “Oh, we’re not going to hand it in till it’s done.” It’s so simple of an idea, but I think that that’s– all artistic process, you just don’t hand it in till it’s done.

Craig: What I think people that work in comedy have, that people who have never worked in comedy don’t have, is this, which is, sometimes I describe it as a work ethic, but what I really think it is humility. Comedy humiliates you.

Mike: [laughs] Yes, sure.

Craig: Humiliates you. Then, as part of the process, you must get re-humiliated over and over and over-

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: -to the point where you don’t even see it as humiliation anymore. You see it as part of the process towards turning it in before it’s done.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: A lot of people who come in drama have this opposite point of view. Their point of view is, “I need to treasure my instincts. That is my voice, and what I have done, therefore, is correct, regardless of what people think.” I think having a little bit of that isn’t such a bad idea, but I’m far more admiring of the humiliation sequence.

Mike: Liz Gilbert has this, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and many other great things, has this TED Talk that’s so good about the idea of not being a genius but having a genius, and holding it, and fostering it. That way it doesn’t become about you, or you, or you.

Craig: Oh, yes.

Mike: I think that that’s really key as a comedian. You can never think, “I am funny.” You have to think, “I want to create something that is funny for these people.”

Craig: That’s brilliant. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. Now, also, you probably need to then do the same thing for whatever the opposite of genius is, the self-loathing, the critic, I guess, which is sometimes hard for me. I should imagine like, “Okay, it’s easy for me to imagine there’s genius over there. That’s not me.” Now I have to figure out like, “Okay.” Also, there’s a critic over there not in here. That can be difficult. I like that.

John: I want to talk to you about how you bring yourself to your work. As writers, we’re always putting ourselves in our scripts and in our pages, but it’s all disguised. It’s never really exactly us. We’re never identifying like, “Oh, this is me doing this thing,” versus your stand-up, which is all about what has happened to you. All of your comedy is very centered on your experience of things that happened to you, and the people around you, which is a challenge because your wife, Jenny, your daughter, Una, they’ve been part of all of your specials. We know a lot about them even though we’ve never met them.

Mike: My parents, yes.

John: Your parents, especially in this one, and your dad, who’s unwillingly dragged into this story.

Mike: Oh, yeah. So you’ve been talking to him about it?

John: Oh, yes. Can you talk to me, as you’re developing this material and trying it on stage, how do you find the boundaries of like, “Well, this is me, Mike Birbiglia, as the individual person, versus me, the performer, who is creating this funny thing that’s not me”?

Mike: That is probably the most challenging part of it. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m going to take a few years off from autobiographical storytelling right now, because my daughter is 10, and she’s entering those years where I feel like you don’t want to make someone more self-conscious about all their stuff.

Craig: Yes, and you probably don’t want to be looking too closely at it either-

Mike: No.

Craig: -having gone through it twice.

Mike: Oh, yes.

Craig: It will be a great story for you 15 years from now.

Mike: Sure, yes. That’s what Jenny– My wife is a poet, brilliant poet, but she always says, whenever we’re going through something that’s really hard, she’s like, “Write it down. Just don’t release it now.”

Craig: I like how concise that is, have you ever checked to see if she’s constantly speaking to you in haiku and you just don’t remember?

[laughter]

John: It’s been a long constant this entire time. We’re going to wind back to the table, and I’ll think, “Oh, everything was a haiku.”

Craig: That would be the most brilliant thing ever.

Mike: She’s very wise and poetic person. Yes, that is hard. I’m pivoting over to the thing I’m writing right now. It’s fictional. I’m writing a movie and hopefully shoot next year, in the vein of Don’t Think Twice, a small-budget indie comedy. Yes, I’m going to take a few years off from it because I do think it’s hard. I’m talking about my dad. My dad’s in his final stage of life. He could go tomorrow. He could go in a year or two years, but it’s the final stage of life. It’s so hard. Yes, that side of it, I’m always juggling what am I saying and am I depicting the person well. Am I trying to find myself as the joke of the story-

John: Exactly.

Mike: -as opposed to just taking on people?

John: Absolutely. In this last special, you’re talking about how terrible nine-year-old girls are, which is just true, nine-year-olds are terrible. There’s a reason why you go to the jumpy gym where everyone’s going to get hurt because everybody gets hurt. All that stuff is very relatable, but none of it is directed. Your daughter comes out well in all of it.

Mike: True. I love my daughter, I hate her friends.

[laughter]

John: Yes, absolutely. A class of people is great, but the focus of the humiliation is always you. It’s your hard nipples.

John: That’s right.

Mike: It’s all-

Craig: I get that too.

[laughter]

Mike: The thing that’s funny about that, about the autobiographical side of that, is the hard nipple story is basically, I’ll paraphrase it for the audience, but it’s when I was 12, I had hard nipples. Sometimes something happens during puberty. I was always a hypochondriac, so I thought it was cancer. I went to my dad– he’s a doctor– and go, “Hey, Dad. I have hard nipples.”

John: On your special you say like, “Dad, I have cancer.”

Mike: I have cancer. He goes, “Why do you think that?” “I have hard nipples.”

Craig: I loved how calm he was. Why do you think that?

John: Exactly.

Mike: He’s a neurologist. No emotion.

[laughter]

Mike: I was like, “Well, see for yourself.” I take off my shirt. In the living room, he feels my hard nipples. Then he gives me the briefest medical diagnosis I’ve received to this very day. He goes, “Nope.” That was the end of the conversation.

[laughter]

Craig: What a comforting presence in your life.

Mike: Yes, exactly. This is a great example of when people ask me, “Are these stories true?” Sometimes they’re not true in small ways that you would never guess. When my dad felt my nipples, it was in his bedroom.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I took it out.

Craig: Yes, that’s smart.

Mike: I relocated it to the living room because the audience–

Craig: You don’t want them going where you don’t want them going. You want them going there a tiny bit, which is, LOL, my dad’s feeling me up.

Mike: LOL, yes.

Craig: If he’s feeling me up in his bedroom, that’s not LOL.

John: What’s also crucial, though, is that you had already set up that your dad would come home from his two jobs and sit in his chair and read his war novels. You’re able pull it back to war novels. He sets down his war novel and puts his hands on your hard nipples.

Mike: That’s right.

John: You already created the image for us, which is why it’s so much better than what it is.

Craig: Apparently we have the same dad.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I love dadness. I have to say it’s underappreciated in our society. We make fun of the fact that the dad comes home sits there and reads the war novel or watches the History Channel or plays a very long version of some World War II simulation with a friend. It’s wonderful. Let’s celebrate that.

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: Let’s celebrate that guy.

John: The last thing I want to talk to you about before we get to these “how would this be a jokes” is transitions. We talk on the show constantly about transitions and how you move from scene to scene. I’d seen your special on stage, but watching it filmed, I was very aware of when you’re transitioning from one idea to the next idea, from one tone to the next tone, from we’re in this world, now, we’re in this world. I’m sure it’s a thing that you worked out doing the show again and again live. You were able to pivot on such small spaces. Sometimes it’s a gesture, it’s a single word repeated, and pull us along to a completely new thing.

Mike: Sure.

John: Are you writing that? Are you thinking that or is just how it works on stage as you’re feeling it out?

Mike: I would describe that as the final stage of the development in a two-year process. It’s probably the final six months just figuring out how is this story, so then this story, so then this story, so then this story. My director, Seth Barrish, who also directed the special and– it’s a confusing title for people, but he is a dramaturgical person. He works through the script with me and the logic of the script. We’ll spend an extraordinary amount of time. He’ll go, “When you go to the hard nipples story, and then you go to but actually your dad wasn’t physically affectionate, but you are physically affectionate with your daughter. You hug her, you say, I love you. I don’t understand the connection between those two ideas.”

It’s almost like he’s making– what Seth is doing is he’s making his brain blank and — or attempting to — over and over and over again, making, trying to imagine what it would be like as someone who’s never seen the show, getting rid of the curse of knowledge. Getting rid of the curse of knowledge. We have these long, drawn out conversations. I’m sure you guys deal with this in television and films all the time, which is like, you’ll end up taking something that was 150 words, and then at the end of the edit, it’s four words. But those four words are the right four words.

Craig: Absolutely.

Mike: That’s a lot of what we do.

John: Last night, we were also talking about how a thing you do really well, which you see other comics do, but I was really struck by it last night, is we’re on one thread, and then you take a diversion, and we’re on another thread, which is really, really funny. Then you pull us back to the main thread, and we’d forgotten that we were on that thread, and yet we’re like, “Oh, yes.” You get a jolt of energy because you’re back on the main thread. You had forgotten that you’d taken a detour. It’s not a recall. We’re just rejoining the story that we were already on. It’s really well done.

Craig: You get to be a genius, because if you’re talking normally with people, you cannot maintain 12 spinning plates, including a hidden one up your sleeve, that you then go, ah-ha, and ah. You plan your own brilliance so that when you do come back around to things, it’s magician stuff. Right?

Mike: It’s a very strange art form, in the sense that, as a comedian, when you meet people, you are always a letdown because you look like that guy on stage, and your voice is the same as that guy on stage, but there’s less jokes, there’s less causality story to story. The transitions aren’t great.

Craig: No big surprises.

Mike: No big surprises.

Craig: No full circles.

Mike: Yes, nothing comes full circle.

John: No natural segues, no.

Craig: Just a lot of stammering, and then, and sweat.

Mike: Also, what I’ve noticed through the years is, I think comedians are people who are frustrated at parties because when we perform, people laugh or don’t laugh. They don’t interject. They don’t go, “Let me tell you about my sleepwalking story.” ‘You know what I mean?

Craig: “No, no. Sir, sit down.” Heckler.

Mike: This is the best one-

Craig: Yes?

Mike: “I’ve got the best sleepwalking story here. Everyone shut up.”

Craig: You do. You should just bring somebody with you to parties, who can tell other people to shut up.

Mike: Yes, can you imagine if comedians showed up at parties, and we’re like, “All right, everyone step aside.”

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: Yes, all of your stupid stories, wrap them up.

Mike: With your banter.

Craig: We’ve got a good one that’s crowd tested. Yes, that must be really frustrating. That’s like being, I don’t know, you play in the symphony, and then you go to somebody’s backyard where everyone’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do a quick jam. What do you play? Violin?” “Yes.” The guy banging the pot lid is really loud and–

Mike: You guys must have that, though, with movies, because people– everyone has a take on movies and television. Then you come in, and you’re like, “Okay, here’s my take, and mine’s right.”

John: Yes, but also, the movie is not happening in front of you. No one’s expecting, “Craig, make a movie right now.” There’s not that performance.

Craig: If it were that.

Mike: Yes, it’s–

Craig: If it were a party where the idea was to write a short scene, then I suppose that would be really frustrating.

John: Yes, I suppose, beautiful people who are photographed, they’re still beautiful in real life, but they’re not as attractive, they look immortal.

Craig: The wind machine is on and so forth?

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, but you’re absolutely– you guys are in the worst spot. Congratulations.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[laughter]

John: Let’s take a look at writing some jokes. We have three different stories that I’ve pulled from recent news things. We’re going to start with the Run Club Haters. This is a story in Curved Magazine, a New York magazine, by Melissa Dahl. Drew, can you give us a short summary of the lead here for this story?

Drew: One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day. The sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone like her, and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight towards her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Amy, who’s 31 and has been running in New York since 2015.

It was, in her memory, a group of young women running five to eight abreast. They were completely across the sidewalk, she recalls. This is the most runners she’s ever seen taking up a path, but she’s gone head to head with run clubs before.

Usually she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane. This time, she wanted to test something. She didn’t change course, and neither did they. It was something of a game of runner’s chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. “Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook,” Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn’t stick around to.”

John: This article goes on to talk with organizers of run clubs, including some who accidentally started a run club because they just posted on Instagram, “Oh, I’m going for a run if anyone wants to join?” and then 100 people show up. They’re also talking about parks that are now requiring permits, costing $1,000 for people to do this. This is as a story space, and I was wondering, let’s first start talking about, where are the jokes? Where’s the comedy we could find in this-

Mike: If we were Amy.

John: -if we were Amy or if we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be Amy.

John: If we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be in the run club.

John: We could be any of the characters in the story, but if this is something that happened to us or around us, where are some of the jokes? Where are the comedic premises there?

Mike: I think, first of all, you’d have to be Amy in the story. If you’re one of the big group of bird people who essentially wallop someone in the street, that’s not going to be very relatable, but we’ve all been the Amy of the story, which is– I would say, if this were my story, if this were something that happened to me, it would be talking about the observation in general of when people take up the whole sidewalk. You can bring up different examples.

