Search Results for: parenthetical

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/how-to-listen).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 438 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about dialogue and specifically about listening. Then we’ll be answering listener questions about submission agreements, strikes, and character POV. And in our bonus segment for Premium subscribers Craig and I are going to talk about the state of the Democratic primary.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Because Craig I was realizing that there are not enough podcasts that talk about politics. It’s really a gap that’s out there in the media landscape. And so I thought maybe we’d do that and we’ll do it just for Premium subscribers so that the rest of the Internet can’t hear it.

**Craig:** Yeah and they won’t. I’m sure it will never get out. RIP our mentions. It’s my new favorite phrase. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. Oy.

**Craig:** Yeah, oy.

**John:** Oh, something to look forward to at the end of the show, but first some follow up. Some follow up from Episode 436. That was the one where Liz Hannah was on. We were talking about How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The last of those was how would this be a rom-com and Craig tell us about the happy endings.

**Craig:** So, you know, you had this married couple, both of them quite beautiful. This was a very good-looking Irish couple. And they were both running for the same office. They were running kind of against each other, so that was the, as the article said, “It sounds like a bad rom-com.” The slight anti-dramatic circumstance of this was that actually there were two seats available and three people were running, so you and I and Liz, I think all three of us thought, you know, of course the movie ends with the two of them winning. And sure enough the two of them won. They were both elected. So they get to go to work together and represent the people of Ireland together. And then they get to go home together. Boy, if they have children those kids are going to look great. God.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Pretty people.

**John:** Good for them. Apparently it was a squeaker of an outcome. And so it was only on a recount or sort of like the subsequent counting of things that she got her seat here. But congratulations to them. Yeah, some version of this kind of story will happen I predict within the next five years. It won’t be based on them specifically but you will see a couple running against each other for political office within five years. I guarantee it.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like where you’re going with this. Well, we kind of have a slight preview of it with the weird relationship between married couple Kellyanne Conway and George Conway.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** Kellyanne Conway the – I don’t know what her job is, Trump Flack I’ll call her – and George Conway, erstwhile conservative, Never Trumper. But they’re married. So, he attacks Trump on Twitter daily. She defends Trump on Twitter daily. And then they go home and just do it like weasels.

**John:** Apparently so. Things we don’t understand but leave them to their relationship.

**Craig:** Whatever it takes, man. You know, I mean, marriage is tough. [laughs] When you’ve been married for a while you’ve got to spice it up.

**John:** Another bit of follow up, Yurian from the Netherlands is a Premium subscriber and he was just listening to Episode 241 in the back catalog. In this episode you and I were discussing a How Would This Be a Movie idea. And I said the following, so let’s play a clip.

“I think the idea of somebody living in your basement is a good starting place for either a thriller or a horror movie, where like somebody in the family thinks there’s something happening in the basement, or the kid sort of sees the person living in the basement and no one else believes him. And like the secret door that he’s hiding behind is so good that you can go down there and you’d swear there’s nobody in your basement. And so you think you’re paranoid. And, of course, there actually is somebody in your basement. And it’s kind of like Panic Room but in reverse.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I predicted Parasite apparently.

**Craig:** You didn’t just predict it. Prediction doesn’t give that justice. You did it. [laughs]

**John:** I did it.

**Craig:** That’s it. I mean, of course Parasite is more than the function of its main plot twist, but you even got down to like the secret door that is so good no one knows it’s there. You got it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** Yeah, this is crazy. And so Episode 241, this is like three, or five years ago? This is a long time back.

**Craig:** Is there any chance that director Bong listens to Scriptnotes and was like, “Hmm…” No.

**John:** No. Of course there’s not. And honestly of course we were talking about a How Would This Be a Movie which was based on a story in the news which actually turned out to be fake about this scientist who was living in the basement. So, absolutely did not come from me. March 16, 2016 was when the episode aired. So, it did not come from that. But it is a good movie idea twist and I was right then and I was right because that movie won Best Picture.

**Craig:** It’s almost like you yourself are some kind of professional writer.

**John:** Maybe so. Maybe like after all of these years of doing Scriptnotes I’ve come to appreciate what makes a good movie idea.

**Craig:** Apparently you had it halfway through all these years of doing Scriptnotes. This is really good. 241. That’s like 30 years ago. Yeah, we were 12 when you did that.

**John:** We were so young. God, I remember – god, do you remember as we were riding our Penny-farthings down the cobblestone streets?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we kept talking about if only there were a way that we could have these conversations but people who weren’t here with us in the room could hear these conversations. And you said, “Listen, Hitler is rising in Germany. That’s really what we’ve got to focus on.”

**Craig:** I was concerned about that. But mostly I just remember that I was delighted by my stick and hoop. Ah, the stick and hoop.

**John:** Nothing really beats a good stick and a hoop.

**Craig:** No. That was the best-selling toy of that year. Stick and Hoop. That’s what kids had. They had a stick and a hoop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** And you know what? I bet it was actually really fun.

**Craig:** It probably was. Probably was pretty good.

**John:** And we’ve not given enough thought to stick and hoop technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stick and hoop tech.

**John:** Last week we were talking about treatments. And this week I actually had follow up on sort of the treatment that I had to write that sort of motivated the whole segment. I had the meeting at the studio to talk through stuff. And I will say that like it was actually a little bit easier getting the notes and processing some of the notes because I wasn’t defensive at all about sort of the script I’d written, because I hadn’t written the script yet. We were just talking about the treatment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in some defense of the stage of writing a treatment and discussing it that way, it was easier for me to think through stuff because I could just say like, OK, so what we need before I actually implement this note and I wasn’t destroying everything I’d actually already done. I was just not doing work I had not done yet. And so that was helpful and constructive on that front.

**Craig:** It is. And I find, too, that when they give notes on these detailed treatments they themselves are less likely to give you the kind of note that would unravel a ton of things because they can see it themselves how it would unravel a ton of things. As opposed to when you’re sort of in a verbal pitch situation and they might not see those ramifications. So I think it helps everybody. I really do.

I was in a situation where I found myself revising the treatment, which I did not love doing, mostly because I just think like, OK, I agree on points A through C. I don’t agree with D. And then E through H sound great. So, I’m going to do those in the script. And then it was sort of like, “Then can you also just do it in the treatment?” OK.

**John:** I actually have a step in this deal where do I have to turn in a revised treatment. So I’m going to do that and it’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be great.

**John:** So it’ll be an even more detailed plan for writing the screenplay hopefully that I’ll get to write.

**Craig:** But this is good. This is a good thing. I like this. I welcome you to the treatment family.

**John:** But I do want to point out a downside, because this is something I’ve heard from several former Scriptnotes producers who are now writers, people tell tale of getting trapped in treatment for forever.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Where you’re constantly revising this document which is not the actual thing you’re trying to make in order please different audiences. And so while I was happy about today’s meeting I definitely can see situations in which it could come into like you never actually get to write a script because you’re always trying to rewrite this treatment.

**Craig:** This is an area where your representative, whether they’re a lawyer or a manager, or a legal agent, should be picking up a phone and saying, “Right, so my client is the most lovely person in the world. They begged me to let them to continue to revise this treatment for you and the 15 other stakeholders in this project. And I said I’m so sorry but no. I’m not going to let them do that. So they’ve gotten all the notes, they get it, it’s time to commence them on the script per the contract.”

I wish that more representatives would do their job.

**John:** That would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So unfortunately sometimes it does fall to you as the actual writer to say enough and I’m done. It’s time to move onto the next step. Advocating for yourself is a tricky thing. It’s a hard thing to learn but it’s also a thing you end up doing at every stage in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pretty much. And part of the job unfortunately of being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s not anything that should be part of our job, it certainly has nothing to do with writing, is the ability to determine exactly where you stand and then apply an amount of leverage and self-advocacy that is concomitant with your standing at that moment. Because a lot of writers push too hard when people actually want to get rid of them. And a lot of writers don’t push hard enough when people are desperate to keep them.

**John:** Yep. It’s absolutely true. And I do have to single out your use of concomitant, because again a word I’ve read and never tried to use in conversation. Well done, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Thank you. And I give it as a gift to you.

**John:** Aw. Thank you. We have talked a lot about assistants and assistant pay this last year on Scriptnotes. A thing we’re going to put out this week, Megana before she left on vacation she reached out to a bunch of people who had written into the show and other assistants she knew asking for their advice to showrunners who are staffing up rooms for the new television season. And so this is advice that assistants, so writer’s assistants, script coordinators, what their advice is for these showrunners and for these rooms as they’re being put together.

We put it together as a little PDF and so people can download it. I’ll also have it up on the website to take a look. But Craig I thought you and I might take a quick look through here and just highlight some of the things that assistants have said.

**Craig:** This is great. First of all, no surprise, it looks beautiful. So well done on the fonts.

**John:** Thank you. That was me.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did a great job there. And I like the fact that you’ve got the headers are Sans-serif and then the actual body text is – I like it when things break up like that. So this looks like the kind of thing that should go on the wall, sort of like the Heimlich poster that goes on the wall in restaurants. So this is great.

The first category is Respect Boundaries. Basically don’t treat your employees like they don’t have a life beyond the job they’re doing.

**John:** Yeah. One piece of advice here I like is don’t procrastinate and stay late and make your staff stay late too. Yeah, you know what? That’s true. As a writer I do procrastinate, but I shouldn’t procrastinate in a way that makes everybody else suffer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like this: don’t use your assistants as emotional support and therapy. Don’t overshare about your life and feelings. So, there’s a show that I’m a consulting producer on called Mythic Quest, which is on the air right now on Apple–

**John:** Congratulations, Craig. I meant to single you out on that. Nicely done.

**Craig:** Is it called Apple Plus? Apple TV? Apple TV Plus? I should probably know this.

**John:** Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** Apple TV Plus. It’s a really funny show. Rob McElhenney and his team have done a great job. Megan Ganz, among others. And there’s a character Carol who is the head of HR at this videogame company. And everybody treats her as their therapist. She’s like, “I’m not – I’m in HR.” People come to her and they’re like, “I’m in love with one of my coworkers. I don’t know how to tell them.” And she’s like, “My god.” “I’m worried that someone is going to report me.” And she’s like, “If they did, I would be the person they would be reporting to. I am not your therapist.”

This is one of those boundary lines that people blithely cross all the time. This is excellent advice.

**John:** I want to say if we keep watching future episodes of the show will we see more of your influence and presence in the show?

**Craig:** You will see my character, Lou, I think he’s in almost every episode in the second half of the season, and I have been told and have no reason to disbelieve that he’s going to be back for quite a few episodes in season two which is currently underway. And, yes, and there’s some other stuff that, yeah, I’ve been helping with with those guys there. They’re great. So, there may be more influence.

My character will never have more than one or two lines. [laughs] I like those characters that just pop in, have one or two lines.

**John:** Yeah. You’re like a Creed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Glenn the Demon on The Good Place. Ah, The Good Place. That was such a nice ending. I really loved it.

**John:** That was so lovely. Yeah.

So, to wrap up with our assistant pay stuff, because we got a little sidetracked there, just really simple advice and we tried to keep it as just short quotes from the actual people. There are 20 assistants who wrote in with their opinions. We sort of chopped it all up and put it into categories. But hopefully this will be useful for assistants to be thinking about, but more importantly for shows to be thinking about as they’re ramping up for this next – shouldn’t even really call it a season. Like, TV just never stops now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But more rooms are being put together in this period than last month.

**Craig:** This is a great document. Just sample headline, “Set Expectations. Tell Us Who is in Charge. Delegate Thoughtfully. Solicit Diverse Perspectives. Give Appropriate Credit. Know How Much We Make. Keep People Healthy. Invite Assistants Inside.” These are all really good things.

And this is an eminently reasonable document. This is not some kind of revolutionary screed. This is something that any decent showrunner would want to do I should think. So, it is well-written and it is followable which is the most important thing. I can’t imagine anybody looking at this and going, “No.”

**John:** “No, none of this.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just like wake up. Get yourself – be a woke showrunner when it comes to your assistants.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s transition to a discussion of dialogue. So this is going to be a craft episode. This is where we’re going to talk about the things that characters say in movies, which is what people outside of the industry think all screenwriters do is just to write the dialogue. That’s all we do, right Craig? We just write the words the pretty people say.

**Craig:** I thought the actors wrote that. I thought they came up with what they say. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right.

**Craig:** I don’t know what we do.

**John:** We write down what they’ve said.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just so that there’s a record of it. Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course. We write down what the director wants to do. You know, in the old movies the director would walk up to the actors and say, “OK, in this scene you’re coming in and you want her to do this. And she’s going to say no to that.” So there’s no script at all and in fact on any given day what you’re shooting is whatever the director imagined. And then the actors make up their dialogue and the director goes, “Cut. Print. Moving on.” Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So when Greta Gerwig was on the show a couple episodes back we were talking about mumblecore which was the movement that she was an important part of. And classically in mumblecore it’s very under-scripted. There’s a plan for sort of what the movie is about. There might be a plan for what the scenes are. But they’re not detailed plans for who is saying what and what’s happening. And so she came out of that movement and I was surprised that as someone who emerged from that movement that she’s so fastidious and meticulous about what the words are on the page and exactly when overlapping dialogue is going to overlap.

And she said that really did come out of the experience of like being an actor who was not given lines to say. She kind of felt boxed in by not knowing what was going to come next. There was not a plan for how to get through stuff. And that she really loves having written dialogue that she can work from so that she can actually find everything else in the scene and not to be worried about, ah, what am I going to say.

**Craig:** I am not surprised by that at all because when you think about the way conversations work in the real world a lot of times one person is just dominating the other. And if you put two characters in a room without a script that has not been balanced and thought through carefully by a screenwriter, one actor may very well dominate the other. And that’s – how is that good for anybody?

**John:** It’s probably not good for anybody. So in this discussion of dialogue I want to start by looking at realistic dialogue. Really how people would speak in the real world. And the way you find out how people speak in the real world is to listen to them. And, you know, you can eavesdrop on people. You can just be paying attention to conversations happening around you. But to really notice people don’t talk in real life the way they do in movies. And when you see movie dialogue that feels artificial, it’s because it’s as if they’re talking in a movie rather than actually how people could speak in real life.

And movie dialogue tends to be an optimization. A synthesized version of real speech. But it has to be based on some real speech. So I thought we’d take a listen to some real life speakers and how they’re doing things. Listen to them and then after each clip talk through what we’re hearing and sort of how we could do that on the page and sort of what lessons we could take from the clip we’ve heard and apply it to the actual dialogue we’re writing.

**Craig:** I love this so much.

**John:** Great. It was actually harder to find some of the stuff than I would have guessed. So, online you can find a lot of examples of recordings of people about their accent and where they’re reading the same text so you can hear specifically how they’re doing diphthongs and upspeak and stuff. But I wanted to hear people talk in sort of more natural conversation. This first one is from a clip about Appalachian English or mountain talk. And so let’s take a listen to this.

**Male Voice:** Everybody hears about Graham County, don’t they? And how good the people is, how they’re happy. I run into people I don’t know, ever seen them in my life. And I help them in any way I can. Somebody the other day said you’ll get knocked in the head. And I said, well, if I do I’m just knocked. It’s just good-hearted. Everybody you meet, just 99% of them. If I didn’t live here I’d move, wouldn’t you?

**Male Voice:** Where you going to go on vacation? If I was going to go on a vacation I’d just stay right on here.

**Male Voice:** Oh yes.

**Male Voice:** On my days off I’m in here.

**John:** All right. So there’s so much to unpack there. And so obviously we should spend a long time on his accent, which is fascinating. But I really want to look at his choice of words and sort of how he’s putting his thoughts together.

That question at the end, like “don’t they” at the end of something. It’s an emphasis. It’s a softener. You know, he’s not speaking in straightforward sentences that end in periods. There’s question marks at the end of things that’s not kind of classically uptalk. You know, his use of the verb to be, he’s using is where we would traditionally use a different form. There’s a lot there that you could write down and it would give you a very good sense of his voice as a character.

**Craig:** Yeah. His sentences, let’s just call them phrases, because sentences is really a function of prose. When we talk we talk in phrases. And his phrases are usually built around a word. So they’re not balanced phrases. They’re leading up to a thing. Like wood. Like carrying wood. Like I’m going to say something about a garbage bag. I’m going to say something about blah-blah. Mountain talk. I love talk by the way. Talk.

**John:** Talk.

**Craig:** Talk. So there’s a certain staccato element to it. And they’re built around a single thing. They’re not complicated in terms of structure. There’s no internal clauses. The sentences are very direct. Very clipped. Love that.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you were to write this kind of character into your script, my instinct would be if he’s using alternate words for places, use those alternate words to reflect what he’s actually doing, but don’t go crazy trying to indicate the dialect and to try to spell things the way he’s saying them. Because that’s only going to be frustrating for the reader. And it’s not actually going to be helpful for the actor or anyone else down the road. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I completely agree. So, what you don’t want to do is get into that weird, because it almost looks like you’re just making fun of it or something. Use the words. I’m a big believer of the flexibility of language when it comes to these things. Obviously I wrote a show where people in Soviet Ukraine were speaking English with English accents. I just think what is the most natural thing to convey – intent. But with a character like this I think it’s fair to use vocabulary, like you say, that we might not know. And then I think about the reader as somebody that just like you when you’re listening to somebody like this instead of stopping them every single time they say a word you’re not quite sure of, you wait. And you try and figure it out yourself using context. And generally speaking we kind of can. So, the point is you got the basic idea, right?

And if you were totally confused then that’s an interesting thing to happen. So you just think how would I actually receive this. Would I be able to piece it together and get the basic idea? Or would I be utterly lost? That’s a good decision that you should make as a writer.

**John:** Another thing to listen for is how a speaker will incorporate other people’s speech into what they’re saying. And so people don’t say like “and then he says blah-blah-blah.” They will actually just shift their voice a little bit to indicate that it’s a different person speaking within their own speech. And so listen for how characters do that in movies, but also how folks do that in the real world. And that a person will be speaking as two different people without necessarily making it crystal clear on the page what they’re doing.

And so what you might end up doing in a block of dialogue is putting some of that stuff into italics to indicate that you’re speaking as the other person. Or sometimes you need to break that out as a parenthetical. But people can convey a surprisingly dense amount of information in what’s actually a very short bit of dialogue there.

**Craig:** My grandparents did this very Brooklyn thing. When they would tell a story about something that happened to them in the past, even like a day earlier, “Oh, I ran into Rose at the market and she says…and I says…and she says…” It was always she says, I says. So says, sez, became this all-purpose describer of her turn to talk, my turn to talk. But it was always there. It was never we’re just going to shift with voices. And it was never I said and she said. It’s the weirdest thing. I remember as a kid just thinking that is bizarre. But they all did it.

**John:** They’re staying in the present tense as they’re narrating a past event. And that’s really common.

**Craig:** But also violating the conjugation of the verb to say.

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Because it’s not “I says.” It was like says became a new way of saying said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very interesting.

**John:** Vernacular is great. Let’s take a listen to this is a woman who has moved to Austin, Texas. I’m not clear where actually she moved from. She’s being interviewed by a person, so it is a little bit more – it’s not a natural conversation, but it reminded me sort of if you were being deposed as a witness. Or often in movie scenes someone has to sort of tell a history of something. And it feels more like that. So, let’s take a listen to this lady from Austin.

**Female Voice:** About eight years ago we picked Austin. We didn’t know anything about Austin. None of us had ever been to Texas. We didn’t even honestly know it was the capitol of Texas. I mean, I’m embarrassed to say, but I didn’t know anything. I thought it was a small town actually. And so we flew to Austin, my husband and I flew to Austin, and we really liked it. And we came here for about a week on our own for our little vacation and then we flew our boys in. They both lived in different places. And we flew our boys in. And so we had a family vacation for a week with just my husband and myself and then a week with our boys.

**Male Voice:** Great.

**Female Voice:** And we all really liked Austin, but yeah, we just thought oh well, Austin. It was just another place we’d, you know, gone. And we went to a lot of the different sites. You know, Lady Bird Lake. And the wildflowers. And we took a tour of the capitol. And we did all kinds of things like that.

**Craig:** So this is not actually a lady from Austin.

**John:** No. It’s a lady who has moved to Austin.

**Craig:** She has moved to Austin. Interesting. So she doesn’t have that classic Texan accent. Even the Austin accent which is quite a bit more muted than like a Houston accent or a Dallas accent. Very singsong-y. Very kind of rambly tale-telling. I like it. Not an efficient talker.

**John:** Well, there is an efficiency, but there’s no periods in that whole clip. She basically–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s as if she never wants to actually finish a thought so somebody else could interject. I also think it’s really interesting how she is continuously clarifying what she just said.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So when we moved to Austin, we moved to Austin, my husband and my boys and I, blah-blah-blah. It’s commas, and commas, and commas. She sort of clarified the thing she just said. Not to soften it but just to paint out the whole picture of stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a kind of indecisiveness going on in there, even the details of the story are somewhat indecisive. We got to Austin and it was just another place. It was just Austin. But as she’s telling it you can kind of feel like she’s building it as she goes and revising it as she goes. And when she makes a list it’s like a this, and then a this, and then a this, and then a this.

Because efficient is not a term of judgment. Efficient would be I visited Austin with my husband. I loved it. I thought perhaps I could live here. I invited my sons. We looked around. And we decided, yes, we want to live her. That is efficient. This is more of a kind of exploration, you know, kind of verbal discovery. Some people discover as they go. And I do think you’ve pointed out something really smart. Some people do speak with a kind of grammatical integrity. I’m aware that I’m one of those people that speaks with a certain grammatical integrity. Most people do not. Most people will stick sentences inside of sentences and then abruptly cut it off and begin something new. And that’s an important part of understanding the music of dialogue.

**John:** A thing that frustrates me often as I read interviews that I’ve done for people is they will try to transcribe literally what I said, which has a lot of ands. Basically one continuous thought that never really stops. And so I will tell people, no, no, it’s OK. You can put in periods in places. Because otherwise it will feel sort of like what this lady was talking about where it just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going. You do sometimes want to provide some structure here.

The other thing I think is important to understand about the context of this, she seems a little bit nervous.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** During this interview. I think that’s part of her rambling is her being nervous. But it’s also a weirdly artificial thing for it to not be a true conversation. If she was doing that and she was in a conversation with somebody, they would talk over the other person, or give “uh-huhs” or affirmatives to keep the flow going. And so she’s trying to keep the flow going by herself and it’s a little bit like dancing by yourself. It’s a little bit awkward what she’s doing.

**Craig:** Yes. There are people that are not comfortable leading a conversation. Just like we were saying some actors could easily dominate another actor if they were all left to their own devices. I suspect that this woman is not comfortable leading a conversation solo like that. This is not somebody practiced in the art of soliloquy.

So, there are moments where I suspect she’s waiting for somebody to jump in and they don’t. And she’s filling space to kind of be able to get to the next thing because she was not necessarily prepared to immediately go to the next thing or explain herself. It can be eerie when somebody asks you a question and then never interrupts you. You start to feel like perhaps you’re slowly hanging yourself because you just keep talking. Because you’re waiting for an interruption that never comes.

**John:** That’s a very classic technique, especially in documentary interviews, where they’ll just let you be silent for a moment. You’ll answer a question and they just won’t put another question back. And so therefore you’re just like I’ve got to keep talking. I’ve got to get stuff out there. It’s a very natural instinct. I remember I had to do a deposition for this legal case and at first I was trying to explain everything. And then in a break the lawyers on my side said you’re trying to explain this as if you’re on a DVD commentary. Don’t do that. Just answer the question in an efficient way as you can and move on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s all about context. I’m sure in other situations she could be much more what we’re saying efficient and direct and not try to keep the conversation going.

**Craig:** But there is a beauty to it. Again, the poetry of somebody stringing it all together in one long melody is really useful. This is very useful. People really should be listening carefully to this. Just so we’re clear about what happens when we read things, and when people in Hollywood receive scripts, the very first thing that will stick out is bad dialogue.

It is not the worst sin that you can commit. Dialogue can be repaired. The worst sin you can commit is a boring story about nothing that matters. But, no one will realize it’s a boring story about nothing that matters on page one. What they will recognize maybe even halfway down the page is that no one sounds like a human being. So this is really important for people to hopefully absorb.

**John:** One thing I should point out here is if you were to put what she said into your script it would be terrible. It would be terrible because it’s not interesting at all. Because I don’t care about anything that she’s saying right there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if she were talking about something interesting and she was talking about it in the way that she’s talking about it there, that could be great. If she had to describe the events of a night, like a horrible thing had happened and she had to describe it and she was using some of that stuff. That would be fantastic. Or if she was trying to conceal something. Love it. That could be great.

**Craig:** Yes. There’s a tendency writers have to convert every human being into a grand orator when it is time to talk about something that is important or hurtful or emotional. Suddenly they become these beautiful speechmakers. That is not how people tell these stories. I’ve listened to people tell heartbreaking stories. And that is when they’re at their most inefficient. And stilting. And self-interruptive. And self-denying and contradicting and fixing and repairing.

It’s what makes us human in those moments. Emotion does not make us more eloquent. It makes us less eloquent.

**John:** Yeah. A great example is the scene in Marriage Story where Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has an incredibly long speech where she’s in the office with Laura Dern. Laura Dern, everything she’s saying is practiced because she’s given that exact same talk a hundred times. Scarlett Johansson’s character is discovering these things for the first time and it’s going to be inefficient, but it’s also going to be emotional and have this ability to cycle back on itself. So both kinds of speech can happen in the same scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are characters, like I think of the character that Jared Harris plays in Chernobyl. He is a scientist and he is someone whose emotions are very bottled up. He’s an emotionally constipated man. And he’s very intellectual. And when it comes time for him to say something important at long last when he does it does have a sort of speech integrity to it because he’s that kind of person. I believe it from him. I don’t think I would believe it from say Stellan Skarsgård’s character. When Stellan Skarsgård’s character, Boris Shcherbina, has a moment where he is emotional and needs to declare something, it comes out as a series of outrageous cursing and then just violence towards a phone. Because he is not an intellectual man. And he does not speak in that way.

It’s just important. It’s one of the ways that we help defeat the most dreaded of notes. “All of your characters sound the same.”

**John:** The worst. So, these were two examples of people speaking by themselves. I was looking for better examples of dialogue and interaction between characters which was surprisingly hard to find until I remembered, oh that’s right, there are podcasts. So this first clip I want to play is from the Las Culturistas podcast is by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. It’s a weekly podcast or semi-weekly podcast. They had Ben Platt on. And so this is the three of them talking. So just notice how they talk over each other. How they acknowledge what the other person is saying. How thoughts don’t get completed and sort of get clarified before the full thing was done. How they know you’re a little bit ahead of where they’re going so they don’t feel like they have to finish thoughts. I thought it was just an interesting clip. So let’s take a listen to this clip with Ben Platt.

