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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 672 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do we handle loss? Loss of a parent, loss of a relationship, loss of a home? How do we grieve both alone and collectively? To help us explore these questions, we have a very special guest.

Jesse Eisenberg is a writer of plays, short stories and screenplays, who’s also an accomplished actor and director. He’s the writer, director and star of his film A Real Pain. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Jesse Eisenberg.

Jesse Eisenberg: Thank you so much, John. It’s a real privilege to be on the show and to talk to you.

John: Excited to have you here. Congrats on your WGA nomination.

Jesse: Oh, thanks.

John: Yesterday.

Jesse: Thanks a lot.

John: I want to talk to you about your movie, about the writing of it, the journey to making it into a movie. Also, if we can, I’d like to answer two listener questions that we got in.

Jesse: Sure.

John: One about signature styles and simultaneous perspectives. Then we do a bonus segment at the end and I’d love to talk to you about the radio drama as a form. Because it’s weird, Scriptnotes, we’ve been doing this for 12 years, but we’ve never actually talked about the audio drama. You’re actually a person who has written and performed in those. I want to talk to you about that as a thing.

Jesse: Oh, great. Oh, I would love to.

John: Cool. We’re recording this on Thursday afternoon, January 16th. We’ve just gotten word that David Lynch has died today, which is the writer-director behind Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, which was such an important thing for me. Jesse, did you ever get to work with him? Did you ever get to meet him? Did you ever cross paths with him?

Jesse: No, I’ve never met him and would definitely have not forgotten that experience. No, I just loved him so much. I think I wrote three different college papers on Mulholland Drive because I was recycling them because I love the movie so much.

John: Yes. I never got to meet him either. I think the thing about writer-directors is they just generate their own work. As a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to enter into his orbit. I was just always so impressed by the specificity of his work and that you have some filmmakers whose names become adjectives and Lynchian is just a thing. You can identify it as a signature style. It’s not even just the visuals, but just the way-

Jesse: The feeling.

John: -his worlds feel. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes.

John: He died at 78, not in the fires, but partially because of the fires. He was evacuated from the Sunset Fire, which was-

Jesse: Oh, is that right?

John: -also affected us. It was headed down our way. Apparently that was part of what set off this last series of things.

Jesse: Oh, I had no idea. Oh my goodness.

John: Emphysema, but when people are in a fragile state and then they have emergency, you’re moving them around.

Jesse: Right. Oh goodness, I didn’t realize.

John: Jesse, I associate you as a New York person. Have you been in Los Angeles much?

Jesse: I’m aware of it. The first times I would go to Los Angeles would be for screen tests for movies. I just developed this horrible Pavlovian anxiety about landing at LAX because I knew I had to go– I was trying to memorize my lines in the car over to some audition. I never got the wonderful LA experience. I shot there and I did a play there actually.

When I’m working there, it’s nice. When I’m not working there, all that old stuff, when I’m there, I have a day off or something, all that old feeling of being out there and, I don’t know, just the anxiety of being out there comes back.

John: Yes. It’s strange that in the States we have these two big cities, big iconic cities. We have many great iconic cities, but the two big ones we think of are New York and Los Angeles. New York though, everyone has a connection to New York. Los Angeles is sort of a place people drop into and out of, but they don’t have that same kind of affinity for.

Jesse: Exactly. Being in the entertainment industry, I always felt like, “Well, if I’m in LA and I’m not working, what am I doing there?” Whereas when I’m not working in New York, it feels like less of a problem because I’m a third generation New Yorker. It just feels like, “Oh, this is where I should be.”

John: This really brought me to this last week in the fire. Watching the national coverage of it, there was good coverage of it. You could see a lot of national interest in it, but it wasn’t the same visceral feeling we had after 9/11, something like that which was so devastating on a national level.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: The attack on 9/11 was an attack on a fundamental piece of America. These fires were more disparate. There wasn’t one center to it.

Jesse: Exactly. I’ve been really eager to talk to people about the fires because I was in LA a few days before. I have so many friends and colleagues there. I know several people that have lost their homes. And in New York, I’m finding it’s more difficult to connect with people about it because it’s really not on their radar as much as I would have expected.

John: Yes. Update from where we are here, as we’re recording this, the fires aren’t out, but they aren’t growing. They feel like they’re largely under control. We have thousands of homes burned, people displaced, and we’re just starting to get a handle on what we’ve lost and what happens next. I and a bunch of other writers donated to the Writers Guild Member Fund, which is through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is helping out people in the industry affected by this.

Obviously at Scriptnotes and individually, we’re going to be doing a lot of donations and fundraising for folks impacted by these fires and the work of rebuilding the city and the parts that were lost. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to resources for writers from the WGA for if you’ve been impacted, places to go first to look for some help here.

Let’s get to talking about you and what you’ve been working on. It’s just so fascinating, this intersection between you as a writer and you as an actor. I want to talk about where things started because looking back through your history, it feels like you were doing both things at the same time. You were never an actor who then decided they wanted to write or a writer who then got put into some things. They were simultaneous interests for you. That started as a kid, I’m guessing.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. I would always write. I started just writing jokes and then I would be writing scenes. When I was 16 years old, I wrote a movie about Woody Allen. That was like a young version of Woody Allen in modern society, but it was about him changing his name to Woody Allen from his real name. I got a cease-and-desist letter from his lawyers once they finally got the script.

John: I want to put you on pause there. Once they finally got the script, so that means that you hustled your way into getting him to read this script.

Jesse: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Because I wanted to film it on a little camera. I was just trying to do all things at all times. As you know or maybe you don’t know because you’re a very successful screenwriter, but as an actor, you always feel like you’re one job away from never working again. I felt that way even when I was 17 and auditioning for things. I always felt like, “This all feels like you have to win the lottery to get a part in something.” I was just doing anything I could in the arts, which included just writing scripts in high school and trying to send them to anybody who might read them.

Then I started getting parts in movies when I was 18, 19, 20. I started getting good parts in movies that people actually saw. That helped me, because I got an agent, that helped me to get my screenplays that I was writing. I was writing commercial style screenplays. That helped me have an agent to get them into company’s hands. Some of them got optioned by like Depth of Field, which is the Weitz Brothers company.

I was 20, 21, and I would rewrite these scripts. I had like three or four of them at the time. I’d rewrite these scripts. I never got paid for an option. It was always just like they were at these companies. I’m not complaining, nor I should not have been paid for these, but I just mean it was not like I was a success. It was basically some companies had taken these scripts and agreed to talk with this nice kid for once every six months. That was the thing. At some point I realized these are never going to get made.

John: I want to unpack a few things there. You were talking about the difference between an actor and a writer. The writer can just go off and write a new script. You have an agency as a writer that you don’t have as an actor, because as an actor, you’re asking somebody to put you in their thing. “Let me be a part of your thing,” versus like, “Let me create the thing behind it.”

Jesse: Exactly.

John: And yet as an actor, you have a lot more access to different filmmakers and different styles of doing things. Because by the time you were 20, 21, 22, you’d been on a bunch of sets. You’d seen how a bunch of different people worked. You were also reading a ton of scripts. That’s a great education.

Jesse: It’s unbelievable. I don’t think I would be able to direct a movie had I not been on so many sets as an actor. I’m on sets as an actor, but really, as you know from being on these sets, you spend the day just watching things happen. If you’re a curious person, which I’m a curious person, you can ask the people and usually people are happy to tell you about their jobs and why they’re doing what they’re doing and why the dolly should go this way and not the other way. That was really helpful.

It also helped me as a writer too, because I’d been in so many– on the micro level, I’d been in scenes that just don’t work. You’re like, “Why does this scene not work? Why is it not playable?” is the word we would use as an actor. “This scene is not playable. My character says this thing and then two lines later says this thing and it makes no sense. There’s no psychological jump.” And so as a writer, I just don’t do that stuff. That’s not the difference between a good movie and a bad movie, really. It’s just the thing that actors like to do versus what actors don’t like to do. So that was really helpful.

Then just because I’m writing things that are character based generally, it’s like, I feel like I have a good sense of what actors like to do, because that’s always the thing I come into conflict with. I just did this movie, we just finished, it was Now You See Me 3. It’s this big Hollywood thing. It’s an ensemble movie, there’s eight characters in it. But I really do have to say my character has a consistent voice from beginning to end. It’s just great. I love doing it. Even though the movie looks like maybe this movie that wouldn’t be emphasizing character stuff too much. For me, my character has a distinct voice from beginning to end and I just love doing it. It could happen in any level of movie.

John: Let’s go back to those first scripts you were writing, the ones that the Weitz Brothers were not paying you for, but to sort of bring in. What is the first screenplay you remember reading? The thing that made you think like, “Oh, this is actually a form I understand. This is a form I want to work in.” Do you remember?

Jesse: Oh, wow. God, that’s a great question. Yes. God, it must have been something. When I was younger, I was auditioning for things, but I couldn’t tell you the difference between a good thing and a bad thing.

John: Yes, and often you’re probably seeing sides, you’re seeing the pieces of a thing rather than the full-

Jesse: Exactly.

John: -work.

Jesse: I auditioned for the movie The Squid and the Whale when I was like I think 19, I ended up filming it when I was 21 because they got on hold for two years because of budget whatever, but I definitely remember thinking, “This is amazing.” It was amazing. It’s funny and emotional in a way that just felt original and that tone just seemed really cool.

John: And The Squid and the Whale, it’s a spare script. It’s not a play, but it’s not a big cinematic. There aren’t car chases. It’s not the camera doing wild things. It’s just characters in a situation creating their own issues.

Jesse: Right, so it’s easier to read. It’s harder to read a big action thing and understand actually what it’s going to look like and be, because there are just so many moving parts that are not able to be explicit in a script. But for a movie like Squid and the Whale, or the first movie I got to do, Roger Dodger, they were great scripts, the dialogue was great, and you could see on the page that the thing was going to be great. It didn’t require directorial or technical flourishes that you couldn’t see on the page.

John: Yes, but the first script I read was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. It was one of the first things that was printed that we had to buy at a bookstore and read.

Jesse: Oh, wow.

John: It was just the realization like, “Oh, everything that’s happening in the movie that I’m watching on the VHS copy, it’s just reflected here.” Realizing that there’s a standard format that makes sense for explaining what’s going to happen in this movie, just on the page.

Jesse: And it was a good read?

John: It was a great read.

Jesse: It was accessible read, right.

John: A hundred percent. Again, it’s spare because it didn’t need a lot of flourishes, but just the sense of like, “Oh, this is how we’re going to introduce a character on the page,” which is not necessarily going to match exactly what you’re going to see on screen. It tracks well. You can hear characters’ voices being distinct even before those actors are being cast in them. That’s a crucial thing.

Jesse: Do you find that there are a lot of movies that just don’t read well, but you know are going to be great?

John: There are. Some of the cases I’ve run into are directors who’ve written things, they have a vision for what it is, but they just can’t get it on the page very well. I know this filmmaker’s going to be able to make something great, it’s just not there yet. I’ve worked a lot at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and sometimes you have these filmmakers coming in who are working on, generally, their second movie, and so the first one they just made, and the second one, they really are trying to put it all together. Sometimes they’re struggling with the form, but you know they have a great vision there.

Jesse: You know that because they’ve made that other movie or just from talking to them?

John: They’ve made another movie or in the conversation with them, you see what it is that they’re trying to do and they’re just not quite able to find the-

Jesse: Translate that?

John: Yes, they’re not able to evoke that on the page for what they’re going to try to get to at the end of it all.

Jesse: Right.

John: There are definitely times where I’ve read scripts that I thought, “That is just a really tough read,” and yet, in talking with a filmmaker, you see like, “Oh, yes, they have a vision. They’re going to be able to make something really cool out of that.” My job as an advisor is just to be– I describe it as like, “I’m your friend with a pickup truck who’s going to help you move from where you are to where you need to be. I’m not going to change anything, I’m just going to help you get there.”

Jesse: That’s a nice way to think about it. The alternative thing is scripts that read really well that don’t make good movies, and I’ve been able to figure out what those are too.

John: Tell me.