One of my examples that drives me nuts is people with dogs where they’re on one side of the sidewalk, the leash goes across. It’s essentially a trip wire created by them and their evil dog, and they don’t act like they’re taking up the whole curb. I would go into observational things about that, and then I would go into, how do you feel about walking? Are you afraid of walking? How do you feel about walking in the city?

Ira Glass, in some ways, taught me how to tell these types of 7 to 10-minute stories. He always thinks of it in terms of a story, non-comedically, is a little bit of plot, how do you feel about the plot, a little bit more plot, how do you feel about the plot? In my case, as a comedian, it’s a little bit of plot, some jokes about the plot. A little bit of plot, the jokes about the plot. In order for us to care about Amy’s story, or “my story” walking down the street and running into a herd of runners, is you have to know that pushes my buttons as a character. Right?

Craig: Not enough to know that anybody would feel particularly annoyed. You really feel.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: If this were in a very broad movie, there’s the classic escalation technique. It begins with, I’m running, and there’s one guy just staggering, “I got to go run.” All right, and then there’s the guy with the dog, and then there’s two runners, and then there’s just a wall of runners, and then there’s a Zamboni.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: You just keep– it just gets stupider and stupider if it’s–

Mike: That’s straight from Naked Gun.

Craig: That’s Naked Gun. I do think there could be a sketch version where you are part of the run-

Mike: Oh, the runners group? Yes.

Craig: -where the run club is the most heinous, horrible group of people. It’s not just runners, it’s people in stretchers, and it’s– I could see that.

John: It’s taking me back to– on safari and you’ll see a bunch of animals stampede, and it’s like, “Oh shit.” One runner by themselves is not threatening at all, but you see a pack moving towards you, they just– all of your instincts kick in. It’s like, “Oh, this is a dangerous situation.” I also want to get back to what you talked about, humiliation and Amy being humiliated or being the source of– the problem is her is also, I think, really important too. What is it about me that I decided like, “Today, I’m going to be the person, I’m not going to move.”

Craig: Today I decided is really good. Maybe the setup is like every day I see the run club, I turn around and flee. Today I’m not going to because a friend told me to stick up for myself and my therapist. I’m going to hold my head high, and I’m not going to move, and she’s killed. That’s all, they kill her, which is a really good lesson.

Mike: I have an analogous story years ago that I do as stand-up sometimes that’s never found its way into the special. It’s a similar city scenario, which is years ago, I’m rushing down subway steps at the West Forest stop. One of the jokes I make is, I’m always in a rush, I have nowhere to be. I’ve never had anywhere to be. I’m always in a rush. I trip on my lace. My dad taught me how to tie my shoes when I was a kid– he was never around. As I’m not good at it, and so I trip fourth step from the bottom, fly in the air, I land on the ball of my shoulder.

Craig: Argh.

Mike: I know. I often tell people growing up, I know. I was that guy writhing on the floor.

Craig: Dirty subway floor.

Mike: Dirty subway floor. People blowing past me-

John: Of course.

Mike: -just like, “Are you okay?” “No.” “Good,” or “Yes, good,” and then they’re gone. Then, what I sometimes say– nobody’s like, “Oh– “ “If you’re laughing, you’ve been one of these pigs. I want you pigs to know, we’re not fooled by your faux generosity.” It is a similar scenario where, essentially what you’re trying to explain is what your point of view is, what your status quo is. It’s not dissimilar to movie writing. Then what happens, and then what happens because of that.

John: Because of that, there’s a chain of events, there’s a causality like this was not the end of the story. It’s moving to the next thing.

Let’s try our next thing. This is a story from Slate’s Care and Feeding. The advice is from Michelle Herman, but the letter writer is anonymous. Drew, help us out.

Drew: My mother and father divorced more than 10 years ago when I was in eighth grade, after my mother learned my dad was cheating on her. Once my parents split, my father married his affair partner, Ruth, and moved out of state. They ended up having two kids who are now eight and five. After my dad moved out of the house, he never paid a penny in child support, and I didn’t hear a word from him again, until now.

My dad told me that my five-year-old half-sister, Amelia, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Her medical team wanted her to undergo a bone marrow transplant, but neither he, his wife, nor my half-brother was a match. He asked if I would be willing to undergo a screening to see if I am. Long story short, I am.

I find myself utterly conflicted. This man, who was supposed to be my dad, to love and provide for me, shattered my family with his selfishness. He abandoned me for the woman he cheated on my mother with. He wasn’t there to teach me to drive or to see me graduate from high school or college.

While I spent a decade dealing with the pain and rage his walking out on me caused, he started a new family and forgot I existed. Had his daughter not needed a donor, I doubt I would have ever heard from him again. Here he is, crawling to me, hat in hand. Part of me wants to tell him and his wife to leave me alone and never contact me again. I’ve never met my half-sister. I feel no connection to her. But then, there’s this stupid part of me that says that my father and Ruth were the ones who hurt me and that Amelia is innocent. That denying her a potentially life-saving treatment as a means of taking revenge against her parents would be wrong.”

Craig: That’s the stupid part? Okay. Because this guy cheated on my mom and left and didn’t pay child support, I now have a golden opportunity to murder a little girl.

John: Oh my God.

[laughter]

Craig: It was pretty awesome, actually. I also like that she said “affair partner,” by the way. There’s a whole side bit on that, like partner, the way that partners become a thing. In our society, it was just husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, and now everyone says partner. I never know if people are gay or not. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if they’re working together or romantic.

Mike: It’s a startup?

Craig: Affair partner.

Mike: It’s an app they’re working on.

Craig: Yes, exactly. An affair partner is incredible. That’s like granting status like cheating– Anyway.

John: There’s lots of things to unpack and potential comedic things to hold on to, even though this is not obviously comedic. There’s some good stuff here.

Her rage to this disappearing dad, that conflict and that my expectation of what this man is versus the reality is great comedic fodder. Obviously, her relationship to whatever this donor, her half-sister is fascinating. The space of bone marrow donations and would you help out a stranger? The trolley problem of it all is also fascinating. Mike, what’s your way in?

Mike: Yes, I think the way in, with anything that dramatic, I always say to people like, “You need to find one joke that works because the one joke that works indicates to the audience, ‘We’re all okay laughing about this.’” The way that Drew read it, and it was beautiful, was a little bit like a eulogy where it’s a sad story. That’s a tough story. If you just told it like Drew told it on stage in the first person, people would not know to laugh. They would go, “Well, what’s the funny part?”

I just think you need to find a joke. It’s like I have a joke in my special where I go, “My dad was a doctor and in his free time, he got his law degree. That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad.” The audience knows that my point of view is I’m over that part of it. I’m okay with that part of it.

I had bladder cancer when I was 20 and the first joke I figured out was like, I had bladder cancer, but it’s funny because I’m a hypochondriac. I think the funniest thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is you get cancer because it affirms every fear you’ve ever had. “See, I told you. Remember last week when I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There’s going to be a lot of changes around here.”

Craig: “When I showed you my nipples–“

Mike: Exactly, yes. If someone wanted to do a comedy bit of this, it’s like, “Well, where is the first joke that indicates that this is okay?” That joke has to be really good. Probably nothing I could come up with now, but it’s like, “My dad wasn’t around as a kid, and then he called me because he wanted my bones.” Just something where just you break open how outrageous the scenario is, and then it turns on itself. I think you can do like, “My dad wasn’t around, and then he wanted my bones,” and then try to come up with a joke around that and then say, “But actually, I’m torn on it because this girl deserves this, and she needs this, and I could help.”

I think with a story that inherently has such high stakes, you have the ability to both have jokes and have dramatic moments. In The Good Life, there’s four or five times where it goes to a dramatic moment just because the audience– a lot of it is, the audience doesn’t see it coming at a comedy show. In some ways, it’s the ultimate surprise. I think the back and forth of jokes in comedy, I think jokes and dramas, it is the potential there.

Craig: You could also– I could see occupying a character and the character is a woe-is-me character, who’s like, “Anyway, my dad left, and cheated on my mom, and then married this other lady. They had a great family that was incredible. He never talked to me ever until his daughter was sick and he came for my bone marrow and I thought, ‘He loves me.’”

[laughter]

Mike: That’s good.

Craig: It depends, like occupying– I do enjoy comedians who occupy characters.

Mike: I love that.

Craig: I love that weird space. It’s always interesting meeting them afterwards and going– like Natasha Leggero occupies a character. Then you talk to Natasha offstage and you’re like, “You are the opposite of that person.” It is–

Mike: Then you can heighten that and be like, “Then he asked to borrow $75,000 and I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t love.”

Craig: “Wait a second. As the marrow’s leaving me, I thought, ‘Wait. Wait.’”

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk about this as a scene. I would say it could be a movie, which is a whole dynamic, but you could also imagine a scene where you’re talking to this girl at a party and it gets to the point where it’s like, “So now I don’t even know if I should donate marrow to this kid.” It’s like, “What are you talking about? You are going to kill a small child.” There’s that, it’s a good build up for like, what kind of monster are you?

Craig: Or you’re like– Obviously, you all know where this went, I didn’t do it.

[laughter]

Mike: Right, exactly.

Craig: She’s been dead like, I don’t know, three or four years now.

John: Oh God. Oh my God.

Craig: I got to go tell you, it feels great. They tell you it won’t, but it does. Revenge is awesome.

John: Yes.

Craig: Got ya.

Mike: A lot of that is– Those are like three different POV takes on the same–

Craig: With different tones.

Mike: Yes, a lot of it’s persona. Anthony Jeselnik gets away with a different type of joke than I get away with.

Craig: I wish we could send him that. Oh my God, Anthony Jeselnik. Can I just–?

John: Again, occupying a character’s place. [unintelligible 00:40:43] area.

Craig: Completely, but I just want to salute–

John: Oh, I assume that. He’s not actually like that, is he?

Craig: Oh God, I hope not.

Mike: Not that I know of.

Craig: Yes, no, that would be insane.

Mike: I’ve never had an interaction with him like that.

Craig: The mathematical precision. He’s the closest thing that comedy has to Agatha Christie. You know there’s going to be a twist and you’re trying to figure it out-

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: -and you can’t. It just happens over and over and over and over.

Mike: That’s right. Yes, that’s right.

Craig: He’s just, the craft there is pretty remarkable.

John: Great. This last one, we don’t have that part to read, but this is a New York Times article by Heather Knight and Loren Elliott, with great photos and video by Elliott. It’s about the coyotes of San Francisco. Basically, there were no coyotes in San Francisco, but 10 years or so ago, they started coming back in, and now there are more than 100 coyotes in San Francisco, and they’re letting them be, largely.

One case, they were going after a young child and they went after that coyote. Basically, they do keep down rodent populations and other things, so there’s a reason to be there. It’s just so jarring to have coyotes in the city that never had them.

Mike: Wow.

John: Coyotes are cool. Obviously, in Los Angeles, we’re used to coyotes in our neighborhood. We have coyotes all the time. The comedic space of predators in an urban environment and like how a person interacts with them, what the moment is.

Craig: This is in San Francisco?

John: In San Francisco. Hacks this last season has a coyote episode where Jean Smart’s character is hearing the coyotes howl all the time. She’s putting out bear urine to scare them away. She has a showdown with a coyote at the end. Let’s talk about what can we imagine the comedic premises are for talking about coyotes on stage? What are the handles for that?

Mike: For me, it would have to be story-based interacting with a coyote. I’m trying to think if I have– Do you guys have any good animal stories of interacting with animals?

Craig: My mind goes to just right off the bat, but what is–? Isn’t a coyote just an asshole dog?

John: Yes. [crosstalk]

Craig: Why have we put it in this special category? It’s just, I’ve looked at them. They’re hungry dogs. That’s all they are.

John: It’s a sense of like, what’s a dog off leash though. We have a sense of like, “Oh, dogs are wonderful,” but when you see in a dog in a place you don’t expect to see a dog or a dog who doesn’t seem to have an owner, that’s–

Craig: You call it a coyote. Right. They’re like the hobos of dogs.

John: I was just in Egypt, and Egypt is just like, there’s just dogs everywhere. There’s street dogs.

Mike: That’s right.

John: I was like, “Oh, wait, why don’t dogs get hit?” Mike pointed out like, “Oh, we’re seeing that’s the logical fallacy. Basically, we’re seeing the dogs that survived and–

Craig: You see the dogs that aren’t hit.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. Coyotes in San Francisco probably, I think the hacky version would just be to start making fun of San Francisco. It’s like, “Oh, now the coyotes keep moving into our neighborhood and the rents are going up.” I wonder where [unintelligible 00:43:29] Coyotes don’t seem funny to me.

Mike: I feel like I would break it–

John: Come on, Wile E. Coyote is an incredible character.

Mike: [laughs]

Craig: The thing is, Wile E. Coyote is, we’re laughing at him, I suppose, but he’s not doing anything irregular. I’ve never seen a coyote use an Acme product.