**Matt Rogers:** You’re telling me like when you’re like doing a show on a Friday night, are you giving it a little bit more than you are on a Sunday? On a matinee? Tell me.

**Ben Platt:** Uh, it depends. It’s like very specific to the actual night. It depends who I know is in the audience. It depends how many shows are left in the week. Because sometimes, obviously because it’s a Friday night it’s exciting, it is like easier to give more than on Sunday. But also Sunday you have 36 hours ahead of you that are free, so you can kind of give abandon. So it depends. I would say like a Wednesday Matt is not ideal.

**Matt:** Not the best.

**Ben:** To come to, unless you’re like 65 and up.

**Matt:** Yeah. Yeah. And you get that little discount ticket.

**Ben:** There’s definitely like an A, B, C version of the show that you have to have.

**Bowen Yang:** Yes.

**Ben:** This is what I’m doing if I feel completely healthy and I have all of the faculties. And then B is like I’m trying to save a little for something exciting at the end of the week. And C is like I can barely be bothered to be here.

**Bowen:** Oh wow. You’ve like very clearly delineated all of these scenarios though.

**Ben:** Oh yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time in that wonderful show.

**Matt:** In that show. So basically, wait, hold on. So do you usually know when someone notable is coming? And do you prefer to know?

**Ben:** I ask to know. So I would receive like literally like an itemized list before like a half hour every night of everyone that was there. Because at the beginning it was–

**Matt:** You don’t want to go out on stage and then see Beyoncé.

**Bowen:** Right.

**Ben:** One million percent. Like I don’t want to clock Meryl like mid-number. And also like in that show in particular like I spend so much time out at the fourth wall or whatever.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**Ben:** So like I’m going to see. And it’s a small house, so I’m going to see whoever it is. And they’re always in the same like nice house seats. So I love to have all the information. That’s like a theme in my life in general is I like to have all the information.

**Matt:** Please. Beforehand.

**Ben:** Because anything unknown is far more anxiety-provoking to me than just like dealing with what the actual reality is going to be.

**John:** All right. So this feels like three people around a table. You can imagine they’re in a diner and they’re having this conversation. So, it’s a little bit heightened because it’s a podcast and there’s microphones in front of them, but it feels pretty genuine to what they would actually be, how they would actually be talking as a group. And you notice there at the very end Ben Platt starts a word and stops it and just keeps going on. He knows you know what he’s going to say and he can just sort of keep moving on to the next thought.

I also really want to point out how much along the way the other two guys are acknowledging and sort of affirming what he’s saying. They’re checking in that they’re actually hearing and they’re listening to him.

**Craig:** That’s the thing that I picked up on the most. So, first of all, these three guys are young. I mean, they’re not young like children, but they’re younger than we are. So there’s a certain youth to their discussion and it is indicated by energy. They are all three of them very energetic. They are listening intently to each other and their conversation is a little bit, I’m not going to say combat, it’s not competition, but it’s a group sport. They understand, each one of them, that they’re supposed to be talking. Right? No one is just going to be quiet for a while.

**John:** It feels like they’re all learning forward.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re all leaning forward. So, what that means is, and you can tell Ben Platt understands they’re leaning forward and he’s used to it. He’s fine with it. But that means he has to speak really quickly. Listen how fast he’s talking. Because he knows they’re fast. They’re on everything he says. There’s no chance for him to slow down, because immediately one or two of them, Bowen or Matt, or both at the same time will go “Yes.” Which as you point out is affirming. They themselves are playing a role of supportive interviewer who wants to play.

So, they don’t just say yes and then ask a question. They also notice the kinds of things he’s saying and then they kind of kick it back and make a little observation, a slightly humorous observation. This is very naturalistic. Count how many times all of them say the word like. A billion. But it’s not dreadful. It’s not caricature. It’s just a natural sort of use of the vernacular like. And they have no problem interrupting each other. Interruption is almost essential to that kind of discussion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think when we’re talking about natural dialogue I think too often we’re assuming it means slow. That it means it’s paced down and it’s very sort of stuff just comes out when it sort of comes out. This is natural dialogue. People are doing kind of what they would naturally do. But it is pretty fast. It’s like it’s Sorkin-level speed. And the conversation they’re having isn’t exactly sort of what you’d expect in an Aaron Sorkin movie. You can imagine having this kind of discussion in an Aaron Sorkin script.

Now, think about what this would actually look like on the page. You wouldn’t have all of those affirmations being put in as dual dialogue or interruptions there along the way. It would be far too much. But you would need to have some indication that people are freely able to speak over each other and that we’re able to process both conversations happening at the same time. This would be a great example of Greta Gerwig’s script where she does the little slashes in the dialogue to indicate where overlaps are supposed to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This would be great for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it implies a certain kind of direction as well. Because when you are shooting a scene like this, if I’m making a movie and in the movie there’s a scene where Ben Platt, Bowen Yang, and Matt Rogers are discussing how Ben Platt either does or doesn’t go full out on a given performance based on the day, and how he reacts or wants to react when famous people are in the audience, their conversation is so simultaneous and fast and Bowen and Matt are so interactive with Ben. And we understand that the ground rules of their discussion are such that anyone at any point can jump in and talk and not stop the train. You need to shoot it where all three of them are visible.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Because what happens when you’re shooting and there’s only one person on camera you can’t have anyone overlap with them because it won’t cut together with the master shot where they all are. So, it implies, in my mind at least, it implies you want a master shot and you almost – there’s a version of this where you just move the camera slowly around the table. And the camera doesn’t necessarily respond to what anyone is doing. You’re just absorbing the speed and the rhythm of it.

**John:** Yeah. The other option of course here is that you’re shooting multiple cameras at once. You could be on singles on people as long as you were actually doing the same shot.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** That’s the other option to sort of get into that situation. But it does feel very – it’s very live, very present. This is rat-a-tat-tat stuff happening here. And the whole show is pitched up at that speed.

**Craig:** Yes. I love the speed of it.

**John:** So here’s a different example. And this one feels a little bit more sitting back rather than leaning forward into the conversation. This is from a podcast called F-Work, But I’m Going to Go. This one is just two women. They have this podcast every week. They’re friends. They’re having a conversation. But let’s take a listen to their clip.

**Female Voice:** I would love to travel and work.

**Female Voice:** I would say I would – I would trade anything to have that life again. Letting the company pay for everything.

**Female Voice:** Everything.

**Female Voice:** On my travel. True. Oh my gosh, like and you just go a couple of seminars, you know. You work with a couple of teams. That’s it. And then after that you’re good. You got a day, a day and a half, or two days to chill.

**Female Voice:** Especially when I used to travel back and forth to Houston like it was just great. Because I’m like [unintelligible], tour the Budweiser facility, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And get to hang out with my friends down there. You can really make places a second home at that point when your job is paying them for—

**Female Voice:** Hey I’m going to be in the city on so-and-so, so-and-so date.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** And then especially if you know somebody there, you can take that. I could use this little hotel money for some more food and drink. Give me that American Express card.

**Female Voice:** Right.

**Female Voice:** So, yeah.

**Female Voice:** Cash me out.

**Female Voice:** But the people that don’t have that work-life balance, I couldn’t imagine like just the money sacrifice for your mental health. Like does that money, does your pay rate, does your salary sacrifice for you not having a life?

**Female Voice:** But see I’m just trying to think about what millennials that I know that I don’t know have a work-life balance.

**Female Voice:** I don’t know none, but you know it’s some out there.

**Female Voice:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** So, as opposed to the other conversation which felt very leaned forward, this one felt leaned back to me. This feels like people who are comfortable in their chairs having this conversation. So they’re very actively listening, but there’s not that frenzied pitch of sort of like got to get on the next thing, got to get on the next thing. And there’s no hunger to be funny, or to score a point.

**Craig:** Correct. So the difference here contextually is what happens when you’re dealing with a conversation where three people who don’t necessarily know each other are conducting an interview and being hyper engaged or two people who know each other really well. These two women know each other really well. It almost seems like what’s happening is they share a brain. And they’re having thoughts and they’re just alternating which one of them is going to say the shared brain’s thoughts. Because they’re in utter agreement and there’s no inquisition. It’s just a complete commiseration, celebration of agreement. The pace of it slows down because they’re in no rush to kind of impress or keep anyone’s interest, by the way.

They don’t seem to be aware that anybody would be listening. They are literally there for each other. It’s wonderful.

**John:** Yes. But I need to point out this is Episode 404, so this podcast has been going on for a very long time.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Which I think is also great. So they have such a long history. You know, as long a history as you and I do basically. And they know each other so well, so they can sort of anticipate the brain.

Now let’s think about this kind of conversation in your script. And talk about first what they’re talking about. They’re talking about work-life balance. They’re talking about taking business trips. Their conversation is so terrific and specific to sort of what they’re looking for in a business trip and sort of what is important. And how they would describe it versus two other people would describe it versus two other people is what makes these characters’ voices seem distinct and different. So it’s not about, yes, these are two young black women and they have millennial voices. There’s vocal fry. There’s all these sort of like very specific things about the actual audio tone of the language which is so great and worth studying.

But just the words on the page and sort of how they are framing their thoughts about it is what makes their conversation unique and specific.

**Craig:** Yeah. For something like this if I were trying to build a scene with these two women having a conversation about this topic my concentration would be on the woman who is listening. Because the interesting parts in a weird way between these two, at least in terms of their dialogue, is when the moment of agreement and hand-off occurs. “Yes.” I love – I mean, there’s this drawn out thing that happens which is much different than when Bowen and Matt go, “Right,” together. “Right.” This is like, “Yes!” It’s like a relief. You just said something true.

And I love the person listening and it’s like they’re hearing this wonderful – it’s like eating delicious food and then going, “Yes, this is so good.” And now let me talk. And then I want to switch over to the other one. And I would be describing them. And even editorially I would constantly be on the person listening, because that’s where to me at least that’s the fun part of these two is how much they – it’s their agreement. It’s their joy of agreement.

**John:** It’s easy to imagine characters who are like these two women in your story and finding great things for them to talk about. And I sort of like keep wanting to give them stories to hear how they would talk through it and how they would wrestle with a problem. So I kind of want to see them solving mysteries. I want to see them doing stuff because I think they actually have a really cool relationship with each other and it’s exciting to think about how they would talk about the stuff they’re encountering.

**Craig:** There’s something also very comic about agreement. I don’t know why. It’s just funny. When you imagine a scene where someone is explaining something to another person. Maybe they’re in opposition. But they have an ally with them. So they’re delivering a speech. And their ally occasionally goes, “That’s right. Damn straight. Amen. Sure said something there.” And at some point the person is going to turn to them and go, “Would you shut up? Stop agreeing.” Agreeing is funny. I don’t know why. It’s just the notion of just full agreement is amusing to me.

So, when I’m listening to them I have a smile on my face just from how happy they are to agree. And it’s a different kind of, like I said, there is a purity and an intimacy to these two because they don’t have any motives here. They’re not trying to get somebody to open up and inform them or educate them about their process or anything. There’s no guest. It’s just the two of them. It’s lovely.

**John:** We often think about well scenes have to have conflict and if there’s no conflict then there’s no scene. That is still largely true. But the conflict doesn’t have to become between the two characters who are talking in the scene. The conflict can be about what is happening in this situation. A conflict could be an outside party. But like it doesn’t mean that the two characters in any scene have to be directly in conflict. That’s not at all a goal.

Something about their relationship also reminded me about Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Swingers. And like, yes, they have contrasting styles, but they’re also buds and they can hang out. And the ability to hang out with interesting people is something that dialogue should give us.

**Craig:** There’s also the potential for – if we know you have a conflict, right, there may be an instinct to just get to the conflict. Jane shows up and tells Sheila, “I’m angry at you. Here’s why.” But sometimes the best way to introduce conflict is to just have an agreement fest and then suddenly on point seven someone says this and the other woman goes…

There’s a great sketch if you want to talk about dialogue and how much you can do with one word, there’s a great Key and Peele sketch where they play two women and one of them, Key, is going on and on about how she’s done with her man. And Peele is playing her friend. And all she says is, “OK.” And she has a thousand different Okays for like exactly, completely, I totally agree, right, oh that’s so true. And then Key’s character starts to say some things that are a little off and the OK becomes O-kay. And she never says anything else except OK. But there’s I think 50 different Okays. They each mean a different thing. It’s brilliant.

**John:** That’s great. And again in your script that probably is a good example of like a parenthetical where you’re going to have to put what is the actual shading of that OK in the situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Great. Well that was a fun exercise. So let’s maybe try to do this again on some future occasion.

**Craig:** I would love to.

**John:** Because that was lovely to do.

Let’s do some questions. Matt from Massachusetts asks, “As I write a feature screenplay I am periodically trapped up by a vestigial thought from my novel writing days about first person versus third person omniscient perspective. In a novel it’s pretty obvious. But do you ever think about this in terms of screenplays, particularly if they don’t have voiceover? If your main character is in a situation where they can’t possibly know something we have to decide whether or not to become omniscient and share that information with the viewer.”

Craig, what is your thinking about limited perspective and omniscience as you’re coming up with a story? And do you always have a plan from the start, or is it situational?

**Craig:** It’s situational. So you make choices about perspective all the time. And I think we’ve done, certainly we’ve done at least an episode about perspective as a specific tool in our tool belt. You want to know from whose perspective and there are choices. It’s either from a character’s perspective or it is from the omniscient camera’s perspective. And if it’s from the camera’s perspective the point is we’re going to see something that the people don’t. Or, that we are seeing something that is a shared perspective by a lot of people. A crowd scene for instance.

So, you want to choose those moments carefully. Typically the kind of omniscient we’re going to see something but nobody else will, it’s the bailiwick of mysteries, thrillers, twisty kind of things. They are associated with the dum-dum-dum kind of sound in your head. And it needs to be used carefully I think. A little goes a long way.

**John:** My daughter has started watching Criminal Intent. Not, Criminal Intent. She’s started watching one of the CBS procedurals that’s been on for like 20 years. And so she’s watching an episode from the first season and I was so surprised because it opens with this scene that’s from the point of view from none of the actual main characters of the show. And it basically shows the crime but hides who the killer was in the crime. And then the rest of the episode is trying to figure out who the killer was. And it’s just not a format that I’m used to at all. But it was a very common format for a long time in procedurals.

So, I agree with Craig that you’re going to be making choices based on the situation you’re going to find yourself in and sort of whether it’s going to be most effective for us as the audience to have information that the protagonist doesn’t have. You’re also going to make some fundamental choices about how your story is told. And so this thing I was writing the treatment on I had to very explicitly from the start say we are not cutting away to this villain’s point of view. This is not going to be a movie where we ever see what the villain is doing independent of the hero.

**Craig:** And you’re allowed to set those ground rules. Just know that if you are going to make a point of saying here’s a thing that someone doesn’t know but now I’m telling it to you, it will always threaten artifice. It disrupts our verisimilitude. Because life doesn’t work that way.

In life we have a perspective. It’s through our two eyes. That’s what we get. So, it’s a little artificial. It can be wonderful. It can also be slightly cheaty. It’s one of those things.

**John:** Yeah. 1917 which was a great movie from this past year had incredibly limited POV where you only follow those guys as they’re walking through the trenches and doing everything. That’s an extreme example. But Parasite also does limited POV. And it could have cutaway to any of those character’s perspective on what they thought was going on. And director and writers really figured out what would be the most effective way to tell their specific story.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. MJ writes, “Last year I made it to the second round of Austin Film Festival.” I assume that’s the screenwriting contest portion of that. “And after receiving the feedback and making changes I felt that my script was ready to submit to my company as a prospective buyer.” Hmm, they have their own company? Maybe they mean another company. “After reading the submission agreement, which they make every submitter sign, I became wary of signing it. My fiancé’s dad is a lawyer. And he said he became unhinged after reading the agreement. There’s one section in particular that concerns us.” And I think what MJ is saying is this is the agreement with the Austin Film Festival? I don’t know. Or with the company?

**John:** So he’s submitting it to a company it looks like. And so the submission agreement had some clauses in it.

**Craig:** OK. So their submission agreement is the problem. “Section five in short states that any damages awarded through arbitration shall not exceed $10,000 for film or $40,000 for television series. I have two questions regarding this. One, is this sort of agreement common? Two, what’s the likelihood that I could be screwed over by signing something like this?”

John? You have a law degree. I mean—[laughs]

**John:** As a lawyer…so what I will say is from other folks that I’ve talked to, some places do have you sign submission agreements. They’re not absolutely all that uncommon. I’m not particularly freaked out by this. I think if you’re approaching everything from a defensive posture like oh my god they’re going to steal my stuff and take my work and it’s all going to be a disaster, you’re not going to have a very good, happy time in this industry.

So, submission agreements are there because the company is trying to protect themselves from claims that someone stole – that their movie was stolen. This blockbuster was actually based on this thing that I sent into the company. So that’s why companies have submission agreements. Studios have them. Other places have them. I’m not actually not worried about it.

But I would ask is the place you’re submitting to have they made movies? Have they actually done things that are out there in the world? If it’s just some person you’ve never heard of, then I don’t know that it’s worth signing any submission agreement because I’m not sure that they’re worth anything at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And behind all this there is a legal concept called adhesion contract. And adhesion contract, it sort of describes a lot of the sort of boilerplate that we are confronted with all the time. For instance, terms of use. We’re constantly signing terms of use that we do not read. And adhesion contract is basically boilerplate language that has been defined by one party. It’s usually a party that is bigger and stronger. And is set up as a kind of hard and fast and unnegotiable gate through which a kind of lesser powerful party has to go through. You don’t have a choice. Sign this or piss off.

And when you do have an adhesion contract there is a possibility that a court – let’s say this company did somehow do something damaging to you then a court would say, yeah, the fact that this poor writer had to sign your dumb agreement does not mean that it’s actually enforceable to the extent that you wish it would be.

That’s something that a lawyer would have to go through. And it’s not anything I think that anybody could ever count on. But just be aware that that is a concept in law. So, we’re held I guess to the standards of these boilerplate definitions maybe not quite as strongly as we think we are.

**John:** Yeah. So I think I’m speaking for both of us saying I’m not especially worried about this thing, but just any place you’re sending this to just keep an eye out for are they really a reputable place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And, I mean, just remember that some of these things are signs of who they are. You know? Are they worried that people are going to be suing – have other people sued them? Is that why this is in there? Because they’ve…

By and large, again, you know, our position is people aren’t really actively ripping other people off actively. But there are a lot of bad actors in the world who do fuzzy – that gray area stuff. That’s where it gets gross. And if they’re all wired up on avoiding lawsuits and going to arbitration and limiting damages it makes me wonder why. So, anyway, something – food for thought.

**John:** Food for thought. Justin in Pasadena writes, “If a writers strike does end up happening, what advice can you give to us non-WGA writers? Are there any unique opportunities we should know about? Or might there be some workarounds we should use to our advantage? And, of course, how can we not step on any toes in the process?”

So prefacing all of this by saying we can talk through hypotheticals about a writers strike, but there’s nothing saying that’s going to happen. But Craig you and I were both around in the 2008 strike and I remember we both interacted with some folks who were not WGA members who were coming out to the picket lines and stuff like that, too. So, let’s talk through at least what we remember from the 2007-2008 strike.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, just as a matter of law, if you’re not a member of the Writers Guild, and the Writers Guild is on strike, that means there’s no current contract between the companies and the union. And you can certainly legally work for them. There used to be a thing, and maybe it’s still there, when you apply for a membership to the Writers Guild it says, “Did you work during the strike?” And you’re supposed to say “yeah I did” if you did. And then they in theory could kind of imply that you can never be a member here, but they’re actually not allowed to do that at all. I remember that came up in a boardroom discussion.

But that’s the legal reality. The ethical reality is, you know, the world does not look kindly on replacement players. Because what you’re doing is making it harder for the union to end the strike and ideally to end the strike in favor of the union that you want to want to be part of. Because one thing is for sure, Justin. The strike will end. And when it ends then you’re going to want to be part of that union. And you’re going to want to be part of a union that has made the best possible deal for its members. So, the question is were you making that easier or harder to do by taking this replacement writer job?

And also what do you think the companies are going to be paying you? Do they think they’re going to be paying you union stuff? You’re not going to be getting pension. You’re not going to be getting health. You’re not going to be getting residuals. You’re not going to be getting credit protections. So, do you want to know how to not step on any toes in the process, don’t take those jobs.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t take those jobs. I would also say back in 2008 it was sort of hard to find screenwriters and actually talk with them. And so one of the nice things about picketing, maybe the only nice thing about picketing is you got to meet a lot of other people. And so I got to meet a lot of other writers who I’d only sort of seen their credits. But I also got to meet a lot of writers who were not yet WGA members who’d come out at Paramount at 6:30 in the morning when I was picketing there. And I would talk to them as we walked in small circles. And some of them have gone on to become brand name writers in this industry.

So, it was a chance to be out there and talk with folks. But that was 2008. This is not 2008. I mean, there’s so many more opportunities to meet writers in person.

**Craig:** Way more.

**John:** Now than there ever were before. So that’s not a good cause for a work stoppage. Hopefully the situation will not come up at all, but if it were to come up I agree with Craig. You’re doing yourself and no one any favors by looking at this as an opportunity for you to advance your career.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty shortsighted. I have a side question. I mean, what is the value of the actual act of picketing for us? I’ve always wondered this. Traditionally the point of a picket line would be to picket the institution you were striking against. A factory. A hospital. A hotel. And then if scabs were coming into work they would have to go through the picket line and the people picketing would go “boo” and shame them. But just make it hard for other unions – so a lot of unions, we’re respecting the picket line. We’re not going through. We don’t really have that ability. It’s not like the trucks stopped rolling into these lots, or anybody else stopped rolling into the lots. We wouldn’t even picket every single thing.

In our circumstance, isn’t the best tool we have to just not work? I’m just curious. What do we get from the picketing other than the kind of meeting other writers and getting exercise, which for us honestly as a group super important?

**John:** I would say, top of my head I would say visibility just to make it clear that this is an actual thing that’s happened. Something that news cameras can point out is kind of useful. A reminder that a thing is actually happening so that people who work inside a studio on a daily basis can see like, oh that’s right, this is actually a thing that’s happening, even if they’re not in a development role. If they’re an accountant they say like, ah, this is a thing that’s happening. So that the president of the studio has to drive past that picket line every day is not probably a great thing for them.

But I think there’s also an aspect of solidarity and just sort of – because what is different about a person who is working on a factory line is that they see their coworkers every day. Screenwriters don’t see each other every day. I mean, TV writers do see each other every day. And so there is probably a solidarity and we’re all in this together thing which is I’m guessing important about picketing classically. But I think it’s fair to ask. This is a different time now than 20 years ago. Things do change.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just kind of curious if there’s some other less industrial revolution way of doing this. Because I don’t perceive that in the 2007-2008 strike that the act of picketing itself had a dramatic impact on what we did. I could be wildly wrong on that. There’s a certain performative aspect to it that I’m just wondering. Like is there something better? I guess really I’m not saying don’t do something, but rather is there a better version or a more impactful modern version?

**John:** If you have thoughts about that as listeners you can write in and tell us what you think.

**Craig:** Neo-picketing. What would it look like?

**John:** All right. It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this website called Travel Time. And so often with Google Maps and other things you can figure out how long it will take you to get from point A to point B. So like from my house to Disney, how long will it take for me to get there as I’m getting my picketing sign ready to march there? This is the opposite of that. So this basically says given a certain amount of time from a certain location how far could you get. This is based on usual traffic or how transit lines work. And it’s really fascinating to look at different cities and say like, OK, from the center of London in one hour I can get through to basically anywhere in London. Center of Los Angeles, how far can I get to somewhere in the Los Angeles region? And it’s disappointingly small in number.

**Craig:** Well, I would love to see how far you can get in London in one hour, because I feel like there was one point where I think I went three blocks in an hour.

**John:** Oh, certainly not driving. But like through the Tube and other ways.

**Craig:** Through the Tube, yes. Or walking even, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Walking. So it’s an interesting way of comparing cities and sort of the choices cities have made. Also just how geography sometimes constrains the ability of cities to function certain ways.

**Craig:** That sounds excellent. I love any tool that makes traveling easier. I have to travel a lot more than I ever thought I would. And so I’ve become like super fussy about making it easier for myself.

My One Cool Thing is another person. So I think two weeks in a row that my One Cool Thing is a person. And this is slightly political. Not even slightly. It’s completely political. My One Cool Thing this week is a man named Mark Kelly. Mark Kelly is running for the Senate in Arizona. He’s the Democratic Party candidate for the Senate in Arizona. This is going to be a special election because of the death of John McCain. So when John McCain died the Governor of Arizona appointed Republican Martha McSally who is not good.

And so Mark Kelly is running. Mark Kelly, I’ve met him, he is fascinating. He is a former astronaut. And he is a combat veteran as well with the navy. And he is also the husband of Gabby Giffords, who was the former congresswoman from Arizona until she was shot by a deranged gunman. And, you know, went through traumatic brain injury. And he’s had one hell of a life.

And he is just a remarkably decent guy and kind of a reminder that there are still these wonderfully principled people who have dedicated their lives to this country. And who have also suffered personally because of the way some of our laws work in this country and have not given up. If anything else they have tripled down and said I want to fix it. And sometimes there are days when I think I don’t want to be here anymore. [laughs] And then I look at – and I talk to a guy like Mark Kelly who says of course you do. And we fix it. That’s what we do.

So my One Cool Thing this week is Mark Kelly. And, of course, if you want to – he doesn’t do PACs or anything like that. He’s just taking personal donations. So if you want to donate to him just look up I think – what’s the website? Think Blue? Act Blue?

**John:** Act Blue.

**Craig:** Act Blue. Think Blue is the Dodgers slogan. Sorry. Act Blue is the header organization that collects individual donations for democratic candidates. And you can Google up Mark Kelly and find his Act Blue site and make a donation if you so desire.

**John:** Fantastic. We’ll have a link in the show notes to that as well. Stick around after the credits because we will be talking much more politics. But for now, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Stuart Friedel and Dustin Bocks. It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is again by James Launch and Jim Bond.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. In those show notes you’ll have the links to all the clips that we used. Thank you to the people who put that stuff online. That’s great. It helps us figure out how people talk in real life.

You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We get them usually within the week the episode airs. And remember you can sign up to become a Premium member of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. That gets you all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re going to do right now. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Craig, more politics.

**Craig:** Oh goodie.

**John:** Oh goodie. Good stuff. So, here’s a thing that I’ve been doing recently, and I think this was a suggestion from Jon Lovett on Pod Save America. Is when someone says, “Oh, you know Trump is going to get reelected,” the response should be what are you doing today to stop that.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** Basically to throw that back at it. So, on my daily to do list I have this sort of quarter sheet that I use as my to-do list of what I’m going to do every day. And at breakfast I fill it out. I have a new entry in there and it’s Defeat Trump. And every day I have to do something that will actually advance that goal. And so generally it is donating to political candidates, but sometimes it’s actually reading up about things. It’s filling out my California ballot. It’s researching sort of who I want in certain offices. So, I’m trying to do something every day to make sure that I don’t wake up a year from now in an actual fascist nation.