Jesse: Well you know, it’s the kind of script that has really flashy dialogue, funny dialogue and things that are like– What I find most of the movies that I’m thinking about that are fun to read, but I know they’re not going to make good movies, are ones that are really quirky, where the quirk factor is turned up, where people have odd names and everything. Stuff that is funny to look at, but doesn’t translate to when you’re watching human beings take on those things, and now you have to follow them. I’m not just saying you have to relate to everybody, but just things where they’re really cutesy and quirky on the page. Usually, those things are just not translating to 3D imagery.

John: Also, I think what you’re describing is sometimes things could be like, “Okay, that little moment was funny, but it’s not the kind of funny that’s going to continue out through two hours of a movie experience.” The difference between sketch writing and longer form writing is the ability to really go on a journey with these characters and want to see them as it continues.

Jesse: Yes, and not be too funny. Sometimes scripts are too funny, and you’re like, “Yes, I get it, this is really funny, but you’re constantly undermining the gravity of the emotions of the characters.” It’s a good sketch, but you can’t actually engage with these characters in an emotional way.

John: Speaking of sketch, you’ve hosted Saturday Night Live.

Jesse: Oh, yes.

John: What was that experience like? As a person who’s usually going in with full preparation, usually you get a chance to really think everything through, and suddenly you’re in sketches. Did you enjoy it? What was that like for you?

Jesse: Oh, it was terrible. I’m an idiot. It’s my fault entirely. What happened was, when I was 18 and I got an agent and everything, I had put together a packet for Saturday Night Live to write. I’d written tons of sketches. I loved that format. Even as an adult, I could look back and say, “Yes, they were good sketches.” It wasn’t like a teenager writing. It was like somebody who had a voice and whatever, and the concepts were funny and varied.

When they asked me to host the thing, I didn’t want to because I only wanted to write for the thing and I didn’t want to be an actor coming in. They put the wig on an actor and parade you around. I wanted to be a writer. I spoke to somebody there before and they said, “Yes, no, you can do that. Yes, that’s fine. You can bring your scripts in. That’d be great.” I didn’t realize that they were just being nice to me. That was not the way it works. There are writers there, they all come from the Harvard Lampoon, and they are competing with each other to get sketches on, and the celebrity actor that comes in, because they’re in a popular movie that week, doesn’t get to write the things.

But I didn’t know that, and so I spent the week trying to have my scripts infiltrate the planned sketches. There was a table read, and I think I did like two sketches at the table read, and I could tell increasingly over the course of the week, people were not happy with me. But I didn’t realize, and I was just so desperate to be a writer. If I went back on the show, I wouldn’t do that again, and I was an idiot, and I guess I must have come off really obnoxious or something. I was just so eager to write comedy since I’m young, and that felt like an opportunity for me to do it.

John: Let’s take it back to the 20-year-old Jesse Eisenberg. If I were to sit you down for an interview then, and say, “Jesse Eisenberg, what do you want to do with your life? What is your goal?” What would you have identified as your aims? What were you shooting for?

Jesse: Oh, The Onion. I would have just wanted to write for The Onion. To me, it’s the greatest thing in the world. During the pandemic, they allowed me to do six weeks on a probationary period. I did not make it past the six weeks, but I had great stuff and I just wouldn’t get it voted in at the end. I was also not one of the core writers. I was on this probationary thing. My headlines and stuff would not be prioritized. That to me still feels like the whale.

John: Oh yes.

Jesse: To me, it’s the greatest comedy writing in the world. I aspire to it and feel shamed that I didn’t get in there.

John: Yes, so instead you’re just making movies and starring in things.

Jesse: To me it’s so much easier, like the head writer from The Onion saw the movie A Real Pain and he complimented me on it and I immediately sent him back a headline because I was so desperate to just have something in The Onion. To me, if I had a non-byline Onion headline, no one knows it’s me, and it came out in one of 100 headlines that week, it’d make me happier than any movie script.

John: Incredible. I want to talk to you about your movie, A Real Pain, because this is your second feature as a director. For folks who haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to give the shortest logline, but then I want to talk to you about what the movie’s really about. It follows two cousins, David and Benji, who are on a group tour in Poland to visit important Jewish cultural sites, including a concentration camp, and to learn more about where their grandmother grew up. That’s sort of the logline version. Was that the actual movie you set out to write? What was the actual intention behind sitting down and starting to write this movie?

Jesse: Yes, thank you so much for saying that in your question, which is the first time I ever was asked it in that way, is quite spot on. Because the log line was the vehicle. The log line was the way to get them– what is the actual screenwriting term? MacGuffin? Is that the thing? What is the thing?

John: Sure. Well, MacGuffin would be sort of like a plot device. It’s just like the mechanic. Yes.

Jesse: Exactly, yes. My background as a writer, after sketch stuff didn’t work out, my background was playwriting. I’ve had four plays in New York, one of them transferred to the West End, and some play in other places. I had written one character in a play, it was named David, the play took place in Poland, the play was called Revisionist. It’s similar to my character David, who I play in this movie. My third play, which is my best play, was called The Spoils, and I played a character named Ben, who is this charming, maladaptive guy, like Kieran’s character in A Real Pain.

Then I had written a short story for a tablet magazine where I took those two characters from the two separate plays, and I put them in the same room as childhood friends who go to Mongolia. These two characters that are pretty similar to the characters in this movie. Then I thought I would adapt that to a movie. I was adapting the Mongolia script and I thought it’d be cool to shoot in Mongolia and I’d never seen it before in a movie, et cetera. It was just not going well. I didn’t have a second act. It’s okay to talk in jargon, right?

John: Oh yes, a hundred percent. Jargon is very much welcome here.

Jesse: Okay, great. Basically, I had this amazing setup of these two guys who were childhood friends and they had all this funny, fraught history together and then they got to Mongolia and this big thing happened there. The problem is it happened the first day they get there so there was no second act. Basically, it was a first act and then it jumped to this big, tragic reconciliation of their past. I didn’t have a second act.

I was sitting there, I was so frustrated because I knew there was potential with these two characters. I loved them so much and I loved their banter. I knew there was potential in a road trip of these guys. I was banging my head against the computer when an ad popped up for Auschwitz Tours, and then in parentheses, with lunch. Auschwitz Tours (with lunch). I clicked on the ad, even though I already knew what it was, which is that, it takes you to a site for advertising English speaking tours of Holocaust sites. I thought, “That’s the movie.” That gave me the vehicle.

I can set these two guys who both have their own internal pain against the backdrop of objective, horrifying pain. Suddenly I could just implicitly make this bigger commentary on what pain is valid? Is my OCD character’s pain valid? Is Kieran’s pain, who has much darker demons than my character’s pain valid? Or are we just individual grains of irrelevant sand on the beach of Polish trauma, in Holocaust history? Once I came up with this Holocaust tour, it just seemed like this is a great vehicle to have a movie with these two characters.

John: The choice to make them cousins makes a lot more sense now that you talked through the history of this. Originally they were best friends, but that really wouldn’t make sense for why they’re going on this tour together. If they were siblings, you’re dealing with all the sibling stuff of it all. Cousins is the in between place.

Jesse: Exactly. Originally when I thought about the Holocaust tour, I thought they have to be family. I thought they’d be siblings. Then I realized, no, it’d be so much more interesting to make them cousins who just lost a grandma because what that would do is allow them to basically not have a relationship anymore.

If you’re siblings, you’re always connected by your parents. There’s just expectations that you should always be in each other’s lives. Cousins who lose a grandparent, which is their only link, really have to make a decision in some ways, unconscious, implicit decision on if they’re going to remain really close. That’s what’s going on with these characters in this movie.

John: Jesse, as you sat down to start writing this script, did that you were going to star in it? Did that you were going to direct it? Was that always an intention from when you started writing the script?

Jesse: No, not really. I write all the time. This was just the next thing I was writing. I wasn’t exactly thinking that I would act in it. I guess I wanted to direct it because I want to direct because I feel like the film industry is so fickle with actors that I feel like I need to have some control. I don’t have your skill set to write the way you do these really big, wonderful movies. I can write my small personal things. And if I direct them, it gives me a little more agency in this industry that I find is really unstable. I thought, “Okay, I could direct this. This could be something. It’s a character driven movie. It doesn’t require a technical mastery.” Then in terms of acting in it, I didn’t really think about it.

John: Because it sounds like you’ve actually played both characters.

Jesse: Yes. I did. I did play both of those characters. I always think of my acting as quite separate, in terms of movies, because I’m in other movies and other people’s movies. I wasn’t exactly thinking of being in it. The weird thing happens, and God, you could probably relate to this in a roundabout or maybe the other side way, which is that, when I send people a script, it’s just much easier to get something made that has an actor attached to it, even if it’s an actor they don’t really like. Even if producers don’t really like me, just the fact that an actor seems to have, theoretically– you’re at a higher level in this, but at my level, with writing, there’s an actor engaged on a $3 million movie, it already seems like it’s possibly real.

John: No, Jesse, I assure you that at my level, and it’s sort of at every level, having an actor attached to something is really helpful. I think it anchors in people’s minds like, “Oh, I can picture the movie, I can sort of picture Oscar Isaac in that thing.” It just makes life easier if there’s somebody attached.

Jesse: Exactly. And it also seems like validated by a non-writer, that seems helpful too. “Okay, this is not just a literary thing. This is validated by somebody attractive.” Once I started sending it out to financiers, independent investors, whatever, I just put my name on it, basically just as a shorthand that it’s going to hopefully be made soon.

John: As folks started to read this, they were reading this as like, “Okay, this is something that Jesse wrote, he’s going to be starring and directing in it.” They’ve seen that you can direct a movie. They know you as an actor. It must make it easier because there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I get what this is and it’s not going to be a crazy expensive movie.” What was the process of going out and finding the money? Was it all independent investors? Did you have a plan? Because you ended up selling it at, was it Sundance or where did you sell it?

Jesse: We sold it at Sundance. Yes. No, it was really hard. Really hard. We were passed up by everybody in the first round of who we went to. It was ultimately produced by this great company, Topic. They’re certainly not a second-round company, but the people we had gone to for a higher budget essentially, all passed on it. A24, who did my first movie, didn’t do this one.

It did feel a little bit like a really uphill battle to the point where I was writing to German reparations funds who give some money to Holocaust themed movies. I was able to get a little grant from them that I thought could be seed money to make this. I didn’t know how I was going to fund it. I know that must seem strange to maybe some listeners who know me as like a Hollywood actor and it seems like, “Well, why don’t we just go make it?” The way these independent movies are made, it’s difficult. A lot of people want to make movies at this level. It’s competitive.

John: Yes. You were able to find producers and financiers. How early on in the process did you list some sort of line producer, somebody who could come up with a budget, come up with a schedule? How early did like how expensive it was to make the movie?

Jesse: Oh God, that’s a great question. Pretty early we did that because, okay, so I should also say, because I don’t want to seem like I’m asking for pity that it was a real struggle. It was a real struggle to find investors, but my producers are great. They’re Emma Stone’s company called Fruit Tree. It’s Em, her husband Dave McCary and their partner, Ali Herting. They were great. When we were looking for actual investors, that was the struggle.

We had a budget done, I think pretty early, but it was a bit amorphous because the budget is partly dependent on getting money from the Polish Film Institute and you don’t know if you’re going to get it. In our case, actually, we lost, I think it was like– we were a three and a half million-dollar movie. I think we lost $850,000 two months before because we were expecting it from the PFI. Then for a set of technical reasons, we didn’t get it. We thought it would cost five and a half. We ended up having to make it for three and a half, which meant cutting out days, which meant cutting locations. It was scrappy. It was quick. Every day felt like something would go wrong.

John: Yes. That’s really challenging. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the screenplay that’s being published, the For Your Consideration script. How close is the script that we’ll be seeing to what you went into production with? Because it’s always hard to tell with For Your Consideration scripts, how much they’re just conforming to the final movie versus what the original shooting script was. What changed?

Jesse: Oh, wow. What a nice question. I haven’t even thought about this stuff. We cut two scenes from the movie, which are not reflected in the For Your Consideration script. We cut the two scenes. Otherwise, maybe it’s word for word. It’s that close. The two scenes, one of the scenes, I put in at the very last minute. It was a scenelet. The big scene we cut was just the beginning of the movie. You see my character at home with his wife and kid. The actress was great, Ellora Torchia, she’s a brilliant British actress. She played my wife. My child played my child. Wasn’t happy to be cut out. The scene felt too formulaic and just standard issue for the pace of the rest of the movie.