Mike: If I were going to go into animals, which I ever, if I ever did, it would be the inherent contradiction. So much of comedy is about inherent contradiction. The contradiction is similar to what you’re saying, it’s like, we eat animals, we own animals. We shoo away animals. How are we deciding? Yes.
Who made up the rules on this?

Craig: I think Gaffigan’s got–

Mike: Oh, did he have–? [crosstalk]

Craig: He’s got a pretty good one of like, we eat the animals that aren’t cute.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Contradictions would be the thing that would go down, and also the personal story, but I always tell people, one of the probably the smartest things I did artistically was like 25 years ago, I had been doing set up punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline based on things in the news, things happening around town. Then, at a certain point, I was like, “If I wrote about my own experiences, then no one can steal that idea.” Really, no one has that idea. No one’s lived that.

The first thing this makes me think of is like, there’s animals in the walls of my apartment that just run over us. Sometimes Jen will just be like, “Mo,” she calls me Mo. She goes, “Mo, what are we going to do about the animals?” I’m like, “I don’t think you know who you married. I don’t really know. I have no plan for the animals in the ceiling, and I’m not going to have one.” You know what I mean?

Craig: Right, and, “You know that about me.”

Mike: Yes. I don’t know. I do think like finding the what’s your story, the thing about standup comedy and in relation to storytelling, is that the more you have examples of things of your experience of dealing with something, the more people can see themselves in the story. They’re not judging it as, “Oh, this is another guy or lady with a hard take on coyotes,” or this or that or whatever.

I always just try and think, “What’s the personal way in? What’s the personal way in?” Because ultimately, you actually, by telling stories are exhibiting a point of view. Because it’s in the form of a story, the audience isn’t as suspicious of the point of view.

Craig: Yes. Also to give you credit, it’s not a persona. This is actually you. You’re incredibly likable. You’re incredibly likable in no small part because you’re not afraid to be vulnerable. A lot of comedians, their persona is, “I figured it all out. I figured it all out. Let me explain the world to you idiots.” Right? Your persona and your personality is I haven’t– I’m on a journey. I often don’t know what to do. I’m scared a lot. I’m confused. Everyone’s like, “Okay, I’m with you now on this.”

Mike: It’s so funny you should say that because the other day, I did an interview for Time Magazine and she goes– The reporter was great. She goes– It’s a funny question. She goes, “What’s your appeal?”

[Laughter]

John: I love that. That’s so good.

Mike: I’ve never been asked that, “What’s your appeal?”

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: It forced me to look inward.

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: She goes, the appeal of Jim Gaffigan is that he’s clean and he’s relatable. The appeal of this person is that she’d go there. I go, “Huh.” It’s so funny what I–

John: It’s amazing.

Mike: What reminded me of it is that my answer is similar to Craig’s.

Craig: There you go.

Mike: If I really had to think about it, I think people think they’re on the journey with me because I’m cataloging these eras of my life as honestly as I can. The audience, I think, trusts that I’m trying my best. I think the people who like me are trying their best. It’s weird to say that that’s my “appeal”, but I think it is probably close to that.

Craig: When she asked the question, was it–? There’s two different meanings to that question. One is, “I’m curious, what do you think your appeal is?” The other one is, “What is your appeal?”

John: Yes, there’s two different reads of that.

Craig: “I’m just so confused why anyone likes you. Can you explain why people like you?”

Mike: It was generous though. I think she’s a good writer. We’ll see how the article comes out.

John: It’s reminding me of when we were doing Big Fish on Broadway, after the Wednesday matinees, sometimes we would do talk-backs, where people could stay in the audience and talk back. It’s always really old people who stick around, who’d go to the Wednesday matinees in the first place.

It’s me and several of the actors at the front of the stage talking to people who stuck around. This one old woman, she asked me a question, she’s like, “Why are you so confident?” I’m like–

Mike: Oh my gosh. Why are you so confident?

John: Yes, and it’s just–

Mike: Wow.

John: It was actually just.

Craig: What a confident-shaking question.

John: Yes, and it sort of put me on my heels, like, “I guess I am con–“ I had to sort of do introspection, like, “I guess I am confident, but why am I confident?” Like, “Who is this person who is speaking right now who is confident doing this thing?” It was a while. It really did shake me a bit.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s a rattling question. “Why are you so confident?” It’s suspicious.

John: Yes, it’s a challenge to it.

Craig: Yes.

Mike: I think to go back to this point of view and comedy concept, it was like, why is Jeselnik Jeselnik, and me me, and Gaffigan Gaffigan? Is a majority of what you do if you’re trying to be a comedian is you try to figure out who you are on stage in relation to the audience.

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: Yes, it’s what’s your appeal?

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: It’s like, “Oh,” and it takes years. Sometimes it takes a decade or more.

Craig: It is interesting seeing comedians early in their careers as opposed to where they end up. Sometimes it’s sort of unrecognizable.

Mike: Absolutely.

Craig: It is a fascinating thing to watch them evolve into the groove. Sometimes I think like, “Oh, do people get trapped? Because they get very successful, and then suddenly, that fake accent and get ‘er done thing that you’re doing, you can’t stop doing it.

Mike: Are you speaking of someone specifically?

Craig: No.

Mike: Just in general?

Craig: No, just in general, like–

[laughter]

Mike: Hypothetically, if someone was like, said a joke and they’re like, “Get ‘er done,”-

Craig: That would be like–

Mike: -that would be a thing that you’re leaning on a crutch.

Craig: They were like had a job that isn’t really a job anymore, like a cable guy, [crosstalk] or a plumber, or whatever.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Yes, like what do you do then, because you’re stuck making all that money?

Mike: What if you never were a cable guy?

Craig: Or had that accent.

[laughter]

John: So good. [crosstalk]

Craig: Then, what do you do? Then what do you do?

John: A crisis of inauthenticity.

Mike: This is like a three-page challenge of personas.

John: What if Mike Birbiglia had a heel turn, where I actually just like, it goes off for a little while, then it comes back, and it’s just like this shock comic, this– I would love to see it.

Mike: It’s funny–

Craig: “Hickory dickory dock.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Mike: No, I do think that there is a version of the next few years, where I’m leaning a little bit away from personal stuff, where I do something that takes on the religion, politics, world events, but in an evergreen way. I think what drives me crazy about topical comedy is that you just go, “Okay, this isn’t relevant today, even. It was relevant 24 hours ago,” but I would like to see something that has a wide-spanning, like the last 20 years of living in America.

Craig: It sounds like something that O’Reilly would do.

[laughter]

Mike: Yes, a cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly would do.

John: As we wrap up our discussion of coyotes, I do want to share one photo, which I think is a great comedic premise. This little white dog is wearing, it’s called a coyote coat, and it’s basically, it looks like a life jacket, but it has all these little plastic spikes on it, so that a coyote can’t bite it and carry it off into the woods. I can just imagine like having to buy the coyote coat for my dog, or just like my dog having to wear the coyote coat. It’s like you’re in a war zone now.

Craig: I think that is, some people might think that that disrupts the Darwinian process, but I think that it is an example of the Darwinian process. You become so cute that a larger, stronger animal dresses you in special things so that you aren’t devoured. It’s a strategy.

John: It’s a strategy.

Craig: That’s a strategy.

John: Yes. Let’s tackle some listener questions. We have one here from Chris.

Drew: Let’s say I heard an idea for a short film expressed on a podcast by a working actor, writer, comedian,-

John: Mike Birbiglia.

Drew: -and wanted to make that film, but was not able to make contact with said person to ask permission. Could that film still be made and shown publicly? Is there credit to be attributed? What if there’s a line spoken by an actor that is nearly identical to what was expressed in the podcast? In this case, this would be 60-second film for social media, just for context.” I can already hear Craig saying you can’t copyright an idea, but maybe the person or podcast details are important.

Craig: Yes, I will say you can’t copyright an idea, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing this.

John: It also feels like stealing a joke. It feels like–

Craig: There’s legal lines and there are moral lines. Legally, could you get away with it? Always remember, legally getting away with it means you were sued, spent money to defend yourself, and won, which is not ideal. In this case also, it’s just, yes, come up with your own idea. That’s my feeling, is if that person wanted to do a 60-second short bit about that, they would. It’s a little odd. I don’t think I would recommend that.

John: The fact that you’re doing this on a podcast with a working actor, writer, comedian, it’s their thing, they may actually do a thing with. If you heard it in a conversation or your brother said something, it’s a different kind of thing. You could also just ask their permission.

Mike: I also think, yes, building on what you were both saying, is as creatives, if you’re pursuing a creative profession, it is so oversaturated. There are so many things being made simultaneously. I actually think the only chance any of us stand is to have our work be so much ours and not something that’s already filmed, recorded, and out there in the universe that you’re actually– It’s a weird case against the argument. The idea is that it’s out there. Even if it’s not a short film already, someone said it, so it’s a little bit less original than you’d want it to be.

John: Going back to what we were just saying about hiking is just walking, that idea, what’s out there, is it’s not an original idea, and so great, do something else that is specifically to you.

Mike: 100%, and by the way, to speak to that person’s note, that’s an oddly helpful piece of feedback, is like, once that person says, “Hey, that’s out there in blah-blah-blah way,” sometimes people, along the tour for two years, people will say to me, “Hey, this line you have is similar to this comic’s thing you have.” Often, I’ll go and I’ll dig it up and I’ll try to find it, and then you have to make a judgment call. Is it too similar? If it is, can I write it in a different direction?

I had one a few specials ago where someone, when it came out as a special, was like, “That’s my joke,” and I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, I never saw your joke, and it’s filmed right now, so I don’t– It’s parallel thinking, and I feel bad that that’s the case, but there’s nothing I can do.” It’s definitely best efforts to not do that.

John: Dylan in Little Rock has a question.

Drew: “I’m feeling myself getting a little bit paralyzed. I’m feeling that I need to start writing in order to feel accomplished and hold onto some momentum, but I’m not feeling that I have really broken the story in a satisfactory way, and I don’t feel that I know the characters as well as I could or maybe should. I’ve considered that the process of writing may help me to come up with new ideas and fill in some of the gaps, but when do you consider a story broken? How do you know when your characters are developed enough and how much character development work do you do before you write?”

John: Yes, so breaking a story means different things in different contexts. In a TV writer’s room, you break a story, you’re figuring out all the beats on a big whiteboard, you’re doing that stuff. The process of writing a feature film, it could be more experimental and you’re sort of putting things together as you’re doing them. I often won’t have the full thing broken as I start. I’ll just feel it out along my way. There’s probably not a perfect answer for this. You’re writing something right now, is what you’re writing broken? Do you know what all the beats are?

Mike: It’s so funny. Whenever people say this term, breaking a story, I’m always like, it’s not my process. Mine is, I have an idea for a story, I write it out in an outline. At a certain point, I take it as script. At a certain point, this is where I am right now, I take it back to outline because I’m trying to isolate all the individual character arcs, and I can’t do it in a script form. That’s literally what I am right now. My brain can’t do it.

How do you guys deal with that, actually? That’s a question from me to you. How do you deal with managing, like in the case of my movie, it’s like, there’s eight characters. It’s akin to a movie like Four Weddings and a Funeral where not everybody has to have a meaningful arc, but unless they have like a little miniature arc, I do feel like there’s some threads that are unfinished.

Craig: I think I probably wouldn’t start writing until I understood all of that.

Mike: All of it.

Craig: Yes, but that’s me. I think your process clearly works for you, and it’s perfectly fine. Anyone’s process is fine if the outcome is good. I think breaking the story is actually, I agree with you, it’s not a useful term. It comes really from writer’s rooms, from 14 writers eating Mendocino Farms and hashing out, “Okay, this episode, this happens. What’s the A story? What’s the B story? What’s the C story?” It is procedurals, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: There isn’t a mechanism to it, which is important for that process. For a movie, I never use the phrase, “breaking the story” for a movie. Really, I would say, outline. I start with a very broad outline. Who’s the main character? What is the thing that needs to happen at the end? What would be an interesting beginning for that? What is the premise of this thing, and what’s the journey?

Mike: I think one of the best things you can have in terms of breaking a story or to use that term is like figuring out, can I pitch this in 25 words or 50 words? And is that compelling? If I told this to a friend and I said it in the first person, are they interested? I think that if they’re not interested is when you start to go, “Okay, let me figure out where I’m losing their interest.”

John: Yes, I just pitched a project yesterday, and in the early conversations with people, it wasn’t fully broken. I sort of knew what the beats were, but by the time where I was actually pitching it to a buyer, it really had all the beats. You could feel what the entire movie was and that’s, I guess, what I would consider broken. It’s like you really can have a sense of what all the sequences of the story were going to be.