**Craig:** Well I think that’s a great plan. Have you considered somehow destroying the orange makeup factory? How deep do you go?

Yes, I also do not want to – look, I think we are actually every day waking up in a country that is – I’m not going to be an alarmist and say that we are currently living in a fascist state. But we are living in something that is in between what we were and a fascist state.

**John:** Yeah. It’s trending in a bad direction.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And particularly this latest thing. I mean, the wall between the Justice Department and the White House has always been a kind of necessary check and balance to power. It’s gone. That is terrifying. And the rule of law is breaking down. And one of the reasons why it’s just as important to me that if you have to put all your money on one bet, and it’s a proposition bet, yes or no, you’re always going to be incurring a lot of risk, even if the odds are in your favor you’re incurring risk. So, if the big bet is get rid of Trump that is incurring risk that you will fail.

What you do to hedge that is actively support people who are running for the Senate in particular. I don’t think the makeup of the House of Representatives is going to change dramatically. I think if anything it will even get better, I hope, in terms of people who are opposed to Trump. If the Senate can swing over and be opposed to Trump that is a big deal. Then it is a different situation. It is a wildly different situation.

So, I’m working on that as well. But I think that you’re right. People who sit there and go, “Well you know…” Look, no. Because, OK, fine, then what are we supposed to do? Just curl up and die? I mean, you fight. You rage, rage against the dying of the light.

**John:** Yes. I think back to the special episode we recorded right after Trump was elected called Everything is Going to be OK.

**Craig:** Is it? Were we right?

**John:** But here’s what I’ll say. The fear I was feeling at that moment was so intense. And I sort of thought we would get to this place that we’re at right now. I thought we would get there within a few weeks. And so I guess I was surprised that it’s actually taken this long to do it and the sort of level of incompetence with evil is sort of what’s taken so long to do that.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That Stephen Miller didn’t know how to do all the terrible things he wanted to do so clearly.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz would have done way more damage by now.

**John:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. So I can take some comfort in that and also in the great successes that happened in the 2018 elections where you saw like, oh, people will actually show up and vote the smart people in. So that gives me a lot of hope.

What’s been frustrating I would say, especially the last three weeks, is looking at the Democratic primaries and the degree to which the people who should be most outraged about what’s happening, the Justice Department things, are directing all of their vitriol at Democratic candidates, which is ridiculous and pointless.

**Craig:** So stupid.

**John:** Let me stipulate, the Democratic nominee is very likely going to be Jewish, gay, or a woman.

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** Almost a guarantee. Unless Biden somehow magically pulls out, it’s going to be one of those three things.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** But it’s true though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah, it does seem – well, the one thing I will say–

**John:** Oh, Bloomberg.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Biden, we are pretty early. So we’re going to run into these other states. We don’t know.

**John:** Or it’s going to either be–

**Craig:** Old.

**John:** It’s either going to be Jewish, gay, woman, or it’s going to be Joe Biden.

**Craig:** Yes. Correct.

**John:** So we have to be prepared for those scenarios. And in preparing for those scenarios let’s be more mindful about the things we are saying about those groups and Joe Biden, because that may be who we are running. So you and I recorded a segment we actually snipped out of the show because it was just goodbye mentions where I ranted about sort of the homophobia and sort of antigay stuff I was seeing being directed towards Pete Buttigieg which was really happening. And I was so frustrated that it was from these people who claim to be giant liberal supporters and that I wasn’t seeing it being called out.

You could say the same about the sexism. You could say the same about anti-Bidenism. Whatever you want to call that.

**Craig:** Antisemitism appears to be missing, which is I guess good? I mean, it is good. Of course it’s good. It’s just kind of curious.

**John:** If we end up with Sanders as the nominee–

**Craig:** Then it will come roaring back.

**John:** It’ll come roaring back and it’s going to be harder to claim the moral high ground when you went after the gay guy fine, you went after the woman fine. So, let’s just, I mean, let’s all be better.

**Craig:** I know. I’m bracing for that. I never forget like how – well, I do. Sometimes I forget. And then America reminds me how many people in America just hate Jewish people and believe that they’re some sort of weird devils in charge of everything. And so I’m bracing for that. If Bernie Sanders is the nominee I just feel like oh boy here we go. Which is a very – you know, it’s a pretty Jewish thing of me think. It’s the way we are.

But, I have been so just – I guess like a dum-dum, just simply focused on doing what needs to be done to get rid of Trump, and I’m happy to make positive arguments, and I could I think make positive arguments for all of those candidates. Maybe not Mike Bloomberg. But all the other ones. But the idea of tearing any of them down right now seems virtually insane.

**John:** Yeah. It does.

**Craig:** What? What? I mean, love who you love. It’s a little bit like my attitude towards movies and television. Like I talk about the things that I love because I think that’s where you actually get the most information. I mean, when they attack each other I feel sick right now, truly sick, in a way I never did before because I just think like, no, we can’t – we can’t. My god.

**John:** We can’t slice each other up over really what are minor differences in what we’re trying to do. The idea that this candidate who is not as progressive or this candidate who is more progressive is going to destroy everything if they become elected is a tremendous fallacy. And so dangerous and so feeds into exactly what the disinformation campaigns are hoping for, where you can’t even tell who are the bots and who are the people who just aren’t thinking this through very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, we know that social media is designed to amplify the extremes. It’s just what it does. Because the only way to rise above a kind of large averaged point of view is to be extreme. And then by getting amplified the extremes begin to pull more people to the extremes.

You want to know who I want to vote for? Whoever is running against Donald Trump.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s who I want to vote for.

**John:** And I do like that the candidates will repeatedly say that. They’ll say after each primary they’ll say of course we’re going to support whoever. That’s great. But I think it’s also a good moment to call out like and don’t be assholes to everyone else online because we need everybody here and we need to all be rowing in the same direction.

**Craig:** All hands on deck. All hands on deck. And, look, do I have a preference right now? I mean, I have some. Because, look, California we don’t have to vote just yet. So, I’ve been thinking about it because I don’t feel a great need to decide in this moment right now and commit to a team and be Team Blank or Team Blank. I’m just thinking about it and reading. And that’s how that’s going to go. But I will say that the argument that we have to vote for A or you cannot vote for B because they can’t beat Trump is horseshit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Every single one of these candidates can beat Donald Trump. Every single one of them. I believe that at the bottom of my heart. Anybody that says Bernie Sanders can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And anybody that says that Pete Buttigieg can’t beat Donald Trump is nuts. And the same for Amy Klobuchar and the same for Joe Biden. And by the way, the same even for Mike Bloomberg. Honestly I do believe that in the end what’s going to happen is the great majority of people are going to be voting against Donald Trump.

**John:** Yep. It has to happen.

**Craig:** Let’s not cripple our candidate before they get in there. Let’s not hobble them, you know.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s look at these as competitors for that spot, but not as opponents. Not as villains. We are trying to pick who it is that we think can run this race the best. But that does not mean that we are going to cede any ground to the person who is already in that office.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I think that because I believe that all of them are capable of beating Donald Trump, then I can also actually then I who would I like to be president of these people. Who would be my preferred candidate? And there are all sorts of reasons to say one or the other. But my god the thought of going out there and saying something cruel about another one of these candidates, I mean, at times I lose my patience with the supporters of a certain candidate because they just are, you know, a handful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s not going to translate to me tearing that candidate down.

**John:** 100%. And I will knock on doors for whoever that person is who is running against Donald Trump.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. I will donate the maximum amount that I can as an individual. I presume that my wife will as well. And, yeah, I’ll knock on doors and I’ll do what I have to do. I think we’ll all just line up. I mean, that’s the thing. We have to line up and do what needs to be done. And accept that there is no perfect answer. There’s just a better answer. So can we please just choose our better answer with respect for each other and advocate as hard as we can? And I could be wrong, but again with the exception of Mayor Bloomberg who I’m a little concerned about, which is fair, I’m allowed to be concerned, I don’t think that any of the candidates pose an existential threat in the way that Donald Trump does to everyone. But particularly Donald Trump poses an existential threat to immigrants, to people of color, to trans people. Generally to LGBTQ people, I think. And to journalists. And to the law.

Now, what else do I need to say?

**John:** To the notion of democracy. Yes.

**Craig:** Correct. To our existence. It is an existential threat to us and our standing in the world and our place in the world and our future. And in the end – oh, I forgot the biggest one – to our ability to live on this planet.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he is not helping solve the coming climate crisis. He’s like how can we speed it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So really we’re going to tear down any of these candidates while we’re – here comes a car. The car is about to hit you. Who would you like to stop that person in the car? Only this person, no one else.

**John:** No one else.

**Craig:** OK. So what if that person, you don’t get that person? Then I’m getting run over. O-kay. Cool. Cool man. Cool. Good for you.

**John:** Good plan. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

* [Victory for both partnered Irish election opponents](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/10/irish-election-couple-who-ran-against-each-other-social-democrats-fianna-fail-both-get-elected) we discussed in [episode 436](https://johnaugust.com/2020/political-movies)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 241](https://johnaugust.com/2016/fan-fiction-and-ghost-taxis), in which John predicts Parasite
* [Assistants’ Advice to Showrunners](https://johnaugust.com/2020/assistants-advice-to-showrunners)
* [Mythic Quest](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/mythic-quest-ravens-banquet/umc.cmc.1nfdfd5zlk05fo1bwwetzldy3) on Apple TV+
* [California Penal Code 632](https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/eavesdropping-penal-code-section-632/) and the legality of eavesdropping
* [Scriptnotes, episode 433](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig) with Greta Gerwig
* [Appalachian English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU&feature=youtu.be) from Mountain Talk
* The Austin History Center’s [accounts from visitors](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3303-klempner-cindy) and an [interview with architect Tom Hatch](https://soundcloud.com/austinhistorycenter/ahc-3341-hatch-tom-20180502a-clip2)
* Ben Platt on [Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/las-culturistas/e/65248782?autoplay=true)
* [Fck Work But Ima Go, episode 404](https://anchor.fm/fckworkpodcast/episodes/Ep–404—Is-You-Gone-Help-or-Micromanage-eao8pe/a-a1ebg8f)
* Key & Peele’s [OK (uncensored)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pufATqebv8)
* [Scriptnotes, episode 45](https://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers), in which we discuss perspective
* [Adhesion contracts](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_(contract_of_adhesion))
* [Travel Time](https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/search/0_lat=34.05513&0_lng=-118.25703&0_title=Los%20Angeles%2C%20CA%2C%20USA&0_tt=90)
* [Mark Kelly](https://markkelly.com/) is running for Senate in Arizona
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/438standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/ambition-and-anxiety).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 434 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you’re back. You’re recovered from your flu.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was a little nasty. I thought it was just the cold. I never think that I have the flu. But you know what, a cold will kind of over the course of a couple days just get worse and worse. This thing started in the morning and by the evening I thought I may be dying. And I went over to the urgent care. Do you know how they do the flu test? Have you had that done before?

**John:** You described it to me on the bonus segment. So we’ll spoil it for people. They stick something far, far up your nose and swab.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nasty. Did in fact have the flu. They put me on Tamiflu and holy cajole that stuff worked great. I guess if you get it really early at the start of your flu. I basically had that day and then the next day I wasn’t feeling too good and then I was fine.

**John:** Great. Glad to have you back.

**Craig:** Happy to be here.

**John:** You missed a terrific episode with Greta Gerwig. So folks if you skipped that episode, go back and listen to it. It really was terrific. We got into a lot of very specific stuff on the page. We talked about parentheticals. Craig will be so envious of this conversation we had about real specificity on the page.

Today is also a specificity on the page, because we’re going to be doing another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** That’s where we take a look at the first three pages of screenplays that people send us and we talk through what’s working and what’s not. We will also be talking about the difference between ambition and anxiety and how writers can find a balance between those two opposing forces.

**Craig:** This sounds like a pretty good day. I love talking about pages. I love talking about screen pages. I also love talking about anxiety. I was feeling rather anxious earlier today. I was in my car and I just got the feeling in my stomach, and I just thought, well, this is terrible. And but I did my breathing. You know? And while I was doing my breathing I thought, OK, I’m doing all the right things. This is just anxiety. It still stank.

**John:** Yeah. It does stink. Even when you know you’re doing the right things to take care of it, it can stink.

**Craig:** I know. It stinks.

**John:** And our Premium members will also hear a bonus segment at the end of the show where I will rant about mugs, because I have really strong opinions about mugs and I feel like I need to talk to somebody. So I’m going to talk to Craig and our Premium members.

**Craig:** This is where the Premium members question the wisdom of their subscription.

**John:** But so many people have joined the Premium membership program. So thank you everyone who has subscribed. The Premium membership is at Scriptnotes.net. For $5 a month you get these bonus segments, you get the bonus episodes, and all the back episodes. We’ve crossed a threshold so I feel pretty confident we’re going to be able to hire somebody new to be able to help on the technical backend side of Scriptnotes, which is great.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So thank you very much to everyone who subscribed.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Thank you.

**John:** And reminder to everybody that the old feed, the one that was on the app, that will be going away, so everything is going to be on the new thing. But thank you to everybody who has signed up now at Scriptnotes.net. And news today that we now started accepting Apple Pay. So you don’t even have to pull out your credit card, you can just hit the little Apply Pay button to subscribe to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** I have to admit that whenever I see Apple Pay I get super excited because I can just use my face or fingerprint. I’m that lazy. They figured it out. They knew exactly what needed to happen and it was to make me be able to buy things without moving.

**John:** Yep. Now if you’re buying things this week a thing you could pre-buy would be the third Arlo Finch book. So I finished my trilogy.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So people who have listened to this show for a while will know that I started writing these books, Arlo Finch. There are now three of them. The third one comes out February 4 here in the US. February 4 is also my Half Birthday, so you can help me celebrate by buying Arlo Finch 3, or the whole trilogy if you haven’t bought it yet. Craig, were you ever a person who would not start a series until he knew that all the books were written?

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**John:** No. But there are those people out there.

**Craig:** That’s a person? Really? That’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** Because they don’t want to get trapped by an unfinished series.

**Craig:** No. It’s called Anticipation. When J.K. Rowling was still working on the Harry Potter series–

**John:** This is before she was canceled.

**Craig:** [laughs] She is uncancelable as it turns out. I think I started reading those books I want to say when she released the third one. So I caught up quickly. And then for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh when those books would come out it was kind of a little holiday for me. I would take the day off and I would just read the book that day.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And it was great. I loved those days. They were great. And the waiting made it all worth it. I love that. We can still wait. We don’t have to binge everything.

**John:** What’s exciting about the third book in Arlo Finch is the first two had advanced copies, and so there were these sort of special paperback ones that would come out a few months before the hard cover. And so folks would read those. And so it was sort of a soft rollout. Kind of no one has read this third book. Like I’ve read it. Megana has read it. My editor has read it. But very few other people have read it. I’ve slipped it to a couple kids who are big readers and they are very enthusiastic.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I can’t wait for folks to be able to take a look at the third Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Spectacular. And congratulations, by the way. That’s a real achievement.

**John:** Thank you. For people who want the custom bookplates, you can go to johnaugust.com/arlofinch and there’s a place where you fill out the little form and I will send you a custom bookplate with your kid’s name on it, or your name on it if you prefer.

**Craig:** Is that an illustration? Is that what a custom bookplate is?

**John:** Yeah. A bookplate is a sticker that goes in the front of your book so in lieu of me coming to sign your book, it’s a way that you have a signed copy without ever meeting me in person.

**Craig:** We had a woman that worked for us for a while. She was a housekeeper. And her thing was more like, mmm, today instead of cleaning I’m just going to pick a project for myself that has not been assigned and do it that nobody wanted her to do. And, I mean, lovely person though. And there was apparently a pile of these little – I guess you would call them stickers that said this book belongs to….

She decided to go through all of the books in my daughter’s bookshelf and put them in there, except that a lot of those books were Melissa’s books when she was a kid. It’s like some of them were worth some money. Well, not anymore.

**John:** Ugh. Sorry.

**Craig:** You know what? What are you going to do?

**John:** What are you going to do? I would say putting one of these author signed bookplates in a book would probably actually increase its value rather than decrease its value.

**Craig:** That will increase the value. Your custom bookplate sounds like a positive thing.

**John:** But if you’d like me to sign your book in person you can come to the signing at Chevalier’s on Larchmont. It’s a bookstore on Larchmont. That’s February 9 at 2pm. So, it’s a chance to say hello to me and buy your Arlo Finches and I will happily sign them. I will also have some sort of talk which I have yet to figure out. So I’m not doing a big book tour this time. Just small little events, including February 9 at Chevalier’s.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, again, congrats. That’s pretty awesome. How many total book papers have you generated?

**John:** Wow. That is a good question. Words I can tell you. I can figure that out more easily. About 220,000 words.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** The three books. It’s a lot.

**Craig:** That’s so many words.

**John:** It’s just a lot of words.

**Craig:** So many words. God.

**John:** That’s the thing about books versus screenplays is just all the words.

**Craig:** I feel like, I mean, in our careers just in terms of screenplays we certainly are over – I never know how many words are – but well over a million words, right? Each?

**John:** Oh, we have to be. Oh yeah.

**Craig:** 10 million?

**John:** I don’t know. We could figure it out. That would be a challenge for us.

**Craig:** Terrifying.

**John:** I’ll have Nima write a little program that will figure it all out.

**Craig:** [laughs] That would be so great.

**John:** That will be in Highland 4.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Calculate your entire – all your work.

**Craig:** I’m almost a million miler on American Airlines.

**John:** Oh, nice. And the pilot will come back and congratulate you–

**Craig:** Is that right? Do they do that?

**John:** Yeah, they do. They come back.

**Craig:** Holy crap.

**John:** When you’ve reached a million medal miles they come back.

**Craig:** Wow. Amazing. OK, cool.

**John:** Things to look forward to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before you can hit that million mile status you actually have to earn a living. And that is something that is a little bit easier for some CAA assistants this week. Craig, talk us through it.

**Craig:** Well, you and I, we can’t take all the credit for this. We did start I think a very worthy conversation. But it was prompted by somebody who wrote in. And this ball has really been carried forth by a lot of other people. But the good news is it’s working. So, earlier I guess last month Verve, the agency Verve, said, hey, we’re going to bump up our pay for our minimum wage for our assistants from $15 to $18 an hour. And this week CAA, which is the second largest agency in Hollywood, announced that they are doing the same. That’s a big deal. They employ at least a thousand people in that building I would imagine that could work as assistants, mailroom folks, etc. Between their two offices in New York and LA. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of money. And it’s a pretty good thing.

So, you know, we are always monitoring the whole hourly wage versus hourly work guarantee thing to make sure that you’re not getting more per hour, but fewer hours.

**John:** Absolutely. As we stressed on the show really your weekly take home pay should be the metric by whether you’re able to survive in Los Angeles. And so we want to make sure that this higher hourly rate really does translate to people being able to afford to do this job in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of the things that was really positive about what CAA announced is also that there’s a different way that they’re contemplating raises. Raises at CAA used to be basically, well, if you’re an hourly employee at the end of the year there’s some kind of – I mean, my guess it was a probably perfunctory raise. And it was just a function of, well, you made it. Congrats.

And what they’re saying now is, no, that actually you can get raises based on upward movement in the company. That it’s not just about the fact that you were a warm body there for a year, but if you take on more responsibility you can get more money. This is – it’s kind of crazy that I’m saying this like it’s something new and exciting. It should have been that way and it should be that way everywhere. And I’m hopeful that now UTA and WME and ICM and Gersh and all the rest of these places will do the same thing. This is how the market should work.

If they don’t, well, they’re going to lose a lot of people to CAA and Verve it would seem to me.

**John:** I would agree. So let’s talk a little bit about our role in this in terms of you and me, because this was sort of a special case. I’m represented at Verve. You know a lot of folks at CAA. As folks wrote in to us at the Ask account the folks who were talking about Verve we took all those emails anonymously and sort of gathered together in a document that we were able to take – that I was able to take to Verve – and say like, hey, just so you know former and current assistants at Verve have these concerns and you should have a discussion.

You were able to do the same for CAA.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Again, all anonymous. But this is really specific things that folks who were working at CAA had concerns as assistants. I do think those helped initiate some conversations within those agencies.

So, if folks who are listening to this who are at the agencies want to write in with their specific information about what they’re seeing at their agencies, we are happy to gather this together and also take them to those agencies to help stoke a little bit more fire underneath them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great. This is sort of an absolute good. If we can keep doing this and improving people’s lives. Look, it’s not an enormous amount, but it matters. This is an amount that matters. And our hope is that not only will it make life better for the people who are doing these very important jobs that support all of us, it will also make these jobs potentially available and feasible for a lot of people. Everyone. And not just people who maybe have additional financial support from their families.

**John:** Agreed. But that was not the only agency news this week. So we’re recording this late on Friday afternoon. It was announced earlier on Friday afternoon. As we were recording it just went out the actual red lined agreement, so I have not had a chance to read through it carefully. The biggest changes from the previous agreement which was with Rothman Brecher is the extension of when this all sunsets, when packaging gets sunsetted. Some different language in terms of auditing and reporting.

But it’s kind of largely the deal that we’ve been seeing in all these other agreements along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is good news. Gersh is what I would call, and again, apologies to everybody else, but I think it was the first what I would call major agency to sign. I mean, I guess Verve is sort of a major agency. I would count them, I guess. But I guess traditionally Gersh was always up there with sort of like – I would think of them in the tier of Paradigm and Writers and Artists and people like that.

**John:** Gersh also represents actors and directors. They represent a huge swath of kinds of people, so they’re not just a literary agency in the way that Verve is.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. They’re a multi-service agency. I’m not sure how many writers they represent compared to say people like at ICM, but they were my first agency back in the day. So this is good news. So glass half full. They signed it. And the modifications that I’m looking at here don’t seem particularly problematic in any way, shape, or form. Packaging fees sunset period going to July 15, 2021. I mean, we’ve been living with packages for half a century, so I think another year and a half is no big deal.

Glass half empty. They weren’t a huge packaging agency to begin with. It took us about a year to get them to sign this.

**John:** Nine months. So, three-quarters of a year.

**Craig:** There we go. I’ll take that back. It took us about three-quarters of a year to get them to sign it. And I think we’ve run out of this kind of target. I think we’ve gotten the Vs that can matter. And so now what remains are the problems that have always been there and that is WME, ICM, UTA, and CAA.

On the legal front things haven’t been going great for us it seems to me. Can you walk us through that?

**John:** Sure. So let me talk both of those concerns. So, we’ll start with the legal side. The legal news recently, there’s been delays, pushes. I think from the last time we spoke the Justice Department had tried to intercede on the case. The judge says, no, no, that’s OK. You don’t need to intercede. So they were not invited to intercede on the agencies’ behalf, which I think is a great development.

But clearly the timeframe on the lawsuits is long. And if you go back to sort of like the initial conversations about how all of this was going to go, one of the things that was sort of stressed in those WGA meetings was like the question was always like why don’t we just do the whole thing as a lawsuit, well the lawsuit could take a really long time. And that’s sort of what we’re seeing. It’s not a speedy process to go through this. So, the timeframe is into 2021 before it looks like we have resolution on some law stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we did get handed a defeat in there, because we were hoping to get the court to toss the agency lawsuit against us, which accuses us essentially of an antitrust violation, and the judge said no I’m not tossing that. So, that’s not good.

**John:** That’s not good, but it’s not unexpected I would say. So, I mean, I would say that the legal tussling has been the legal tussling that was sort of anticipated. I think the difference being that it’s happening in a federal court rather than a state court which was the initial plan.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the legal stuff is long ongoing.

Back to your previous point though in terms of the big four. The time before that we spoke about this I said that one of my frustrations is that I know a lot of things that I can’t tell you. And I said a possible solution for that which would make me feel better would be to type them up in an encrypted PDF and give you the encrypted PDF so that when this is all resolved I can give you the password and you can see like, oh, that’s why John was feeling the way he was feeling because he knew those things. And so I did give you that PDF.

**Craig:** Yes. I have that. Obviously I don’t know what’s in it, because I don’t know the password.

**John:** Yes. And so all the hacker teams you’ve pulled on the PDF to try to break it open, I know they’re trying their very, very best, but strong encryption is really, really strong.

**Craig:** I have not even inserted it into my computer.

**John:** So, but here’s a thing that is on that list that I’m actually now allowed to say. I have official approval from the WGA to say is that the guild has been negotiating with the agencies this whole time. So, not just the Gersh who signed this deal now, but these negotiations have been happening since the middle of the election, up until this past week. And it’s not just the agencies five through 12. Like it includes three of the four big agencies, ongoing negotiations.

So you say that you don’t think there’s more progress to be made, that’s why I think there’s more progress to be made.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. Well, first of all, I presumed that there were ongoing back channels. I mean, I know that there haven’t been official negotiations, in other words you guys haven’t gotten back into the big formal room with anybody. As far as I know that would have to be announced. But then again I don’t think that that’s the proper venue for negotiating, nor was it ever the proper venue for negotiating this kind of deal.

So, that’s not a big shock to me. All I’m saying is that in terms of I guess what I would call the “easier victories,” the agency that would be more likely to sign this without major reconsiderations, we’re kind of out of those. And it’s a little discouraging that it took this long to get Gersh to sign it. Again, because not a big packaging agency. Obviously I am rooting for all of this to conclude as soon as possible in a way that is favorable to us. And whatever the negotiations have been, they have been long. Longer than negotiations that we typically have for instance with the companies, which while can be bruising and difficult they tend to finish within a matter of say, I don’t know, three months.

This has been much, much longer. And also with what I think we all presumed would be much more effective pressure. They have gone along for nine months now without collapsing which is, you know–

**John:** So, just to point out though Gersh is a major agency that was part of the ATA. And so all the deals that have been made now are with ATA agencies who have said like, OK, no, we’re dealing with the ATA anymore. We’re dealing individually. So I want to distinguish between back channel and individual, because back channel I think implies it’s those sort of unaffiliated folks who are sort of like sticking off in a distance. That’s not what this is. It’s been individual negotiations. And it’s been a lot of what I would say papers being pushed back and forth rather than sort of like the weird Kabuki thing that we do in MBA negotiations where it’s a bunch of people in the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I like that.

**John:** That is different.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I do like that. I think if you’re negotiating individually with CAA or ICM or WME or UTA that’s great. I mean, that’s all I think we’ve all wanted. Well, I don’t need to get into communication issues. I mean, the Writers Guild tends to communicate in a way that I don’t understand or think is effective. But, on the other hand nine months is not an eternity. The closer we get to a year the more difficult this becomes.