John: Absolutely. The way you’re starting now makes a lot of sense because we see we’re in New York, we know we’re headed to the airport. I suspect what you found in the edit was that seeing the wife and family made you want to see them more over the course of it. That really wasn’t the movie you were making.

Jesse: Exactly. It was not helpful. Actually, you just want to– God, you probably know this better than anybody. Audiences pick up on shortcuts to characterizations really quickly. You see me in a taxi cab now in the beginning and I’m calling my cousin. It’s a funny little scene, but it just says everything you want to know about who I am, who that character is, the cousin who I’m calling. It’s a funnier scene and it’s more original. Audiences are so aware, they just know, “Oh, that’s this person. Let’s see how this person unfolds now.”

John: Yes. I want to talk about a showcase scene in the script right now. It’s eight pages long. It’s pages 64 to 72, which is the restaurant scene. This is where we’re at a restaurant, Benji’s being very prickly. He leaves the table. David apologizes for him, explains what sounds like bipolar disorder.

Two of your lines here, basically, “I know he’s in pain, but isn’t everybody in pain in some way? I know my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” Sort of central thesis that you’re getting out there.

Jesse: Right.

John: It’s also the revelation to this group that Benji had attempted suicide six months ago, which is new information for us as the audience. Can you talk about the writing of that scene? Did you always know it was going to be a turning point in the movie that would be a showcase scene? What were your feelings going into it, not just as a writer, but also then as the actor and the director?

Jesse: I hope it’s okay to admit this, but I didn’t have that line in the first draft that Benji tried to commit suicide. There were little droppings within the movie that indicated that this guy’s pain was far more, was darker than mine. My instinct was to not put something so explicitly detailed like that. The reason I put it in, again, I hope it’s okay to talk about this stuff, because it’s inside baseball-y a little bit. But the first movie I made wasn’t received that well.

I think the reason it wasn’t received that well is because I assumed that the audience would totally understand how I felt as a director about my characters, and they didn’t. They thought I maybe had contempt for them, and I didn’t. I was in love with them, but they were not being their best selves in the movie. It was really hard to read harsh criticism of the other movie. For this, I just wanted to make sure the audience understood what was happening and that, yes, you could imply in 10,000 different ways and looks and lies of omission and all this stuff, indicate that that character may have done something like that or tried to hurt himself or kill himself, but I needed to be more specific.

John: Yes, because we’re seeing this as an audience. We’re approaching it only with the information that we’re seeing on screen. You as the writer or director you know the facts. You know things that we’re not necessarily able to see.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: We don’t know whether this is typical behavior for Benji or atypical. Is he always just an asshole? What’s going on in this moment? What I like about the revelation where you put it is that it re-contextualizes the scenes that we’ve been thinking about beforehand. The same way that we as an audience are doing that, the other people around the table are like, “Oh, okay, the stuff we saw before…” It actually does provide just really good dramatic fodder for figuring out what happens next. It makes us appreciate both you and Benji differently for now knowing this information.

Jesse: The scene used to end– the kicker at the end of that monologue was not this revelation that Benji tried to kill himself, but the kicker in the– kicker is such a sleazy word to use for something emotional. The great ending prior to that, it was that our grandparents survived by a thousand miracles to get us here. The ending of the monologue was, “And I know we were born on third base. I know I was born on third base and I feel so lucky, but it feels like Benji is just constantly trying to run back to second.” That was the ending line. It was this guy who had everything and was trying to make his life so much worse.

John: Yes, and that’s such a great line. It’s not supported by the scene that’s there beforehand. I can understand why it changed, but it’s such a great sentiment. I want to drill into this aspect of it because what’s interesting about your movie is that it’s hard to make a dramatic comedy, comedy drama, something that walks that line. It also goes to the fact that this movie has to become quiet at moments.

It has to let the concentration camp be what it is and then find a context for it. Because you’re talking about the loss of a grandparent and your own personal pain in this environment of just unspeakable, catastrophic, unfathomable loss. And trying to hold the balance of that. And the shame you feel of feeling bad when others have it so much worse around you.

Jesse: Right, exactly.

John: Talk to me about the rest of the people in that group and how you thought about those characters and the tour guide, Will, and how you thought about putting together the rest of the folks who are going to be surrounding them.

Jesse: In a macro way, after I read up a lot on what these Holocaust tours mostly are, they’re mostly suburban, middle, upper-middle class Jews who are doing their responsible trip. Instead of going to Rome this year, they go to this place. It’s very well-intentioned. I don’t mean to sound flippant about them. No, it’s wonderful that they’re doing that and exploring that history. Basically, I knew I couldn’t have 15 people on the tour that were all basically my parents. It would just be monotonous. I was trying to think of who could be on this tour, realistically, that is just a little more interesting than probably what most of these tours offer.

For me, that meant, I wrote a character based on my friend, Eloge. I met this guy named Eloge in real life. He survived the Rwanda genocide, converted to Judaism. If you look up his name, the first video that comes up is him talking about going on an Auschwitz tour. He’s my most religious Jewish friend. I asked him, “I think you’d be a really interesting character.” I told him what I was writing. I said, “Would you mind if I used your life story in this?” Not only did he agree to it, but helped me with casting and wardrobe. It was wonderful. That was interesting.

I had a neighbor, Martha. She’s the basis of Jennifer Grey’s character, Marcia. She was divorced and she was curious about her roots in Hungary. I just put the story together in my head of how interesting it must be to be going through a divorce and trying to find grounding in your own family’s history, even if that means Holocaust history. That was a character.

Then in terms of the tour guide, I thought it’d be interesting to have a character that is– there’s a term that Jews use called a philo-Semitic. Anti-Semitic is a hatred of Jews. Philo is of course a lover of Jews, but it’s a weird– the word is not used exactly. It’s kind of derogatory. It’s basically used to describe somebody who fetishizes Jewish culture. Like, “You guys are so, and I love the food,” that kind of thing. I thought it’d be really interesting to have a character as a tour guide who is an academic so that he can represent just the cold facts of the tour because I wanted somebody–

Basically, I was just trying to create people that Benji could play off of, that Kieran’s character could play off of. I knew if I had this guy that was overly academic and intellectualizing this tragic history, I knew it would just create some tension for Kieran. As I was writing it just proved to be true because once they got to the cemetery and they’re looking at this oldest Jewish cemetery, Kieran just goes nuts on him.

John: Yes, so you’ve assembled sort of this group of folks who are traveling through this place. At this point, you’ve cast Kieran. How much time did you have to figure out the relationship between you two guys? Because I can imagine if you weren’t also the writer-director, you were just the two actors, you might find some time to get together and figure out what your dynamic was. How much time did you have to spend with him to figure out how to play things? What was the process of working with him?

Jesse: Insane. I had no time with him and that’s more having to do with Kieran than it is anything else. Kieran is the most unusual person. Every writer listening to this, hire him in your movie, but don’t expect to have any conversation with him. Don’t expect him to know what scenes you’re shooting during the day. Not only is he the main character in this movie, he’s the focus of every scene in this movie.

First of all, he showed up to Poland a day before we shot. He didn’t want to talk about it with me on the phone ever. We did a 15-minute rehearsal. Basically, he showed up to Poland the day before we shot and I had a three-hour rehearsal planned. It was the scene where he calls up all these characters to this monument to take pictures and he just bringing the group out of the shell.

I thought we’d had a three-hour rehearsal. Kieran, he was late to rehearsal. I’m criticizing him only because I’m about to compliment him. He came to the rehearsal and he didn’t know what scene we were rehearsing and he didn’t know any of his lines. He said, “Can I look at the script for a second?” I showed him the script. He looked at it for 30 seconds and then was word perfect and did the scene once so perfectly that I said, “Let’s not rehearse any more. Let’s just shoot it.”

Then he would come to set during the days and I would say like, “Hey, are you okay?” He’s like, “Eh, I’m okay.” He said, “What scene are we doing today?” I would say, “It’s the scene you have five pages of dialogue on a train and it’s moving quickly.” He goes, “Oh, I remember reading that scene. That was funny. Can I take a look at the script?” I would say, “You don’t have your script?” He’s like, “Oh no, I don’t know if I brought it.” I give him my script. I’m sitting there panicking that this guy doesn’t know his dialogue and we have eight hours to shoot on this train scene. Again, he looks at the pages for like a minute and he’s word perfect and brilliant.

He’s just the most unpretentious actor but he’s doing all of the work. He’s just not doing it in a way that’s performative. We found out from his hotel towards the end of the movie that he had been sleeping on the floor and his room was a mess. His mattress was on his floor and he was living– I don’t know if he was eating at night. He was living like Benji, the character in the movie. He was just not telling anybody about it. I contrast that to the actor that comes to set every morning and says, “God, I was just going over the pages last night and it just reminded me of Lear.” This bullshit pretense that adds nothing to the movie but just makes you realize that this person is doing their work or whatever. Kieran’s the exact opposite. I would love to work with him again and again but he doesn’t make the director comfortable or the writer comfortable.

John: I want to talk a little bit about directors here because a thing that I was thinking through this morning as I was getting ready for this is there’s some actor directors who’ve directed themselves incredibly well. I was thinking like Bradley Cooper directed himself great in A Star is Born. Lena Dunham did a great job directing herself in Girls. Yet there’s other, I won’t name names of the people who didn’t do a great job, but people who are really good actors who are good directors who don’t direct themselves well. How did you make sure that your performance is working as an actor when you’re also worrying about everything else as a director? What are the challenges there? Do you have any hints or tips?

Jesse: Yes, I guess from the outset, because I’ve been writing so long, it was not like I was an actor trying to make a vanity project for myself where I was putting so much emphasis on my performance because I had written it for me to show the audiences that, “Hey, I can do this dark thing. Look, I can play homeless.” That was not my intention with the script.

I’ve been writing for myself for years. I’ve been in my plays and I don’t know who or what you’re referring to when you say it doesn’t work, but my sense is that probably those are intended as not vanity pieces, but trying to show something that they’re not often cast in and those things just go wrong for the reasons because the initial intention is off there.

For me, I just didn’t have that and I’m sitting at the library writing the scripts and I’m crying when I’m writing because I’m feeling all the emotions and then I’m on set, it’s an extension of that. So it’s coming from a real place. I’m probably an unusual writer, actor, in that I’ve started out doing plays and stuff and so I just never think of the extravagance of a movie being something important for me to act in. Yes, maybe that helps.

John: We have two listener questions that I thought we could take a crack at together here. Drew, can you help us out with a question from Tate?

Drew Marquardt: Tate writes, “I’ve written about seven scripts now and I found that a specific central theme always seems to wriggle its way into my stories. The characters, the narratives, the settings, they all vastly differ, but this one thematic question can’t help but rear its head. Is this a problem? Where do you draw the line between crutch and signature when it comes to a screenwriter’s overall work? At what point does something shift from being a unique, constant quality of a writer’s work to a laziness that the writer continues to rely on?”

Jesse: I’m expected to answer this?

John: Together we can answer it.

Jesse: Okay, great, because like, gosh, I couldn’t possibly. Yes, no, please.

John: It strikes me that we’re trying to answer this question on the day that David Lynch died and David Lynch had very common things that kept appearing in his stuff. They felt like of a consistent piece and so I wonder whether Tate is just actually recognizing what their style is and what interests them. I think if you look at a lot of my movies, generally it’s about a person crossing from one world into another world, having to learn the rules of it and survive within it and get back out at the end.

Go is that movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that movie. A lot of my movies have those same themes in them, but they’re all very different where sometimes people become a crutch and they say that they’re a hack, they’re basically doing the same scene again, movie after movie, they have one way to go to. Jesse, talking about the plays you’ve written, the two movies you’ve made, they’re consistent and of a piece, wouldn’t you say?

Jesse: Yes, they’re all based on my preoccupation of why do I have a good life when other people have a bad life? All my plays are exactly that theme. My first movie is that, it’s about a woman who works at a domestic violence shelter and resents her son because she’s raised an upper middle-class son, and so she tries to parent this kid at a shelter.