Mike: It’s funny, you hear terms like breaking story or industry terms, and in so many ways, the work I enjoy most is people trying to reinvent what their artistic process is. If you look at Last of Us, for example, I think my favorite thing about it is it’s not like other television shows. That it is, in some ways, weirdly, doesn’t resemble a TV show. That it feels like life, it feels like we are in this apocalyptic scenario and oh my God, what is that? What would I do? What’s she going to do?

Craig: Oh, it’s definitely not like other shows.

[laughter]

Mike: Don’t you think that’s part of it is like making things that don’t feel like other things?

Craig: Yes, I do think so. I think that’s become more and more important because there are 14 million television shows. The trick is to find a way to both be different and also compelling. It is very easy to be different and bad because a lot of difference were considered by our forebears and tossed aside because they were bad. I would say to Dylan, you need to slow down a little bit and ask yourself if maybe the story that you’ve come up with, any of the things that you think of as fixed in position should be fixed in position.

Sometimes we get stuck. We build a column and a load-bearing wall, and then we’re like, “I can’t fit the rooms I want around this.” Maybe the problem is the column and the load-bearing wall. Those things that we think of as immovable, maybe start moving them.

Mike: I also think you look at things that we admire, I was saying like Last of Us, another one would be like the films of David Lynch. It’s like if you try to put Mulholland Drive into the story-

John: No.

Mike: -the story format,-

Craig: You create that story.

Mike: -of McKee or something, it’s like,-

Craig: Or you could-

Mike: “I don’t know what that is.”

Craig: Pitch that in 50 words.

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: That would be the pitch.

Mike: Yes, exactly, that’s the pitch.

Craig: “What’s it about?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things here. I’m going to call an audible, and so I’m going to pivot from what I was going to recommend to in terms of just like breaking the form and spinning a bunch of plates. John Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, it’s just gotten really, really good.

Mike: Oh yes, it’s great.

John: If you’ve not watched it at all, go back and watch the episode, guests are Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt, but the show is just nuts, and Mulaney’s blindfolded through the whole episode. 19,000 things are happening, and it all holds together really, really well. It’s postmodern in the sense of like, there’s a theme kind of, but it’s just crazy. it’s just I’m really admiring what they’re able to pull off once a week on Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing. What about you?

Mike: I was thinking of young comedians and newer comedians. There’s this great comic named Chris Fleming who came on my podcast recently, and he just kills me. He’s a Massachusetts guy like me. He — talk about burning it all down — he just has no allegiances to anyone, specifically in culture, and so he’ll say things where I’ll just– I said to him on my podcast, “Do you know that–?” the person he’s referencing? He’s like, “No.” I go, “You don’t know that person you said that crazy joke about?” but he’s great.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Mike: He’s super funny, and to speak to the kind of David Lynch with The Last of Us of it all, of creating a thing that hasn’t existed before, when I look at Chris Fleming, I don’t go, “Oh, that’s like this.” I just go, “Whoa, that’s Chris Fleming. I love that.”

Craig: Yes, who is this?

Mike: Who is this?

Craig: That’s my favorite. I’ve been on a roll for one cool thing for games, so I spoke to Inevitable Foundation, which is run by Richie Siegel, and it was a lovely group of folks. He was kind enough to send along some of the feedback, which was all bad, and [laughs] not really. They were very happy. One person in their feedback said, “Oh, and by the way, since I know Craig likes these sort of things, he really needs to play Blue Prince, if he hasn’t.” Blue Prince is as in blue, the color, and then Prince, P-R-I-N-C-E, but of course, this is a pun on blueprints. The game is so simple and so hard, which I love.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Craig: You have inherited a mansion from your mysterious uncle. Your job is to go through and explore the mansion, which has 45 rooms, find the 46th room, and you will be able to keep the mansion. The mechanics are every day, you start in the foyer, and there are three doors, and when you open a door, it gives you a choice to draft what room goes there, and there are like 40 types of rooms, and you pick it, and you start to move through, and every time, the house is different, and some rooms just stop, and you know if they stop or not.

There are costs, and keys, and methods, and puzzles, and it’s roguelike, because then the next day, you’re like, “Okay, that didn’t work, let me try this.” It’s early on for me, and I’m so beautifully frustrated.

Mike: Wow.

John: Love it.

Craig: Yes, it’s really, it’s like when you come across a fresh idea like that, it’s really cool, yes. Blue Prince, and it’s developed by Dogubomb.

Mike: Great.

Craig: You can get it on PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, your Steam Deck, which is where I play it, and so forth.

Mike: Very nice.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Sam Shapson. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Don’t leave comments on Spotify because we turn those off, but you can leave comments to our YouTube videos, which we have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel.

Mike: You do?

John: Yes, we just added this week.

Craig: Another place for people to yell at me about Joel. I’m Scriptnotes Premium, by the way.

John: Thank you very much for that.

Mike: I joined recently. I love it.

Craig: Oh– [crosstalk]

John: You get all those back episodes.

Mike: I love it. Two of my faves are Dennis Palumbo of course and the Craig Mazin, Here’s How to-

John: How to Write a Movie.

Mike: -How to write a Movie. It’s so good.

Drew: Those are both available on our YouTube.

Craig: We should probably charge extra for them.

John: We should. Yes, yes, how do we charge extra?

Mike: Yes, supplements.

Craig: Because we got to get these cool new microphones.

John: You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You get the show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. For Craig to dream of new microphone setups in our office studio here.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes, like episode 99 and How to Write a Movie. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the infrastructure of being a standup comic and doing all the things that you have to do to actually make a living. With that, Mike Birbiglia, thank you so much for being on the show.

Mike: It’s such an honor. I love this show. My favorite podcast.

John: Aww.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Mike, one of the things that impressed me when I came to record the podcast at your place is that you do video, you’re promoting the podcast, but it’s also part of your bigger machinery because you have to, as a touring comic, you have to plan all that stuff, you have to do marketing, you must have a giant mailing list. I want to talk to you about sort of the infrastructure it takes to be a comic who’s doing the kind of stuff you’re doing.

Mike: It’s funny, I was on The Town podcast the other day, which is really good, and we had this discussion of this thing where Matt says, “Do comedians need Hollywood anymore?” The answer is they don’t.

Craig: Not at all.

Mike: Weirdly, they don’t, and I think that that’s good. I think the things to make comedy and get the comedy to market are less and less expensive and more easy to access. It puts the onus on you to make something that’s great and sets itself apart from all other things, but also, you have to get it to market and market it, really. There’s a lot to that.

John: Getting it to market, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, those are crucial channels for comics. What else?

Mike: Weirdly, sometimes I’ll say, because Mabel and Gary and Peter and Joe, that’s my company, and we all produce the podcast together. Mabel and Gary are in their 20s, and so sometimes they’ll point out things to me that I’m just going, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that at all.” For example, at a certain point, like two years ago, Mabel goes, “We have to have the podcast on video. I’ve never listened to a podcast.”

[laughs]

John: Yes, that’s my daughter too.

Mike: I was like, “What do you mean you haven’t listened to a podcast?” She goes, “I’m sorry, I just I put it on. I don’t look at the video, but it’s on. Sometimes I’ll reference it, I’m like, ‘Oh’.” There is a degree of rolling with, so then we did it. Rolling with where culture and media is going. Then the other side of that is, sometimes I’ll say to Mabel and Gary, I’ll go like, “We have to be aware of what are the platforms that are next. Because when I was coming up in the 2000s, it was Myspace. Myspace is gone.”

Craig: It is? I’m spending so much time on that.

[laughter]

Mike: Your premium membership on Myspace is $49 a month?

Craig: Yes.

John: I have a friend request, and you never get nothing.

Craig: It’s the only place people don’t yell at me about The Last of Us.

Mike: Of course, Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars every year to make sure that Instagram is still relevant, still relevant, still relevant. Cut to, at a certain point, it’s not going to be.

Craig: It’s the opening credit sequence of Silicon Valley, just watch them go up, watch them go down.

John: That’s right.

Craig: Explode, implode, come back, grow. You have to have– Well, really, it sounds like part of your infrastructure is youth.

Mike: It’s youth. Yes, it is. Yes.

John: A mailing list. Is there a mailing list people subscribe to and you send out blasts with all your upcoming tour dates?

Mike: That’s right, and I’ve been doing that oddly since I was in college. I would do shows at the Washington, DC Improv, and I would have comment cards on the tables and say, “If you have your email address, I’ll send out a newsletter once a month.” I think the infrastructure is Maichimp and one of the companies that does it–

John: Mailchimp is so effing expensive.

Mike: I know.

Craig: Mailchimp is expensive?

Mike: It’s on the pricey side.

Craig: Also, then everybody, their podcasts are sponsored by Mailchimp, so Mailchimp is just like rotating the money around.

Mike: Yes.

John: Yes, it’s a money cycle.

Mike: No, it’s true, but I do think the relationship between artists and audiences has just gotten closer and closer through the years, and such that things that are massive, and it’s a comedian who’s playing Madison Square Garden, you might mention that person’s name to someone else, they go, “I’ve never heard of that person.” They’re playing Madison Square Garden, and it’s just them talking into a microphone, you’ve never heard of them.

Craig: That’s right.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

Craig: That’s happened a few times recently to me, where I don’t know, and that’s part of getting old. I actually love the way the world is slowly getting cottony and sealing me off in preparation.

[laughter]

Craig: I don’t mind that, but I do love talking to the people that work for me that are younger because– Riding back and forth from location every day with Ali Cheng, who used to be my assistant, and now she’s a writer on The Last of Us. Ali was able to explain to me in deep detail the whole Kendrick and Drake thing as it was happening, because I was like, “I don’t know– What is going–? First of all, who’s Dot?” She was like, “Oh my God. Okay.” But then, I was so into it.

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Then I was deep in, and I was– Then the next day, I’ll come in, I’m like, “Oh my God. Did you see?” It keeps you plugged in, but you’ll need somebody to help you.

Mike: Yes, I think the key thing about entertainers in this moment is continuing to be open to where everything is going and nonjudgmental about where it’s going. Because if you become the judgmental person of like, “Oh, back in my day,” blah-blah-blah, I think you’re toast, or you will be toast.

John: Someone like Gary, who’s working for you, or Mabel, they have their own careers, they’re developing their own online presences.

Mike: Absolutely.

John: They have their own analysts. They have to figure out all that.

Mike: Directing things and short films and all kinds of stuff, yes.

John: Yes, so who teaches you? Basically, you just have to learn. You get in the crowd and see what everyone else is doing, because it’s not like you can go to film school, you can theoretically, learn how to write a screenplay. If there’s no comedy school, I guess you could go through-

Mike: UCB-

John: UCB.

Mike: -or improv and stuff like that. Yes, there’s no path to be a comedian, but at the same time, there never was a path, right?

John: Yes, it was always figuring out how early in a career does a person need a manager or an agent who’s doing mostly standup?

Mike: I’ve always thought– People ask me who are starting out all the time, how do I get an agent? When I think back to my agent now, Mike Berkowitz, who I’ve worked with for I think 25 years, he was starting out. I was like one of his first two clients. He started out at a management company, but he was doing the side, booking thing on the side. We’re the same age, and so we came up together. Now, he represents Kevin Hart and John Mulaney, all biggest comics on the place. He’s a huge agent, but I think part of it is surrounding yourself with people who you respect, who are in your roughly age group, and even level.

I think there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I need to sign,” I’ll throw out someone who’s dead, but it’s like, “I need to sign with Bernie Brillstein.” It’s, “No, no, you don’t need to sign with Bernie Brillstein. He doesn’t have time for you. You need to sign for someone who’s three rungs below Bernie Brillstein.”

John: Yes, absolutely. Signing with an agent who was really a peer and who I was grinding with together was incredibly helpful, because he just knew the right people. He knew what was actually happening.

Mike: The people who are young, while you are young will be the stars of tomorrow across the entire field.

John: Absolutely.

Mike: -and so making friends and making bonds and collaborations with people who are in your peer group and investing in those people, and hopefully, they invest in you. That’s, I think, one of the best things you can do.

John: How much of your work time is devoted to writing, figuring out the comedy, figuring out that work versus the career of like setting dates, and doing social media, and doing all the other stuff? What is the split?

Mike: I would say like it’s 2/3 the art, 1/3 marketing, but I would say, there are periods in my career where it is like 70/30 marketing. It’s miserable, but it was because there wasn’t enough work, and so it’s like, “Oh, I have to advertise my work more. I have to market my work more.” It’s like, you’re always rest always, and I think this is true of everyone.
It’s like the next hurdle is like, “We got to figure out the key art.” The next hurdle is, “We got to figure out the trailer.” The next figure, “We got to figure out what the Instagram tile is that conveys the idea of this whole project.” All that kind of stuff. It’s like, it is important. Yes, I try to minimize it, but it’s like, I don’t think anyone gets out of doing that.