And I do have some concerns about the fact that these lawsuits are hanging out there. There’s some weird stuff in there that I am, well, I just find concerning. So, as always, I am hopeful that this gets resolved in a way where the great majority of writers who have not signed on to the agencies that have signed on to our code of conduct, but are in fact waiting to get the agents that they wanted back can get them back.

**John:** You and I share that goal.

**Craig:** Yes. I cannot wait to see this conversation in print verbatim in Deadline again.

**John:** Oh my. [laughs]

**Craig:** Can’t Deadline just say, “Hey, listen to their show.” Wouldn’t that be better?

**John:** Yeah. That would be terrific.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** You know what we should do? We should put all of this conversation only on the Premium feed so that they have to–

**Craig:** They have to pay us $5?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I think they will. [laughs]

**John:** They probably will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s move on to another piece of follow up. Akiva Schaffer wrote in to us about his frustration with all the waste being generated by DVD screeners and scripts and everything that we get sent during this awards season. And asked like couldn’t we possibly just have this all under an app. He wrote back in with some follow up.

**Craig:** Yeah. He says, well, so Akiva just to refresh you guys is one of the three members of Lonely Island. And of course therefore he is friends Jorma Taccone and Jorma Taccone is married to Mari Heller. Everyone is a friend of the podcast. Akiva took a look at Mari’s Academy account to see how they laid things out. I want to be clear. He wasn’t looking at the screeners or anything illegal like that. He just saw how they basically do their thing.

And he said it looks amazing. That the Academy basically has figured out how to do the screener thing. “Every movie is HD or 4K with 5.1 sound. They are laid out and organized in a way that is easy to use.” And honestly his hope is that the Academy could reach out to the guilds, WGA, DGA, SAG/AFTRA and help them do that. Because there is really at this point no reason for us to be getting paper scripts in the mail and DVDs in the mail with all the attended packaging and then I guess associated carbon that’s being spewed out of the trucks. It’s all silly. None of it needs to happen that way. It has to stop.

So, I think good advice. Everybody should be calling the Academy and saying help us do it the way you do it.

**John:** Yeah. It really has been quite good. So, during the nomination season as the For Your Consideration season the interface was a little bit wonky on it, but the minute the nominations came out the screen was redesigned. So it just goes by category. And so it’s like Best Picture and here are the movies available for Best Picture. All the way down through things you can see like, oh, in this category these are the movies I’ve not seen. It’s really well done. I’ve had zero problems with it. So, yes, my hope is that the other guilds can go to the Academy and say like, hey, can we piggyback on this thing or whatever vendor it is that is providing it can also provide it for the guilds. Because it is just a mitzvah to everyone.

**Craig:** I love hearing you say mitzvah. I have a voting question for you, John.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I have noticed both the DGA and the WGA appear to do some kind of staggered voting, where you get a window to vote for a certain number of categories, but not all of them?

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know why.

**Craig:** Then you get another tranche where you get to vote for – why don’t we just do it all at once?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m not wrong about that, right?

**John:** I think you’re not wrong. I think there are certain categories which get held out for certain reasons. There’s also certain categories for nominations where you have to be on a specific committee, like foreign film.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not talking about nominations. I mean, like just voting to see who wins.

**John:** Oh, category wise I think I vote for everybody all at once. I could be wrong.

**Craig:** But for the guild we don’t seem to be.

**John:** Yeah. Because I don’t remember, I mean, I’m going to vote for Chernobyl, but I don’t remember voting for Chernobyl yet.

**Craig:** I don’t think that that has opened up yet. So, like the last one was feature screenplays and a couple of other things, and drama series, and news series. This is for WGA. All sorts of voting. I don’t know why they don’t – I’m sure there’s a reason.

**John:** There’s always a reason.

**Craig:** There’s always a reason.

**John:** I don’t know why though either.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** It’s probably about some weird thing that’s in the guild bylaws about when things have to happen.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** It’s probably the bylaws.

**Craig:** Oh god. The guild bylaws.

**John:** The most important thing about mentioning Akiva Schaffer is that Akiva Schaffer brings us to Jorma which brings us to the news that MacGruber–

**Craig:** MacGruber!

**John:** Is coming back as a TV series on the Peacock which is the only real reason I’ve heard so far for why we need another streamer. It’s so we can have MacGruber.

**Craig:** Well these streamers aren’t dumb, right? They go I think people need something. And somebody over there must have realized that MacGruber is this quiet sleeping giant.

**John:** Oh, 100%.

**Craig:** That is ready to be awakened. As anyone who has been listening to this podcast since, god, the beginning practically knows that I’m obsessed with MacGruber. And I have read various incarnations of a second MacGruber movie. None of them ever happened. I can’t wait for this.

**John:** Yeah. It’ll be great. I’m very, very excited for it.

Craig, will your kids watch MacGruber? Will they find it funny?

**Craig:** My son will not watch MacGruber. He doesn’t really watch any television like that. That’s not what he does. My daughter watches an enormous amount of TV. Will she watch MacGruber? No, I don’t think that’s her gear. No.

**John:** Yeah. And so my daughter wanted to watch a comedy this past week and so we ended up watching Airplane which was phenomenal.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**John:** It’s just great. And I was happy to be able to get her to that place. But I think comedy is an especially tough thing to watch with teenagers because what the teenager wants to watch that’s funny versus what I remember being very funny as a teenager, there’s just not an overlap. It’s such a – so many movies that were funny to us are just not funny to them.

**Craig:** And aren’t really funny anymore.

**John:** Sometimes they’re not funny anymore.

**Craig:** They’re just not funny anymore. I mean, Airplane is kind of permanently funny. But I do remember the feeling of my father saying you will love this movie, it is so funny. And I was just like brace for impact. And it was usually not that funny. But, you know, you watch it with your dad.

**John:** So, comedies can bring us together. Action movies can rev us up. But news came out of London this week that the film Aladdin, my film Aladdin, could actually save your life. We’ll put a link in the show notes to according to the University College of London going to the movie theater to watch a movie can be as good for your heart as going to the gym.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So in this study of 71 people they had folks who were watching Aladdin with all sorts of monitors attached to them and folks who were reading a book with all sorts of monitors attached to them, and the folks who were watching Aladdin had a better, more beneficial heart outcome than the folks who read the book.

**Craig:** The folks who were reading the book died. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I should also say that this study was put together by a movie theater chain.

**Craig:** So cigarettes don’t cause cancer?

**John:** It’s funny.

**Craig:** Books are bad for you. Movies good.

**John:** Cigarettes improve your vim and vigor. Yeah.

**Craig:** Four out of five doctors agree. Not a ton of stock to be taken in this particular study. But it is nice to see at least watching movies isn’t something that will kill you. I mean, every day there’s a study that explains why something that you like doing will kill you. So, you know, I’ll take that. I’ll go as far as saying it doesn’t appear that they kill you.

**John:** So this was arguing for why seeing a movie in a theater is a beneficial thing for you. And a point it makes here which I think is probably a valid point which they could study some other way is that it is a communal experience but it’s also an experience of focused attention. Because in theory when you’re watching a movie in a theater you are not doing anything else. And in our 2020 world we’re always doing nine things at one time. And so to be doing one thing and being focused on one thing at a time is probably a novel experience for someone in 2020. So in that way it probably is helpful for your mental wellbeing.

**Craig:** It’s like going to the spa.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like the Onsen but for cinema.

**Craig:** What’s the Onsen?

**John:** So some future episode we will talk about public nudity, but Onsens are the Japanese spas–

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** It’s where you hang out naked with everyone else. And it’s uncomfortable for a moment but also kind of a nice thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not going to do it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. Last bits of follow up. Highland2. We came out with a student edition. So people were writing in saying like, hey, I am a film student at this school. We would all like to use Highland. Final Draft will give us a discount. Can you give us a discount?

And so we found out a way to do that. So, if you are a film student at a school, and at a school that uses an edu or something that’s clearly a school email extension where you are, we have a program now where you can sign up to get basically the full version of Highland2 for two years for free.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So send us in at brand@johnaugust.com and cc your professor or whoever runs that program so we can get your school signed up so that you guys as film students can use Highland2 for free.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, a discount off of Final Draft may reduce its price to nearly what you ought to pay for it, but you’re probably still paying too much.

**John:** Yeah. So send this is in, brand@johnaugust.com and we will get you hooked up.

**Craig:** Great. Good job.

**John:** Lastly, Weekend Read, the other app my company makes, we have I think all of the nominated scripts for the 2020 awards up in Weekend Read right now. So if you want to read what those screenplays are you should take a look in Weekend Read. They’re there. I think one of the best ways to really celebrate the movies that you’re seeing is to see what those words were like on the page.

**Craig:** Excellent. Smart idea.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our feature topic today which is anxiety and ambition. We’ll start with a listener who wrote in. “I’m a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is currently working a ‘job with value’ from Episode 422 for a major TV network here in Los Angeles I am not gainfully employed as a writer, but I’m hoping to be one day. For much of my adult life I’ve been dealing with some form of manageable anxiety. To cope I’ve always brushed these feelings aside. After all it’s easier to blame the news cycle, Twitter, a bad relationship, or some other external influence.

“I tell myself things like this must be part of what makes me me, or aren’t the most shining archetypes of writers always battling and embracing their own demons in one way or another? After years of brushing my anxiety issues under the rug with little work to show for myself I thought it time to reconsider my practices. During the past few months I’ve started seeing a therapist, practicing yoga three or four times a week, journaling daily, and exploring the many realms of meditation. Before these practices it felt like I’d been subconsciously wearing a heavy jacket of tension that forced me to suffer in silence.

“Paying attention to mindfulness seems to be impacting my life in dramatic, positive ways. I feel happier, healthier, and more able to connect with my inner voice. A lot of the credit for me taking the step to see a therapist goes to your discussion in Episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo. So, thank you. Out of curiosity what sort of mindfulness practices do you both engage in? I apologize if you’ve already talked about this in some form and it missed me.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s terrific to hear. I think you’re not alone, friend. A lot of people cope with anxiety by brushing it aside, which of course is not coping, and nor is it aside, nor can it be brushed. It never goes away. Avoidance is everyone’s first move. It’s the path of least resistance. And we’re humans. We’re built to be efficient. So if someone is walking down the street and suddenly they turn left and they’re walking on a bunch of nails they’re going to stop and go a different way. Avoidance. Pretty normal.

Unfortunately with things like anxiety and depression they can’t necessarily be avoided because you are the nails. You’re generating pain. So a lot of people, they engage in mindfulness exercises – meditation, yoga, deep breathing. Some people just sit really still and think. Honestly, whatever works. I mean me, personally, I’m a breather. I just stop and I really just work on breathing for about 45 seconds. I hate it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I hate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then like suddenly it works. But while I’m doing it I just feel stupid and angry. And then it works. So, you know, it’s like eating vegetables. You’ve got to do it.

**John:** So the listener mentions meditation. So I started using Head Space. I don’t use it regularly right now but I will say that going through the practice of like that first month of it got me much better at being able to mentally open up my fist and sort of let that anxiety go. There’s a way in which your mind grabs onto things and holds them really tight. And it just lets you unclench and let that thing float away and you find like, oh, I can actually get that thing to not be occupying every thought in my head.

Mindfulness to me is really about sort of recognizing where you are in the present moment and so it’s not ruminating on the past or like over-planning for the future. It’s really sort of being like where you’re at right now and sort of checking where you are in that space. So, breathing is fantastic.

Another thing that can be really helpful and this sounds really simple and dumb but it’s just like to sit where you are and take a survey through the room and just like notice everything in the room. And not try to put judgment or value on it, but just be really seeing everything that’s around you. And it just sort of stops kind of your brain from doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are things I find myself doing when I get stressed out.

**Craig:** I do think that for some people, and I’m likely one of them, sometimes there is an anxiety because of some emotional things that you’re holding onto or you’re struggling with, or you’re afraid of. Sometimes I think I’m experiencing anxiety because my brain is designed to work. It’s designed to chop a certain amount of wood. And if it’s not chopping the wood it can start chopping itself.

And it’s one of the reasons why I love puzzles so much because they kind of just – it’s like my dog will just sit there with that rawhide bone and she’ll just chew, and chew, and chew. And I just think well what for? It’s not food. You’re not getting anything. Well, because she needs to chew. And puzzles are like my rawhide bone. And I think it’s important for writers to also remember just because their mind is worrying and they’re kind of feeling that sort of brain churn it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re broken or flawed or sick. It’s just that’s how your mind works. And sometimes all you need to do is give it a bone to chew.

**John:** Yeah. I want to talk about an aspect of anxiety that’s probably more common to writers than sort of the general population which is ambition. And so I was having a conversation with some USC film students this past week and they were talking about this need they feel to like I have to say yes to every project. I have to always sort of be climbing ahead, ahead, ahead. They sort of sounded like Silicon Valley types. That they were constantly sort of chasing. And they were overworking themselves. They were suffering from burnout. And like, wow, you shouldn’t be suffering from burnout when you’re in your second year of film school. That’s too much.

So I wanted to distinguish between some good things about wanting stuff and going after stuff, which I label ambition, versus anxiety. If you’re going to say yes to a project here are some good reasons to say yes to a project. It might be because there’s something you’re just genuinely excited to do. Or there’s a specific thing you want to learn or a specific person or group of people you want to work with.

You’re asking yourself why do I want to do this. And if those good reasons are there then, yeah, that’s a project you should consider. But, if you’re approaching a project and you’re wanting to say yes because of these bad reasons that’s anxiety. So you might be thinking you’re afraid if you don’t say yes there won’t be another opportunity. You’re jealous of other people doing stuff like that. Or you’re just kind of adding to a list. And it’s understandable why people sort of want to do all the things but really if you just take a second and think about why you’re trying to do this thing you may decide, you know what, I don’t really need to or want to do that. Because every time you say yes to a project you’re de facto saying no to something else. You have a limited amount of time and there’s a bunch of stuff that you probably should be writing, that you want to write, that are really uniquely yours to write that if you’re always chasing after other stuff you’re never going to get the time to actually do them.

**Craig:** And you will make mistakes. You will say yes to things that you shouldn’t say yes to.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** You will say no to things you shouldn’t say no to. You will say yes to something that makes total sense and then 12 days later somebody comes along with something that’s so much more interesting and better and now you’re not available. These things will happen, so just price it in. There’s no way, there’s no perfect strategy. You’re not going to be able to solve this. You just kind of hope for the best.

I think your list here is great. The only thing I’d probably add into the bad column is that you don’t want to say yes because someone is giving you approval through the offer of work. When someone comes to you and says we think you’re amazing, we love what you do, only you can fix this, you’re incredible, and it’s a big deal, you might go, well, who am I to say not to that? I mean, this is amazing, right? They’re telling me I’m great therefore their opinion of whether or not I should write this is more valid than mine. And as it turns out it’s not.

**John:** Craig, I got a shiver as you talked through that because that still works on me, honestly.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it works on me, too. It never stops. I’m trying to become more aware of it because I think 90% of the time people are being honest with you. They’re saying we love you. And as somebody who is – you know, we all start in this business unloved. Right? We’re out in the cold. We’re desperate for somebody to take us in. We’re like the Little Matchstick Girl in Hans Christian Andersen, freezing out there, while everyone is inside eating that big turkey.

And then suddenly people are inviting us inside and we’re so delighted. And we never really lose the trauma memory of being shut out and undervalued and underused and underemployed and underappreciated.

So, when people come at us with honest approval it can sometimes screw up our brains.

**John:** Yeah. It overwhelms your pleasure sense. You’re just like, oh yes, this is what I’ve craved all this time.

**Craig:** Exactly. 10% of the people know exactly that they’re doing that. And those are the worst people. And you’d think, well, 10% is not that many. It’s a lot. It’s actually numerically a lot of people. So you just have to allow yourself to enjoy the approval of somebody wanting you to do something without feeling that that obliges you to do it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, I also want to be aware that what we’re talking about may seem like luxury, like we have the choice of things, where you’re not stuck doing a thing because you have to keep the lights on, because you have to sort of pay rent. Totally understand and get that. But the things you’re doing for yourself, the choices you’re making I’m just arguing to avoid sort of meaningless grinding. Like there’s that videogame quality where you’re just killing orcs in order to make enough leather to do at thing.

You know, sometimes you have to grind a bit and just try to make a meaningful grinding and at least be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing. And if it is just to keep the lights on, that’s fine. That’s good. But don’t pretend that it’s also your artistic satisfaction if it’s not.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I mean, if you’re doing it well you will end up in a place where you will have more things offered to you than you can do. That’s inevitable. So, yeah, we don’t mean to rub it in because some of you are listening to this going what a wonderful first class problem. But, my friend, if you are struggling right now but good you will have this problem.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. The other last thing I would say to avoid burnout is to focus on the process and not the results. So obviously you want to come out of this with a great script. It would be wonderful to get awards. But really look at how do you make the days’ work meaningful? That doesn’t mean it’s actually fun and joyful at all moments, but that you could wake up in the morning saying like, OK, this will be a difficult day but I will get to learn this thing. I will get to see these people who I like. There will be a good reason for me to go through this day. And I will go to bed knowing that I did something that mattered today. If you can do that–

**Craig:** [laughs] I always struggle with that.

**John:** But if you can do that then you’re finding some meaning in the process and it’s not all about sort of chasing this thing down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, I say all the time that what we do is a process job, not a results job. And yet there are days when you kind of feel bad because there weren’t results that day. Over time you will be able to recognize that just because you didn’t get results on a particular day doesn’t mean that you’re result-less.

Look, it never ends. It never, ever ends, no matter what you do. No matter how you do it in this business. Your brain is going to mess with you somehow. It messes with you on your worst days. And I’ve got to be honest, it messes with you on your best days. It just gets in there. You know, you’d think like, whoa, hey, cool man. You won some awards. And then you think, oh, never going to do something that good again. Then your brain starts doing what it does. It’s just part of who we are and you’ve got to kind of give yourself a break as your brain undermines itself. It’s just inevitable.

**John:** Yep. It is true.

Let’s move on to our next thing, and we can frame this with a question that we got in from Michael. He lives in East Hackney, London, UK. He writes, “I was curious to hear your thoughts on how much knowledge and spatial awareness writers should have of interior spaces. Seemingly subtle things like the location of a bathroom or the distance between your character’s living room and their study may play an important part in your story, but its location has been scouted or built is there an industry standard for how specific you should be when it comes to describing specific interior spaces?” That’s a good question.

**Craig:** It is a good question. I don’t believe there’s any kind of standard of how specific you should be when it comes to describing those spaces. But I’m a big believer that you should know them. Because what you fail to do if you do not know them is write something that will easily map onto real physical space. If you have thought about the physical space clearly, and then written the scene, nothing that you write will be incompatible with the physical space.

Very frequently new writers will write scenes and then you get there and you’re like so this person just, what, teleports to the other side of this room in one second? How does that work? Because they haven’t thought about the space. So this person is coming out of the thing but they’re facing towards the door so the bathroom is in the street? What’s going on here?

And, Lindsay Doran, famous for asking me, “Where are they standing?” It’s a big thing. Literally where are they standing in the space. So I think about that a lot. A lot. And the fact of the matter is the more you have a sense of what it ought to be when the rubber hits the road and reality shows up and you’re shooting somewhere that isn’t like what you imagined in your mind what you imagined in your mind can still exist in it, because what you imagined is consistent with reality.

**John:** 100%. So I want to offer as proof of concept of this is Rian Johnson’s screenplay for Knives Out. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

**Craig:** Garbage.

**John:** It’s a pretty good script, I guess.

**Craig:** Garbage. And nominated for an Oscar. Congratulations, Rian.

**John:** Yes. A wonderful movie. But we’ll look at the first two pages of this, just as you take a look through them, he describes “The grounds of the New England manor. Pre-dawn. Misty.” We come inside the house. I’m not going to read the whole thing aloud. But he talks about the first floor, what’s there. “The detritus of a party. Stray champagne flutes.” It’s minimal. We follow a housekeeper named Fran carrying a tray of coffee up a flight of stars. The second floor doors are all closed. “The house has not woken up, and Fran steps lightly.” So he’s describing this tracking shot which is going to establish the geography of this house, which is of course incredible important. But it’s so well done. And it doesn’t feel like D&D descriptions. It’s not talking about a 20×30 foot room with ceilings of a certain height. He’s telling you what the character of the house is, but also giving you a sense of the unique geography. The way the hallways get narrower and narrower. The stairways get narrower and creaky. It completely tells you what you need to know about this house.

I’m assuming he wrote this way before he knew what the actual locations were he was shooting in and he was able to find locations that gave him what he wanted. It’s a great example of sort of how important it is to think about these interior locations as you’re writing.

**Craig:** I mean, I haven’t even asked him this question. My guess would be that the house was a set.

**John:** No, the house was not a set. I heard him on another podcast talking about it.

**Craig:** Wow, really?

**John:** So – actually when they screened it for the Academy Rian and everyone else was there talking about it. And that was the question, like what was the set? And basically it wasn’t a set. It’s a real house. There’s certain rooms in it where they shot at other houses. But, no, it’s not sets.

**Craig:** Wow, great. Well, it’s a terrific job that he does here. First of all, he’s directing on the page. And you can say, no, he’s a director, too. Yeah, uh-huh. OK. So it’s our job is to direct on the page. And it doesn’t involve camera, zoom, lens, blah. It’s just I need to know what’s going on.

I love how short and terse and readable it is. There is exactly as much information as I need. And none of what I don’t need.

So, and this will come up as we read through these things here. Here’s a wonderful thing. The very first line of action description. “The grounds of New England manor.” “The grounds of a New England manor” is not a sentence. Doesn’t matter. I get it. Great. “The grounds of a New England manor. Pre-dawn misty.” 999 writers out of a thousand, particularly those who are aspiring to be professionals, will come up with some sort of purple, rosy, fingers of Jesus pre-dawn haze lingers like the breath of an angel. Blah-blah-blah. “Pre-dawn misty.” Got it. Next.

Do you know what I mean? Like no time for baloney. Just here’s the deal. “Inside the manor. Unlit and still.” That’s how we do it. “Unlit and still.” It’s just like when we talk about how to describe characters. Wardrobe. Hair. Makeup. Things I can see. “Unlit,” view, and “still,” sound. Wonderful. Three words. Also not a sentence. Doesn’t care. Lovely. Great job.

**John:** Yep. Lovely. And by doing things so efficiently he’s able to give us a dead body at the bottom of page one.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well done Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Yeah. He deserves an Oscar.

**John:** All right. So he did not submit his three pages for us to critique.

**Craig:** Should have.

**John:** But a bunch of other people did. So thank you to everyone who submitted to the Three Page Challenge. Here is how this works if you’re new to the podcast. We have a page on the website, johnaugust.com/threepage. People send in the first three pages of their screenplay. They sign a little form saying it’s OK for us to talk about them. And they go into a big hopper. Megana reads through them. This time we had help from Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko in your office. Thank you very much for lending them to us.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** To read through all of them with a specific mandate for what we wanted to talk about this week which is how you establish settings. So that was the mandate we gave them to look for scripts that would let us talk about settings. So in some cases they did it brilliantly, or there were some issues. But that’s what we’re really going to focus on as we look through these three pages. So if you want to read along with us you can find links in the show notes and pull up the PDFs. But we’ll also give you a quick summary of the three that we’re going to take a look at today.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll start with Bruja by Janelle B. Gatchalian.

**Craig:** All right. Shall I read the summary?

**John:** Read the summary for us, Craig.

**Craig:** I shall. Outside of a condo building two security guards fan themselves off with folded cardboard as a swarm of bats flies past them. One considers shooting at them but stalls. He looks up at a window. Inside a child’s bedroom we see a dresser, a doll on the floor, and four clocks set to different time zones on the wall.

On a calendar we see that it is April 13, 2001, Good Friday. There’s a crucifix on the wall and below that two cribs. A mother tucks her twin daughters in. They’re infants. One has a twinkling face. The other has watery eyes like she’s going to cry.

Nearby her son asks from his bed about the aswang. His mother replies, “We don’t believe that stuff anymore.” And he says that he heard bats. She says, “No, you didn’t. The sounds would be too high-pitched.” She says go to sleep. She leaves. Turns off the light revealing glow-in-the-dark stars.

Later we watch the stars fade as a breeze sweeps through. The door hinges open. Bats fly into the room in a cluster. The bats take form into a Filipino woman wearing white. We see her black hair in the mirror reflection as she makes her way to the cribs. She floats above them. Then wraps her tongue around one of the crying baby’s necks before she eats its head and then the rest of it.

The little boy is scared but watches as the aswang makes its way over to the other twin. And holds her, resting the baby at her shoulders where we see three small freckles on the baby’s ear.

And that is the first three pages of Bruja by Janelle Gatchalian.

**John:** Fantastic. So small exception here. There’s actually an extra page here because Janelle has included a glossary. It’s between the title page and the real page of script. There’s a glossary that lists seven terms and sort of gives descriptions of them. For some scripts I would be fine with this. I didn’t need it for these three pages. For a longer script it might be helpful. Craig, how did you feel about the glossary?

**Craig:** I don’t mind it. It’s not ideal. If you can get away with not putting the glossary in you’re better off because the audience will not get a glossary.

**John:** Nope. They will not. Also panopticon I don’t think belongs in a glossary because that’s just a normal English word.

**Craig:** That’s just a word.

**John:** All right. But getting to the actual text on the page, you know I did have a sense of the space and the place. I liked what we were doing in terms of establishing that there are security guards, that it’s hot, that’s it is in an environment that is sort of interesting and exciting to read. I have nitpicks on some of the writing on the page in terms of like some of the word choice. But I will say that I read this this morning and did sort of stick with me. If you were going to have a lady made of bats who then eats the head of a baby it’s going to stick. And at the end of these three pages I was curious to read more.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is meant to be a pilot for a series. My biggest issue really was with the very first scene. So this exterior condo building, night. I don’t know what a condo building is.

**John:** I don’t either.

**Craig:** I mean, I know it’s an apartment building that has condos, but how many, what, three stories? Four stories? 100 stories? And then I don’t know where it is. Is it in a city? Is it in the suburbs? Is it outskirts.

**John:** Yeah, only when we get to the caption near the bottom of the page it says Manila, Philippines. Give that to us at the start. It’s important. Really anchor us into the place where we are.

I love that it’s hot. I love them fanning with the cardboard. But we’re talking about the stagnant air and yet I can’t feel that. We need to see what’s happening to the security guards who also a little too generic for this. I want to see them – distinguish them. Make them sweaty. Tell us more about where we are.

**Craig:** Yeah. So this condo building is a nondescript building. It’s in the middle of nowhere that is defined. The two security guards emerge out of a guard post. What? What guard post? A guard post in front of a condo building?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s like.