The thing you said though, you used the word interest, that seems great. You’re finding the things that you’re interested in. Well, that’s great. That’s really great, and you could repeat forever and ever, because if you’re interested in them, maybe it feels like maybe perhaps you haven’t found the solution. When you don’t have a solution for something, that’s always the best thing to write about because it has an unanswerable tension.

John: I fully agree. Tate, I think just as you’re looking through the seven scripts you’ve written now, which is great, you’ve written seven scripts, you have a sense of what it is that you like to do, those are things you’re writing for yourself. Down the road, if you’re going to be a writer who’s working for other people, you may be writing stuff that’s not that. You may be using your skills at putting scenes and words together to do a very different thing, and that may be a great opportunity for you. The same way that Jesse gets to act in movies that are not his movies, and he gets to play different people too. It’s not a problem that the stuff you’re writing for yourself is of a piece, it’s you.

Jesse: Yes, it means you have a voice. To me, it sounds actually great. When I read writers and you can recognize that it’s theirs, it’s wonderful.

John: Drew, next question.

Drew: Victoria writes, “One of the things I struggle with most is handling sequences where I’m relying on multiple perspectives to move the action forward. The problem isn’t one of plot or emotional outcomes. I know story-wise and emotionally where the characters will be, but more of rhythm and fragmentation. It’s a filmic problem. At this point, I’m almost ready to start using storyboards and diagrams to augment my process. How do you guys make directorial choices for sequences like these? Should I think in terms of shot coverage, where I outline each character’s full action in the timeframe of the scene, and then edit them together? Is there another good way to look at this? Do you have any specific directorial techniques you use when writing these action sequences?”

John: Whether it’s an action sequence or any time we were moving between two different things in a movie, that’s one of the great wonders of cinema, is we can cut between two different things. It’s how do you make it that feel like every time you’re cutting back and forth between them, you’re gaining energy that you’re actually moving the story forward in a way that it all fits well together. It’s just honestly so different than what you do in a play. A play is a continuous space and time, generally, and this is so different. Jesse, what’s been your experience? Because I would say that I can’t think of moments in A Real Pain where you’ve had to sort of intercut between two different things that much.

Jesse: Yes, to me, I couldn’t even imagine doing that. I’m so impressed by this questioner’s ambitions. I was just thinking, “oh wow, yes, notecard sounds like a great idea.” I’m the last person that should be asked about this. I just finished acting in this movie, Now You See Me 3, and to me, the writers are great. It’s like, to me, they built the Empire State Building. I have no idea how they put this thing together. They’re accounting for an ensemble, they’re accounting for tricks, they’re accounting for studio notes from a big studio. To me, it’s like they built a building. It’s that far afield from the thing I know about.

John: Yes, and so, listen, I think, Victoria, if you’re writing stuff that involves intercutting between that stuff, reading a bunch of scripts that do it is going to be a real help to you. Look through the For Your Consideration scripts. We have them all up on Weekend Read. Just read the scripts of the movies that you like that do it and see what that looks like on the page, and you’ll get a sense of it.

The most challenging script I had for intercutting was probably the first Charlie’s Angels, actually, in which you have the three different angels in different parts of this castle. You have your villain, you have all this stuff that’s happening and all is fitting together, and that had to work on the page before we started shooting it. What I wrote is very much the cut that there, and it’s making sure that every time you’re moving from one thing to the next thing, you’re remembering where it was there, but also you’re getting energy out of that cut. It’s a skill to learn. If it’s something that you like writing that kind of stuff, it can be really exciting.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is this little website, gamey kind of thing called Network of Time. It’s networkoftime.com if you want to go there, it’s free. It’s basically doing six degrees of separation between two famous figures. You put a person on the left, a person on the right, and it figures out like, okay, how are they connected through what other people are they connected? Not just the names, it actually connects them through photos. It shows you the photos that put all those people together.

I’m going to go to Network of Time here, because I think you are a person in here. I’m going to try Jesse Eisenberg. What other famous person should I put you into? It could be any historical figure as long as they lived in some time of photography. Anybody post-Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Shakira?

John: Shakira, a hundred percent. I suspect Shakira will be a link through some other actor or a talk show host. Let’s see, because you’ve probably been on the same talk shows.

Jesse: Oh, got it. Okay, so that’s an easy one.

John: It’s loading up now.

Jesse: Oh, wow, you’re right.

John: Talk show. Four photos. All right, so the connections are Jimmy Fallon. You’re both on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show. There’s a photo of here with Fran Lebowitz, all right? Jimmy Fallon, then Donald Trump, Jimmy Fallon and Donald Trump, then Donald Trump and Jennifer Lopez, then Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

Jesse: Oh, this is amazing. Oh my God. This is amazing.

John: Before we started recording, I did one to figure out how many steps between you and Abraham Lincoln. For Abraham Lincoln, it goes to Jimmy Fallon, Paul McCartney, Queen Elizabeth, George V, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Robert Lincoln, was Lincoln’s son, and then Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse: Got it. Oh, I see, that’s interesting. I could see this website is Jimmy Fallon and probably the British royalty are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

John: They are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Yes, presidents do a lot there. What’s weird about it is it has a limited set of things because if I try Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, it’ll go through Jimmy Fallon. It’s like, “No, no, no, there’s photos of you and Kristen Stewart.” You starred in two movies with Kristen Stewart, at least.

Jesse: I see. Okay, got it. It sticks to its own game.

John: Absolutely. Jesse, do you have something to share for us? One cool thing?

Jesse: Yes, sure. One of my favorite shows of all time– God, when did I first learn about it? Probably when I was 14 years old? I’m 41, so do the math. It’s called Floyd Collins. It’s a great musical by Adam Guettel, my favorite composer. It’s coming back to New York. It’s a musical that’s basically every college kid’s favorite musical, but it’s never been produced on Broadway. Now it’s coming. It’ll be in New York, I think, pretty soon. I just recommend it to anybody who can go. It’s just the coolest music.

John: Floyd Collins by Adam Guettel. Tell me the story of Floyd Collins, I don’t know it.

Jesse: Actually, you probably would know the Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole. It’s about a caver in Kentucky in 1925 who gets stuck in a cave, and then this circus forms around him. Ace in the Hole, I think, follows the reporter. In this, you’re following the guy who gets stuck in the cave, and this just circus forms around the cave of he turns into a novelty and he dies. This is a true story of the guy stuck in the cave. Come look at the guy stuck in the cave. The guy died, he couldn’t get out. It’s just this really dramatic irony and tragic true story and the musical.

John: That’s awesome. Floyd Collins.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies.

You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about in the newsletter you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to our premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on audio dramas. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: Thank you so much, John. What a great honor to be on your show.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Jesse, I want to talk to you about audio dramas because you have written a few, you’ve starred in some. Talk to me about that as a form and what interested you about them and how you do writing that you know is only going to be heard and never seen.

Jesse: I like writing fiction. What I mean by that is prose. I like writing. I’m not a very good writer when it’s not about characters. I can write voices really well. I wrote this book called When You Finish Saving the World and it’s three characters over the course of 30 years. That for me was my version of a novel because I can write those characters really well. It’s all first person. That’s as good as I can get at prose, which is essentially monologue form. Stories are being told and characters are shifting and changing and it takes place over 30 years. Things that are seeds that are planted in, when was it, 2002, come much later. That for me, I loved. I loved and I would do that all the time if I could.

John: So in writing something for an audio drama or performing in one, you’re just reading a script like a play, but you also have to think about creating the space. I don’t listen to a lot of fiction podcasts, but the way that you establish, ‘Where are we? What’s going on around us?” You’re in a black void without any visuals to establish what’s happening there.

Jesse: Exactly. What I did with that book was I created three mechanisms for these stories to be told, because it was all real audio, it wasn’t like a narrator. Basically, it was all audio that would have actually been recorded. The first story took place like five years ago. I played this character and it was a guy who was having trouble connecting to his emotions and they recently had a baby and they went to a couple’s counselor and the couple’s counselor told me to make a recording for them once a night where I try to talk about my feelings about the baby, where I can really talk about feelings, try to emotionally connect to the baby. Basically, the first set of tapes were just me on the iPhone messages.

Then it jumped 15 years in the future and this kid is going to therapy and it’s a therapy bot. It’s essentially like a ChatGPT therapy. You’re hearing him talk to the therapist. Then it jumps 30 years in the past and it’s a young woman and it’s the mother of the boy and the wife of me but in her past and she is making tapes for her boyfriend who is deployed overseas to Uzbekistan right after 9/11. Anyway, once I came up with the mechanism for it and you slip in as much exposition as you could possibly put in briefly and entertainingly to just establish where they are and what they’re doing and why they’re talking, then you’re good to go.

John: Just like for your movie, you had to provide a context for why we’re on this Jewish cultural site tour, but you had to provide a context for why are we hearing this audio.

Jesse: Right.

John: This is audio that would have been recorded at that place, that time. That makes sense.

Jesse: Yes, and what I’ve discovered by being in movies and writing plays and stuff is, once you just like establish that thing, audiences go on the ride because they’re no longer– as long as you make it seem relatively reasonable that they would be doing this, then they’re into the emotions and the human stories. Then you can, basically, have free rein.

John: I went to go see this play, I Am My Own Wife, which is a great one man show.

Jesse: Yes, I love it.

John: I went to see it at the Geffen here in Los Angeles and this older couple was in front of me. The woman leans to her husband and says like, “It’s a woman, but I think it’s a man in a dress. He’s all alone on stage.” I’m like, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” It took me a while to realize like, “Oh, the guy she’s sitting next to with is basically blind.” She basically had to provide a context, but then the rest of it, you didn’t need to see things.

Jesse: Not in that play.

John: A radio play made sense for that viewer there.

Jesse: Do you work in that genre at all or media?

John: I really haven’t. I’ve done the Big Fish stage musical. I’ve gotten a chance to do that, but I’ve not done the audio drama. Other than Scriptnotes, the only other audio format thing I did was called Launch, which was about my Arlo Finch book series. It was the whole process of putting that series out into the world.

Jesse: Oh, interesting.

John: I had to learn the ways of establishing, “Where are we at this time?” Literally finding audio that grounds us in a place where this conversation is happening. If we had to do audio mixing to get you back and forth from that place to this place, this time to that time, it’s just so different than the one-on-one conversation that we’re doing right here, right now.

Jesse: Right, of course. Yes, exactly. That’s interesting. I wonder if you’d find it interesting or liberating to basically just be able to write long monologues.

John: I think it would be great. It sounds really appealing. It also sounds like something that probably more of our listeners should try to do because it’s very producible, and it’s just a good writing exercise in terms of how do you convey this information out there and not worry about all the rest of prose that has to happen there.

Jesse: Exactly.

John: I get frustrated sometimes by screenwriters who say like, “Oh, I could never write a book.” It’s like, “Wow, it’s just words?” Yet I recognize that people have different skill sets and there’s things that are interesting to them or not. You’ve also, I think, acted in some things that have not been stuff you’ve written for audio, is that?

Jesse: Yes, that’s right. Yes, I’ve done books on tape and stuff like that.

John: Do you enjoy the process?

Jesse: Not really. Doing a book on tape is actually like the most physically strenuous thing of all the things I do, including big action movies where you’re shooting overnight. Doing a book on tape, just sitting there reading for like eight hours is mind numbing and really tough vocally. I’m constantly surprised because I always forget, like the pain of childbirth. You forget like, “Oh, I forgot. Last time I did this, it was miserable. It was really hard to do.” It’s hard to do. It’s not really the performance I like. I’ve done a few like radio plays. Those are better. Books on tape is not my thing. I think some actors are really great at it and have the stamina. I have too much, whatever ADD and weak constitution to–

John: My friend Graham is a narrator and it’s such a different way of living. He gets to make choices every sentence about how he’s going to do things. He gets to find a character’s voices that feels really appealing if you’re good at it.

Jesse: Right no, he’s probably great. That’s probably, he’s figured out a way to be really performative and great. I just didn’t have that skill.

John: We’re facing the question of what’s going to happen with the Scriptnotes book. We have a Scriptnotes book coming out at the end of the year.

Jesse: Oh, cool.

John: Probably should have an audio version of the book, but Lord knows I don’t want to narrate it and I don’t think Craig does either. We’ll have to find the right choice for that.