John: I think one of the big differences between a pure screenwriter and what you’re doing is that we talk about like a screenwriter has to be entrepreneurial, but it’s like that whole level of magnitude is greater. You literally are responsible for how much the money’s coming in, whether you’re getting that date, whether you’re getting that thing to happen. Your income is so directly tied into how much promotion and everything else you’re doing for yourself.

Mike: Yes, and also, I feel like you have to have an awareness or try to have an awareness of where the business is going, where it’s been, where it could go, where we can’t possibly imagine it’s going. The AI discussion right now is so interesting because it’s like, it’s some people going like, “All right, easy on the AI stuff,” it’s every other conversation, but it’s like “No, no, it literally could change everything.”

John: Oh, absolutely.

Mike: Everything.

John: Yes, next week or a week after, I do once a full episode where we really just look at it because you look at not just the, how it’s impacting writing, but you look at the new video production things that come off, which is like, “That looks completely photorealistic, and the speech lines up,” and I just don’t what we’re going to do.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

John: Because like, maybe you won’t have to tour anymore because you could just press the button and there’s Mike Birbiglia. You’ll be this age forever.

Mike: Yes, we can only hope.

[laughter]

Mike: I got to lock in age 46, because it’s not getting any better.

John: This is the good life. Congratulations to get on the special, and thank you for coming on.

Mike: Thanks for coming to the screening last night, it meant the world to me.

John: Cool.

Links:

• Mike Birbiglia
• The Good Life on Netflix
• Mike’s previous episodes: 121, 168, 261, 427, 443, and Working it Out: Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use
• Episode 660 – Moneyball
• Ira Glass on Mike’s podcast Working it Out
• Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk
• The Run Club Haters by Melissa Dahl for Curbed
• I Hadn’t Heard From My Dad in Over a Decade. Now He’s Returned With a Brazen Request. I’m Actually Considering It. from Slate’s Care and Feeding
• The Coyotes of San Francisco by Heather Knight and Loren Elliot for NY Times
• Coyote Vest
• Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
• Chris Fleming
• Blue Prince
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 685 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, screenplays and stage plays are superficially similar. They both consist of scenes with characters talking to each other, so why do they feel so different and why is it often so challenging to move something from one format to another?

To help us explore these questions, we are joined by writer, director, showrunner, and playwright, Leslye Headland, best known for creating Russian Doll on Netflix along with the accolade on Disney Plus. She wrote and directed Bachelorette, adapted from her own play, and she’s coming off of a Broadway runner for acclaim play, Cult of Love, which I got to see in New York and absolutely loved. I’m so excited, Leslye, to get to talk with you about all these things. Welcome, Leslye Headland.

Leslye Headland: Thank you. What an intro. Gosh, it’s so nice to be here. I didn’t realize you’d seen the play.

John: I saw the play. Here’s how I saw the play. I was in New York because we were doing a new version of Big Fish, and we were there for the rehearsals and the 29-hour reading basically of Big Fish. Andrew Lippa, who is the composer lyricist of Big Fish, is a Tony voter, and so he said, “Oh, hey, I need to go see a bunch of stuff, come with me.” I’m like, “Great. I’ll go do anything you want to see.”

We show up and I’m just talking with them and I literally walk in the theater and I have no idea what the play is or who’s in it. I didn’t even look at the signage to see who was in the show, and so literally I come into the theater and there is this gorgeous set, the prettiest set I’ve ever seen on a stage play. I absolutely loved what I saw on that beautiful set.

Leslye: Oh, yes. The set was designed by John Lee Beatty, who is an absolute legend in terms of set design. I had a really, I would say, clear vision for what the set would look like, that it would have that Fanny and Alexander touch to it. There was a play by Annie Baker called John that took place in a bed and breakfast that was also like just stuffed to the brim with coziness. All of that just directly contrasts the darker content of the plays, and those plays as well as mine.

John: I want to get into that because we’re actually– I want to take a look at the very first page of your play because you actually lay out in the same description what it’s supposed to look like. It’s so different than how we would do it in a screenplay, and it’s so effective on this page, but it’s just a different experience. We’ll get into that, but I also want to talk about– obviously you’ve done film, theater, television. I want to talk about origin stories, because you went from assistant to auteur, which is something that a lot of our listeners are trying to go for. I want to talk about time loops because I love a time loop. You’ve written a bunch of time loops in a Russian Doll, and we have listener questions about music cues and long scripts, which I hope you can help us tackle.

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

John: Then after we’re done with the main show, in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the difference of seeing plays versus seeing movies, because as screenwriters, it’s easy to catch up on movies. We can just watch them anytime we want to watch them, but for plays, it’s such a specific deal. If you can’t actually go see a play– if I didn’t happen to be in New York to see your play, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about how great it was. I want to talk about the differences between seeing plays versus seeing movies and how you keep up as an artist.

Leslye: Oh, I’d love to talk about that. I love working in all those mediums, but they’re all very, very, very different.

John: They are, and so having done a bunch of them, there’s gatekeepers, there’s shibboleths, there’s this a whole sets of systems you have to learn the ropes of, and so there’s things you come into it thinking like, “Oh, I know how to do this thing,” and you realize like, “Ah” that it works so differently. Can we wind it all the way back, though, because I’d love to some backstory on you and how you got started, where you came up from, and when you first decided that writing and making things was for you?

Leslye: Very, very young. I was one of those kids that just wrote, you just started writing. I would read books for– I’d get them from the library, like the Judy Blume, or I ordered a bunch of American Girl doll books, which I absolutely loved. Then I would fill composition books with rip-offs of those. Just doing exactly the same structure.

John: You learn by copying, you learn by imitating other things you see.

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

Leslye: Just beat for beat imitations, but with my own characters, like with the themes and personalities that I found more interesting than the simplistic morality of those types of books.

John: Absolutely.

Leslye: One of the reasons Judy Blume is so great is that there’s this gray out area that she writes about, but very soon I found musical theater. I became completely obsessed with Stephen Sondheim. Nobody could tell me anything that wasn’t Stephen Sondheim. I was introduced to him from the D. A. Pennebaker documentary about the marathon recording of Company. My dad watched it with me. It was on PBS or something.

He was watching it late at night and he said, “Leslye, get in here.” I ran into my parents’ room and he said, “You need to watch this.” I started watching it. He didn’t know what it was, I think he just started seeing it and was like, “This is my girl.” I started watching it. Sondheim is in light all Black. There’s one part where he puts his head in his hands, he’s so depressed at what’s happening. I said, “Who is that?” He said, “That’s the writer.” Suddenly, I was like, that was my basis for what a writer was.

John: You had the opportunity to see this thing that you loved. Oh, you can actually see the face of the person behind the thing and see the hard work and process it took to make that thing?

Leslye: Absolutely.

John: Rather than scaring you away from it, you were like, “Oh, I want to go and do that thing.”

Leslye: Yes. Absolutely wanted to dive in. Jumped into being a drama kid, then I went to Tisch for college for directing and acting a little bit, but not writing. I would write screenplays on my own that were terrible. I would give them to my friends. They would say, “This is terrible,” but I learned so much from directing. Just figuring out how to tell a story visually rather than texturally was exactly what I needed for those four years.

John: Talk to us about the program at Tisch. Was this all directing for the stage? Was it directing for a camera? What was the classes and what things we were learning?

Leslye: It’s a good question. They’re all broken up into different studios, and I was in a studio called Playwrights Horizons. It’s actually not that connected to the off-Broadway theater, but this particular studio, rather than– and they have Strasberg, Adler, the musical theater program. Playwrights was a little jack of all trades. You could study design, you could study directing, you could study acting, you could study, not dance, but Alexander Technique and have all these voice classes and everything. It really was a hodgepodge of information, so you could pick and choose what it was you wanted to focus on.

My main one was directing, and each year you’d do something different. The first year you’re just going to everything. Everything. I did acting classes, I did design classes, I did directing classes. I was not great at any of them, to be quite honest. I did have a couple of spurts of directing that were good that I felt very proud of, but that was it. Then in second year, you stage-managed for the juniors and the seniors. When you became a junior, you did two short plays. You did one in the fall and then you did one in the spring. You did two one-acts. I did The Lesson by Ionesco, and I did Beirut.

Then when you’re a senior, if you’ve made it this far, which a lot of people did not, you do a full length. I did Waiting for Godot because I love that play. It is my heart. It is exactly who I am, and the story that I want to tell influenced me beyond– like Sondheim. I’d say it was like Sondheim and Godot were just the major thing. I got to do that for my senior thesis project. I would say that people at Tisch responded to it, essentially, the same way that people respond my work now, which is, they’re impressed, but they’re also confused by what’s happening. I do think that the style of what I do now absolutely was born out of that production.

John: Let’s talk about that style, because what was it about that? Was it your choices in terms of how characters are presenting themselves on stage? Was it how you’re handling dialogue? Because as we get into Cult of Love, I want to talk about your very specific choices in terms of when characters overlap and when they don’t. What were some things if someone said like, “Oh–“ if they could time travel back and see that production, it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s very Leslye Headland.” What was it about that?

Leslye: Well, it was definitely very choreographed. One of my teachers said that was the most energetic version of Godot I’ve ever seen, because I didn’t have them just standing there. My aha moment for it was Marx brothers. I was just like, “It’s Vaudeville, that’s what this is.” Therefore, it was very choreographed and it was almost a musical, essentially. That Sondheim influence was pushed into it.

We did so many visual gags that were– even Lucky’s speech was this massive, just all of them hanging onto that leash of his and yanking him around. My Lucky was an incredible dancer and a gymnast. He could fall on the ground in just a violent, violent way. My mentor for the project said– When you do a postmortem with all of the teachers and the head of the studio and you get the critique, and some of it was good, some of it was critical, which is normal for what that moment is, but my mentor for it said, “I think you’re one of the darkest people I’ve ever met, but also really stupid things make you laugh.” I do think that what I ended up doing was very messed up characters and situations that then became a big joke. [laughs]

John: Coming from that, you’re graduating from Tisch? This is early 2000s. When are you coming out of Tisch?

Leslye: I graduated in 2003. I immediately started working at Miramax. I actually was working at Miramax while I was in school. I would go to my classes in the morning, I would go to Miramax. I was working in the Archive Department, which means that I was archiving all of the props and costumes and any set pieces for films, so that they could be archived for posterity. Also, all these things were sent out for Oscar campaign so that they could be displayed in places, like the costumes for Chicago, or the props, and the costumes for Gangs of New York. It was that time period, 2002.

Then, 2003, I immediately started working as an assistant. The next thing is that I quit. I had no money. I lived on my friend’s couch in a studio apartment. That’s where I wrote my spec Bachelorette. I worked at Amoeba Records, I worked at Rocket Video. I got a job wherever I could. Then I started writing these plays. There were a bunch of friends from NYU who had started a theater company called IAMA Theatre Company, and they’re still going strong. We just started developing these plays.

I started the Seven Deadly Plays series because I just wanted to challenge myself to write seven plays. That was really the biggest thing, was, “Can I keep writing, and can I keep getting better, and stop thinking about one particular project as being the thing that’s going to make me?” I felt that was really helpful. It was really helpful to develop the plays with actors, to watch them read things, and understand like, “Oh, that’s a really bad scene that I wrote,” because people don’t talk– I just saw two people do it, and it’s absolutely uninteresting, and there’s nothing going on.

I think sometimes when we are in a fishbowl of writing drafts or writing first drafts, it’s almost like your brain is a dangerous neighborhood and you really shouldn’t be hanging out there alone. [laughter] That’s how I– People have got to start reading it. You’ve got to have a reading with some actors. That’s just my advice. I’m sure nobody else does that, but that’s what I do.

John: No, Mike Birbiglia, who’s been on the show a couple of times, always talks about how important those readings are to get people just– the pizza readings just with friends, just to get a sense of, “What does this actually sound like? What does it actually feel like with real people doing it?”

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

John: You created a great situation for yourself, where you set yourself a goal of writing these seven plays. You wrote these seven plays. In the process of writing them, you got to stage them, see what they actually felt like on their feet.

Leslye: Yes. They were all done in little black box theaters. I forgot to say that, when I was an assistant, I was still doing that. I was putting my own money into black box theaters so that I could mount other shows like Adam Rapp and Neil LaBute. When I started writing the plays, again, like the composition books, I just started ripping off other plays. Bachelorette is just a female Hurlyburly. I just was like, “Oh, I can’t believe nobody’s thought of that.”

Each play had its own genre reference, if that makes sense. Cult Of Love is a family drama, which is a staple of plays. There are so many family dramas, but I like to, within that composition book, do my own thing.