**Craig:** Is there like a guard arm? Is this to enter the parking lot? Is it just a kiosk? What are we looking at? Why do they emerge? When it says to beat the hot still air, I need to see that they’re hot before they emerge. Usually if you’re hot on the inside there’s a little fan or something. So, they’re just coming outside. And I don’t know why. It seems like they’re emerging just because the writer wants them to emerge.

And then this is one of the stranger bits, because we’re talking about geography. It says, “Their eyes roam to motionless wheels of a parked car.”

**John:** I had a big question mark there, too. I don’t know what that means. They’re looking at a parked car?

**Craig:** The one thing that will never attract anyone’s attention ever are the motionless wheels of a parked car. Also, is it just one car? Is it alone? What kind of car? Why would they care? And then it says, “A swarm of bats rush in.” To the outside? You can’t rush into the outside. They’re outside.

**John:** They can rush past.

**Craig:** They can rush past. Where do they come from? They don’t just materialize out of thin air. This is exactly the kind of logic geography that we need to consider or else on the day of production meetings people say, “Are the bats just poof? What’s up?”

**John:** Yeah. So let’s describe the fantasy version of this scene which I think is what we were maybe trying to go for. Is that you have these two security guards who it says, “Swelteringly hot night.” They’re near their little booth, whatever it is. Have them already be outside the booth. There’s no reason for them to be inside and then come out. They’re already outside this booth. They’re fanning themselves with the cardboard. I love it.

Suddenly a thousand freaking bats are swarming past them. They freak out. They get inside the booth. One of them pulls a gun like should I shoot the bats. Like, no, of course you don’t shoot the bats. That is an interesting opening and I think that’s kind of what we’re trying to get to here. But the words in this opening section didn’t land for me.

**Craig:** They didn’t. And also it says that one of the guards “aims his gun at the bats. He stalls, shivering with fear.” Nobody actually shivers with fear. Not like that. And then it says, “He looks up at a window.”

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** Why? And which window?

**John:** Why?

**Craig:** How do we know he’s looking at a window? You know what it will look like when he looks up at a window? He’s looking up. That’s what it will look like. We won’t know. There is a version of this, by the way, just occurred to me, where you start with these two guys in their guard kiosk and it’s super-hot but there’s a little fan going [spinning sound]. And then the fan goes [sound of fan dying]. And it stops. And they’re like, oh no, because it’s super-hot, but they don’t want to go outside, which is information. Like well why don’t you want to go outside? What’s the problem?

And then they’re like, screw it, let’s just do it. It can’t be that bad. And then the bats come. Because the implication is that they know, I guess, that there’s some sort of supernatural thingy out there.

**John:** Yeah. Could be. So let’s take a look at this moment of looking up at the window because I think the instinct was to be, oh, that’s going to help the transition into the apartment. It doesn’t help. It’s just confusing. So if we see these guards and all these bats go past, the fact that we’re cutting to the inside of this apartment with this mother and these kids, we are expecting those bats to come. And that is tension that is great. And so that suspense is going to be there because holy cow something is happening.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. But the problem is that the bats appear to be in some sort of JFK air traffic control holding pattern for a very long conversation.

**John:** They do. Yes. So I think we can probably lose a little of this conversation. I also want to lose the mother’s line on the bottom of this first page. “Naku. It’s 2001. We don’t believe those things anymore.” Scratch that line. Just say like, “Mama, what about the aswang?” “Naku.” “I heard the bats.” Cross all the rest of this out. “Just close your eyes. I’ll keep the AC on. You’ll fall right asleep.”

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** That’s all we need.

**Craig:** That’s it.

**John:** We’re set.

**Craig:** We’re done. We’re good. The scene where the woman appears, it can be scarier. The truth is that the – like when it says, “Hard to make out her face. She flips her raven hair back.” You know, like my daughter’s friends flip their raven hair back. Do you know what I mean? There’s a way for the hair to – you want to feel like this – is it stringy? Is it wet? Is it dirty?

**John:** Dirty fingernails claw through her stringy hair.

**Craig:** Or does the hair just float away revealing this terrible face? We’re missing something. And then honestly when she eats the baby it’s gross. There’s a line – sorry folks – “a bloody flesh of flesh, eyeballs exposed, floats and enters her mouth.” Well that almost sounds funny. Because like how does – flesh doesn’t have eyeballs. Anyway, there’s some issues here like this. And in the middle of this page – there’s about a page description or three-quarters of a page of this creature eating a baby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when it is done eating the baby our writer writes in description, “She just ATE THE BABY!” Yes, we know.

**John:** We were there. We saw it.

**Craig:** Yeah. We saw it.

**John:** But did the young boy see it? And that’s where I got a little frustrated with the sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah, where is he? What’s he doing?

**John:** So I was confused by sort of the boy is in the room with the twin babies. OK. That’s great. But we lose him through all of the baby eating and then suddenly he’s there on page three. “The young boy grips the covers. He can’t control his heavy breathing. The aswang turns its head to the other baby twin, unfazed.”

So, he’s there but we don’t clock him for a very long time in there. And that should be – we should be worried about him. We should be seeing him.

**Craig:** Perspective. Right? You want to talk about what’s scary? Well the kind of objective perspective of this creature is not scary. A little boy’s perspective of this creature as it floats by him and then eats one of this infant siblings–

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** And then we’re like peeking. We’re getting peeks. We’re getting things. And then it looks over and he hides. You know, you’ve seen this stuff before. I mean, so anyway, that’s – yeah. But, you know, it seems like a good setup for a show.

**John:** It does seem like a good setup for a show. So this is a show about setting and sort of places things in a specific place. I like Manila, Philippines as a place to set this story. I have not seen it before. I’m curious about the mythology that Janelle is building for all of this. And while I didn’t love some of what happened on here I did like the idea of like, OK, there’s this woman who is made of bats who just ate a baby. That’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Bat-cloud lady baby-eater is good. So, we’re really talking about, again, living in that space. Looking around. Seeing it. And asking what do people need to know. Space. Relationship to space. Time matters. If bats are going to fly toward a thing they need to show up at bat speed, right? That’s just how it goes. So it’s stuff like that.

**John:** Yep. All right. Let’s travel still in the southern hemisphere for Night of Game by Alex Beattie. We’re in Kruger National Park at night. We see 50 white rhinos migrate through the plains. We hear the buzz of cicadas. And through the long gross we spot a silver tip of a rifle and then a few yards away more silver tips. We watch a rhino grunt as it charges ahead only to be shot with bullets and the wail of the rhino as it collapses. We see these white Boer poachers rise from the grass, removing their knives.

Then we cut to the Zimbali Lodge at night. Masks and sculpt animal heads lining the lobby. We follow the footsteps up the stairs to the hotel rooms. There’s a beep as a card swipes and a door opens. Miles, 18 years old, sleeps. We pull up on him as his eye flickers open and we see his seven-year-old sister Caitlyn. She’s fully dressed, trying to wake him up.

Miles protests that it’s too early. It’s 4am. Miles gets up and meets his mom, Lori, in her hotel room. He looks at an old framed photo of his parents as Lori makes a comment about the night she met Miles’ father with a melancholy tear in her eye.

We cut to a game reserve with an anti-poaching sign. The family rides in a jeep. Caitlyn is asleep. Miles is in the back. Lori is up front with her guide, Barry, who welcomes them to the park saying it’s the largest white rhino population in the world. Lori says it was her husband’s second home. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** OK, well, keeping with our topic today of location we begin with exterior, the bush, night. Super: Kruger National Park, South Africa. And then we see a crash of at least 50 white rhino. That is a lot, by the way. We tend to underestimate the size of numbers when we look at these things. 50 white rhinos. A ton. Migrate through the vast rugged plains. A rhino lingers behind and wanders into the thicket.

Well, is it plains or is it thicket? Because plains ain’t thicket.

The huge bull feeds on a nearby thorn bush. And so hidden in the long, dry grass a silver gun tip. I feel like this is an area where you’re setting up a rhino is about to get picked off by predators. And therefore I need to know specifically what’s going on. Is it a little area that’s through a gorge? Is it flanked on both sides by tall grass? Is the rhino aware? I mean, this is the setting of a kind of a murder, right? So what we have is a little too generic. It’s sort of like Africa. Here comes guns. But then it charges and it dies. And they come out in their night vision goggles. OK, so that’s kind of, you know, it’s fine.

But I would do, I don’t know if you thought the same, but I would be far more specific about the arrangement of cover and stuff to create a sense of suspense and danger and also give the people who are making this movie a fighting chance at actually picking a location or designing something or even filling it in to fit the vision of the writer.

**John:** Yeah. So going back to Rian’s script for Knives Out. The grounds of a New England. Pre-dawn misty. So incredibly minimalist but we also identify it as Thrombey Estate Manor House. So it’s pretty easy to summon an image in your head of what kind of place we’re at. This right here I do feel like we’re sort of generic African savannah. I need to be grounded a little bit more clearly. You’re going to have to paint me a picture a little bit better, in part so we can get the suspense that Craig is looking for. Like, you know, if we’re just seeing these rhinos here, well, I mean, is this going to be a predator attacking? What’s going to be happening here?

Once we see a gun, OK, it’s going to be some sort of poaching thing. Is there going to be a twist? How many people are there? What’s happening? And I didn’t get that sort of grounding that I wanted here.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard to generate surprise when you haven’t really laid in the arrangement in my mind of where these things are coming from and why it even works at all.

So, our next location is Zimbali Lodge and we start inside Zimbali Lodge which is an interesting choice. Typically we’re going to want to see the exterior of something like this. But hopefully we get the sense of what it is. We’re going to need a break in between the scene before and this scene, which is why I’m thinking you might want some sort of exterior. And we’re in the lobby and we’re creeping low along the stone tiles and faint footsteps climb the steps. I was a little confused by that. Are we the footsteps? I think so.

So, it’s OK in this point and here’s where I would say golly gee, don’t be afraid to say “we.” This is a perfect time to use “we.” We are climbing the steps slowly. At the top of the landing, hotel rooms. Beep. A swipe. We push the door open. A fan whirls. Reveal we are, blah-blah-blah, if we needed to, right?

Why is this little girl in a lobby at night? I have no idea. She’s seven. I understand why a little girl would want to sneak out of her room to wake up her brother because she’s bored. But why would she start in the lobby?

**John:** Yeah. That didn’t track for me either. So, this little girl, so story logic wise, this little girl is excited to go on their safari. They do start at the crack of dawn. I’ve done them. They’re fun. But you do start at night, so that’s not unrealistic. But it’s unrealistic that she’s out of the room. I also get concerned by – so if you’re in a location that has multiple sub locations you can do the thing like what we’re doing here which is just hotel room, but I didn’t get a sense of like, wait, are we inside the room? Are we outside the room? You got to make it more clear where we’re at here.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I didn’t know why we were sort of sneaking up. But then through binoculars we see Miles Abbott, 18, slim build, sprawled out asleep. Wait, were we in binocular vision this whole time? What’s going on? I was just really confused by why we were doing what we were doing. And are we supposed to feel frightened for Miles? That these poachers are after him? I didn’t get what the writer was going for here.

**Craig:** Well, I think it is fake suspense. By the way, it’s not shootable. You can’t shoot the thing through binoculars. It just doesn’t work like that, unless they’re fake binoculars because they’re a toy apparently. She’s holding a tiny pair of pink binoculars. Maybe they’re a toy. But even then you’d have to vignette it like binoculars which would just be confusing to people.

And like you said are they doing that the whole time? So it’s meant to be a misdirect and it just doesn’t make sense.

So here’s the thing about misdirects. Totally cool to do. But when you reveal they have to make retroactive logic, otherwise their just a cheat and the audience loses faith in you and they feel like you’re just cheating, which you are.

**John:** Which I worry you would feel that way in here. So, the actual conversation between the two of them if you just strip away all the other stuff is just like the girl is really excited to go, the boy is 18 years old and sort of being a teenager and wants to sleep in. He then goes into the mother’s room and has – this is the kind of scene that I really – it’s not quite the air vent for me, but it’s close. Where there’s a conveniently placed photo of the person who is dead. And for no apparent reason one character picks it up and starts talking about it and they have a conversation about this dead person, which is meant to set up something else. You got to find a different way to do that, folks, because it can’t be there. It can’t.

**Craig:** Well, when a man dies and leaves behind a wife and two children inevitably about three years later one of the kids will look at a picture and the wife will start talking in an impromptu fashion about the first night they met, as if the kids never heard that story.

It’s just, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s not emotionally logical.

**John:** And here’s the opportunity that Alex has given himself for getting that backstory out, because they’re going to go on safari and she gets the opportunity to say like my husband was a safari leader. Basically we don’t need that information on page two because it’s going to be very easy to get out on page three if it really is that crucial. So, I think that’s interesting and helpful.

I had a question on page two about accents. I think they have British accents but I’m not sure if they have British accents. You got to tell us, because I don’t know how to read some of these lines until I know what accent these people are.

**Craig:** I mean, generally speaking cheeky would imply British to me. Or Irish. Or Australian.

**John:** Or they could be South African.

**Craig:** Or they could be South African. Actually you’re right.

**John:** There’s a lot.

**Craig:** There is a lot. It could be a lot of different things. This is not a sentence. “Hluhluwe home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” There is no verb.

Now, people don’t necessarily have to speak with verbs in their sentences. But this is a sentence that would normally have a verb like “Hluhluwe is home to the largest population of white rhino in the world.” Why is he suddenly saying that? I mean, normally we want to come into these scenes in the middle. He’s going on and on. He’s rambling.

**John:** Yeah. OK. But let’s talk about transitions between moments in scenes. Because page three, the end of the Lori/Miles scene, “Where’s Caitlyn?” “She’s already started her little safari adventure!” It’s not a good out. So we talk about the out of a scene is like how do you stop a scene so you can get onto the next thing? Or leave a scene with enough energy that you’re spilling into the next one. I didn’t buy it. Especially with “They both laugh.” No. That’s not–

**Craig:** What’s funny?

**John:** Yeah. Maybe laugh at something that’s funny. This is not a moment that’s funny that’s going to give you the out. And in so many cases stop trying to write for the out and look for what is the last thing that sort of necessarily wants to happen in that scene so you can just cut to the next thing and move on. And you can come into the next thing a little bit later. I just felt like we always have these opportunities to be moving ahead.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve covered this one.

**John:** I think we’re good.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did it.

**John:** But I want to say setting something at a safari park is good. That’s a space that I’m not seeing in a lot of other things, so I think there’s really good opportunities to do fascinating things there. But describe what’s interesting and new and different. And unfortunately in these pages we got kind of generic-y Africa and we got a hotel room.

**Craig:** And generic people and generic emotions.

**John:** Again, we want you to take advantage of the specific things you can do in that place which is to make your movie and your first three pages different than all other three pages.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. Well, let’s move onto our last one. This is Upward Mobility. It’s limited series pilot. Oh, I like limited series. And this is story by Carol Gold Lande, Lande I’m going to guess, L-A-N-D-E, and Linda Minnella Yardley. And it is written by Linda Minnella Yardley.

We watch an opening credit sequence of the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Fresco Murals. The show opens in the dining room kitchen of the Ford Bomber Plant, late morning. A busboy unloads Ford monogramed china while a black waiter, Lester in his 50s, and a young white trainee walk through the kitchen. Lester explains to the trainer that Mr. Ford and his executives eat breakfast in the dining room every day. And Mr. Ford prefers his milk unpasteurized, believing that it’s healthier.

Trainee doesn’t like this, doesn’t appreciate that he has a person of color as his boss. We head into the dining room. Other waiters are getting the room ready for lunch, but Henry Ford, 79, and Harry Bennett, 55, are in conversation. Harry hands Ford a photo of a University of Michigan football player. And throughout this exchange we learn that Ford is disappointed in his own son and is looking for someone to spy on him. He rejects the football player, thinking that his son would identify him as a spy. Lester serves Harry a steak. The trainee gives Ford his milk and cereal.

Ford looks through and finally picks a photo of a middle-aged man named Joe Salvo. Lester brings the phone from the kitchen. There’s a call for Harry. Harry listens briefly and has to leave. He tells Ford one of their planes has blown up and the entire crew is dead. He also says to Ford that Edsel has landed. Ford drops his napkin and then tucks it back into his neck and tells Harry to get Joe Salvo hired for his son, Edsel, quickly. And that is our summary of Upward Mobility.

John, what did you think?

**John:** So, the pages we’re reading are not the first three pages. Apparently there’s a teaser that happened right before this. I’m guessing in the teaser we actually saw a bit more of factory-factory because in what we’re seeing here we have the opening title sequence and then we’re into this sort of executive dining room.

But, with what I saw I was intrigued by sort of some of the setting, the geography, and curious about what was happening, but a little bit confused.

So, let’s talk about this opening title sequence. I know Diego Rivera Fresco that she’s talking about. I think that’s actually a great idea for using in these opening titles because it feels dynamic, it feels period, it feels really cool. In my head because I recently saw Ford vs. Ferrari I keep picturing that Ford Motor Company. So this is a few years earlier. I need to know a little bit more place and time. And I might have gotten those in the first three pages before this, but I was missing some specificity about exactly what year I’m kind of in. And I would love to have seen that.

That said, I’m excited to see Lester and, you know, the black waiter who is training the trainee, and that little bit of racism. I always love a moment where a phone gets brought to a table. I find that to be a good period detail.

But I also got a little bit lost in the we’re hiring someone to spy on the son. And I felt like there could have been sharper moments than that. Craig, what were you feeling?

**Craig:** Yeah. If I had to guess, I mean, again who knows? But I would think the teaser might be the plane crash.

**John:** Yes, OK.

**Craig:** That would be a fun way to open a show is a plane crash. I mean, everybody likes a good old plane crash. I mean, except for the people on the plane. Or the people under the plane. Yeah, the opening title sequence could be pretty cool. You know, the thing about opening title sequences is if they’re not actively telling story, like for instance the title sequence for Game of Thrones, then they might not even need to be detailed if they really are just graphic title sequences.

The bomber plant, again, I would probably not start inside a kitchen if I don’t know where the kitchen is. I haven’t seen the exterior. I’m guessing I don’t see the exterior in the prior bit. That’s if I don’t. I also don’t know what bomber plant means. And bomber plant is kind of a strange phrase. It means bomber airplane. So maybe just a little clearer there.

But there’s a good job here of using space. I like steaming fog. I like rattling. I like flinching as he plucks hot plates from the rack and stacks them.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I can feel it, right? Like I can see it. I can feel it. I’m not sure why young white trainee who is part of this scene and who is bristling under the training of–

**John:** He gets a name. He should get a name.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Right? He gets a name. Otherwise I’m less interested in his racism to be honest with you. It just has less impact because he’s not a real person.

**John:** Craig, I want to delete the paragraph, “Even though he’ll never hold paper on a spec of land, Lester addresses the trainee with the posture and confident formality of the man who owns this kitchen.”

**Craig:** I agree with you.

**John:** Don’t need it.

**Craig:** Because his dialogue does that for you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think the actors can see what’s going through here.

**John:** I like Lester’s line, “Fix that good in your mind.” It’s specific and kind of weird and it sticks. I mean, and it doesn’t feel too written. I dug it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wasn’t – so we have to talk a little bit about when people say names. We’ve had a few of these in here. People are just announcing names. Generally speaking a cook, “Lester, food is good to go here.” No, I don’t think so. Cook taps the order-up counter. “Food’s ready.” Or just taps it. And they take the plates. There’s an opportunity if Mr. Ford knows Lester’s name that’s good. Or if Harry says, “Thank you, Lester,” because they know him. That’s good. It’s just finding those moments. Speaking of names, a lot of people aren’t going to know that Henry Ford’s son was named Edsel. In fact, most people will not know that. So when it says, “Even Edsel could spot him as one of your moles,” is Edsel a competitor? Does Edsel work for the government? Who is Edsel? Is Edsel confusion? Hard to say.

So, “Even my son could spot him as one of your moles.” Something. You just have to be a little clever about this, otherwise we’re going to get a little – I think that’s part of the confusion. Because this is also a confusing thing they’re doing. They’re looking through photos to find somebody who can spy on or look after his kid and they’re not even sure what the criteria are.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a Talented Mr. Ripley situation where he wants somebody to kind of befriend or sort of get close to his son so he can keep an eye on him. That’s my guess is that Edsel is sort of a mess-up and he wants somebody to watch over him.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. So it’s a little bit – and I love that. I think that’s a really cool idea. It’s just that I’m not quite sure when he says I don’t like this guy, I don’t like that, I’m like why exactly? Altar is spelled incorrectly by the way. A-L-T-A-R.

And also I don’t quite understand what’s going on when Harry says, “One of our planes blew up. The whole crew is dead.” Ford doesn’t care. Lester is worried. And then Harry says, “And Edsel just landed.” That’s all in italics. And that seems to jar Henry Ford. Why?

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t think we have – it’s not that we don’t have information, but we’re not sufficiently curious to make us really want to go to like got to have the answer to that question. And I think some tightening in these scenes could get you to that place.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** We may have seen Edsel in the first three pages which is why we’re focusing on this. So we don’t know everything about this.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Something I want to talk about with title pages on all of these projects. In this case it’s story by Carol Gold Lande & Linda Minnella Yardley, written by Linda Minnella Yardley. It wouldn’t be written by, it would be screenplay by. So, written by is both screenplay and story. So, if this is a situation where the two of you came up with the story together and one of you actually wrote these pages, Screenplay by is what you would actually be putting in that place.

That date belongs in the bottom right corner of the page.

Generally you won’t see the Written by or Story by, you won’t see the word written or story capitalized. Those would be lower case by themselves. It’s not a big thing. But most scripts you’re going to read are going to have that be lower case. So you might as well do that.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I’m just thinking about this because it’s television, I don’t know – would it be screenplay by–?

**John:** Sorry, teleplay by.

**Craig:** Teleplay by. Yeah.

**John:** Teleplay by. You do television now, Craig, so you’re going to have to learn this.

**Craig:** I mean, I am so far behind on everything.

**John:** All right. I want to thank everyone who submitted. So I guess it’s more than 60 folks that we read through. But especially these three/four people who wrote in with their scripts. Thank you for sharing them with us so we can talk through what we loved and what we thought could be improved upon. If people want to send in their own scripts again it’s johnaugust.com/threepage. And you will be able to submit for the next time we do this.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, Craig.

**Craig:** Oh, good, you know I have one this week.

**John:** You go first.

**Craig:** So many, many, many moons ago one of my One Cool Things was a game for iOS and possibly for Android, although I don’t care about Android, called House of Da Vinci. And House of Da Vinci was kind of a Room knockoff. It wasn’t kind of Room knockoff. It was a Room knockoff. But it was pretty good. And as I recall I said this is like a good stop gap for people who love the Room. And they have a sequel out now and it’s really good. And it’s not really a Room knockoff. It still has very similar mechanisms in terms of picking up objects, manipulating them, folding them, turning them, twisting them. And some of the same sounds. But the nature of the gameplay is quite different. And it’s really well done. I have to say. And it runs beautifully. Very smooth for a game that’s clearly complicated and large in terms of its demands on my iPad.

So, strongly recommend. If you do like puzzle-solving games like the Room, check out the latest House of Da Vinci.

**John:** Fantastic. I will check that out. I have two One Cool Things. The first is How America Uses its Land, which is a Bloomberg thing, which apparently is from 2018, but I just saw it this last week because people were tweeting about it. It’s this really good map of the US that sort of shows acre by acre or however they’re dividing it up sort of how America actually uses its land. And so of course all the cities in America could fit up into the northeast. And most of our land is pasture and other sorts of things. Really it’s a great way of describing the choices we made as a country in terms of what we’re using our land to do. And we could probably use our land better than a lot of golf courses.

The second thing is an article in the LA Times about Sweetgreen. So I eat at Sweetgreen every week or two. They make good salads and they try to compost and do things. This article talks through the struggles they’ve had actually composting and sort of they try to have no waste go into landfills. And it’s very, very hard. So the article does a good job showing the real struggles they’ve had with waste management in terms of it’s one thing to try to source recyclable products and things that are made of compostable materials, but actually getting them from the store to those facilities is really difficult. So, just a good article about sort of the really complicated production chains of modern commerce.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao with production assistance this week by Bo Shim and Jacq Lesko.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs.

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 you’re going to hear right after this music where we’re going to talk about mugs.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Bonus Segment

**John:** OK, here is my issue with mugs.

**Craig:** I cannot wait for this.

**John:** All right. So I think mugs are a good invention. I think they’re delightful for coffee or for tea or for whatever you want to drink. My issue is with novelty mugs that are given to me as gifts or as part of gifts. And I don’t want your mugs. I don’t want the mug you’re giving me for this school where I did an Arlo Finch event. People give them to you because they’re thankful for you doing something for them, but you can thank me by not giving me your mug because I don’t want your novelty mug.

**Craig:** You’re a real mug Grinch.

**John:** I’m really Grinchy about mugs. Craig, so let’s say you went to some award show. You’ve been to a bunch of award shows lately. And in the gift bag there was a mug. What would you do with that mug?

**Craig:** I’d probably shove it in the mug cabinet.

**John:** So, you have a mug cabinet. And tell me about your mug cabinet.

**Craig:** You know, it fills up with mugs. [laughs] The thing is like the mugs – I want you to direct your mug ire at Color Me Mine. This is an entire business where you’re paying them for you to end up with an endless mug.

No, I get it. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that accumulates. The things that bums me out is there’s all these gift baskets and things. Like people send you a gift basket, great, that’s awesome. But there’s an actual basket. It’s like this woven thing.

**John:** What do you with the basket? Yes.

**Craig:** You got to chuck it. There’s nothing else to do with it. You can’t have a room full of baskets.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And at least, look, it’s basket material. It’s not made of iron. Or chemicals. But still like it’s just more junk.

**John:** There’s a limited number of Baby Moses, so I cannot send him down the river. I mean, there’s nothing for me to do with this basket.

**Craig:** Like back in the day of Moses when he was sent down the river, do you think when people found him they thought it was a gift basket? [laughs]

**John:** They did. Like, whoa, look what we just found.

**Craig:** What a bummer. It’s not even like – there’s no wine. There’s no crackers. It’s a freaking baby.

**John:** Yeah. There’s no fancy cheeses in there. There’s nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** Useless.

**John:** This year I got only one gift basket. And so I realize – I think it’s partly because, well, the agency I was at which usually sent me a gift back, they’re not my agency anymore. Bruckheimer did not send me a basket this year. Another director I worked with before didn’t send baskets this year. And you know what? I honestly didn’t miss it that much.

I missed sort of like not having that moment of thinking like, oh yeah, I remember I used to work for them. But I didn’t miss like the stuff that I didn’t want that I was going to throw away.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s funny. CAA doesn’t send gift baskets for Christmastime. They usually just send – they do a charity thing and then they’ll send a little booklet to show you, OK, here’s where your money went, I mean, here’s where we donated money instead of buying you a basket. Which honestly I think is great.