Jesse: You could also do a thing where you have multiple voices.

John: Yes, that’s probably the way to do it.

Jesse: Especially you, because you have so many contacts of performers that would love to do it, I’m sure.

John: We’ll find somebody good to do it. Maybe we’ll draft you in for a short chapter because I know you don’t like to do it.

Jesse: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. I’ll do the titles.

John: Fantastic. Jesse Eisenberg, an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Jesse: You too. Thank you so much, John.

John: Congratulations on your movie.

Jesse: Thanks so much.

Links:

• A Real Pain | Screenplay
• Jesse Eisenberg
• WGAW Wildfire Resources
• David Lynch
• Mongolia by Jesse Eisenberg, Tablet Magazine
• Jesse’s plays The Revisionist and The Spoils
• Network of Time
• Floyd Collins the Musical
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads and Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 667 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most screenwriters dream of getting their first movie produced. Today on the show, we are joined by a guest who just had his first two movies produced and released this year. Justin Kuritzkes is a screenwriter behind both Challengers and the upcoming Queer. He’s also a novelist, a YouTuber, a playwright. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honor to be on here.

John: It’s so nice to have you here. I want to talk about this past year because a bunch of stuff has happened this last year, but clearly, the last year is only the tip of the iceberg and there was a bunch of work that went behind that. So I want to get into the work that got you here. I also want to talk about working with a director, sex on screen because both of your movies are very sexy and notably more sexy than a lot of things we’ve seen recently, and get a little granular with what’s on the page, if that’s okay.

Justin: Great, yes.

John: In our bonus for premium members, I want to talk about your videos because, in addition to this screenwriter in front of us, you were an early YouTube personality person. You had a character you played. I want to talk about sort of how that tied into the rest of what you’re doing or if it even does tie into what you’re doing.

Justin: Amazing.

John: Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s get the back story on you because I’m just meeting you for the very first time. You grew up here in Los Angeles?

Justin: Yes, I grew up in the valley partially. The first couple years of my life, I was in Encino and then my parents split up and my dad moved to Santa Clarita. So I spent a lot of time there. Then my mom moved all around the West Side.

John: Parents not in the industry, what was your sense of the industry growing up in town?

Justin: No. It was kind of a weird thing in that my immediate family, like my nuclear family, is very square, which I say lovingly. It’s a family of doctors and lawyers from Queens on both sides. But I have an uncle who’s a screenwriter and a producer in features. Probably the thing that caught on the most was this movie called 3000 Miles to Graceland with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. It was like about Elvis impersonators doing a heist in Vegas.

John: All right. Nice.

Justin: I kind of, through him, saw that a creative life was possible from an early age. But then also just growing up in LA, even though my parents weren’t in the industry, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were. So the industry was not something that felt abstract. It was very clear to me early on that movies were made by like actual people who went to Ralphs and bought their groceries.

John: Definitely. It feels like if you’d grown up in DC, you’d be surrounded by politics all the time.

Justin: Exactly.

John: If you grew up in Nashville, you’d be surrounded by country music. Even if it wasn’t your family’s business, it was part of the atmosphere that you are in.

Justin: Exactly. Yes.

John: So when did you first get a sense that movies or writing for movies was a possibility because you were writing other things, but when did movies enter into the equation?

Justin: Movies were kind of my first love. The first thing I was a fan of was movies. I was a cinephile before it was anything. Then in high school, I started writing plays because my school had like a one-act play festival with student-written stuff that other students would direct and act in. Through that, I all of a sudden became a playwright and then was just doing that all through college and for 10 years afterwards.

Then accidentally found myself writing a novel, which I thought was like a monologue at first, because that’s the way I would start a lot of my plays are just have somebody start talking and follow the thread of their voice until I wanted to have somebody else interrupt them. This guy just kept talking for 60 pages and nothing had happened. There was no story yet, but I liked the guy. So I wrote that as a novel.

Then I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book when I got the idea for Challengers. That’s kind of how I started writing screenplays.

John: Before we get into Challengers, I want to put together some pieces that are along the way. You mentioned writing plays in high school. You went to school here, that was Harvard-Westlake.

Justin: Yes, I did.

John: Which is a good, very– I don’t want to say aggressive. Very academic. A top school.

Justin: I think aggressive is an accurate description. Yeah. In every way.

John: The reputation I always hear about Harvard-Westlake is if you don’t have one thing you excel in, you’re going to get sort of lost in the system, and the churn of Harvard-Westlake. Is that fair?

Justin: I don’t know. I really found dramatic art there. I found performance there. I don’t think I would have necessarily gravitated towards it if I’d gone somewhere else. But I think really through that, one-act play festival, and through the teachers in the drama department, who really became early mentors for me, yeah. For me, I had that, and that was what pulled me through it.

John: That’s great. Now you’re applying to colleges where you’re applying specifically to the thing. I’m like, “I’m going to go write plays,” were those the programs you were looking into?

Justin: I knew I wanted to write plays, but I wasn’t applying to theater school, or film school, or anything like that. I went to Brown, just as a liberal arts degree. I think I majored in philosophy. I was doing a lot of theater while I was there because I knew that that was the life I wanted to live.

John: We haven’t had a lot of people on the podcast talking about theater through college. We have a lot of people who like went, “I know I’m going to write movies. I know I’m going to write books,” those kinds of things. What is it like to be writing plays in college? Are you put into little groups to put on your one acts? What stuff are you doing as a person doing plays in college?

Justin: At Brown, there was this real tradition of student-run theater. There’s this place called Production Workshop at Brown, which has had people like Laura Linney and Richard Foreman and a lot of these iconic people in film and theater move through it. I was on the board of Production Workshop. And we were really left to our own devices. We had our own building on campus. They gave us a really small budget that we had to fight for every year. Then we just could do whatever we wanted, basically. So that was a real early view into producing too. The scrappiness of that was definitely something that got ingrained in me.

John: Now, someone who’s curious about studying film or studying television, they can just go out and see all the movies that are made, all the TV series that are made. How are you learning about plays? How are you learning about other plays that were happening out there? How are you learning about the form?

Justin: That’s such an incisive question because it is this really weird thing when you’re studying theater. You’re studying it all on the page, for the most part. Most of the plays that were inspiring to me or that I was taking my cues from artistically were things that I had never seen. They were things that I was just reading. I think something that stuck with me from those years of reading a lot of plays was that, in theater, there’s a standard formatting that you get taught at some point about how a play is supposed to look, but you realize when you read a lot of plays that nobody follows that.

John: No, nobody.

Justin: Every play has an instruction manual on how to read that play. Every play is developing its own vocabulary and is almost operating as a way to evoke an idea in you about how to stage something rather than a step-by-step guide. That was something that originally really daunted me about screenwriting because the form can feel so rigid and official. There’s something very strict about it. But I realized that part of the work of learning, for me how to write screenplays, was learning how to find my own language in it, and like treat each screenplay like I have to teach the reader how to read this one.

John: We had a Greta Gerwig on the podcast talking about her coming out of the mumblecore movement, which was a very under-scripted way of making a movie, of telling a story where like the improv and the figuring out as you go along was part of the process. When she actually got to write in screenplay format and realize like, “Oh, actually, I’m responsible for all these things, but I also get– it’s cool for me to actually describe in full detail what these things are like and what a character is wearing,” and kind of what the point is. Put the boundaries on things in a way that plays sort of don’t.

As I read through plays right now, I do just feel lost in terms of where are people in this space. I’m having to imagine this all myself because it’s just basically the dialogue in so many classic plays.

Justin: Yeah. A lot of my plays wouldn’t even have stage directions. They would just have characters start talking. You can’t do that in a screenplay or else people will just put it in the trash bin.

John: Absolutely. Talk to us about your first attempts to write in screenplay format. Challengers was your first attempt to write a script?

Justin: Challengers was the first script that I finished that I felt good enough about showing to anybody.

John: Let’s talk about what you’re lighting there. There you had other experiments with a form. What was it about the form that you found challenging, interesting? What broke your brain about it at first?

Justin: Maybe a really concrete example is I wrote this book called Famous People, which is my novel. That book is all written in the first person through the language and the voice of this young pop star who’s never named because he just he’s writing his memoir and we’re reading the first draft and he just assumes everybody knows his name so he never says it. And then I was turning that into a television pilot. That was one of the first attempts at writing screenplays as an adult.

John: I can imagine that’s a really daunting process because all the stuff that worked about that on the page as a book can’t translate directly.

Justin: No. You realize really quickly that so much of the experience of being famous, which is this character’s life, is that people are screaming your name at you all the time. I didn’t want to give him a name because that was thematically important to me that he’d be this every man, that he was like this idea of a pop star. I had to figure out ways in that pilot to plausibly move him through the world that he would inhabit without having people scream some name at him. That was a challenge. Often those kinds of unreasonable challenges end up forcing you to write in an interesting way.

John: We often say that it’s the restrictions that provide the shape and the boundaries for what the specific story is you’re trying to tell.

Justin: Yes. You have to give him a name for his dialogue. I ended up just calling him “the kid.” But even doing that felt like a betrayal.

John: Absolutely.

Justin: It felt wrong to me, but I had to compromise on that level.

John: Yes, absolutely. You had that experiment. Was that something you were just doing for your own kicks and giggles or had someone asked you to try to write this as a pilot?

Justin: A little bit of both. I was writing it on spec, but it was a producer was interested and I was trying to put it together. It was mostly for myself. It ended up being something that was really useful and just getting in the rhythm of writing screenplays.

John: You said you were starting to work on your second novel and when you decided you got this notion for Challengers and you put the book aside and started working on that, is that accurate?

Justin: Yes.

John: What was the spark idea in Challengers? What was the thing, like, “Oh, this is the central idea. This is a movie rather than a book,” shat was it about it that caught your attention?

Justin: It was 2018 and I just happened to turn on the US Open. It was in the middle of it. There was this match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in the final. There was this very controversial call from the umpire where he accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Up to that point, I had not been a massive tennis fan or a sports fan even. Tennis wasn’t a big part of my life. I just happened to turn this on.

Immediately that struck me as this intensely cinematic situation, that you’re alone on the court and there’s this one other person in this massive stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do and that’s the person you can’t talk to.

John: Wow.

Justin: Immediately it just clicked for me, “Well, what if you really needed to talk about something, and what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was about the two of you and what if somehow it involved the person on the other side of the court?” That all came like right away, but I didn’t sit down to write the movie for a long time. For a couple of years, I was doing other stuff. In that time, I became a legitimate obsessive tennis fan.

Originally I thought I was doing research, but then it morphed into just a new fandom. There’s a lot of exciting energy about being a fan of something for the first time. It felt like discovering movies for the first time.

John: Yes.

Justin: Just like when you meet a young cinephile and they’re like, “Have you heard of this movie, The Godfather?” or something. I was watching Roger Federer and Djokovic matches from Wimbledon and being like, “This shit is amazing.” I was doing a lot of research that didn’t even feel like research. It just felt like fandom, to the point that I almost didn’t even want to write the script because I knew it would ruin it.

John: Did it ruin it?

Justin: Of course. Yes, it did. I still watch the Grand Slams, but my love for tennis is not as pure as it once was.

John: For sure. When did you start writing the script for Challengers and how did you start writing it? Did you outline it? Did you know what the movie was and just sat down to create scenes?

Justin: I knew a lot about the movie. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to move. But I knew the structure because– The impulse to write the movie in the first place was that I was watching a lot of tennis and I started asking myself this question, which was, “What could I write that would be as good as tennis?” Because tennis was so good.

Then next to that, there was this question of, “What would make tennis even better?” For me, the answer to that question was, “It would be better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody.” If I could have somebody whispering into my ear, “Here’s why this point matters so much.” From that, the structure of dropping people into a tennis match and then gradually revealing why these people were looking at each other like this was so serious, even though it was this low-stakes thing, technically. That all felt like a natural outgrowth of my desire to write the thing in the first place.

John: You’re focusing on that moment between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. What was actually really happening in that moment? You couldn’t know, but as the storyteller, you could figure out motivations behind what was really happening in that match.

Justin: Yes. Of course, what happens in Challengers is nothing to do with Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. The more I read about actual athletes, the more I’m convinced that they’re very boring people, in the most part, just like writers are very boring people for the most part.