John: Let’s talk about Bachelorette. This is one of your Seven Deadly Plays. You were able to write it as a play mounted in a black box theater situation, and then you went in and made the screenplay version of it with the intention of you directing from the very start, or did you think, “This is something I’m going to sell?” What was your intention in going into Bachelorette?

Leslye: I thought I was going to sell. I did not in any shape or form assume that I was going to be directing it. I worked really hard on the screenplay. I got an agent based off of it. I started to do the Water Bottle Tour. That’s what I call it. I don’t know if other people do.

John: Oh, that’s the term of art. We all say that, yes.

Leslye: This, for people who don’t know, it’s where your agent send you out to the executives at different production companies or different studios, and they’ve read your spec and they just get to know you and you guys have a little chat. Over and over again, I got the feedback about the movie that, “This is absolutely the way women talk, but no one wants to watch that.” I thought it would be a good writing sample, and maybe I can get some jobs off of it.

Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, and Jessica Elbaum ended up optioning it just as the play was going up in New York. It was a confluence of this piece that had been– this little tiny play that I didn’t really think was going to do– It was just one of seven. It didn’t seem like the one that was going to go, but then it went up with Second Stage in 2010. Then they optioned it at the same time.

They sent it to a bunch of directors, which is very par for the course. I can’t even remember who we sent it to. We sent it to every human. Everybody passed. It was also the time of– It was actually written before Bridesmaids, but Bridesmaids got made first, so there was this rush of, “Can we beat Bridesmaids? We can’t.” The directors started passing on it because–

John: They were just too much alike.

Leslye: Yes, it was like, “We already saw that. We already did that.” I was at the Gary Sanchez Christmas party with Adam and a bunch of other people. I was just sitting there with Adam chatting, and he said, “We haven’t found a director for Bachelorette.” I said, “I think we’ll find somebody.” He said, “Why don’t you just direct it?” I said, “I think that’s a great idea. I think I should.” Again, just do everything before you’re ready. If you get that opportunity, do not think in your head, “I don’t know how to do that.” Just say yes. Just be like, “Absolutely.”

His reasoning, and we talked about this a little bit, was, “You know these characters more than anybody in the world, and you can work with actors, because that’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven, eight years.” He said, “To me, that’s the most important thing. We can set you up to success with all the other stuff.”

John: I’d love us to transition now. We talked about getting Bachelorette set up, but I want to go back to plays and really focus in on playwriting versus screenwriting, because they look so similar at a glance, but then actually get into how they work and what our expectations are as audiences, they’re really different. In a stage play, the audience is actively participating in the imagination with you.

Leslye: That’s correct.

John: They’re there, they’re game to go. If you show them a desk and say, “This is an office,” this is an office. You have their full attention in ways that you don’t know if you have it with a movie. With a movie, you don’t know if they’re half watching. Here, for those first 5, 10 minutes, they are there, they’re fully invested into what we’re doing, which is great, except that some things are just harder to do on a stage, like that sense of where we are. Creating a sense of place is more challenging. You don’t have close-ups, so you have to make sure that small emotions are going to be able to land if we can’t see a person’s face.

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

John: I’d love to start with, in Cult of Love– Drew, if you could read us this opening scene description of the house where we’re starting. We’ll read this first, and then we’ll get a summary from Leslye about what actually happens here. Drew, help us out with what happens on the page. Page one of Cult Of Love.

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

“Home, the first floor of a farmhouse in Connecticut, 8:30 PM, Christmas Eve. The kitchen, dining area, and living room are all immediately visible. A small door to a washroom, an entryway alcove/mudroom with a coat closet/rack. An upright piano stands near a staircase to the second floor. A red front door with a Christmas wreath leads to a quaint, covered porch area. Snow falls.

The house is decorated for Christmas. This cannot be overstated. The place is literally stuffed to the brim with goodies, evergreens, and cheer. It’s an oppressive display of festivities and middle-class wealth that pushes the limits of taste. There isn’t a surface, seat, or space that isn’t smothered with old books, LPs, plates of sweets, (no real food, though), glasses of wine, wrapped presents, stockings, and garlands of greenery and tinsel.

There are many musical instruments, a spinet piano, banjo, nylon, and steel string guitar, ukulele, steel drum, washboard, djembe, melodica, harmonicas, hand bells, spoons, maracas, and sleigh bells. They are not displayed or specially cared for in any way. They lay among the Christmas decorations and book collections like any other piece of ephemera. When a character picks an instrument up, regardless of size, the audience should always be surprised it was there hiding in plain sight. Notably absent, a television, a sound system. Actually, there’s no visible technology. No one’s holding iPhones, tablets, or computers. They will come out when scripted.”

John: All right, Leslye, five paragraphs here to set up this room that we’re in for the duration of the play. It’s so evocative and so clearly shows you what you’re going to do here, but you, as the screenwriter, Leslye Headland, would never put that in a script. It’s a different thing than what you would do on the page here. Talk us through how you approach the scene description at the start of a play.

Leslye: Well, I think with this play, it was important to be super prescriptive about what that world was going to look like. Like you said, when you came in and you were like, “That’s the most beautiful set I’ve ever seen,” that was the idea, to go through five paragraphs so that it was very clear that this is not open to interpretation.

John: Absolutely. It’s not a metaphor of a family living room. This is actually the space. Your point about, when I walked in the theater, the curtain’s up. We’re seeing this behind a scrim, but we’re seeing the whole set. As the audience, we’re spending more than five paragraphs just looking at the space before any actors come in, and I think, which is also serving us. It’s really establishing this is the place where this story is going to happen, which is great.

Leslye: I also think that there are cues, essentially, that you should follow. One thing that I felt very strongly about with the play was that it didn’t feel too now, that there would be an essence of this could perceivably take place at any time. Putting the technology in there would be disruptive to the fantasy, because that’s really what it is. It’s a fantasy play. It’s not Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s not August: Osage County. It’s in that genre, but it’s not meant to be.

John: It’s in that genre. The audience approaches it with some of the same expectations, and so you have to very quickly establish that it’s not those things, and you doing that through music and other things, but we should say, because most of our listeners won’t have seen this play, we’ve set up this gorgeous set, what’s going to happen here? What’s the short version of Cult Of Love? You don’t have to go through everything, but who is the family that we’re going to meet here?

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

Leslye: This is about a family, upper middle class family in Connecticut, who all come home to celebrate Christmas. It’s parents, four grown children, and their partners. They all are essentially exploring and voicing and venting all of these pent-up frustrations in history that they have with each other, which is pretty normal for a family play.

What I would say is that the thing that makes it set apart is that there is no plot. No one is trying to do anything. There isn’t a thing that any one character is trying to achieve. The action of the play is the disillusionment of both the family, or the disintegration, sorry, also disillusionment, but the disintegration of the family as a unit, as a beautiful idea into the reality of how a family breaks apart eventually and gets completely decimated.

The idea behind the play is that you watch that, but instead of watching the story of that, because there is no plot, that you yourself insert the plot of your own family. Therefore, the catharsis comes, hopefully, at the end of the play because you have been watching your family, not my family, or the play’s family. That was the intention of the show. I don’t know if I answered your question.

John: Oh, absolutely. We’re going to see on stage this family go through these dynamics. As an audience member who went in literally knowing not what play I was going to see, that’s what I was pulling out of it.

It’s interesting to say that there’s just no plot, because you’re overstating that a bit. People do want things. There are goals. Characters have motivations. There’s things they’re trying to get to, but there’s not a protagonist who comes through to the end and things are really transformed. It’s not the last Christmas they’re ever going to be at this house. There’s no establishment of that, but it’s all the little small things, the little small tensions that are ripping at the seams of this very perfect situation that you have established.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the big inspirations for the play, and one of my biggest influences, beyond who surpassed Sondheim, is John Cassavetes. Cassavetes once said about Shadows, his first movie, that he was very interested in characters who had problems that were overtaken by other problems. That’s what I wanted to achieve, a lot of my work, for sure, but specifically with Cult Of Love.

That’s really where the overlapping dialogue comes in. It’s meant to evoke a Cassavetes indie film, where you can’t quite latch on to one character as the good guy or the bad guy. You’re dropped into an ecosystem where you have to decide, “Am I going to align myself with this character or this character?” That’s where all of that came from.

John: Actually, before we even get to this description of the set, there’s a description in the script about how dialogue works. Drew, could you read this for us

Drew: “A note about overlapping dialogue. When dual dialogue is indicated, regardless of parenthetical or stage directions, the dialogue starts simultaneously. After indicated dual dialogue, the cue for the next line is the word scripted as the last spoken. Overlapping dialogue is denoted by slashes.”

John: Incredibly prescriptive here. Greta Gerwig was on the podcast a couple of years ago, and she was talking about Little Women. She does the same thing with slashes when she wants lines to stack up the right ways, but you’re making it really clear. If there’s two columns side by side, simultaneously, those are exactly happening at the same time, the other overlapping, which in features we’re more likely to just say as a parenthetical overlapping to indicate where things are. You’re saying, no, this is the word where things are supposed to start overlapping, which works really well in your play, but also feels like you got to rehearse to that place. It’s not a very natural thing for actors to get to.

Leslye: No, it is absolutely not. It’s a magic trick, for sure. Initially, you’re like, “Oh, this is super messy.” Then it continues and you really get the sense of the musicality of it. That kind of goes back to Godot. It’s essentially the way I staged it was a musical. That’s what Cult Of Love’s overlapping dialogue is.

It is meant to suck you in as a “realistic way that people speak.” There are certain sections, especially large arguments, that do need to happen, boom, boom, boom, right at the right time. It was difficult to explain that to the actors, that you do need to rehearse it in a natural way. You do need to say to each other certain lines, and you have to find the real, genuine objective, or super objective, or however the actor works. The issue is that once you’ve learned it, it has to be done in the way that it is written perfectly.

For example, Zach Quinto, who’s playing the character of Mark, there is this argument that happens. He has, in the clear, a bunch of moms. It’s like, blah, blah, blah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. That was difficult to explain to him that it should be in the same cadence, each mom, but, of course, for actors, that’s a little unnatural. I’ve had to give that note to actors very often, that this is not real. Your intentions and your pathos has to be real, but the way you speak is not.

John: If you watch any sitcom, you recognize that there’s a reality within the world of that’s sitcom, but it’s not the way actual people would really do things. When you’re stacked up, when you’re clear how you’re doing stuff, how you’re selling the lines, it is specific and it’s different on a stage than it would be on film. You would try to literally just film this play as it is. It would probably feel weird. It wouldn’t feel quite natural to the format.

Leslye: That’s correct. I think that you’d have to move it into the Uncut Gems world if you were going to do this, where the sound design becomes a fill in for dialogue that is happening off screen so that it feels a little unusual and a wall of sound of dialogue, or like Little Women, you’d have to figure out some way of doing it, but in a way that was parsed out and easier to follow, I think.

John: I want to take a look at four pages here at the start of Act Two. We’ll put a link to these in the show notes. Thank you for providing these.

Leslye: Of course, yes.

John: We’re 60 pages into the script, and we’ve now gotten to scene two. Scene one is very long, and we’re getting into a shorter one, which is–

Leslye: The scene one is about 40 minutes and then you start this.

John: We’re now into this new space. Time has passed, but we’re on the same set and everything is progressing here. I think it’s just a good way of looking at what’s happening with our dual dialogue, simultaneous dialogue. Then I think on the second of these pages, we have–

Leslye: [chuckles] This is such a funny session.

John: For folks who are listening while they’re driving their car, talk us through what’s happening in the start of this scene here.

Leslye: Johnny, who is the third out of four of the children, has arrived very, very late.

John: Yes, it was Waiting for Godot for a while, but he actually does show up.

Leslye: Yes, Waiting for Godot. Exactly. Everyone’s waiting for this guy. He shows up in a very eventful way by playing this huge song, this countdown song with everybody and joins everybody together after this fractured first scene. He’s standing and holding court at the top of scene two. He’s telling a story or attempting to tell a story about when he was younger, that he went to a chess tournament, and that he placed 51st out of a thousand, and how impressive that was and what essentially beautiful memory it was for him.

At the same time, he’s just doing that sibling thing, where he wants to tell a story and no one’s listening and correcting him and jumping in, moving into different spaces. The kids start quoting things to each other. They start doing little inside jokes and he gets sidetracked by all of that. I don’t think it’s in these pages, but there is a point as this moves on where he goes, “I’m telling a story about me. Can I tell a story about me?” Evie, his sister goes, “I don’t know. Can you?” [chuckles]

It just reminded me so much of those conversations at Christmas where everyone’s not sitting there talking about big things. They’re sitting there talking about things that are basically stupid and– not stupid, but they’re essentially superficial and it’s the subtext. There’s just the idea that he’s trying to tell this story about how special he is, but everyone is pushing down how special he is.