The thing is sometimes I think – so there’s a whole world of company junk out there. My late father-in-law was a Burger King franchisee. He owned a couple of Burger Kings. And he and my mother-in-law would go every year to a Burger King convention. And kind of the whole deal was like stuff. Junk. Pads. Pens. Clips. Mugs. There’s like a world of crap that gets generated with logos.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the logo crap industry.

**John:** Logo crap. Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know what? You’ve converted me. I’m out. I’m out of the mug business.

**John:** I’m out of the mug business, too. So, I say, Craig, just take that – Marie Kondo that mug cabinet. You don’t want those mugs. So what we’ve done is we got rid of all our novelty mugs. And so all of our mugs are the exact same identical mug from Pottery Barn. And you know what? I make my coffee in the morning. It’s indistinguishable from any other mug. And it’s better that way.

**Craig:** Look, we have these glass coffee tea mugs that are kind of like that insulated glass so you can have a hot thing and it doesn’t hurt your hand. That’s all I need. But I guarantee you if I throw one of those mugs away I’m going to hear about it from one of the two women in my house. No question. One, either my wife or my daughter, is going to say where is my blankety-blank mug? And I’m going to say, really? You wanted that? And then I’m going to get in trouble.

**John:** I want to be able to opt out of mugs. And so I want to be able to like – I want there to be a polite way for me to be able to say like, hey, I’m excited to come to event. And if you’re thinking about giving me a mug, or a baseball hat, with a logo on it please don’t. Or pen. These are things – you’re actually going to make me feel worse about the event for giving me this thing.

**Craig:** I will always take a pen. I love pens. So, I’ll take your pen.

**John:** Another bonus segment will be about my strong feelings on pens.

**Craig:** Oh, I love them.

**John:** All right. I love pens, I just don’t like any pens except for the pen I actually want.

**Craig:** Ugh, god, you’re a robot.

**John:** I am. Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Bye.

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* [Upward Mobility](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F01%2FScriptnotesUM.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ac2859f1a8bf18c18229be6012dc782fc4b4fcc279a8a44a17974472e3847aae) by Linda Minella Yardley (Story by Carol Gold Lande and Linda Minella Yardley)
* [House of Da Vinci](https://www.bluebraingames.com/the-house-of-da-vinci-2)
* [How America Uses its Land](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/?sref=q8seIhDd)
* [Sweetgreen Composting](https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-01-15/sweetgreen-green-image)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2020/the-one-with-greta-gerwig).

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

**Greta Gerwig:** Hello. I’m Greta Gerwig.

**John:** And this is Episode 433 of Scriptnotes.

**Greta:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. 433 episodes.

Today on this show we will be discussing ambition, authorship, and adaptation, which is why we’re so lucky to have Greta Gerwig filling in for Craig. She is the acclaimed writer and director of Little Women and Lady Bird. We’re going to answer some listener questions about descriptive writing and parenthood as well.

**Greta:** Great.

**John:** Craig is out sick today. But he has promised to join me after the credits for a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about what was happening with him and Tiffany Haddish at the Golden Globes. So, Craig won a Golden Globe. He won a Golden Globe for Chernobyl.

**Greta:** That’s amazing.

**John:** Which is great. And now you already had a Golden Globe, because you won a Golden Globe for Lady Bird.

**Greta:** Actually you know what? The thing is because I wasn’t listed as a producer on Lady Bird or Little Women I actually don’t have any awards.

**John:** Well, you have many awards. You don’t have a Golden Globe?

**Greta:** No. Because it won a Golden Globe for Best Comedy but because I’m not a producer I don’t have a Golden Globe.

**John:** I’m going to throw this table.

**Greta:** I know.

**John:** I’m so angry.

**Greta:** I know. People are like let me see your Golden Globe and I’m like the thing is I don’t have one. It’s quite all right. I think eventually I will be a producer on my projects. But for the first couple I was like I want other people to be able to take that full space.

**John:** That’s fair. So I assumed that you and Craig had that in common winning Golden Globes. But you and I have something in common I discovered during our research. We are both born on August 4th.

**Greta:** No?

**John:** We are birthday twins.

**Greta:** Birthday twins. Plus Obama.

**John:** Plus Obama. The three of us. A powerful–

**Greta:** Have the same–

**John:** A powerful team.

**Greta:** And I think Queen Elizabeth. Is that right?

**John:** That sounds right. I’ll believe it. Say it with confidence and we’ll believe it.

**Greta:** Queen Elizabeth. No, that’s really great. A Leo.

**John:** Yeah, a Leo. I don’t really believe in astrology but like–

**Greta:** Oh, I do. [laughs]

**John:** But I have many qualities of Leo.

**Greta:** I mean, actually I don’t know that I believe in it in that I don’t know that I think there’s a correlation between the facts of the world and what you can glean from astrology. However, I think people use lots of things which it’s not technically based in hard fact at all. And if it makes you a little happier, why not? I mean, an astrologist told me once that I was in a lucky corridor. It was when I was making Lady Bird actually. And then she was like so if anything goes wrong, just ask yourself how is this an opportunity for me. Because it is.

And I was like well that’s just pretty good advice in general.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Astrology maybe not true, but good advice always welcome.

**Greta:** Good advice. And I have Leo-ish qualities.

**John:** I’m going to be asking a lot of advice from you for our listeners. But let me lay out the overall agenda of things I’d love to talk about while I have you here for this hour. So I want to talk about your adaptation of Little Women which is unconventional and just terrific.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** We have the script in front of us so we’ll be able to do some deep diving on some scenes. But I want to know how you came to write it. Why you wrote it? It’s a story about ambition. Jo is very ambitious. You are ambitious as a filmmaker. You were instrumental in helping create a whole genre of filmmaking. So we should talk about that.

**Greta:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then I want to talk about the notion of authorship because Jo aspires so hard to be an author. And the work I associate you with is so autobiographical. And so like Little Women is sort of meta autobiographical because of some of the things you did, but Lady Bird is highly autobiographical. So the degree to which you are writing things that only you could write is I think a good thing for us to talk about.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** That will be our agenda for this hour. But I want to know how you came to write Little Women because it’s a public domain story. You could have written it at any time, but you wrote it in a very specific way. So tell me about how you came to write it.

**Greta:** Well, the truth is actually I didn’t really know about the public domain for a long time, in terms of the text of Little Women. But I grew up reading this book. I read it many, many times. And Jo March was my favorite character. And in many ways she was the character that made me believe I could be a writer, because she wanted to be a writer. She was a writer. And then in some way that I didn’t know completely but I think you intuit when you’re reading it is because you’re holding the book Little Women in some ways you know she became the writer who wrote the book even though it’s a different name.

And I didn’t really know who Louisa May Alcott was because I read books the way all kids read books which is that the things within the pages seem real to you, even though they’re fiction. And I think the last time I read the book when I was something like 14 or 15 and then when I was 30 I reread it and I felt like I’d never read it before. I felt like it was brand new.

**John:** You read it just on a lurk? There was no reason?

**Greta:** I was actually moving out of one apartment into another apartment and that’s often the occasion to uncover some things, which is why it’s sometimes good to either move or clean stuff out, because then you revisit stuff. Anyway, I had the copy of Little Women that I had had when I was a girl. And I reread it. Or I sat down to sort of like page through it. And then I started reading it and I was like, oh my god, this is – in one way I almost know this by heart, and in another way I feel like I’ve never read it. I feel like it’s totally modern and strange and pressing. And I knew I wanted to make it into a film. I started seeing it as a film.

And then coincidentally my agent mentioned that Amy Pascal and the folks over at Sony were interested in making it. And I said you’ve got to get me in that room. And I went and I talked to Amy and Denise Di Novi and Robin Swicord and I told them what I wanted to do with it. And I hadn’t yet directed Lady Bird. So it was a long shot. But they said – initially what they said yes to was me writing the screenplay.

**John:** Let’s talk about you as a writer before that moment. Because you’d written on other movies before. And you directed before, but much smaller things.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so what were they reading of their work?

**Greta:** Why did they give me this job?

**John:** I’m truly curious. You’re coming into this room. What was it like?

**Greta:** Well, I had co-written two screenplays with Noah, Frances Ha and Mistress America. I think especially now that I’ve written and directed stuff on my own I think it’s a little easier to see how much of that is my writing. But I think when you’re initially a cowriter and also when you’re an actor I think there’s almost an assumption that maybe you just wrote the lines you said.

**John:** Exactly.

**Greta:** Which is not true. But it’s an understandable assumption. And then–

**John:** And that’s probably true for any writing team in general. You don’t know whether one of them by themselves can really do the work.

**Greta:** Exactly. And you’re not sure – and, because Noah had done things alone, it’s a little harder to tease out. But I’d done that. But then I had been hired properly – properly I mean by a person – I wrote a script for Lionsgate for Eric Feige and that I went in, I knew they had an idea of doing something I pitched and I said here’s what – and they gave me the job. And I wrote them a script. And so that was kind of the first thing that I’d done like that.

And then actually interesting on a sitcom that I tried to do that didn’t work, How I Met Your Father, How I Met Your Dad, I was a writer on that as well.

**John:** So there were things people could look at to say like she can really write by herself.

**Greta:** Yeah. There were a couple things. But it was kind of on faith. I mean, I did give them the script to Lady Bird even though I hadn’t made Lady Bird yet. And said, oh, I wrote this.

**John:** OK. That’s a pretty good script.

**Greta:** It was a good script, but I also think, you know, it’s hard to be the first one in the pool. And I thought it was a good script and I had gotten some feedback. People said, oh yes, it’s a good script. But like nobody really knows yet. You know, you have to believe in the thing before anybody else says it’s good. And that’s like what makes great producers is they can read something without anybody else telling them it’s good and think it’s good.

I had that script but it was still kind of – I mean, they certainly didn’t hire me to direct it. And it was like, well, give it a shot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** It wasn’t like–

**John:** Take a chance on you.

**Greta:** Yeah. It wasn’t like some big like now we’re all in on you. And I think I always wanted to direct it and thought that I should, but even though they weren’t thinking that way, I think a couple of things helped in that regard which is that I sort of had a sense of like I’m going to do whatever I want with this script because I mean nobody is ever going to make this.

**John:** Well let’s talk about talking into that room, meeting with – because I know Amy well and I know Denise and I know Robin Swicord. They’re all very smart, accomplished women.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** What was your conversation? Were you coming in to them saying like I want to do Little Women and here’s my take of a nonlinear way to get into this and how you’re going to handle all this? How much of it did you know as you were going into those meetings?

**Greta:** I knew quite a bit actually going into the meetings. Well, I think one of the first things I said was that I said to me this book is about authorship and ownership and it’s about money. And it’s about women and money and how that intersects with artistic output. And it felt like it was all over the book to me. And then I had already started looking at Louisa May Alcott’s life and what that was. And how that intersected with the subject of the book. And I didn’t quite know how I was going to interweave the time periods, but I didn’t know that I wanted to start with them as adults. That was the way I wanted to come at it.

And I think in part because I knew that the adaptation that I wanted to do was not just an adaptation of the text as it is in the book. Although I did rely heavily on the text in the book. I also wanted to treat all adaptations as almost an urtext as a collective memory of what Little Women is, so that there are things – you know, this is an example that I don’t know how much it’s useful but I always think about it. Our conceptions of heaven and hell for example. They’re not from the bible.

**John:** No, they’re not at all.

**Greta:** They’re from Dante. That’s where we got all of it from. So if you actually go to the bible and you’re like where are the descriptions of the hell fires? They’re not there. They don’t exist. Because that’s something we got later. And I do think that there’s this sense of an urtext or collective text which means more than even what the original text said. So I felt like I had the original text, but then I had images. And the images are things like Marmee and the girls gathered around the fire reading the letter from father. And the kiss in the rain under the umbrella. And Amy falling in the ice or burning the book. There are these little moments. Or going to the Hummels or the Christmas morning. These moments that I feel like they’re from the book but they’re also from all of the times we’ve seen it.

**John:** The collective unconscious. It’s what we associate as this being–

**Greta:** Exactly. So what I wanted to do was kind of find a way for that to be almost like the found materials. And then to explode it and deconstruct it and put it back together again.

**John:** So you mentioned the starting with them as older and then going back to them as children. My guess when I watched the movie was that part of your instinct for doing that was so that the actors that you cast would be established as the older versions so that when you come back to them as a younger version it didn’t feel like a weird mismatch. Like if you started with those older actresses as the younger versions you’re like, wait, she’s not 13. But you’re more forgiving. That’s something as a filmmaker you’re doing, but it was also your narrative sense of that you really wanted to make sure that the older life of them was as important as the younger version. What was your instinct?

**Greta:** Yeah, well, one thing that I realized – I mean, there are so many angles I could come at this from which leads to very longwinded answers. But there’s an inherent meta quality to the text which I was alluding to before which is that you’re holding a book, so someone wrote it. And then so you have Louisa May Alcott writing Jo. And Louisa May Alcott is writing something that looks vaguely like her life and Jo is kind of an avatar. And then Jo was also writing something that vaguely looks like her life. And then it’s me writing Louisa writing Jo. And I felt like the only way to represent all of this is to get quite Cubist about it.

It’s like there’s all these different points of authorship. And I think that there’s a real ache in the text. There’s a couple of lines I could point to that have it. But one thing is that the text is not told – it’s not first person. It’s not Jo narrating it. It’s Louisa or the narrator or whoever that person is. And there’s a lot of sadness in that person behind the people. And this perspective of Louisa’s real sister is already gone. Her sister Elizabeth died. And Louisa herself had gone to the Civil War as a Civil War nurse and had suffered through typhoid fever and almost died. And her sister, not Meg, but the character that Meg is based on, she’d gotten married and it was devastating for her.

And so there’s all these things of like she is writing about a thing that already past. And there was something when I was reading the text – and this is why every answer is so longwinded – I realized that once they’re all in their separate lives, like once Amy is in Europe, once Meg is married, once Beth is living at home but sick, and Jo is in New York trying to sell stories, they are never all together again. The thing that we think of as Little Women has already past. And I think that ache and that absence of the togetherness and that absence of the sisterhood as being the way that we contextualize these cozy scenes brought out something in me that felt was inherent in the text.

And then I think I wanted to start it just squarely with the publisher with this idea of this negotiation of will you buy my work and what do I have to change for you to buy it. And I think, you know, there’s another level on which like this scene is something that I know from this scene. I know what it’s like to sit across from someone who basically tells you morals don’t sell nowadays. So it was – I mean, there were lots of reasons for it. But emotionally I felt like there was, yeah, that ache. That it’s already gone. And then beyond that this relationship of Louisa to the text and me to the text of I think that what artists do is you write it down because you can’t save anyone’s life. Like I think that’s part of what the impulse is.

I can’t save your life, but I can write it down. And I can’t get that moment back, but I can write it down. And I think that’s part of it for me. And that kind of – and it allowed me to kind of weave that sense of is that how you remembered it or is that what happened. Is that what happened or is that how you wrote it?

**John:** But you also by moving back and forth between the two timelines you’re creating a tension for the viewer saying like, wait, how did we get there because I assumed that Laurie would be with her, but Laurie is with this other guy, so it becomes a mystery.

**Greta:** Exactly. And then also I will say this is a less poetic response. But I think there’s always been just when you tell the stories narratively straight, this is now just a nuts and bolts thing. I think there’s two things that are tricky about the traditional straight ahead narrative of Little Women. The first one is Beth gets sick and then she gets better. And then Beth gets sick and then she dies. And I always find that’s like a little hard narratively to kind of get like oh no, oh it’s OK, oh no it’s not. So one idea I had was just that stacking. And then there are poetic reasons within the stacking–

**John:** Of course. There are scenes where she comes down and sees her there, sees her not there.

**Greta:** Exactly. And that feeling of like when someone dies I think you have this inherent feeling of like but they were just there. And it was just the other way. And I felt like it was a way to cinematically give us that. And then the other thing was I felt as a viewer and as a reader and why I wanted – I hope there’s no spoilers – but why I wanted Mr. Dashwood as the publisher to say like “Frankly, I don’t see why she didn’t marry the neighbor” is because that’s what everyone for 150 years has thought. Like if you’re going to marry someone, you might as well have just married that guy across the street. Like he seemed really nice and he likes you. And what’s wrong with him?

I feel like it’s more true in movies than any other medium that the person you see them with first is the person you believe they should be with. I don’t know why it works like that. I just think it tends to work like that. And so one thing when you tell the story straight through is that you see Laurie and Jo together. And when it’s like Laurie and Amy you’re like what the hell is this? I’ve been with these other people.

The second thing is then when you meet Professor Bhaer you’re like dammit who is this guy? I don’t know this guy. I don’t care about this guy. I’ve never met this guy.

**John:** I don’t want him in my movie.

**Greta:** I know. He’s an old German professor. Like who cares? So in a way, I mean, that’s just nuts and bolts-y. I was like if I see Amy run into Laurie first and obviously he’s the object of her affection, and if I see Professor Bhaer at the beginning then I’m less introducing a new person later. And then on top of it someone said later they were like, oh, Professor Bhaer when he shows up it’s like deus ex machina, but to me I was like but that is what it is. It’s in the book. It is deus ex machina. He just shows up. And it’s like if we could set that early at the beginning and be like – and I mean, also because I’m dealing what is storytelling and what do you need and what do you expect from your characters, like with just the briefest outline of this is a romantic interest that you’re like, oh yes, I see it is a romantic interest. Part of it is playing with narrative expectations. So in any case that’s like the less beautiful answer.

**John:** But even in trying to establish that, Bhaer as a potential love interest, you’re doing a very deliberate rhyme where like she burned her dress both times with both of these guys. And so we associate like, oh, her burning her dress or being caught on fire is a thing that happens when there’s a love interest introduced.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. It’s right. And also the first scene of the movie when she’s trying to sell the scandal story and he says, “You know, if the main character is a girl make sure she ends up married, or dead, either way.” And then the very first scene you see her in it’s like well there you go. There’s the guy. I mean, we just set up guys because it’s like he just told her married or dead. So now we have to see is it marry or dead. It’s like putting a gun on the wall in the first act.

**John:** Chekhov’s marriage.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** All right. Let’s take a listen to a scene. So this is a scene from Page 68 in the script. This is Amy and Laurie in France. I think it’s chapter 39 in the book. It’s pretty late in the book. This is a scene between Amy and Laurie. Let’s take a listen and then discuss the scene.

**Amy:** I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?

**Laurie:** It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you love it.

**Amy:** Well, I believe we have some power over who we love it. It isn’t something that just happens to a person.

**Laurie:** I think the poets might disagree.

**Amy:** Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And we had children they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.

**John:** Ah, such a great speech.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** So Julie Turner who hosts the Slate Culture Gabfest, they were talking about your amazing movie on this week’s episode. And I asked her like Greta is coming in so do you have any more questions for her. And she said, “Did you always find Amy sympathetic or is that something that came to you on later readings? How did your view of her evolve?” Because this is the evolved Amy we’re hearing in this scene.

**Greta:** Yes. Well, no, Amy was one of the characters that I was just utterly knocked backwards by when I read it again. And she was the one that I kept underlining lines. And there were so many great lines I couldn’t even get them all in. I mean, everything about the script I will say can be essentially footnoted. I could tell you why every line is there. And it’s either directly from the book or it’s from a piece of research. But she has a line where she says, “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant.” And I was like holy crap! Who is this? That’s such an amazing sentiment. And I felt like, oh, she’s been sitting here this whole time.

And I felt to me actually the section when she’s in Paris and in Italy, but she’s with Laurie and she’s kind of contending with her art, I found that to be very profound. And it was, you know, the line “I want to be great or nothing” it’s straight from the book. And I was like well that’s not a person who takes their art lightly. That’s somebody who is really swinging for the fences. And I think that depth of seriousness about her work was fascinating to me and also the pain of giving it up because she doesn’t think it’s going to go great. That’s a very adult thing. And it’s something that I very much understand.

And so, yeah, Amy was the one who was fascinating to me. And also hilarious in a way that I felt like I hadn’t even totally tapped into. Or I hadn’t realized when I was younger. But there’s a whole section – I mean, there’s so many great things in the book that I couldn’t include. But there’s a whole section where she says, she’s asking about Beth because Beth is very good at piano. And I think it’s after Mr. Laurence gives her the piano, and Amy is trying to logically work out what the difference between her and Beth is. And she’s like, “Oh I see. It’s nice to have talents. But it’s not nice to tell everyone you have them.” And they’re like, right. And then but she’s not humble. But she’s figuring out that to be liked she better look like she’s humble, which I think is really funny and really great. And anyway she just was so much richer and funnier than I had ever really totally given her credit for.

In any case, and like the “I don’t pretend to be wise, but I am observant” I later turned that into the line where she says – “Since when did you become so wise?” And she says, “I have always have been, you were just too busy noticing my faults.” I kind of thought that for me it’s like for 150 years we’ve looked at this character as being kind of petty and a little shallow. And I was like we never noticed. She was always kind of amazing.

**John:** Let’s take a look at this scene again. So this is a moment where Laurie is really noticing how incredible she is. So she says, “I’ve always known I would marry rich. Why should I be ashamed of that?” Laurie, “There’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you love him.” He’s the person challenging the romantic ideal that you should marry for love. And she has the insight to say, no, this is an economic transaction. This was obviously a thing you pitched from the very start.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** This idea that this is really a story of money.

**Greta:** Right.

**John:** And here it is. So of her speech here, what comes from the text? Because we looked through chapter 39 and couldn’t find any of those words, but the spirit is there.

**Greta:** The spirit is there.

**John:** It’s a much longer scene and a much longer conversation. But none of these actual words. So how do you get to this?

**Greta:** Well, OK, so the line “I’ve always known I would marry rich” that’s from the text. She does say that. And later she feels sort of embarrassed about actually having said that. But this speech actually for the most part it comes from a conversation I had with Meryl Streep about this movie. We had an early coffee and we talked about it and she was going to be in it. The book had meant a great deal to her. And she essentially said to me the thing that you have to make the audience understand is this. And she said some version of this. But she was sort of like it’s not just that women couldn’t vote. It’s not just that they couldn’t own property. They couldn’t. It’s that they didn’t own anything. And that they legally couldn’t unless they were completely unmarried and had their own fortune. But even then it was complicated. They couldn’t get educated.

And so she was sort of laying out these limitations. And I knew I wanted Amy to have a speech like this, but actually this particular speech I wrote ten minutes before we shot.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Greta:** Yeah. Because I knew I wanted it to get there and I knew I wanted them to have this conversation. And I assume the people who are listening are screenwriters. In the run up to making the movie what often happens is you end up having to cut a lot of stuff to make page count seem lower, because you’re trying to be like this isn’t unwieldy. This is completely reasonable to make. So you end up like cutting so much stuff. And what I was doing, and it doesn’t matter now because it’s all made, but what I did was I cut the script down, but then I would just save the pages I wanted to make and then write before we’d go. I’d just give them to the actors and I’d say, all right, we’re going to do this. Or I’d give them the night before or something. Sometimes I’d just give it to them handwritten so there was no paper trail. Because I didn’t want them to give it to anyone.

And I’d say like can you just say these things. Because I figured once the lines are in the dailies what are they going to do? Tell me I can’t have them?

**John:** They’re not going to compare them back to the printed pages. No.

**Greta:** No. Nobody is going to do that. So I knew I wanted something like this, but I knew nobody is going to let me do this.

**John:** So this scene existed in the shooting script, but it was shorter and it didn’t have quite this text in it.

**Greta:** I think this scene ended before the speech. It did. It ended before the speech because nobody was interested in the speech. And anyway, I handwrote it. I gave it to her. But I always knew I wanted something like that in it. But I just felt like hearing Amy say I want to marry rich sounds quite crass if you don’t really understand the stakes of what that means. And it’s, you know, for women at that time it was the decision. And if you married the wrong person, if you married someone who had–

**John:** Disastrous.

**Greta:** –drinking problem, or couldn’t make a living, or treated your children badly, that’s it. That the worst decision you could make. So, in any case I wanted to give her context.

**John:** Now, while we’re looking at physical printed pages here, two things you do in this script which I find so great and so fascinating. So first off, all the scenes that are in the past you have printed in red. And was that from the very start. Did you always plan to do that?

**Greta:** Yes. I always did it that way.

**John:** Because very few scripts have such a back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It’s got to be so helpful for everybody involved to know like, OK, from production design to costumes to everyone like what world are we in.

**Greta:** It was a beast in prep I will say just tracking everything. And we had things set out that, you know, on boards where it was like here it is chronologically. And then here it is the way it appears in the script. Because I just always wanted the present and the past to be talking to each other.

**John:** Of course.

**Greta:** And there’s always a link. And in some ways like I felt like I wanted everything to work emotionally. Where moving from one place to another that even if you’re not intimately familiar with the story, because the truth is everything moves forward, which is there’s two origin points of the story. 1868 and 1861. And everything moves forward from there. You don’t actually go back in this story. You just go between those two timelines that are everything is going forward.

So I wanted it to work emotionally, but I also wanted it to if you broke it down to completely work logically. I actually did look at them like a graph, like Nolan had made during Dunkirk. I mean, he had the three timelines that took different amounts of time. And I mean I really loved that intersection of time and the play with it. But you might not know on first viewing how everything lines up. You just are watching it emotionally.

**John:** But you also have confidence that it will work.

**Greta:** Right. So if you do break it down later it all works. And so I wanted it to be, you know, have that thing that it both works. I mean, there’s lots of movies that do that. Obviously Irishman does it.

**John:** Big Fish does it the same way.

**Greta:** That’s right.

**John:** So Big Fish both timelines move forward, but we’re in a fantasy timeline or a real world timeline. And ultimately they overlap.

**Greta:** Exactly. I mean, I think it is one of the things – it’s tricky to do and it’s scary to do. But I think it’s something that movies do well. Can play with time in a way that other mediums can’t as much. Like it’s certainly harder in theater. And also because this is a movie about what it is to make something and to make something of your life–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Greta:** So it felt like the exact right way to play with it. But, yeah, I definitely put it in red from the beginning and I remember Tom Rothman at Columbia Pictures who is great, I always say he’s my favorite person to fight with. He was like, “But I know that it’s the other time because it’s red. How will anyone else know?” And I was like, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.

**John:** There will be a flashing red light in the corner that says PAST, PAST.

**Greta:** I know. But it was actually in the writing of it it was always like this. But it was a bit of a trick in the beginning to figure out how to present everything. But I really have faith in viewers. I love lots of complicated movies. But also people watch really complicated television shows with multiple plot lines, multiple timelines. And I was like viewers are super sophisticated.