John: Yes, absolutely. But from when you first started, you knew that there was going to be a central match that we would be pinging back and forth into.

Justin: Yes.

John: Did you have a grid outline of, “This is how we’re moving forward in time,” or did that all evolve organically?

Justin: Yes and no. I knew the container of the time period. I knew that it would be roughly from 18 to mid-30s because that’s the lifespan of an athlete. If you think of an athletic career as a mini life, it starts when you’re born, when you’re 18 and you’re dead when you’re useless, when you’re 35, or 40 if you’re lucky. So I knew that would be the timeframe of the movie, but I didn’t know when I started writing exactly where I would jump back to when.

John: Let’s take a look at some stuff on the page. This is from the very first page of the script. We’ll start with this one. This is a script we found. It’s labeled 2021, but this could have been earlier than that. This is the one that ultimately ended up on the blacklist.

Justin: Yes, this is the first draft.

John: First draft. When you say first draft, this is probably the first draft of something you would actually show to a person.

Justin: Yes. This movie was weird, in that I wrote the first draft of it towards the end of 2021. Then the distance between that and us being in pre-production was five or six months, which is crazy. That’s because I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor. They quickly sent it to Zendaya because they had made all the Spider-Man movies together. She said she wanted to do it. She needed to make a Dune: Part Two in June so we had to make it before then.

John: Little window there.

Justin: There was no development process. We went into pre-production with this first draft and then ended up having what would have been the development process during pre-production.

John: Well, great because we’re going to talk about some scenes later on that changed a lot.

Justin: Great.

John: I really want to get into this. Let’s start with, we often do a three-page challenge on the podcast where we talk about the first three pages of listener scripts and talk through what’s working and what’s not working on the page.
Yours, it starts with Set 1 at the very top. Donaldson 0-0, Zweig 0-0. Exterior, a tennis court in New Rochelle late afternoon. Would you read us through the character descriptions for these three main people we’re going to be here?

Justin: Sure. Yes. Tashi Donaldson, 33, Black, a former player, sits looking out at the court where two men stand across the net from one another, looking like they are about to fight to the death. Patrick Zweig, 32, Jewish, scrappy, ranked 201 in the world, has the face of a man who’s been beaten down by this sport one too many times. He wears a mishmash of clothes from different companies. He’s got no sponsorship deal, though he has somewhat haphazardly ironed to his shirt the name and logo of a random Italian company, Impatto. Art Donaldson, 33, Wasp, good-looking, is the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. His shocking presence at this rinky-dink tournament is the sole reason why the modest venue is packed with locals, tourists, and anyone living in the vicinity of New Rochelle who is even remotely interested in tennis. He wears a pristine Nike outfit that practically glistens in the hot summer sun.

John: Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this page that we’re talking through. These three character names, they’re all bold-faced. People can see right now, these are our three main characters. I think it’s the only bold-facing you’re doing of characters in the script, basically.

Justin: Yes.

John: This is your trio. This is who you’re following here. These are chunky descriptions, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that’s not filmable, and yet feels really crucial. We often talk on the podcast about what’s cheating and what’s not cheating. There’s stuff here that we can’t quite know. We can’t know that he’s the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. We can’t know that as an audience watching this but we’re going to find it out soon enough. It’s going to become clear as we go through stuff.

You’re also giving us physical details that do help us see the difference. We can see Patrick’s scrappiness. We can see the difference in clothing level here. We get some sense of what this is.

Let’s jump ahead to the For Your Consideration script because you’ve made some tweaks to this. You were talking with Amy Pascal, Luca, and other folks here, and you maybe made some adjustments about what you’re really going to see.

The first description of Tashi is she’s two years younger. She’s wearing sunglasses now, which became iconic, became very, very important. The description of Patrick is a little bit different between the two. He’s now ranked 271 in the world. We’ve gotten rid of the, “Beaten down by the sport too many times.” We still have this idea that his clothes have no sponsorship deal. In both cases, he’s ironed on this logo for Impatto.

What else do we notice the difference between? Art is pretty much the same here. You’re still giving us this story of why people are here that’s not quite filmable, but we’re going to figure that out over time. Looking at these two pages, do you remember typing any of these changes?

Justin: Every one of them. Yes, of course. It’s the difference between– I think a screenplay is always two things. It’s always supposed to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience, but then it also becomes this very practical document that serves as an invitation for hundreds of different people to do their jobs.

John: Yes.

Justin: When you get into pre-production with a script, you’re really starting to realize that you have to put everything in there that someone’s going to create. Then that gets informed by the knowledge and the artistry that everybody else is bringing to it. For example, the sunglasses. By the time I had done these changes, we had already done the costume fittings. Jonathan Anderson, our costume designer, and Luca had put Zendaya in these amazing sunglasses for this opening scene. So I wanted to put that in the script to make sure we didn’t forget that those were going to be there because she was also going to have business with them and take them off and signal where she was at emotionally through what she was doing with her sunglasses. In a way, it was like this armor that she had.

John: Yes, 100%.

Justin: I made them all the same age for a number of reasons. I think it’s a tricky movie to cast in that the characters have to go from teenager to 30, and we didn’t want to cast two sets of actors. That idea was floated for a second before even Luca came aboard, Amy and I talked about it. We quickly realized we shouldn’t go down that road. Making the ages slightly lower made it so that we could cast people plausibly.

What else changed? 271 in the world, that’s a note from our tennis consultant, Brad Gilbert. If you follow tennis, he’s a legend in the tennis world. He used to be Andre Agassi’s coach. Most recently, he coached Coco Gauff when she won the US Open. When I explained to him and when he read the script, the position of Patrick in the world of tennis and how down on his luck he was, Brad was like, “Well, 201’s not that bad, but 271, then you’re getting into the territory that you want this guy to be in, where it costs more to drive to the tournaments than it does to win the tournament.” That was really the scrappy world of the lowest rungs of professional tennis that I wanted to show with Patrick.

John: Talk to us about your tennis expert here, because reading through the Blacklist script, the tennis is good. I totally believe the tennis. It’s probably written as a person who’s been watching a lot of tennis, but what were some of the things that the tennis expert could say about the 201 versus 271? What are some other things along the way that became important?

Justin: There’s countless things, but I’ll tell you some of the ones that are at the top of my mind. For example, I had in the Black List script, the first draft, that two weeks before the US Open, Art was at the Winston-Salem Open, and Brad read the script and went, “The schedule wouldn’t work out. It’s too close. Atlanta would work, but Winston-Salem, he wouldn’t be able to drop out and get a wild card in this other tournament.” Stuff like that is big.

Then probably the most useful thing that I did with Brad is that before we went into pre-production, Brad and me, and this guy, Mickey Singh from ESPN, went through every point that gets played in the script. Mickey’s job is to notate highlight reels. He breaks down points as a script, basically, so that the editors for the highlight reels know what to do. Mickey went through the script with me and broke all my points. Brad would critique them and go, “He wouldn’t go inside in there, he would go inside out,” or, “He’d go down the line,” or stuff like that.

John: Now, were these people also involved on set in terms of figuring out the tennis that was being played and the simulation of the actual matches?

Justin: Brad was essential for all of that because Brad was also the person who found us our tennis doubles. He was the person who brought those guys to Boston and then had real tennis pros play through the points so that Luca, our DP, and me could go around and Luca could shot list. We really treated the tennis in the movie like we were shooting fight sequences, like an action film. When you watch the movie and Luca’s doing 100 setups for a tennis point, that’s all storyboarded. That was only possible because we had these real tennis pros playing through everything. Brad was amazing for that.

Then also connecting us with real lines people and umpires. Everybody you see in the movie who’s working the match, that’s their job.

John: Great. That helps. Let’s go to a scene that didn’t change as much between the two drafts, but it also, I think gives a good example of you have a scene on the page, but then actually as you shoot it, things just drift and change a bit.

Justin: Great.

John: Here we actually have audio that we can play.

Justin: Amazing.

John: This is a scene early on in the movie. Patrick Zweig is trying to check into a hotel and his credit card is being declined. Let’s take a listen.

Patrick Zweig: I’ve been driving all day. I’m exhausted.

Motel Receptionist: If we gave out a bed to every tired person who walked in here asking for one, we’d be a homeless shelter, not a business.

Patrick Zweig: Listen, I’m a tennis player. You know the tournament down the road?

Motel Receptionist: Oh, that thing at the country club.

Patrick Zweig: Right, you get $7,000 if you win and you get money just for qualifying. I need a place to stay tonight so I can rest before my first match.

Motel Receptionist: I’m sorry. I need a card on file.

Patrick Zweig: What if I signed a racket and gave it to you?

Motel Receptionist: Sir? Sir, I don’t know who you are.

Customer 1: Look at this guy. He’s a disaster.

Customer 2: I don’t know. I think he’s kind of cute.

Customer 1: Carl. He smells.

Patrick Zweig: The racket alone is worth like $300.

Motel Receptionist: We need a card that works.

John: All right. We’re looking at a scene. It’s on page 10 of the original script in the blacklist version. Could you read just this Scene 13, give us a setup for where we are?

Justin: Yes. The actual–?

John: Yes.

Justin: Interior roadside motel, New Rochelle, same time. Patrick is standing at the reception desk in a soul-crushingly sad motel lobby, the kind of place you pass on the highway and wonder who stays there. It’s about as far as you can get from the fancy hotel room we just left. His card has just been declined.

John: Fantastic. Really great descriptions of what this feels like. You’ve, of course, broken the cardinal sin. You said the word “we” in the scene description, which we fully applaud. People will say that you should never say “we”.

Justin: Yeah, I never got that memo.

John: “We” is fully appropriate. We as an audience, as a movie, we’re just at a place and now we’re here. Craig and I both strongly believe in saying we here, we see, we are.

Justin: Me too.

John: Yes. It makes sense. The scene that is in the Blacklist, it’s the same basic content, but it’s not the same lines. Things are in some different orders. Why I picked the scene is because it’s clear that this is– Is your film a comedy?

Justin: I think it’s funny, yes.

John: It’s funny but it’s not hilariously ha-ha funny. It’s not joke funny but it’s funny. This is an example of the movie is funny. You’re putting people in situations that are familiar and uncomfortable. Getting your card declined, we understand what he’s trying to do and we also see the comedy around it.

Justin: Right.

John: This is the original version. Now let’s take a look at the for consideration, which is not quite the scene that we just heard either. There’s some changes that must have happened after that point.

The addition of the guys who come in,–

Justin: The couple.

John: The couple who come in later on, which in the for consideration, they don’t have dialogue, also they got some dialogue on the day.

Justin: It’s insert dialogue. It was stuff that I had written for them on the day or before the day. I don’t know what your philosophy is with putting that stuff in a script. I think for the flow of reading a script, it often doesn’t feel right to put that stuff in there because it’s not the main drive.

John: What’s so interesting is that because we’re pulling this out of the For Your Consideration script, it’s a question of should the For Your Consideration script accurately reflect the actual movie that’s on the screen-

Justin: Totally.

John: -or what the intention was? There’s no clear consensus on what it’s supposed to be.

Justin: It’s a very particular fake document, right?

John: Yes.

Justin: Because a shooting script is a script. It’s a practical document in some way, but that doesn’t often translate to the best reading experience.

John: 100% because there were scenes that were added or omitted. There’s all these blank little pieces.

Justin: Yes, there’s stars all over the place. It’s gross.

John: Yes. But then if you think of the ideal sort of For Your Consideration script would reflect– If scenes moved around, those scenes should move around in the script too so it reflects that. In this case, that couple that was added in or the other changes that happened, what do you remember about why those things shifted and how they shifted?

Justin: The couple was something that– Luca is always trying to give texture to everything. Even in a relatively straightforward scene in any of his movies, there’s always five things going on. He shoots a lot of inserts of a prop or of a piece of set dressing that you wouldn’t think should be highlighted. Then because it is, it all of a sudden puts the whole scene into this different context. Those guys, when we were building the world of that motel, we were talking about who could be populated in there. He offhandedly said there should be a gay couple road-tripping across America. I took that and wrote those lines for those guys with it.