John: It works so well on the stage, but I’m trying now to imagine, try to do this scene with a camera, try to do this scene on film, and you run into some real issues. You have a lot of characters to try to service. Basically, who’s in the frame? Who’s off the frame? Who are we actually looking at? How is the camera directing our attention versus the person who’s speaking at the moment.

As an audience watching it on a stage, we can see the whole thing at once and we can pick an actor to focus on and see what they’re doing. You get a sense of everything. Cameras, by their nature, are going to limit us down to looking at one thing. Somebody’s going to be on camera and somebody’s going to be off camera for their lines is just a very different thing. I don’t know if you’re ever planning on adapting Cult of Love into a movie.

Leslye: I am, yes.

John: It’ll be terrific, but obviously you’re facing these real challenges and looking at how there’s times where we have eight characters on stage. You have a lot of people in scenes.

Leslye: I think actually in this scene there are 10 people on stage.

John: Crazy. It’s just really different challenges. Our expectation of how long we can be in a scene is much longer on the stage than it is in a movie. These scenes would be– it’s possible you could find a way to play this all in real time, but our expectation as audiences is like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to cut to something else. We’ve got to get out of this space when we’re in these things.” These are all of those things you’re thinking through.

Leslye: Dinner table scenes are a nightmare. They do become so static and you have to jump the line 34 times or something like that. However, yes, I do think it’s possible. I think that the Bear episode did it rather well. I think that the first episode of the second season of Fleabag also did it really well.

I guess what I would say is that it really would be about your editor. It would really be about having a lot of options for him or her to whittle it down into something that was as exciting. I agree, I think this would either have to be massively choreographed, like one take things that everybody is doing now, like The Studio and Adolescence. You’d either have to do that.

John: We talked about that on the podcast recently, just that how thrilling they can be, but also how baked in all your choices are and how– it’s the opposite of what you’re describing with theater, having a bunch of choices. You’re just basically taking all the choices away. Maybe that’s the closest to the experience of being in a theater, is that theater is all one continuous take. It’s just you’re in one continuous moment the whole time. Maybe that’s the experience you want to get out of this.

Leslye: I would just argue, I don’t know how immersive one take things are. I don’t know. Certainly, there are many people who watch Adolescence, for example, which is an excellent show. There are many people who watch that and probably don’t notice that it’s all in one shot. I don’t know. I’ve said this before, but in theater, the audience is wondering what’s happening now, and in film or television, they’re wondering what’s going to happen next.

John: Oh, wow.

Leslye: Yes. I think your point is that it’s impossible to drop in that immediacy and the ecosystem and all of that stuff. I would agree that adapting Bachelorette meant that it had to have a plot, because Bachelorette is plotless. Again, you’re right, the characters care about things and they’re pushing towards something and they all have arcs and they all have actions that have consequences, but Bachelorette, the film, had to be about fixing her wedding dress, the bride’s wedding dress. That had to be the thing that kicked them out of the room and into New York City. Otherwise, the audience would, I think, pretty quickly tune out in a way.

John: Yes, they rebel. I think audiences in a film or a TV episode come in with an expectation that early on, you’re going to establish what the goal is, like, “What is the contractor signing with me that we will pay this thing off by the end?”

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

John: It’s just a different relationship you have with the audience. They really have clear expectations.

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

John: One of the promises you made with the audience early on in Russian Doll was that you would pay off the answer to what was actually happening with these time loops because Russian Doll, the concept is she keeps repeating the same moments, and no matter what happens, disaster befalls her at the end. I was doing a little research and I found your explanation of the time loops at the end. I was wondering if you could synopsize down what it was you were trying to make sure the audience got out of the metaphor you’re using with the orange about what the time loops were and what was really going on.

Leslye: Wait, what did I say? [chuckles] What did you see? Who knows?

John: Near the end of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne’s character picks a rotten orange at the market and explains these time loops are evidence that there actually is a solution to this, because it’s rotten on the outside, but the reality is still on the inside. Do you remember that as–

Leslye: Yes. No, no, no. I remember, I just wasn’t sure what I said about it six years [laughs] It’s like, I’m sure I said something very smart then. Well, in Russian Doll, I just think it’s really helpful if anyone is looking to dissect that first season. I would just say the way we started was with the character. We did not start with, “Here’s how we’re going to circle the drain.” It had to be somebody who was struggling with her own mortality, but in a way where she’s not talking about it, if that makes sense.

I just wanted to write a show about a woman that was going through an existential problem rather than a tactile problem, like, “Who do I marry? What job do I take? Oh, I’m being chased by this guy. I’ve got to solve the case.” It just felt like what female protagonists are truly just based in, “I’m having an existential crisis about my own mortality and whether or not the choices that I have made up until this moment are adding up to anything worthwhile.”

I think what then happened, if I’m remembering correctly, it was how do you externalize that? That really for me came from the Seven Deadly Plays. How do you externalize and physicalize envy? That’s a thing that happens in your mind. How do you put it into an active space? The circling of the drain for Nadia, which, if you haven’t watched the show, it is Groundhog Day. In addition to being Groundhog Day, each loop gives you an evidence of things, like you said, disappearing.

It’s not just, I’m going through the same day, it’s, I’m dying continually, and each time I die, something is taken away from me, some aspect of it. We did plan out, if I’m remembering correctly, it was animals go at this time, fruits, vegetables, and flowers go at this time. Other people start disappearing here. It was the shell, really, of the real– It was like a medicine that you’re trying to get somebody to take. If you put it in a gel cap, it’s easier to take down. I think that the premise of that was essentially a gel cap for–

John: What you’re describing in terms of needing to physicalize the problem, the crisis is a thing we’re always wrestling with as screenwriters, stage writers, is that there’s this feeling you have about the world or how reality is functioning, and you need to find some concrete way to put a handle on it so you can actually move it around and talk about it in front of things.

In the case of the Russian Doll scene, she’s picking up an orange, and she’s describing what this actually really means.
Without that, then you’re just having a conversation about an abstract, philosophical thing, and there’s no doorknob to open the door. It’s just like you’re pushing against it and there’s no way to get it to open up, and there’s no way to have a conversation or to see anything change about the issue you’re grappling with.

Leslye: Listen, I don’t mean to devalue that container within the story, but the way we talked about it in the writer’s room, of course, there was the temptation, to be like, “Oh, the reason this is happening is X. The reason that this happens is, I don’t know. There’s some sort of–”

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

Leslye: Yes. There’s some sort of thing. I think Severance and Lost are a really good example of this. Puzzle box shows, they ask the question, what’s really going on? Who is pulling the strings and et cetera, et cetera. I just didn’t find that super interesting. I thought that the time travel movies that I found really interesting were, of course, Groundhog Day, which is totally based on morality. It’s absolutely the universe just teaching him a lesson. And Back to the Future, which, of course it has Doc and the time machine and got to get back and all of that, but truthfully, the reason he’s there is to get his parents together and to learn the lessons that he learns. It really isn’t like, “Why is he disappearing? Let’s go find out.” We get it, he’s disappearing because he’s being erased from existence because his parents aren’t going to get together.

We don’t need to know why this happened then, and this thing, it’s like very quickly in Back to the Future II, the alternate 1985, they just explain it really quickly. I am obsessed with Back to the Future. It’s a perfect movie as far as I’m concerned. I think Robert Zemeckis was just, just cooking so hard in that movie. He explains time travel in 90 seconds. In this day and age, that would be three scenes of explaining time travel. It’s all one shot. It’s just Doc coming into this thing, or actually it’s overs for that, but there are other times where he– oh my God, sorry, I’m going to go on a tangent about Zemeckis and how he blocks actors and then how his camera moves work, but I’m not going to do that.

I just think that those types of time travel are just more interesting to me. I felt that the orange moment that you’re talking about really just, again, metaphorically meant that even as you don’t change, the world keeps going. You can either let go or be dragged, kind of thing. She was just going to keep dying until she acknowledged the more, again, moral psychological issues, which is the little girl at the end of episode seven represents an inner child and a love that needs to be given to herself that never was by the world around her.

As the world closes in and threatens her in this very intense way of– threatens her mortality, at the same time, she is confronted with the fact that the rest of the world or that timeline will continue to go without her. Did that answer your question?

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

John: I wanted to get back to something you said about the writer’s room, that it’s not that you weren’t curious about what was going on, but you didn’t want to establish that as being the central question because if it’s a show about what’s actually really happening, then that’s what the audience is going to be expecting an answer for. They may not be paying it as close attention to the things you actually want them to focus on, which is her growth and what she’s actually looking for, and what she’s actually needing to achieve. I think by not foregrounding that question, you also let the audience follow you to places where you actually really want to take them. That’s a good insight.

Leslye: I think a really good way of describing it and coming down into the central question of the first season was we don’t want the audience to be asking what’s going on. We want the audience asking, “How is she going to get out?”

John: Exactly.

Leslye: That’s the interesting question. I think that as much as I enjoy watching Lost and Severance, which I do by the way, the going into this space of there’s really a cult that’s pulling the strings or running this thing, and there’s really a– Alice and Janie had two kids. It just feels like answering the question or attempting to answer the question of what’s really going on was just not the intention of that story of Nadia.

John: We have two questions from listeners to answer, which I think you’re uniquely well-suited to answer. Drew, can you help us out with Liz’s question?

Drew: Sure. Liz writes, I’m a professional classical musician working on a pilot set in the classical music world.

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

Drew: [laughs] I have several action sequences that I’ve choreographed specifically to a given piece of music. For instance, this punch has to land right on beat 3 of measure 14. Should I be including these details in the script itself, or would they be notes for a director and/or editor later down the line?

John: I think you’re a perfect person for this because not only do you care about Zachary Quinto saying mom the same way at the right cadence, but we haven’t really talked about Cult of Love is not a musical, but it’s the most music I’ve ever heard in a play. It is a very musical family that plays instruments and sings live the whole time. What’s your instinct for Liz here with her music cues?

Leslye: I think you have to put them in the script. You just have to. The director and the editor will make their own decisions. Not in a bad way, but once the script is turned over to the process of production, mentioning the song in the action line versus this is where it lands in the first movement or whatever, I think that you have to do it. Now, the caveat of that is do your best to streamline it.

If the action is happening on a particular sequence, like you’re referencing– I don’t know if you’re referencing a track, you can say, “It’s Beethoven’s whatever by such and such and this album,” and then your action lines should be really sick because I do think people will be intimidated by that. That’s the caveat is that I do think that executives or producers may read that and go, “Oh gosh, this is so prescriptive,” but there will be somebody that reads it and thinks, “God, I believe in this vision. This is cool.” I think you’d rather that than somebody taking it over.

John: I agree. I haven’t read Todd Field’s script for Tár, but I have to believe that he’s specifically mentioning exactly what piece that she’s conducted because it’s essential to that story.

Leslye: Oh, absolutely. I haven’t read it either, but he must have done that. I wonder if the Bernstein movie too did that.

John: I suspect it did. I think Liz could also try, and this is the thing I ended up doing for the Big Fish musical script, because we had to send it around to some people who wouldn’t know the actual tracks that were previously recorded is you can now in Highland and other apps probably too, include links that actually link out, so the PDF will link to something like a track you have on Dropbox or someplace else, or Spotify.

I wouldn’t do that for everything, but for something where you absolutely need people to hear the real music that goes with it, it’s an option there. Specifically, from a piece of classical music, you can put the full name of the thing in there, the odds that someone’s going to find that are very, very low. If you need to hear a specific thing, I’d put a link in there.

Leslye: Oh, a link is a great idea. A link would be really good to listen while that’s happening. The only other thing I would say is maybe think outside the box about how to write it. Meaning if you write music and can read music, the reader will not, but if you wrote it like a musical where instead of dialogue, the action lines are underneath each thing, at least, one, it would look pretty, and two, I think people might be really intrigued by that. It might also be a terrible suggestion, but I think if this is really important to you, try to think outside the box in terms of how to present it.

John: Absolutely. Just the way stage musicals, they have both the script and they have the score that has the stage directions and dialogue in it too. Providing a supplemental piece of material there, it could just be surprising for people in ways that’s interesting. A question here from Richard.

Drew: “What’s the longest draft you’d send to a friend for notes? Is there a sliding scale of pain or rather page count that you’d be willing to inflict on a best friend? What about a friend or a writer’s group? Of course, I know never to send a professional contact like a rapper producer, a bloated 140-page draft.”

John: Leslie, what’s your end stage? Do you send long stuff to people to read? When do you like to show people stuff and and how early in the process will you show it?

Leslye: You’re right, love. It’s like 90 to 100. I do think that for a first draft, anywhere between 100 and 150 is okay because you can say in a caveat, it’s too long, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that I think I’m curious about what you think I should cut. I know it’s too long, but I don’t know where to make these changes. 120, if you consider one page as a minute, that’s two hours. That’s a decent script. I write pretty short scripts, and I keep an eye on the page count for sure, but then you asked something else, John, was it about the first drafts?