**John:** They are.

**Greta:** Like I think that they’re very good at – I mean, I watch Game of Thrones. It’s amazing how intricate it is. I think that sometimes people underestimate how sophisticated viewers are. And they really are able to follow things that aren’t – you don’t need to sign post everything as strongly as you think you need to sometimes. And actually it’s so funny because I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience. Like while you’re making something you encounter different things and then you’re like, oh, well they did it this way, and they did it this way. But also at Columbia Pictures was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood which I loved very much, but like I remember talking to Tom about it and sometimes there’s a chyron that says it’s this place or this time, and then sometimes there’s not.

**John:** It’s arbitrary.

**Greta:** I was like how does he do that? And Tom I think was like because sometimes the audience needs it and sometimes they don’t. And I was like, oh, that’s right. You can do whatever you want.

**John:** Whatever is helpful is helpful.

**Greta:** Sometimes when you’re conceiving of these things everything feels like it has to be so very logical. And the truth is when you’re watching a movie sometimes you need it, sometimes you don’t.

**John:** I will say in watching your film, at the start I wasn’t quite clear what timeline we were in for a while. And I gave up worrying about it and I just trusted that it was going to work, and it worked. But I was reading our local free paper that gets distributed, The [Unintelligible] Park whatever. The reviewer gave your movie a 9 out of 10. And said phenomenal except that it has this crazy nonlinear thing which is completely unnecessary.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s really funny.

**John:** You don’t understand the movie you watched, but you enjoyed it.

**Greta:** Well you know what’s funny? You might not think it was necessary, but maybe you wouldn’t have had the experience you had–

**John:** Oh, he wouldn’t have at all.

**Greta:** If you had told it linearly. I mean, that’s the thing. I don’t know. Movies are mysterious like that.

**John:** Someone will do a cut of Little Women that puts everything back in order.

**Greta:** Well, it can’t be done. I mean, it really can’t be done. Because it’s not made that way. It’s not constructed that way. There is no entry point. And I will say there was in the edits a moment where we looked at – because we were asked to look at could you do it the other way. And you can’t. I mean, there’s no movie. And actually one thing that’s not funny but just that I’ve noticed – again, I hope it’s not spoiler-y, but I assume if you’re listening to this you’ve seen it. One thing when shows have asked for clips one thing that’s interesting to me is I often find that the clips aren’t very good at communicating what it is because if you see just childhood in isolation–

**John:** It looks weird.

**Greta:** It looks weird because that’s actually not what it is. And if you see – it’s like seeing the kiss at the end of the movie as if it was just the kiss. But that’s not what it is. So, when you just see them gathered around reading the letter from father it looks like a very pitch straight down the middle. But it’s not a pitch down the middle. What’s the pitch that drops? Do you know baseball?

**John:** No. I don’t talk about sports well on this show and Craig always makes fun of me for not knowing. Like a slider? A drop?

**Greta:** Yeah, a slider.

**John:** Sure. We’ll pretend.

**Greta:** Like it looks like it’s coming over the plate and then it’s just not. So I find that like actually there’s no way to really – the tone is the contrast if that makes sense.

**John:** Totally. On page 68 we also have an example of something else you do which I’d not seen before. You have a lot of overlapping dialogue.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** But you also do this thing where you warn us in the title page. There’s a slash in the first person’s dialogue to show where the person is interrupting. And I’ve never seen that done before. Tell me about your choice to do that.

**Greta:** The slash is sort of a “don’t make,” and then there’s a slash “fun” and then Laurie is “I’m not!” So the word that overlaps is fun and I’m. So don’t make/I’m not. That’s sort of the way it’s supposed to sound. I took that from playwrights. Caryl Churchill does it all the time in her plays. And Tony Kushner does it in his plays. And it’s something that I find really useful because if you want to specifically hear certain words but you like a controlled cacophony it’s very helpful because it makes the actors know it’s not talking over each other. It’s like a madrigal or a round or something.

**John:** It’s also an anticipation of what they’re going to say and–

**Greta:** Exactly. So it gave for the girls in particular like the four of them it’s overlapping over the time. And it gave a very technical thing to work on during rehearsal which was wonderful which was getting everyone up to speed. And it means that, I mean, I like this in general. I like everything said exactly how I wrote it. Because I have strange rhythm things that if you change a word it sounds wrong to me. And it makes it so that you need to have the lines memorized in a muscle memory. You can’t be reaching for the lines ever. And I like that kind of memorization. And I like that kind of ability because it allows me to – especially with the group scenes – treat all the actors like an orchestra.

**John:** And you’re also able to stay wide which is helpful.

**Greta:** Yes. Exactly. And I think some of that does come from my background. My first love was theater. I wanted to write plays.

**John:** And plays are very much that. But here I want to talk about the other films you’ve made. The whole genre of filmmaking you’ve made. Because I associate mumblecore as being under-scripted.

**Greta:** Well it was. The funny this is, well, I wanted to be a playwright. But then I became involved with this very loose improvisational – and improvisational in all ways. We’d have characters, we’d have scenes, ideas, but we would have no actual lines written out, or just the most rudimentary lines written out. Because we would find it in improvisation on camera. And it was incredibly useful in a lot of ways because it, I mean, it became a film school. It became the way I figured out how things were edited and what the camera is interested in and not interested.

But I always missed writing. I really always missed the written word. And I missed what actors could do with text because I found that in a certain way I think we’re all understandably self-protective. And as actors improvising I think it’s actually very hard to go to scary places. Something will stop you from doing it. You know, your brain is protecting your ego or however that works. And one thing about text is it forces you to be vulnerable in a way that you might not be if you weren’t given it.

So when I think of part of the job of an actor is to rise to the text, you can have very complicated, very vulnerable things that you might not access another way. So I always missed the text. And so when I started writing with Noah Baumbach and I wrote those two movies with him part of it was because – the first time I worked with him was as an actor. And when I read his screenplay for Greenberg I thought oh this is, yes, it’s so precise. It is so precise. I know exactly – I could hear it when I was reading it. And that was something that we really shared. So when we started writing together that’s how I wrote.

And then as I continued writing that’s just how I continued writing. I mean, maybe one day I’ll loosen up. But I really like things just said as they were written. [laughs]

**John:** You talk about vulnerability, so I want to get to a second clip. So this is Jo and Marmee. They’re talking in the attic. So it’s page 100 of the screenplay. Probably comes from chapter 42 of the book.

**Greta:** Yep.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Jo:** I just feel – I just feel like women – they have minds. And they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition. And they’ve got talent as well as just beauty. And I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.

**John:** So that is a terrific. A terrific moment. So iconic. Let’s talk about what it looks like on the page. So they’ve been having a conversation. It gets down to Jo. The parenthetical reads (crying, trying to explain herself to herself). And then it gets into those words. What a great parenthetical.

**Greta:** Oh yes. I do like a parenthetical. You know, it’s funny. I do think of screenplays as pieces of writing that should be able to stand on their own. And I try to make them as deep as possible. And I think I never want it to be just a blueprint. And I think one of my sadnesses actually about screenwriting is unlike playwriting is that the screenplay is just never a thing.

**John:** It’s not seen, read.

**Greta:** No. And I have some pride in what the actual text of the screenplay is, including screen directions, including parentheticals. So, in any case thank you for pointing out the parenthetical that no one will know. But I also think sometimes I try to cue in the actor to something that is going on. But in any case.

So this scene, you know, it’s come off of this sequence of death to marriage. I wanted to do this thing of like the older timeline where Beth lives then all of a sudden it’s Christmas. And then when you go back she’s gone, then it’s to funeral, and then of course to me it made perfect sense to go from a funeral to a wedding. These are the ceremonies of how we mark life. This is how we do it. This is what… – Anyway, so we do that. But there’s all these losses that have accumulated in both timelines. And this comes from the chapter where Jo does say–

**John:** I am so lonely.

**Greta:** She actually doesn’t technically say I’m so lonely.

**John:** Oh, Marmee says, “I see you’re lonely.”

**Greta:** Yes. And Marmee says it. And then but she does say, “If he asked me now I’d say yes,” which I felt like, wait, we always think of Jo as being like so certain in her path. She never doubts it. I think that’s kind of to the urtext of Jo. And I was like she doubted it. She wondered should I have done the other thing, which just kills me. And in any case this text, this speech, “women have minds and souls, as well as hearts,” actually is from another book that Louisa May Alcott wrote. This is from Moods, I believe. I have to go back and double check that. But I think it’s from Moods. And I found this piece of text. I thought it was so beautiful, but to me that “but I’m so lonely” just was kind of the penetrating thing in this chapter.

I will say about this chapter, too, which goes to the idea of the narrator, is that it begins with the narrator, which we can assume is Louisa May Alcott, speaking about being a spinster and speaking about never marrying. What she says is, “Girls of five and 20 joke about being spinsters, but they do it because they don’t really think it’s going to happen. But when girls become 30 they stop talking about it at all because they know it is happening.” And then she says, she goes on this kind of tangent of be kind to the spinsters because you don’t know what passions are hidden under their somber gowns, or something like that.

It’s this amazing tangent. And I was like, oh my god, it’s her talking. Like you don’t know what my life was, or my loves were based on the fact that I didn’t get married. You cannot tell my heart from my outsides. And I just thought that that was such an incredible thing and in any case I wanted that to be part of this scene. And so when I found this passage I was like I love this passage and I want to add this penetrating loneliness. And I also think there is something about not just Jo as a character, but I think there is a certain loneliness to the writer. And I think she has the loneliness of both.

**John:** At the end of the script we get to sections where they’re labeled “fiction?”

**Greta:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the lovely controversies of your movie is sort of like what actually happens. And I’m not going to ask you to specifically state because clearly looking at the script you want there to be some ambiguity in terms of to what degree did she do this thing, did she not do this thing. To what degree is she the author of this text? You start the movie with a book by Louisa May Alcott and you end with a book by Jo March. So it’s clearly getting into that sense of what is authentic, what is authorship.

But this choice of labeling fiction at the end, was this controversial at all during the development?

**Greta:** Yes. Well, it was controversial also because someone said, “Oh, you sent the wrong thing. There’s question marks all over the end. This can’t possibly be the final draft.” And I was like, no, it is. I mean, this is the end of the book. The end of the book is she’s opened the school, she’s married Professor Bhaer, and it’s Marmee’s birthday. That’s the end of the book. So that is the end of the book. And in life Louisa May Alcott, she didn’t get married, she didn’t have kids, but she did keep her copyright. And the book which was printed, which is actually the book that you see being made is a reproduction of the first printing of 1868 which sold out in two weeks, which is kind of incredible.

**John:** Crazy.

**Greta:** I knew I wanted it to interweave. And this goes more towards directing, but to me directing and writing, it’s all so linked. Because to me everything needs to be on the page in a way that I understand. And I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to shoot this, or how I wanted to shoot the scenes of the past or the “fiction?” But I did know I wanted the style to be different. And it’s a more heightened style.

**John:** It is.

**Greta:** And I wanted it to feel that way.

**John:** You got some big long Steadicam shots.

**Greta:** Yes, well actually we’re on a crane. We’re on a big like–

**John:** The Techno Crane kind of thing?

**Greta:** Yeah. And someone is on a wheel. And we did these big long shots. We did two, no, three sequences. It took all day to go through the house and then to go on the other side of the house and then go down to Marmee. In any case, it was a big – I don’t actually have a lot of – I have two moments of Steadicam in the movie. But everything else is on dollies or cranes.

But in any case like I knew I wanted it to feel heightened. It’s funny, I was actually just talking with – I hope I’m not giving away trade secrets, but I think he’s talked about this – Edgar Wright about the end of Baby Driver, which is a fantasy.

**John:** Sure.

**Greta:** But he was like well some people don’t know that. That’s OK. Like that’s OK.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Greta:** Like whatever you want to know about it. In any case, I hope I didn’t give anything too much away about that. But I wanted it to be both. But what I did know is that I wanted the moment at the end when you see Jo hold her book. And I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be this way. I wanted to figure out how to do a trick where the image you didn’t know you wanted to see was this girl holding her book.

**John:** Exactly. You’ve established the goal of the character from the very start to have her book printed.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** And so if the movie ended with like Marmee’s birthday that’s not rewarding.

**Greta:** No. It’s not. Marmee’s birthday–

**John:** It’s lovely, but it’s not the reason we’re here.

**Greta:** But I felt like because I’m doing this thing where I’m honoring the book itself, I also really wanted to do the literal ending of the book, which is this birthday. Someone was like, “Oh, it’s so weird that it’s her birthday. Why do you need that?” And I was because for the people who know how the book ends this is how the book ends.

**John:** Julie Turner had one extra question which is related to this moment. She asks why did you make the professor a smoke-show. Why is he hot?

**Greta:** Oh. Well, I mean, for a couple of reasons. Number one, movies. It’s movies. [laughs] But really, I mean, I don’t want to get too much into this because I hesitate to talk about male gaze, female gaze, because I think it can sometimes ascribe something gendered to something that doesn’t have to be. Like I don’t want to say like this is how women see the world and this is how men see the world. Because I just think that that’s too reductive.

But, I’m a female filmmaker. I want Professor Bhaer to be Louis Garrel.

**John:** Great.

**Greta:** I mean, I feel like men have been putting glasses on hot women forever and telling us they’re awkward. I can do whatever I want. I always saw, you know, with Laurie and Professor Bhaer and with James Norton who is also very beautiful, you know, all the men. You know, Chris Cooper. Tracy Letts. They’re beautiful men. And I thought, you know, the very first time we see Timothée Chalamet I shot that 48 frames per second. I shot that to be slow because I wanted to shoot him like Bo Derek. He’s the object. He is the object. And I felt like no one really understood why I’d done that. And actually I felt like no one knew totally at the studio why I had done that and thought it was kind of goofy and weird and maybe take it out.

And then the first time I ever had a screening of the movie in Paramus, New Jersey I heard every girl in the audience go – [gasps] – they did exactly what Amy did and I was like because that’s the way we feel about Timothée. And that’s OK.

And I felt like I wanted to make Professor Bhaer the same way. I’m a female filmmaker and this is in some ways if you’re allowed to author that the way that looks maybe you get to author it this way. You know, I wanted to do that. Also, I just Louis. But, in any case it was in a way my own commentary on what we’ve been told women are in movies.

**John:** Two questions that people wrote in with. They’re not specifically about your movie, but I think you might have some answers for it. This one you kind of already answered but I’ll ask the question, too. Jordan asks, “I recently read the script for Parasite by Bong Joon-ho and was completely blown away by how the scenes lifted off the page and roped me in. To be clear, I haven’t seen this movie yet, but the text was enough to draw me in and make me incredibly invested in the family. I also read the script for Annie Hall, another movie I hadn’t seen, but it felt like a chore to drudge through despite many people saying it’s one of the best movies of all time. I felt like if I was a reader at a studio and came across this on my desk I would have passed on it.

“My question is how important is it for a movie to be engaging on the page? Writer-directors don’t necessarily need to paint the world as richly because they’re the ones shooting it, but it seems strange to leave that detail on the page because you know you have it in your head.”

Now, you were saying that you think the screenplay needs to be a real document to read and enjoy that you can really see and feel the movie.

**Greta:** Yeah. Sorry, I’m just going to go to the first – I want the sentences to be active and to draw you in. I want to feel part of something that’s in motion from the beginning. And I’m very deliberate about this.

**John:** Do you want to read some of your first page?

**Greta:** Sure. So, you know, it has the sort of New York publishing office, 1868. Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. To me, I’m interested. What? She hesitates. Like I feel – it feels open. It feels like I’ve opened something. And not everyone has my taste, but for me to give something that feels perhaps unnecessary, you could just write she’s standing in a hallway. Like there’s no reason. But the hesitates, you’re like why? What’s going on?

**John:** Yeah.

**Greta:** So Jo March, our heroine, hesitates. In the half-light of a dim hallway she exhales and prepares, her head bowed like a boxer about to go into the ring. She puts her hand on the doorknob. A pause. And then she opens it onto a disorderly room. Like I want the words to draw – I want it to draw the picture. And then even at the end, and I didn’t know what I meant when I wrote this, but at the very last page she’s given the book and I say, “Jo turns it over in her hands, touching it like the holy object it is, her inchoate desire made manifest. Jo looks up…and sees the future. Cut to black.”

I don’t know what I meant by “sees the future,” but I also did.

**John:** Yeah. You knew what you meant.

**Greta:** And I knew that Saoirse would be able to do that because she’s a genius. But I feel like for me I always want every piece of making a movie to be as excellent as it can be. Because the truth is I don’t know if this is going to become a movie because it’s so unlikely because they’re so unwieldy and expensive and it takes so long. So for the moment all I have is this script. So I want it to be as good and as emotional and as detailed and as specific and honestly as dense as it can be. Because this is all I have of the movie at this moment. I don’t have the movie yet.

So, I want every piece of it to feel that way because that’s how I know it’s – I can will it into existence if I can feel it on the page.

**John:** Yes. You’re going to be asking all of your department heads to do their very, very best work. And so you as the writer doing your very, very best work, it’s got to be inspirational if they can see what you’ve done on the page.

**Greta:** And I also think like little details, little details that are – like I mean on page two a parenthetical that I always liked, I mean now I’m just complimenting myself.

**John:** I enjoy.

**Greta:** But I do think nobody ever knows the parentheticals, but on page two it says, “What do you – that is, what compensation?” He’s saying, they’re talking about the story she’s selling him. He says, “We pay twenty-five to thirty for things of this sort. We’ll pay twenty for that.” She says, “You can have it. Make the edits. But the parenthetical just says “(money over art).” And like to me I was like, oh, no one will ever see it. But I think – I sort of wish – now this is probably I shouldn’t say this, but I sort of wish that the screenplay that would get distributed would be the actual complete shooting script. Because I find it, you know, you do take things out and change them. And this is very close to the shooting script.

But, at the same time, I mean, I find as a screenwriter one thing that helped me tremendously was being an actor because there were lots of things that I auditioned for that I didn’t get. But what I did get was to read the script. And then I got to watch the movie. And then I was like, oh, I see. It went from this thing to that thing. And I feel like reading essentially a transcription of a movie after the fact isn’t as useful as reading the screenplay. Because then you can really see what happens.

So, I understand why later it’s like, well, you don’t need to have the scene in that wasn’t in, but I mean, but for my movies actually I will say they cut really, really close to the actual screenplays. And also my line producer said to me, he’s like, “You really did use all of it.” And I was like I told you I would. That’s why I needed it.

**John:** So the next movie they’ll know.

**Greta:** Exactly.

**John:** So, on this podcast a lot we’ve been talking about assistant pay. And how low assistant pay is a pervasive problem in Hollywood. There’s a New York Times story that came out today as we’re recording this. You can see a photo of me and producer Megana Rao in this exact room where we are recording this. But Kimberly wrote in with a question. She said, “I’d love your thoughts on assistants with or wanting to start families. I’m really hoping to start a family within the next year and I have 100% confidence in my ability to get both my assistant work and my own work done while also having a baby. But I’m afraid to ask for any maternity leave or an increase in pay to do so. Do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family? If this becomes an issue with my higher ups do I have the right to call foul for women’s right? Will this cost me my job, which I like and want to keep entirely? I recognize this is an issue that is country-wide and spreads across multiple industries, but I’m hoping you can talk more about specifically assistants who aren’t in their young 20s who may have families or rather responsibilities, especially women, and how they can navigate moving up in this crazy industry?”

**Greta:** Yeah, well, I mean, this is a big one. This is the big – I think this is a huge part of talking about women both in our industry and all industries. And what we’re doing about it as a country and collectively. And I think it’s something that, I mean, I don’t want to speak to things that I don’t have actual correct knowledge to speak to, but I do think that there is something about things that are “women’s issues” or “family issues” where somehow they become something that you just have to deal with behind closed doors and we have no idea how you got from A to B.

And I think that’s a failure of our sense of what civic life is. And I think civic life is family life. How do you think we get engaged citizens? By people raising them. Mothers and fathers. And I think you can point to a lot of Scandinavian countries who have very excellent ways of dealing with this. And when I was in Sweden they told me they have not just maternal leave, but they have paternal leave which is mandatory.

**John:** Absolutely. Norway has it as well.

**Greta:** Because otherwise they want to make sure that men don’t not take the time.

**John:** Or that women are penalized for having taken the time and men are moving up.

**Greta:** And men are moving up. So, I mean, I think that this is at the center of a civic discussion is what are we doing for families. And it’s everything. It’s healthcare. It’s benefits. It’s leave. And I will say, because I was pregnant while I was making Little Women and I gave birth 72 hours after I showed the studio my cut. And it’s something I’m still educating myself about and learning about because I did not know a lot of the laws that were already on the books. And I’m not someone who doesn’t have access to information, but I actually didn’t know that you have – in California – that employers are required to have a certain amount of paid leave. And I didn’t know any of that. I actually didn’t know stuff like that. And I also think what are the laws that are on the books? What are the laws that we need to get on the books? What do we need to move forward?

Also, I mean, childcare. I mean, national childcare. I have help and I also have my mother. And my mother and my dad watching my baby while I’m able to do different things.

**John:** Record this podcast.

**Greta:** Record this podcast. And I also have an amazing nanny. And that is something I am able to have because I have access and I have means. And not everyone has that. I mean, this is a big old thing. So, I guess everything I’m saying is just to say I don’t know if that’s the right question. And I think I am everyone else, I do want to figure it out.

I think also as filmmakers it’s difficult because if you’re employed by a corporation there’s laws that you can – again, I don’t know that this is completely right. But there can be laws that constrain and also prescribe corporations to do X, Y, or Z. So if you are an assistant working a company, or employed through a company there is something that sort of can be done in a top-down way. But if you’re a writer or if you’re a director it’s a gig economy in a different way. Then it’s like you’re writing something on spec, there is no one to give you leave. You’re on leave because you’re not working. Do you know what I mean? So, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

Same with acting. Like it’s not–

**John:** Totally.

**Greta:** And I think, and I don’t know if that’s something that we need to go guild by guild, or it’s a national thing we need to be dealing with, or industry, but it is – here’s another thing I’ll say in addition to being in Sweden. I shot a film in Paris. There’s French hours.

**John:** Oh, French hours are required.

**Greta:** French hours are also – the women who are working on the set, and the men who are working on the set, because of the day is more manageable they were able to either take their kids to school in the morning, or give them dinner and put them to bed. But if you’re working 12 hours and then with transpo and everything it’s 14 hours away from your family, if you’re a man or a woman when are you going to take care of your family?

**John:** Craig and I are both pushing for French hours.

**Greta:** I think it’s so much more human. And so that’s a whole lot of gobbledygook I just spat out, but I–

**John:** I share your frustration. And in Kimberly’s question when she said “do I have any right as an assistant to get pregnant and start a family” I wanted to throw a chair.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Because, yes, you do.

**Greta:** Yes, you do. Yes.

**John:** And part of like having reproductive rights is the right to become pregnant.

**Greta:** Yes, that’s right. That’s right. And of course – and also there should be laws to protect that and resources to help you. I mean, actually there’s a book I read. The title of it is, it sounds much more hard than it is. But it’s called Motherhood and Cruelty. But it’s by a really interesting thinker, Jacqueline Rose I think is her name. Anyway, she says it’s funny that parenthood is seen as an antisocial act because what could be more social. That it’s something, meaning as we were speaking about civic responsibilities, but sort of like a thing you do on your own. But yet what is more social than parenthood?

**John:** Parenthood and continuing our culture and our species and our civilization.

**Greta:** That is a social act. But it’s seen as you do on your own time. And the social thing is seen as just capitalism or commerce. And somehow that’s not part of it. But, anyway, yes, of course you have the right.

**John:** At the end of every episode we talk about One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing this week is actually a puzzle which is sitting in front of you. It’s called New York in Color. It is this really good 500-piece puzzle we did over Christmas holidays. It’s these photos by Nicole Robertson. I just loved it. I love a jigsaw puzzle.

**Greta:** Oh, that’s so cool.

**John:** I find it a great way to make my brain stop braining and just sort of focus on puzzle pieces. Especially good for the last thing at night before you go to bed. Just check out.

**Greta:** Puzzling. You know who is a big puzzler is this genius actress I’ve gotten to work with is Laurie Metcalf.

**John:** Oh, I can imagine.

**Greta:** Loves a puzzle. She also puzzles before she goes on stage every night on Broadway. She’ll like get there an hour early. She’ll puzzle for a while. And then she’ll go out and give the best performance you’ve ever seen in anything. And she kind of, I don’t know, she’s extraordinary. I love her.

That’s good. Well, I guess I’ll give a book suggestion.

**John:** We love books.

**Greta:** It’s a big book, but it’s a rewarding book. It is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I don’t want to give the title wrong, but he’s a professor at Stanford. He’s an evolutionary biologist, I think. But he’s written a lot about – he studies primate behavior. Anyway, he’s written a lot of really fun – I love science books for lay people.

**John:** As do I.

**Greta:** Because like I don’t really have the math to do it.

**John:** Give me some Dawkins. Give me all that.

**Greta:** Yeah. Like I can’t do any of the real stuff, but like I’m so happy to have it explained to me in sort of laymen terms. And I loved it. And it’s chockfull of lots of interesting things. But it’s sort of about a given behavior that we say like why this. And he sort of walks it through kind of from the nearest proximity to the farthest away.

So like milliseconds before a behavior happens, what are the synapses in your brain doing? How does it get from there to here? But then if you walk it back two weeks, where are your hormonal levels? And then if you walk it back 100 million years, how did we get to this point of this behavior? It’s a very interesting book and also I think one thing is because obviously I tend to – I read a lot of fiction. But it’s not a book that I inherently thought, oh yes, I need to know all about this. But I think as a writer it’s important to read widely.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And this sounds like a book an actor, a director, a writer.

**Greta:** Yes.

**John:** Like talk about behaviors.

**Greta:** It’s interesting.

**John:** What is the motivation that got that moment to happen?

**Greta:** And it’s looking at it from a very specific perspective, but it’s really, yeah. And I also think – somebody told me when I was young, it was actually a neighbor who said, “If you read widely consistently, that’s as good as going to college.” And I said, really? And she said, “Yeah, just keep reading everything and don’t only look at the one thing you’re interested in.”

And I mean I ended up going to college. But I don’t know.

**John:** Maybe you didn’t have to.

**Greta:** I never forgot that she said that.

**John:** I think that’s probably true. That is our show for this week.

**Greta:** Oh.

**John:** So for listeners who are Premium members, stick around afterwards because Craig will talk about what happened at the Golden Globes.

**Greta:** OK.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Megan Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Jemma Moran. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You are not on Twitter I’ve noticed.

**Greta:** No, I’m not on any of those things.

**John:** You’re so smart. So smart. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll have links to the books she mentioned and we’ll also have a link to the screenplay so you can download it and read it. That will also be up in Weekend Read if you want to read it there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

And, of course, you can become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

Greta Gerwig, thank you so much for being on the show. Please come back any time.