Then, I think I had COVID when they shot that scene so I wasn’t on set. Then when they were editing it, I wrote some more like ADR lines for them for when they’re off-screen where they’re complaining about, “This place doesn’t look like the description online,” and all of that. It’s like a little pocket of a movie where you remind yourself that there’s a world going on that doesn’t care about these characters. For somebody like Patrick, that stuff is especially important because so much of his experience of moving through the tennis world is that nobody gives a shit. He’s always inconveniencing people with his existence because that’s what it’s like to be ranked 271.

John: Let’s talk about the scene and its importance overall in understanding Patrick and his motivation. It feels like it’s a scene you could cut. But if you did cut it, I would understand less about him. What’s nice about the scene is he has a clear motivation. He’s trying to get a room for the night and it ties into his bigger motivation, which is basically, “I need to be part of this tournament. I need to win.” He’s already envisioning himself winning this thing, or at least placing high enough that he’s going to have the money to do this thing. It tells us a lot about him in a short as a one page, and change scene.

Justin: If it’s a movie about two sides of a rivalry or two sides of a match, where those people are coming from is really important in establishing what’s at stake for each of them, and the texture of them ending up facing each other. I think also with Patrick, at this point, you don’t know that he comes from wealth either, it’s a bait-and-switch in some way in that you think, “Oh, this is a really down-on-his-luck broke guy.” Then you learn later on that, actually, he could end this misery in a second if he just called Mom and Dad.

Maybe this is true for you too, that you get inspiration from unexpected places and the genres that you wouldn’t think about when you’re– With this movie, even though it’s a sports movie, with Patrick’s story, I was thinking a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis.

John: Oh, yes.

Justin: I was thinking of Patrick as Inside Llewyn Davis of tennis.

John: First time I saw Oscar Isaac was in that movie. Yes, so good.

Justin: There’s something about that guy because he has so little of a handle on his own life, he’s always like pissing off everybody who shows him kindness.

John: You mentioned Inside Llewyn Davis, but what other movies resonated for you with this? Because I was thinking Broadcast News in the sense of there aren’t a lot of movies I can point to that are three-handers where it’s not just this main couple, but it’s the interplay of the three of them. What were the other things that were touchstones for you?

Justin: Carnal Knowledge and just Mike Nichols’ work in general was a real touchstone for me with this, Closer to some extent. Then there’s the great history of movies about love triangles like Y Tu Mamá También or The Dreamers or Band of Outsiders, or Jules and Jim, which came in to some extent.

In terms of sports movies, I think the ones that ended up meaning the most to me when I was thinking about this movie were movies like He Got Game, where, if you think about the final game of that movie, it’s a game between two guys who, if somebody was walking by on the street and they saw them playing, they would think this was just a pickup game between a father and son, if they even knew that much. They would have no idea that their whole lives were at stake.

I think for me, that’s always so much more interesting and dramatic than a movie about the NBA Finals. If I wanted to experience the drama of the NBA Finals, I would just watch the NBA Finals and it’s going to be better than a movie about the NBA Finals. Stuff like that. Bull Durham.

John: Bull Durham, another great reference because you have–

Justin: And another great three-way triangle movie.

John: Absolutely, there’s a sexual component to it that feels specific. Let’s talk about three-way sexual encounters. A scene that’s not in your Black List script, but it’s sort of iconic in the movie itself, which is the teenagers all get together in the boys’ hotel room and they have their kiss. What is the origin of that scene?

Justin: So Luca read this script. Amy was on board, Zendaya was on board. Luca was like this dream director for us. We sent it to him and he read it and we talked on the phone towards the end of 2021. Then like a week later I was on a plane to Milan to just spend some time with Luca and see if we could be in the trenches together right away because we knew that was how we were going to have to make this movie. We were going to have to really be comrades right away.

During those first days in Milan, we were talking about the script and one of the first conversations we had was that Luca said this thing that was really phrased beautifully, which is that, in a love triangle, all the corners should touch. When I heard that initially, I thought, “Well yeah, they do. These people are all very involved in each other’s erotic, emotional, and psychological lives. They’re really deep in each other’s shit, all these people, so they’re touching.”

John: But literally touching.

Justin: Yes, exactly. Luca was like, “No, no, no, literally.” The moment I heard that, I was electrified by it, I thought it was an incredibly exciting idea. My task then became finding a way for that to happen that felt organic and earned and that felt like it was coming out of the characters and the situation that was already there and not like something that I was imposing on them, for sensationalist sake or something. Then it became a process of figuring out where, how, and what kind of runway I would need to give that so that it felt like it had always been in the movie.

John: I thought it had always been in the movie. As I was reading through the blacklist script, I kept waiting for, “They had this scene at the party and this, and why did they omit that?” It felt missing. It felt like you already had the runway there. You just hadn’t put the plane on there to take off.

Justin: That came out of lots of conversations with me and Luca and then with our producers. Eventually, when I landed on putting the scene there and having it be an outgrowth of when they first met each other when they were kids, it felt so natural. It was a 20-page addition to the script.

John: It’s about seven pages is the actual scene-

Justin: The actual scene.

John: -but it becomes a hugely important part of a big chunk of the early section of the movie. We should note that your blacklist script is 128 pages, but the final shooting script is quite a lot shorter. Obviously some stuff got cut, but this was a huge addition. Let’s talk through this addition. Did you just go off and write up a scene and send it through and say this is the plan? What was the conversation?

Justin: when I was in Milan, I wrote a first pass at that scene in a different place and Luca and I were both really excited about the scene, but the more we looked at it, the more we realized that where I had put it, it’s like a bomb that you’re dropping in the movie and it can really throw into a disarray the delicate structure of the rest of it. We knew we didn’t want to change that. We wanted to keep the structure of the movie as it was. I needed to find a place to put this that didn’t throw everything out of balance. This finally felt like the right place for that.

John: Great. Had you tried to put it earlier or later? Where were you trying to slide it?

Justin: Later.

John: I could see why that wouldn’t work. It feels like what’s good about the scene is that it has that teenage energy. It has that each of them on the time, be an energy, which is they’re very horned up. There’s a woman here who’s willing to be there with them.

Justin: What’s important about it being where it is that they don’t know, or they don’t have the tools to know the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t know the implications of what this is going to do to their lives together. Because it’s coming from this place of innocence and from this place of genuine excitement and curiosity about each other. They don’t have a sort of adult judgment of each other or of themselves.

It was also exciting realizing if I put the scene here, because part of my hesitation with having the scene in the movie, even though I was excited by the idea of it, part of my hesitation with it for people who’ve seen the film is that I always thought of the ending as the consummation of their relationship. That that was finally the moment when they all come together. I didn’t want to take the wind out of that. I didn’t want to zap the energy out of that. Every other place I thought about putting this scene felt like it did, but somehow putting it at the very beginning made that feel like a return.

John: It makes it feel foundational, like part of the journey that they’re going on.

Justin: Yes, exactly.

John: They had this thing. The scene itself feels like a play. It feels like you could actually stage this as a little one-act, one-scene thing because it’s just the three characters in a room. They’re having a conversation. There’s builds, there’s developments, there’s things that happen along the way. At any point, someone could pull the rip cord, but they don’t pull the rip cord. It feels like your playwriting background kicks in there. It’s also just a really long scene. Did you get any pushback from movie people or from the Amy Pascals of the world of, “This is a really long scene”?

Justin: No, Amy was amazing in that respect. She really wanted the scene to be as whatever it had to be. Strangely we had no pushback. Then I think the way that Luca ended up shooting the scene, it’s still intensely cinematic.

John: Oh yes. This is your first collaboration with Luca, but then you ended up going on into doing Queer. Talk to me about the transition between Challengers and Queer and how those two things came to be.

Justin: We were on set for Challengers and working very closely together, me as the writer and him as the director. One day Luca gave me the book for Queer and just said, “Read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me.”

John: It’s a novella. It’s a short and it’s–

Justin: It’s about 100 pages, the book.

John: It’s a Burroughs book that was published much later than it was actually written. It’s set in 1950s Mexico, but came out in 1985?

Justin: Yes, exactly. He wrote it in the ‘50s, it got published in the ‘80s and Luca had read it in the ‘80s when it came out in Italy, as a teenager and he had been wanting to make this book into a movie since then. I felt this tremendous honor, but also this tremendous responsibility to write him the movie he had been dreaming about. Which was heavy.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Justin: I read the book that night and immediately said yes. Then after saying yes, figured out how I was going to do it.

John: Those are good experiences when you know you have to do a thing and then you figure out as you’re doing it, you’re building the plane to do it. What was the writing process for that? He loved it. He must have come in with some ideas of what was important for him, but he also needs to give you the space to actually write a movie, movie. What was the process?

Justin: It was really different from Challengers, obviously, because that was a movie I wrote on spec before I knew Luca and before I knew any of the people who made it with me. Queer before I even started putting pen to paper, Luca and I got to talk about it a lot because we were on set together, we were hanging out a lot and we would just talk about Queer and the cinematic possibility of the book. We got to work out a lot of the vision for how this was going to be different from the book and how it was going to honor the book before I even started writing. Then I started writing the bulk of the scenes while we were on set for Challengers and then really finished it right after we wrapped.

John: Like Challengers, it had a lot more on-screen sex than we’re used to in movies these days. I want to talk about that because in both cases we’re sort of used to seeing sex on streaming series. We’re used to seeing sex on our own TV screens. We’re not used to seeing it in a public place. Seeing Challengers on the big screen with an audience, it was fun because people are gasping like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that this thing, this thing is happening.” There’s that nervousness of like, “Oh my God, sexy things are happening on this big screen while I’m around all these other people.”

It’d be so uncomfortable to see it like with your mom sitting next to you.

Justin: I was at the premiere next to my stepmom.

John: Absolutely. It’s good stuff. It’s perfect. Was your stepmom also at Queer, the screen–

Justin: She was, yes, but I didn’t sit through.

John: That’s a challenging one. Talk to us about like what your, what your instincts are about terms of showing sex on screen and, in both cases, there’s– what I liked about what you’ve done in both movies is that you’re showing us the awkwardness and the transition moments between we’re all in our clothes and now we’re actually doing this thing. It’s not cut two and now we’re underneath the sheet.

Justin: I grew up starting to really watch movies in the ‘90s when there was a tradition in action movies of the sex scene would happen and the music would start to play and it would have no dramatic point.

John: A little saxophone.

Justin: A little saxophone, or take my breath away or whatever. It’s sexy and almost just felt like it was a montage that was a placeholder. That feels completely cinematically dead to me. In the case of both Challengers and Queer it was really important to me that any intimacy that was on screen was always revealing of character. That drama was happening there. There was something at stake for people there because then it feels essential, it feels like the movie is still going on, you’re not watching a break from the movie. As long as that’s the case, then anything is worth taking the time to show, but otherwise, it’s not.

John: Some of my movies have sexual content on the go, have some sexual content and that’s fun. It’s always so awkward to write and discuss and have the conversation about this is what I see happening here. This is how it’s all going to go into play. Then you have to have a conversation with the director about it and then with the actors about it, how this is going to play. What I think is so important about what you’re describing is the characters have agency within the scenes. The characters are making choices within the scenes. It feels like it’s a natural thing that would have happened next, and yet they’re still alive. They’re not these robots going through it. That’s tough.

Justin: In terms of writing the description of it, I agree. It’s completely embarrassing to write that, but at a certain point, you have to feel like, “I’m going to ask people to perform this, and I’m going to ask people to light this and there’s going to be a guy holding a boom mic for this, and Luca’s going to have to shot list this.” So if I’m asking all of those people to very practically make this happen, I can’t take comfort in being vague on the page. It’s not just cowardly, but it’s irresponsible.

John: It is.

Justin: It’s really irresponsible to give people a vague sex scene and go, “Have at it.”

John: There was a script I was handed early in my career to do a rewrite on and it was a movie that had cars throughout it. There was a bunch of car racing and car chases in it. At a certain point, halfway down a page, the screenwriter of that script would say, “Now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. I won’t bother describing it because it wouldn’t do it justice, but it’s really, really awesome.” I’m like, “You have abdicated your fundamental responsibility here.”

Justin: Yes. It’s like, “Fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? We have to go into production with this.”