John: Yes, how early in the process do you like to share what you’re writing with people, and who are the trusted people you love to read early stuff?

Leslye: I would say very close to the first draft, I will do a reading with actors, pretty close. I would make sure stuff that was really wonky, I’d be like, “Mm.” What’s fun about that is that because all of my friends are actors, I don’t want to have anything embarrassing there. Anything that I feel like that would be stupid, I’ll take that out, and it forces me to be a little bit better at my job. I try to get a reading as soon as humanly possible.

They also have good feedback. I have to say, the actors will have really good feedback. If they’re trusted people, they won’t be like, “I just don’t get it.” They’ll say, “I really loved this part. I didn’t really understand this scene. Is it supposed to be this or that?” Getting the direction from them. Then, yes, once I do that, of course, I will send it to either a trusted friend or I have a manager that I really love, Michael Sugar. I will send him stuff as soon as I can.

John: A question for you. Is it ever awkward that you’re having friends who are actors read through stuff, but they may not be the people you actually want to be in the project itself? Does that ever become an issue?

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

Leslye: That’s a good question. When I was working with IAMA and we did readings, because it was an actor-based company, it was unspoken or explicit that the people reading those lines would be the actors that would eventually do the show, for sure. When I do more casual readings, especially if screenplays, just to be super blunt, we will try to get the most famous person that we can, [laughs] who’s right for the part, but the financing will be based on the profile of the number one and number two on the call sheet.

I think a lot of actors that I know who are brilliant theater actors understand that that’s how the world works. It becomes more difficult when actors have done the production of the play, and then the play gets moved to a different medium. That’s different.

John: All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing this week is Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions. I think I’ve heard about these before, but I saw an article in the New York Times about it, and then I went through and actually found the original study. Aron was a psychotherapist, I think, who was really focused on how people connect and what are the ways to get people to draw closer connections, and so would put together strangers and have them talk through this list of 36 questions that escalate as they go along.

You do reveal a lot about yourself in the course of them. Some of the sample questions are, number seven, do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? Number eight, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. The partner being the person you’re talking with. Number 30 is, when did you last cry in front of another person or by yourself? Number 33, if you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone, and why haven’t you told them yet?

There’s 36 of these, and actually in the study that we’ll link to, there’s also a whole bunch more questions there. They’re good icebreakers for human beings, but they’re also really great questions for characters to be chewing over. I think if you have characters who you’re trying to get inside this character and you are just doing some free writing, having your characters answer some of these questions would be a great way to get some insight into what’s happening inside their head, these people who don’t fully exist in your brains yet. Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions.

Leslye: My God. Should we answer them right now?

John: You did Russian Doll, so do you have a secret hunch about how you will die, Leslye Headland?

Leslye: I’ve always thought cancer. It’s how most of us go. My dad had Alzheimer’s. He died, and he was very young, he was 64, so it’s something that I would never want to have happen to me. I hope not that. The last time I cried in front of somebody was last night. [laughs] That’s an easy answer.

John: The last time I cried in front of somebody was, it wasn’t full-on crying, but it was misty, a couple of weeks ago on Survivor. There was a heartbreaking moment, and so that made me misty. Drew’s smiling. He knows what it was, I think. Exactly what it was.

Leslye: Oh my God.

John: A young woman with autism who had a meltdown, and then a guy on another tribe knew what was going on and got permission to intervene and talk her down. Then she told everybody what her situation was, and it was really well done. It was very heartwarming.

Leslye: Oh, my God.

John: Leslye, do you have something to share for us as a one cool thing?

Leslye: In classic fashion, I’d love to do two things. [chuckles]

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

Leslye: Just breaking the rules already. I just read Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I just had never read it.

John: I’ve never read it.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s short, you can finish it in a day probably, or a couple of days if you’re busy. It’s a real handbook. It really tells you, “This is the script stage, this is pre-production. Here are all my experiences with The Verdict and Orient Express. Here’s how I behave on set, this is how I do takes. This is who this person is, and this is who this person is.” I wish I’d read it before I made my first movie. I think that it’s a real– it’s not, I guess, instructions, but handbook, I think, is better.

Then, again, I’m just now reading Alexander Mackendrick’s On Film-making, which is much more of a textbook. It’s harder to get through, but it’s really, really cool and asks many, many questions about specifically how to create a narrative that is in the medium of film. Like I was saying, plays, you’re wondering what’s happening now, films, you’re wondering what’s happening next. He defines drama as anticipation mixed with uncertainty. He’s always pushing. He has a great way to do outlines in there, but it is more like reading a textbook. You have to get through a chapter and then put it down.

John: My very first film class ever was at Stanford. We had filmmaking textbooks, and I just remember being so technical in a very sort of like, “Here’s how the film moves through the gate, and also, here’s how we tell a story at the same time.” There’s a very specific era of those things, which is you were learning a whole new craft, and it was all new. I think we’re now in a place where we treat those as separate disciplines, and we don’t really think about the technical requirements of movie making at the same time we’re thinking of the storytelling goals of filmmaking.

Leslye: I agree.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email that you get each week as a premium subscriber.

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 those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslye Headland, such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes.

Leslye: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for asking me, John. I’m really honored, which is a goofy old word, but it really was lovely to be here, and I feel like I’m in really awesome company. Thank you.

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, for our bonus segment, I would love to talk about how you keep up with what’s going on for plays the way we do on movies. For movies, like when I was going through Stark program at USC, the expectation was that you would see basically all the new releases that came out each week. We would have the variety top 60 movies, and every week, I could just check through and see, “Okay, I’ve seen 40 out of 60 of those movies.” I would just see stuff every weekend to keep up on stuff.

As a screenwriter, you can do that. You can always go back and watch things on video for stuff that you missed. For plays, it’s harder because plays, if it’s not being staged someplace, you can’t see a play. If someone wants to be a playwright and they want to see what’s going on, it feels like it’s more challenging. Leslye, can you talk us through your ability to see plays coming up and how you’re balancing that now?

Leslye: That’s a great question. First of all, the community that I’m in it’s medium-sized. It’s very close-knit. What happens is, everybody goes to see plays. Everybody sees different plays. You get together and you do a kiki. You go, “Glengarry is absolute a mess. You don’t need to go, you don’t need to see it. Then, Deep Blue Sound, you got to go. Oh my gosh, it was incredible.” You get a sense of where you’re supposed to point your boat, I guess. If you’re looking for an old play that you can’t– definitely reading it, it’s tougher, but meaning, if you’re used to reading screenplays, you have to move your head into a different space to read them. They are super enjoyable.

John: Reading old plays, I obviously read a lot of screenplays, but the screenplay form is designed to evoke the experience of watching a movie, and it’s like all the action scene description is there to give you that space. In plays, reading plays, I have a hard time just staying in the moment, and sometimes, if they’re great, then I can click in, but I do find it hard to get the experience of what it would feel like to watch that play by reading the text.

Leslye: This is really annoying, but Shakespeare is a really good read. He didn’t have a big production because they were just doing shit at the Globe, whatever, all the time. His dialogue– actually, he does it through dialogue. He’s like, as this person is entering, and then there’s the exposition, and then there’s also what somebody should be doing, they’re saying something like, bad version is, “Lord, I pray to you,” or something, and it’s like, “Get on your knees, you’re praying.” It’s just your brain, or not, but your brain starts to go, “Well, this person’s saying something, and therefore, I can imagine it.” Where, like you said, the stage directions and then just dialogue, is tough. It’s tough to read.

John: Yes, it is tough. You and your friends get together, you kiki, you talk about the things that you’ve seen. There’s also a very limited window to see those things, because they’re going to be up for a couple weeks, and then they’re gone, and I was lucky to see your play while it was still there. Now, I want to send people to see it, but they can’t-

Leslye: They can’t.

John: -because it’s not there to see anymore. There’s also the pressure to see the shows of friends, people are in things, so you’re going to see those things, even if they’re not your taste to see.

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

John: Talk to us about previews versus the final thing. If you go to something in previews, do you hold back some judgment because you know that it’s an early draft? How do you feel about previews?

Leslye: In previews, you’re pretty much there with the script, or at least for me. I’m pretty much there with the script. I don’t feel like once we’re in previews, there’s certainly– some people totally rewrite the ending of the play. That’s definitely something that does happen in previews, but my experience has always been, “Oh, this is– oh, I got to tweak this, I still don’t understand it.”

With Cult, it was like, “Oh, these overlaps aren’t working. Let me uncouple them, let me do this,” but I consider previews to be rehearsal with an audience. I know the actors don’t feel that way, I know that once the show– and then you freeze the show. You have a couple performances, and then you freeze it, and that’s when press comes. I don’t know, I see that time period that way, and I don’t think the actors do. I think they go like, “Oh my God, I’m up here, and I’ve got to give this performance,” but that’s not my experience. That’s not how I think about it. [chuckles]

John: The other thing that’s different about plays versus movies is that the movie is the same movie every night, and the play is a different experience.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

John: Small things change, which is great, and which I loved with the Big Fish musical. You’d see, oh, this is how it’s working this time, or that joke killed last night, and why did it not work tonight? It’s just something about the atmosphere, it makes it so different. It also means that my experience of going to the show on Thursday might not be the same show that somebody saw on Friday, and you can’t know why. That’s also one of the challenging things. It’s just, you literally have to be there.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the things I had to say to most of the cast of Cult of Love was ignore the laughs, the best you can. Not ignore them, but don’t rely on them as a temperature taker, because in my work, people laugh at bizarre things. I don’t set up jokes the way that Seinfeld does. Obviously, it’s not a sitcom, but my characters just say things, and then an audience can just take it in and decide whether it’s funny or not.

It’s very important that they understand that. In previews and then in performances, people– when you saw the show, I can guarantee you that wherever people laughed was not the same where they laughed in a different performance. Some are hard jokes, definitely for sure, like when Evie yells at the preacher, everyone’s like, “Ha, ha, ha. She’s screaming at him,” but there was a night Mark and Johnny, these brothers are talking, and Mark says, “Basically, I don’t want to live anymore.” Johnny says, “Well, you’re not going to kill yourself.” Mark says, “How do you know?” Johnny says, “Because I tried.” I’m not kidding, one night, that got a laugh.

John: Yikes.

Leslye: In my work, I don’t see that as a bad thing. When Evie says, “Death is expensive,” which, by the way, I stole from Streetcar, and he was there, but people started laughing. They were just like– that is a very serious moment when she’s talking to them, and they start laughing. I just don’t– there are a couple times where I feel like that’s bad, and things have to adjust in order because it is very much supposed to be a serious moment.

I went on a little bit, but that was the barometer in terms of when you’re saying previews are different. Each night, there were laughs where it was like, “Oh, my God, you guys are sick people,” in the audience. Why would you laugh at that?

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

Leslye: I love when people walk out. Whoever I’m sitting with, when people leave, I turn to them, and I’m like, “They got to go, they got to get out of here. They can’t take it. They can’t take the realness.” I am obsessed because if somebody stands up and leaves in the middle of a scene, they are making a statement, and I think that’s gorgeous. If somebody walks out of a movie, it’s like, “Everybody walks out of a movie,” and also you’re not seeing it.

I also love when things go wrong. Oh, I love when somebody drops– and I think the audience loves it, too. When somebody drops a prop, because it just reminds you this is happening in real life. These people are not these characters. They’re people who have voluntarily gotten up here to do this.

John: This last year, we went and saw the ABBA show in London, which is phenomenal.

Leslye: Phenomenal.

John: It creates the illusion that you’re watching real people, but, of course, it is all on rails. Yes, there’s a live band off to the side, but they’re not going to drop a prop. They’re not going to knock over a microphone stand.

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

John: I don’t want theater to just be a bunch of perfectly moving robots. It’s the sense that a real thing is happening in front of you that makes it so thrilling.

Leslye: Oh, I love it. I have to say, in wrapping this up, I really love theater, probably, and I’ve worked in those three mediums, and I hope to start moving into YouTube. I’m kidding.

Although that’s where we’re headed. We’re headed to an OnlyFans distribution. I always say that on mic. If you want to know what distribution is going to look like in 10 years, just see what porn is doing right now.

John: Absolutely. Leslye, you’ll be a hell of a content creator, or whatever.

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Leslye: Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

John: Awesome.

Links:

• Leslye Headland
• Cult of Love – selected pages
• Bachelorette the play and the movie
• Fanny and Alexander
• John by Annie Baker
• Original Cast Album: Company
• Stephen Sondheim
• Waiting for Godot
• John Cassavetes
• Tár screenplay by Todd Field
• Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions
• Eva discloses her autism on Survivor
• Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
• On Filmmaking by Alexander McKendick
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (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.