John: Yes, absolutely. We need to know what is actually happening here. I think both in your tennis and in your sex scenes, I respect that they’re telling you what’s really going to happen. Obviously, everyone can bring their own expertise to it, but you get to see what is actually going to be happening on screen.

Justin: Yes, but that’s the dance you always have to walk in a screenplay, which is give enough information that people can see the movie in their minds when they read the script because the movie is happening visually. If you don’t put that information in, you’re not writing the script. But also leave it open enough that people can bring themselves to it and their own artistry. That’s a thing that took a while for me to figure out. It is something I’m always negotiating every time I’m writing something.

John: We have one question from our listeners, which I thought was especially appropriate for you. Drew, could you help us out here?

Drew: Yeah, of course. Jeremy writes, “A frequent conundrum in my writing is when I need characters to talk through a conflict. I’m decent at knowing my character’s objective and having their actions work towards those objectives, but I struggle having them navigate towards those objectives via dialogue. I’m not an elegant debater or salesman, and it makes sense that my characters, by extension, are not either. My absolute worst-case scenario would be writing a character trying to seduce someone. How do you get your characters to employ social graces or charms that you yourself don’t have?”

John: I can think of both in Challengers, there’s a lot of discussion debate, and trying to pull persons to one side or the other. Then also in Queer, Daniel Craig’s character is trying to seduce Drew Starkey’s character and fumbling at it and really having a hard time knowing where he’s at with that. Think about what are the challenges of figuring out that negotiation from inside a character’s point of view. How are we doing that?

Justin: With Challengers, I think it’s a movie that essentially only has three characters, which I think was a carryover from my experience being a playwright for so many years. You get it ingrained in yourself that you should only write parts that you feel really great about asking somebody to show up 100 times to perform, which is why there are so many plays with only three or four characters. So when there’s a movie with only three characters, the whole movie operates on the different ideology and philosophy and way of moving through the world of those people and how they rush up against each other, and sometimes, sympathetically and sometimes antagonistically.

I think ideally before you even start writing dialogue, you know enough and the audience knows enough about where everybody’s coming from so that by the time they open their mouths, we already know their point of view. We already know what’s at stake. We already know why they’re in opposition. For me, that’s why I spend a lot of time describing what somebody’s wearing in the opening page of a script, because you get a lot of visual information for free in a movie, right at the top that sets you up so that when a character opens their mouth, even if they’re saying something as banal as the kind of things you have to say in tennis like, “Let’s go,” or “Come on,” because that’s the limit of sports vocabulary because you’ve done all this work that’s not about dialogue, that dialogue means something and you know where they’re coming from when they say that.

I think it’s really tough in a movie to work through who somebody is through dialogue as a starting place because you just don’t have the space for it. Ideally in every scene, by the time somebody is talking, that’s the last piece of information we’ve gotten about who they are.

John: I think you’re exactly right. It’s that you can’t know what the dialogue is until you actually really know what’s happening behind the scenes. What are those inner gears that are turning?

Way back when, when I did my very first TV show, which was a disaster, mind you, but an exercise I did for myself, that was really helpful was, of the five main characters, I would write paragraphs about how they thought about a certain topic. I would give a topic and I’d just write in their voice how they thought about that topic. It gave me a sense of how their brain works, what their priorities are, what their intentions are when discussing a thing, and got me closer to what their voices are, what their speaking voices were like because I understood what their philosophy was like behind the scenes.

Then when I have the characters in scenes together, it felt natural for them to be going back to their principles and how their brains work that’s creating that dialogue. The challenge is you both want it to feel completely understandable how they got there and still surprise your audience. You still need them to say things that are interesting and provocative and surprising. It’s making sure that people don’t just feel like they’re on their rails, but they really are live in that moment, and that that’s the balance that Jeremy, I think, is struggling to find.

Justin: That’s what’s difficult about screenwriting.

John: That’s the hard thing about screenwriting.

Justin: I feel that’s something I think every screenwriter is always dealing with. You don’t get to choose which parts of it come easily to you. I think screenwriting is one of those forms where it’s all right if some part of it is really difficult for you because everybody has one part of it that’s really difficult for them and they’re all equally important. I think dialogue is actually less than 10% of a screenplay. For me, I’m thinking a lot more about structure than I am about dialogue. Maybe that’s because structure is harder for me and dialogue is easier.

John: We’ve had a lot of people in your seat who are in the same situation or they can write dialogue all day, but they really struggle to figure out how stories fit together. Other people have got really good puzzle pieces fit together, but it’s harder for them to individualize different characters’ voices. It sounds like Jeremy’s in that second bucket, but that doesn’t make you a bad screenwriter. It just means that some stuff’s harder for you than others.

Justin: Not at all. There are moments writing where I would trade a great dialogue scene for being able to figure out a structural problem that’s been plaguing me for three weeks. We don’t get to choose our fate in that way.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a really unimportant, but this is something you may have noticed as you were driving around Los Angeles this week is, sometimes you pass by a strip mall or mini-mall and the signs look like they were on fire. It looks like they’ve been burned. They’re brown and yellowed and like, “What happened?” I got curious, and so I Googled and it was actually hard to find the answer, but I actually now know what’s happening is that it’s not the lighting behind it. It’s the actual, the vinyl, and the plastic that they’re printing on. They’re printing on a cheap plastic.

I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this Australian article that’s talking about what’s actually happening to the signs. Basically, it’s just sunlight damage that is breaking them apart. Now that I’ve mentioned it, if you were in Los Angeles or some other sunny environment, you’re going to see this constantly. Where it’s cheap signs and it’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon. If you, like, signs that have been up there for 10 years–

Justin: The way they used to make signs was more craftsmanship.

John: Absolutely. They swapped out to sometimes a cheaper plastic and it’s just disintegrating. Now you know what’s happening with all the weird burnt-brown signs in Los Angeles.

Justin: I feel like that’s a really real thing that the way things used to be built was better. I think that’s been true forever, but that’s just a product of globalization.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think somebody found a cheaper way to make those signs. It was like, “Oh great, it looks really good,” not realizing like, “Oh, it’s going to fall apart in a year.”

Justin: Of course. But then they’ll have to order more signs. Keep the gravy train going.

John: Justin, what do you have for us?

Justin: My one cool thing is a podcast that’s run by some friends of mine called Know Your Enemy. They’re pretty left-leaning journalists guys. They do deep dives on conservative thinkers throughout the years. Sometimes it’s very contemporary people who are a part of making really major decisions that will have big ramifications for people right now. Sometimes it’s really far in the past and doing a deep dive on the theory of some important conservative thinker. I’ve found that really useful for myself.

John: Know Your Enemy, a podcast.

Justin: Know Your Enemy.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for a weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on YouTube and other video things. Justin, thank you so much for coming in.

Justin: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Justin, so one thing we allotted in your description of all the work that you were doing before this time is in addition to all your writing, you were also doing these little YouTube videos. The first one was Potion Seller. Talk to us about this character and what the idea was behind these.

Justin: Those I started making when I was in college, I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis, which ended up being the first play that I did off-Broadway. I was working really hard on this thing and treating it very seriously. Then at night when I was exhausted from that, as a way to blow off steam, I started playing around with the photo booth app on my Mac. And I noticed that if you use the facial distortion thing, you could do more than just one goofy face. You could actually create multiple characters. Coming from the world of theater, that felt to me like it had some relationship with mask work or improv.

I just started messing around on it and then was uploading the videos to YouTube because that was the easiest way to share them with my friends. Then–

John: What year would this have been?

Justin: This would have been 2011 is when I started and I was doing it all throughout that year and then would keep doing it every once in a while. They caught on in a very small way among my group of friends and their satellite of friends. Then a year after I posted one video called Potion Seller, it ended up on a Reddit forum or something. It all of a sudden went semi-viral. Then all of a sudden, millions of people were watching these videos. At that time when that was happening, I had just moved to New York and I was an off-Broadway playwright who was working for months or years on things that if I was lucky, a couple hundred people would see.

The dream that– you’re doing great if 100 people see your work as a playwright. Then I was making these things in five minutes and uploading them that night and they were being watched by millions of people.

John: Was it inspiring or dispiriting?

Justin: No, it was really freeing. It was really amazing because it put everything into perspective for me and made it also simultaneously impossible for me to take myself seriously as a writer or an artist or something because there was this stuff online that was going to be there forever, that completely threw a wrench into that. I really embraced that and made a decision very early on that I was never going to make those videos on any schedule or I was never going to make that into work. That that was never going to be a job. I was never going to cultivate my online content.

John: You were coming into online content manufacturing at a time before there was the TikTok, before there was all those things before it became really possible to commercialize what you were doing. Therefore you’d never had to think of it as work. It was just this thing that you were doing off-on. It was just a side project and a way to blow off steam and just do your own thing. If you were starting now, do you think it’d be easier or harder to put those characters out there in the world, and what would be different?

Justin: What’s funny about those videos now is that sometimes people will reach out to me about them and they’ll talk about when I started making those as the golden age of YouTube. For me, I’m like, “That was only 10 years ago. It’s not that long ago,” but the life of the internet is really fast.

John: It is.

Justin: I think part of the freedom that I felt in making those was that YouTube at that time was like the Wild West, kind of. It felt like the early days of the internet.

John: People didn’t know what to do with it. The first YouTube video is a visit to the zoo.

Justin: There were plenty of people who were doing really interesting things with video online since the beginning of streaming video online.

John: I know Ze Frank, Ze Frank was doing those very early explainer things in the pre-BuzzFeed era. It was himself, but it as a character talking about things. But it was all new.

Justin: It felt like there was no expectation and there was no standard of professionalism. Now there’s a sort of sheen that a lot of the content has. There’s conventions of how those forward-facing videos-

John: Absolutely.

Justin: -work and look and how they’re edited. None of those conventions mattered at that time.

John: Absolutely. Your Potion Seller, it would be a vertical video now. It’s just horizontal because that’s what it was on your laptop.

Justin: It would be vertical. You would keep it under one minute so it can get in TikTok and be on the algorithm or be a YouTube short or whatever.

John: What I do find fascinating is I think there’s– you talk about the conventions, there’s storytelling genres that exist only in an online video and that sense of the space within this one video, but how it pertains to everything else in your grid and how it pertains to this ongoing character is really interesting or reaction videos where it’s like, this is my reaction to what this other thing is or me building upon this other thing. It’s fascinating to watch all those things grow. We have this instinct that we want to tie them back into what we make in film and television. And I think that’s probably the wrong instinct.

Justin: There was a moment when like in a very well-meaning way, my reps would be like, “Make a pilot about the world of Potion Seller or something.” I would like, think about it or try and then quickly realize that’s exactly not the point. The point of this thing is that it’s doing nothing for me professionally, and the point of this thing is that it’s not polished. It exists only in the space that it occupies.

John: Two friends from very different parts of my world. One of whom works with a bunch of online creators who are so good at being able to talk to their audiences and make really amazing things super cheap. They just have all this vocabulary for doing what they do and another friend who has made classic big film and television and the guy who does the online videos, his creators want to bridge over into that space and to tell more sophisticated stories, longer stories, and all that stuff. I’m trying to get them to talk and interface with each other so that they can learn from each other.

But I had to warn both of them, you have completely different words for the same thing. Just make sure you’re defining everything clearly at the start because your instincts, while it’s both telling stories with a camera, everything about it is different. The nature of how you’re approaching this stuff is different. They’re not used to having any gatekeepers at all. It’s so challenging to get them to be on the same page about what it is that they’re trying to do. Yet the online people have a ton of money and so they can do a bunch of stuff.

Justin: For me, it’s all part of the same impulse, I really try not to think of them as separate categories of a creative life. I think they’re all– I enjoy being that confusing to people and to myself. I think it’s a good antidote to a lot of the dark possibilities for the heaviness of this kind of work.

John: For sure. Cool. Justin, thanks so much.

Justin: Thanks for having me.

Links:

• Justin Kuritzkes on Instagram and YouTube
• Challengers and Queer
• Justin’s novel, Famous People
• Challengers – Production Draft
• Challengers – First Draft
• Queer by William S. Burroughs
• Potion Seller
• 3000 Miles to Graceland
• Why does my sign look like it has been burned? by Perth Graphics Centre
• Know Your Enemy podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.