**Greta:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Greta:** Bye.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig Mazin, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you John. A little under the weather. Sorry I couldn’t be there. I was so bummed. But you did not want me there. That’s for sure.

**John:** So when I was talking with Greta you thought you had a cold but that was not in fact the case.

**Craig:** No, so I thought I’m feeling worse than I would normally feel with a cold. And I had a night of – you know those dreams, those looping dreams?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yep.

**Craig:** Where you just dream about like the same four seconds of dream over and over and over.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a fever thing.

**Craig:** That’s a fever thing. So I went to work. I sat there. I did absolutely nothing except feel awful. And on the way home I swung by the urgent care clinic here in my little town. And they did a test for the flu. Have you ever had the flu test?

**John:** No, but is it a nasal swab? How do they do it?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a nasal swab. They put a little Q-Tip up both nostrils. But man they go in deep. It is incredibly unpleasant. Anyway, they go and they do this fast test and the doctor came back in and she said, “Well, you know, let’s just cut to the chase. You’ve got the flu.” Which is bad. And I’m stupid. I didn’t get the flu shot. Because I was – it’s not because – I love the flu shot. I worship the flu shot. I just, you know, oh I was too busy. Blah. Well.

**John:** That’s what happens.

**Craig:** And people are nice. They’re trying to comfort me by saying I got the flu shot and I also got the flu, which can happen. But they put me on Tamiflu immediately and it’s been very effective I will say.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if you have a choice between getting a cold or getting the flu and having Tamiflu started immediately, weirdly you’re better off with the flu and Tamiflu.

**John:** All right. So you’re on the mend. Now the reason why I desperately wanted you on for this bonus segment is you and I have not spoken since you won your Golden Globe and most crucially since that moment where you were up on stage and Jared Harris is speaking, he’s giving a speech, but you’re holding the Golden Globe. And Tiffany Haddish leans her weight against you. And there’s an eye contact moment. What was happening between you and Tiffany Haddish on stage at the Golden Globes?

**Craig:** You know, some people thought that maybe she was going to faint or something, but I think all she was doing was taking her shoes off. I think she was uncomfortable in her shoes. And when I look at the shoes that people wear I get it. I understand why. So we were just kind of – so I was like, oh, this is cool. Me and Tiffany Haddish. I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. We had a good conversation. It’s private. It’s private stuff between me and the Tiff.

**John:** 100%. I get it.

**Craig:** But, well, I’ll tell you off the air. I was so happy to not – so I had arranged to not do the speech. Some people were wondering why I did not do the speech. And the answer is, you know, we all worked on this. And when it comes to an award where the show was winning I think it’s fair for some of the other people that worked so hard on it to talk. We initially – I had convinced Jane Featherstone to do it, but we all expected Jared to win. And he didn’t. In fact, the opposite of what I thought would happen happened. I thought Jared would win and I thought the show and Stellan and Emily would lose. And Jared did not win. And the show and Stellan won. And I said to Jane, what do you think about the speech and she said, yeah, let’s give Jared the speech. I mean, he was our quarterback. And so he did a great job.

I mean, he was a little nervous that he had to have a rejiggered speech up there.

**John:** He also had to follow Michelle Williams which felt like just I mean a bullet dodged on your behalf because she gave really the moment of the evening. And the next speech after that was not going to be as big a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think when you’re watching television that’s probably how it feels. In the room itself there were a lot of good speeches I thought. I mean hers was terrific. Maybe my favorite was Ramy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I thought he was adorable. I was like this guy is so humble and not fake humble. Humble-humble. And genuine. And funny. I thought that was fantastic. And I could have listened to – Tom Hanks who I think gave me the flu from the stage. I didn’t meet him. I didn’t get to meet him. I was so bummed out. But I think just by listening to him intently I got his flu. But I could have listened to him for another hour. I was fascinated by him.

But you know the truth is honestly speeches–

**John:** Speeches.

**Craig:** Speeches.

**John:** Now the reputation of the Golden Globes and everything I’ve heard is it’s a very boozy evening. Was that your experience there in that room?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. So it is. There’s two large ice buckets on your table, each with a magnum of Champagne in it. I think that’s what that’s called. That big bottle. And they have wine coming around all night long. And people are getting drunk. There’s no question about that. It’s a very strange kind of dinner. We got there on the early side. And because it’s – I mean the red carpet had no interest in me. And the feeling is mutual. I’m not wearing like some flowing gown, or am I an actor.

So Melissa and I just headed on into the ballroom I guess you’d call it and there were – you know, maybe it was like 20% full. And every single seat at every single table there was a bowl of soup. And after about eight or nine minutes of being in there and maybe five or six other people had come in an army of waiters just swept through and removed the soup. And I just thought no one is ever going to have the soup.

**John:** Nope. The soup is gone.

**Craig:** The soup is gone. And then, yeah. It’s a very–

**John:** Maybe it’s a lesson for life. Like the soup will always disappear. If you don’t take advantage of the soup when you can have the soup, there’s no soup to be had.

**Craig:** I just thought like – but I get it, because actually what they don’t want is people eating during the show. If you don’t want people eating during the show and you do want people on the red carpet then you should just not have food. But then I think some people will get grumpy and drunker. Look, I mean, I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I mean, the tables are so close. Everyone is very chummy. I mean, it is tight.

**John:** And Cousin Greg was joining you at your table for at least part of the evening.

**Craig:** Oh my god. We were so happy. So Nicholas Braun who plays Cousin Greg on Succession, aside from being one of the tallest people in the world is also one of the most pleasant. He’s just a sweetheart. And there were just a lot of Succession people. And he kind of got overflowed onto our table. And I kept telling him I’m like first of all I spent most of the night just yelling the word Succession out because I love that show so much. And Jesse Armstrong is so brilliant. And the cast is so great.

And they seemed like a happy family. They legitimately do seem like they like each other which is always nice. Especially when it’s a show about people that hate each other, or are rivals. And I said to Nicholas if we win you should come up there with us. Just come up. Let’s not explain it. Let’s not make it seem weird. You just happened to join us as if you were on the show.

**John:** Yes. The way Greg Roy is always showing up at the Roy’s places. Like why is Cousin Greg there?

**Craig:** Right. And he said, “Should I?” And there was an HBO executive at the table who said, “No. You should not.” She said, “You know, Chernobyl is over. Your show is continuing. No.” [laughs] But so we almost had him. We almost got him.

**John:** Congratulations on the Golden Globe. You are skipping out on the – is it TCAs tonight? What was the awards tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight is as we’re recording this it’s the Critics’ Choice. And I’m very sorry I can’t be there. But Carolyn Strauss and Jared Harris are there. And hopefully we do well. But, you know, listen, I never thought I would be in any Critics’ Choice short list. So, it’s very nice. And I’m sorry I won’t be there. But I think everybody would prefer that I not bring my contagious self.

**John:** Absolutely. Well, congratulations on that. I hope you do get a chance to hang out with Greta Gerwig in the future because you would love her. We talked about parentheticals and a lot of stuff on the page. She will be one of your favorite writers I suspect. But Craig continue to heal up and we’ll have a normal show next week hopefully.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Appreciate it. Bye.

Links:

* [Follow along with the Little Women script in Weekend Read](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173)
* [Little Women Script](https://pmcvariety.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/little-women-by-greta-gerwig.pdf)
* NYT Article with John and Megana [Hollywood Assistants Are Fed Up](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/business/metoo-hollywood-assistants.html) by Rachel Abrams
* [Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [New York in Color Jigsaw Puzzle](https://amzn.to/2FDEBI0)
* [Behave by Robert Sapolsky](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/)
* [Greta Gerwig](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1950086/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jemma Moran ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/433standard.mp3).

The original post for this article can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/fantasy-worldbuilding).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, ah.

**John:** You got it.

**Craig:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 416 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’ll be talking with a senior narrative designer at Wizards of the Coast about fantasy world-building as a profession. It’s a great conversation about what is probably a lot of listeners’ dream job.

But first we have a ton of follow up to get through, so Craig let’s get at this.

**Craig:** Let’s go.

**John:** All right. So in the last regular episode before the Veep episode I was talking about this movie The Shadows that I’m planning to go off and direct. We’re starting casting on it because there’s this one very specific role that’s going to be challenging to cast. It is a 15-year-old girl who is blind. And to find a 15-year-old blind actress could be a challenge. But luckily a lot of people have sent in stuff and, you know, I’m starting to get audition reels and people out there have been really great about passing the message out there. And so it’s been really gratifying over the past two weeks to see a ton of stuff come in from people who kind of want to be in the movie or want to help find the actress for this movie.

**Craig:** That’s great. And so how are you doing it? You’ve set kind of, you know, a tricky goal for yourself. You went to America and said–

**John:** America and English-speaking countries outside of America.

**Craig:** And English-speaking countries outside of America. And you said let’s crowd-source this. Let’s see if we can do it. How has it been going?

**John:** It’s been going pretty well. So the things I did for the announcement was obviously Scriptnotes and I put out a tweet. That tweet got shared a lot which was terrific. And people sort of reached out beyond and into their networks. Now we’re doing the systematic outreach to all of the organizations we can find in the US and English-speaking countries that work with blind youth because the theory is that this actor may not realize that she’s actually an actor yet because she may not have had the opportunity. And so we’re reaching out to them. We’re sending the casting notice which you can find at johnaugust.com/casting.

But we’ve also brought in a casting director who has done a lot of big movies, but has also worked on projects that involve actors who are blind or low-vis. And she is also helping us do some more outreach there. So I’m optimistic that we will be able to find the actress for this role.

**Craig:** Great. I am, too. I’m sure you will. When there’s a will there’s a way. And, also, let’s just say, people generally want to star in movies, don’t they? It’s not you’re looking for somebody to clear out your P trap underneath your sink.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So, yeah, I feel like you’ll get there.

**John:** I think we’ll get there. Along the way in this process people sent through this link to something that was really great, so we’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s the Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit put out by an organization called Respectability. It’s a really good website that talks through what to be thinking about when you’re thinking about inclusion in your project, in this case looking at people who have different abilities. And it’s just really great. So I was happy that this thing existed. I would not have known about it if people hadn’t sent me the link, so I’m going to pass on this link to you guys. If you are writing a project that includes people who are not in your realm of experience this may be a really good place to start looking and start thinking about the questions to ask and the issues to keep in mind.

**Craig:** And it’s good that we have these resources now. I mean, it’s one thing to say to creators, look, you have to do better, right? That’s the Twitter phrase, do better. It’s the all-purpose Twitter phrase for shame on you, I’ve noticed by the way. Any time somebody doesn’t like what you say or do they just go, “Do better.” But in some cases we really can do better. We have not done well as a community on this particular topic of casting people with disabilities. And people who don’t have disabilities, writing for characters who have disabilities, even just the amount of writers with disabilities is pretty low, like a lot of our marginalized groups in our business.

But you can say to people, well OK, do better. And then they think I want to, where do I start, what do I do, how do I get there? The last thing you want to do is call up your one blind friend and say, “So can you tell me about blind stuff?” That’s no good.

**John:** That’s what I do with Ryan Knighton all the time, but yes. Ryan Knighton cannot be everyone’s resource.

**Craig:** [laughs] He can’t be everyone’s resource. And also I should say like, yeah, there’s like three phases. There’s I don’t know you, so don’t talk to me. Then there’s I casually know you so this is awkward. And then, OK, we’re friends, I can ask you anything. If you haven’t crossed all the way over into we’re friends and we have a certain understanding and trust of each other. So, it’s nice that organizations are providing these resources. And when they do they’re not only offering you help, they’re removing one of the great excuses of all time: well I don’t know where to go, I don’t know who to talk to. Well, now you do know where to go and now you do know who to talk to.

**John:** So we have a couple listener questions about this. I’m going to mash two of them together because they were both long but they covered some really good territory.

**Craig:** Mash them up. Let’s do it.

**John:** So Ian wrote in to ask, “After listening to this week’s podcast I was very intrigued by John’s movie concept and casting call for a young blind actor to play Abby. At what point does an actor cease becoming an actor. Actors exist to portray people they are not. Some examples like gay actors should be able to play a straight person. A kind, caring actor should be able to play an unspeakable evil. A younger actor can portray an older actor, especially with the help of makeup. A native English-speaking actor can portray somebody from another country with an accent, for now anyway.” That was his parenthetical there.

“A qualified actor should be able to inhabit the role of the living person, for example Queen Elizabeth.” I’ll continue on with Matt who wrote in to say, “Perhaps you and Craig could speak to the larger trend of increased casting scrutiny currently coursing through Hollywood.”

So, Craig, what do you think of these questions? Have you noticed over the past few years a change in what is considered proper for casting in certain roles?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I think what we’ve seen is there’s a change in what is considered inappropriate casting. So there have been a couple of very high profile incidents where white actors were being cast to play characters that either were not white in source material or were not really even white in an original screenplay for instance. So there’s a sense that you do want to – I mean, look, I’m with Ian in one sense. The whole point of acting is that you’re being somebody you’re not. Just like the whole point of writing is that you’re writing somebody that you’re not. In fact, you’re writing lots of people you’re not. And the last thing we want to do is balkanize everyone so that you can only write what’s in front of your eyes. That would be disastrous.

However, in the case of acting it is reasonable and I think it’s desirable to say to people there are certain actors that are underemployed and under-utilized and they have really interesting things to offer your part that others don’t. If I am making a show about the life and the challenges of an obese woman, OK. I could hire a thin actor. You may have noticed there’s quite a few of those. And pad her up. I could do that. And she can act that. That’s doable. In fact, it’s been done.

But, when you do that not only are you taking – you’re taking something away from a kind of actor that generally is under-utilized, but you’re also robbing yourself of an actor who may bring a certain emotional depth and truth to that part that someone else wouldn’t have access to. There is an authenticity there that you no longer have access to.

So, my feeling is this. If the part could be played by somebody who is of the sort that is under-utilized and underemployed, try and find the person that’s under-utilized and underemployed. Go for that. Yes, a gay actor can play a straight person because straight actors are not under-utilized or underemployed. Can a straight actor play a gay person? I would have said, you know, it’s an interesting kind of thing. And I’m interested in what you have to say about this. Because I feel like it used to happen all the time because gay characters weren’t really people, they were characters. And then there was a stretch there where it was sort of like, OK, let’s not do that. And now I feel like there are so many gay characters that maybe – for instance on Modern Family, Eric Stonestreet is not gay and he plays a gay character. And his husband is played by an actor who is gay. There are enough gay characters where maybe you can say well that’s OK. What about Jewish characters? There are a lot of Jewish characters, so I guess I don’t mind as a Jewish person that an Irish woman plays Mrs. Maisel. [laughs] It just doesn’t really bother me that much.

But, yeah, I think if you’re talking about under-represented characters then why not try and help people that have been ignored. It only works to your benefit as far as I’m concerned creatively.

**John:** Yeah. I think it does work to your benefit creatively. And I think a thing to look through in the examples you gave, but also the examples that Ian gave in his initial question, I think it may be interesting to draw a distinction between external realities of a character that we’re seeing onscreen and internal realities of that character. And so the idea of whether a gay person can play a straight role or a straight person can play a gay role that is internal acting that is 100 percent sort of what the actor inside is doing. That is not the physical reality of how that character presents onscreen.

And so I feel like we’re in a moment as we approach 2020 and probably this next bit of time where you’re going to try to cast the person who physically can inhabit that role sort of natively and naturally wherever possible. And so that’s part of the motivation behind looking for a blind actor for the role of Abby is that I don’t want the blindness to be a thing that the character is acting. I want the blindness to be a thing that is just naturally part of what comes in that performance.

**Craig:** So that’s a purely creative justification. And I would love to live in a world where you have purely creative justifications. There is a layer of our businesses is a very public business and it’s a very publicized business. And I think part of the reality that we have to steer through, I don’t want to sound like I’m naïve or a child, we also are aware that we live in a world now where these things are scrutinized.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And if you’re going to make a film about somebody who is say deaf, or someone who is hearing-impaired, who is sight-impaired, who is blind, someone who is in a wheelchair because they are a paraplegic, and you don’t cast somebody who has that then you’re going to be criticized wildly and heavily. That’s something that did not exist ten years ago.

Now, let me take that back. We weren’t aware of it ten years ago. So what’s been happening is people have been yelling in their own homes. Right? People have been yelling at the screen saying, “Not again.” Right? And now we all hear it. So I think that’s the difference is that we now hear it. If we are not naturally responsive to it, and I think we should be, then at the very least there are enough people in this business who just from a cynical point of view are aware that products that we make here in Hollywood can be damaged if we are stepping on people’s toes and being dismissive of needs for representation.

So, we have to take that into account. And I don’t take those things into account with my eyes rolling like, ugh, I guess we have to. No, I mean, look, all we’re doing is working for an audience. If there are people upset in the audience then we screwed up. So, why not do it the right way?

**John:** Yeah. So I think we have at least articulated three reasons why at this moment it feels important. First it’s creative reasons. Second is looking for access for actors who would otherwise not get a chance to be in these movies. And third is the realities of putting out these movies and TV shows in our environment right now and that there is an increased scrutiny which is probably merited.

So, those are three reasons why I think anyone who is looking at casting these roles is going to be thinking about with this role written a certain way how do I find the actor to best fit that role.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that’s something that happens I’d imagine in the beginning. When you started working on this I’m sure the second thought after so a blind girl, dot-dot-dot, you went, “And I’m going to need a blind actor.”

**John:** Yeah. And so as we get into this process and hopefully this movie gets made, you never know if this movie gets made, I’d love to talk more about how this all comes together and sort of the specific challenges not just with the Abby role but with the movie altogether in the next 100 episodes of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Cool. Further follow up. We had a How Would This Be a Movie where we talked about ice cream wars. We talked about Mister Softee in China and in Brooklyn. Ed in DC wrote in to say, “I’m surprised neither of you remember the 1984 film Comfort and Joy which was a dark comedy about such a turf war between ice cream companies. If you haven’t seen it it’s great. And he puts in a link in the show notes. I didn’t know about Comfort and Joy. Did you?

**Craig:** No. And I’m surprised that Ed is surprised. It’s not that I’m not familiar with the director of Comfort and Joy, Bill Forsyth, because Bill Forsyth directed Local Hero which I think a lot of people have seen. It’s a fantastic movie. But suffice to say that Local Hero was far more popular than Comfort and Joy. I’ve never heard of Comfort and Joy. Obviously it made it over here because Ed is in DC, unless Ed is Edinburgh. I don’t know. I don’t remember Comfort and Joy rolling on HBO with the same frequency as Beastmaster in 1984. So, sorry Ed.

No, I mean, I will check it out because, again, huge fan of Local Hero. You’ve seen Local Hero I assume?

**John:** I’ve never seen Local Hero.

**Craig:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** The list of movies I’ve not seen is long and embarrassing.

**Craig:** You know what John? Here’s the thing. That’s OK. No one has seen everything except weirdos. But Local Hero is one of those movies that is just a ray of sunshine. It’s just an absurdly positive, happy-making movie. It’s sweet. It’s adorable. Yeah, you will–

**John:** I’ll love it.

**Craig:** You will love it. Everyone loves it. It’s just got this wonderful whimsy to it. You’ll think it’s great.

**John:** I’m excited to see it. Jason Pace also wrote in with a link to 99 Problems which is a short film by Ross Killeen in Ireland. I think it may be becoming a feature. But his point was that it’s definitely universal. This idea of ice cream trucks which might seem so specific to the East Coast, there’s a universal quality because they’re happening in other places.

**Craig:** [laughs] Is there? So wait, hold on. There’s been a movie in Scotland and a movie in Ireland. So we’re now saying that this is a universal thing?

**John:** It is universal. Because if you have Brooklyn plus Scotland and Ireland? Come on, that’s like three different islands. So come on.

**Craig:** So how many Irelands, Americas, and Scotlands are needed to equal one India? Just out of curiosity. I think like six. I don’t think that this is necessarily indicating that we have a universal property or universal cultural point of view. But that’s OK. It’s not that everybody needs to know about the same thing. Sometimes you’re learning about them. Yeah, no, the fact that something has happened with a topic does not quite get us into universal territory.

**John:** Maybe not. But speaking of specificity and universality, do you want to do the follow up on Akashinga rangers?

**Craig:** Akashinga rangers. Meg writes, “I was so excited to hear you guys talking about the possibility of making a movie about the Akashinga rangers. This past spring at the Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival I was lucky enough to see the Black Mambas, a short doc by Bruce Donnelly about the all-woman, all-badass anti-poaching crew who patrol Kruger National Park in South Africa. It was a great short doc and it was followed by an even more mind-blowing feature-length doc, When Lambs Become Lions, which I cannot recommend enough, even if you were already expressing some interest in how to make a story about anti-poaching units. Really gripping. It is hands-down the most stunning drama I’ve seen in years.” Hold on a second. Sorry. I’ve just got to back up a second.

Meg, I’m right here. Come on. I mean, I just – I tried so hard. Come on.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Chernobyl, I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m not saying it has to be the most stunning drama you’ve seen, but anyway. That’s Meg’s question. I’m just joking Meg. “I was constantly forgetting that it’s a documentary because it was just so beautifully constructed to keep you right on the edge of your seat the whole damn time. Its complexity hinges on the fact that the anti-poaching units in this small Kenyan town are so inconsistently funded that many locals go back and forth between working as poachers and working to prevent poachers, depending on which best allows them to feed their families. Friends and family members can easily find themselves on opposite sides and maintain close personal ties outside of the elephant refuge while hunting each other to death within. It is completely crazy. It is a fragile system to try and wrap your head around. And by the end of the movie you feel like everything you thought you knew about anything is maybe not so certain.”

Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I want to watch that.

**John:** Meg wrote a good review of When Lambs Become Lions. And, yeah, I think that if you’re going to make this movie about the Akashinga rangers that’s going to be a great aspect of this where even if it’s not our central characters that we’re following, the community that they’re in flips back and forth based on just economic need and necessity. And that’s great. That’s true. That’s human drama.

**Craig:** I mean, that does actually sound like possibly the most stunning drama I would see in years. I’m feeling a little bad.

**John:** Also, I mean, I’ve been to Kruger National Park and it is stunningly gorgeous. So just imagine that against that backdrop? Yeah, it’s good.

**Craig:** Ugh. [laughs] Darn it. We have another question. This is coming in from Leann and we’ve got an audio follow up from Episode 315, 100 episodes ago.

**John:** Let’s take a listen.

**Leann:** Hi John and Craig. Over two years ago on the show you gave your thoughts on a question of mine about waiting to hear back from a producer who is considering one of my scripts. A couple months later I briefly met you, John, at McNally Jackson Bookstore in SoHo after an episode recording. I told you that the producer had indeed come onboard the project and the film was now in development. You told me to write in again when my movie became ‘more real.’ I am very pleased to say that this film, my debut feature as a writer-director, recently wrapped production and is now in post.

We’ve had a wonderful cast and team behind it and things look exciting for the film’s future. Also, before we shot I submitted a different script to the Nichol and just found out it has advanced to the semi-finals.

I mention this because both of these events are a culmination of many years, hard work, and learning and your show has played a significant role in both my screenwriting craft and my understanding of the business. So thank you very much, again, for all your invaluable guidance over the years. You truly help so many people with your work. Thanks.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Congratulations, Leann. So congratulations on wrapping your film. Post is a wonderful and terrifying time where you will question why you’ve made this movie in the very first place. But I hope it comes through in spectacular form and you get it to a good venue, be it a festival, be it a distributor. However it ends up in the world, congratulations. And congratulations on your script placing well at the Nichol.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic. First of all, thank you also for writing in Leann, or speaking in and letting us know. It’s really nice to hear those things. And it’s particularly great that after all of this time we can chart people’s progress from the very, very start to here you are with a movie. And I think what John’s saying is absolutely true. No matter what happens with this film, and I hope it is everything you ever wanted it to be, tons of great careers started by people falling on their faces immediately after the starter pistol went off. Like mine. Just, you know, just right away face plant. And that’s OK.

That is not a predictor of future failure or anything. It’s just great that you’re through this now. You have gotten the hardest part done. You are now one of the very few people in the world who has written a screenplay that has become a movie. You now have access to a certain experience and information that 98% of screenwriters do not have. And so take all the lessons from this. Think of this as this great opportunity to learn all these lessons and I’m very glad in particular that when you did run into John at that bookstore that he wasn’t a monster to you. Because you know that’s – I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had to talk down after they’ve had a run-in with that monster. [laughs]

**John:** The Jekyll and Hyde quality. Sometimes it’s just, ugh, it’s just the worst. I know.

**Craig:** How great would that be, by the way, if you really were a monster? Like every time people met you in person they were like oh my god he is not what he is on the podcast at all.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, it’s Matthew’s clever editing that makes me sound like a rational human being when in fact I’m just–

**Craig:** No, you’re a nightmare.

**John:** Completely crazy.

**Craig:** Nightmare on wheels. So, anyway, thank you Leann. That’s wonderful.

**John:** Hooray. Craig, I don’t think we’ve actually talked about the fact that there’s an election happening, a WGA election that’s happening for the West. So I don’t know if you’re aware of it.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** But it’s happening right now.

**Craig:** W, G, oh, the Writers Guild.

**John:** The Writers Guild. We’re both in the Writers Guild.

**Craig:** Here’s I think practically speaking this is my point of view about this election. Any Writers Guild election will favor the incumbents. I don’t remember the last time an incumbent ran for reelection and didn’t win, for anything. Officer or board. But this year is different because there’s quite a bit of controversy and the union has been undergoing an internal disagreement. Which I think is good.

I think there’s a generation of writers that have grown up inside a guild that has never argued. And you and I come from an earlier time when the guild would argue all the time with itself and I think that that was healthy.

I would love to see dissenting voices in the mix. I would love to frankly have more disagreement inside the room because I think when there is more disagreement ideas can be better stress-tested and evaluated and you will get better results. That’s my working theory here. That’s the board that I was on. I remember the way it functioned. In fact, in two consecutive years there were two wildly different leaderships and a consistent disagreement inside the room which was terrific.

So, I am supporting all the members of the, what is it, Writers Forward. I think they call themselves Writers Forward. They always come up with names. I don’t care about the names. Nobody cares about the names. But that, because I want to get some of those dissenting opinions in there, particularly as it regards the agency issue which I think is a terrific cause that has not been prosecuted correctly.

And so, you know, even if all that happens is everybody votes and it’s clear from the voting that a lot of people are unhappy with the way leadership has been doing things to this point that too will impact how leadership behaves following the election.

One last thing I’ll say. There has been this what I consider a very poisonous notion that has been introduced into our body politic and I’ve seen it – really this is the first time I’ve ever seen it. And the notion is this. That disagreement with leadership weakens the union. This is a terrible notion on its face. I don’t even think that people who are proposing it and promoting actually believe it in their hearts anyway. Because if Phyllis Nagy and her slate sweep the election, which is unlikely, but let’s just say that happens, those people aren’t going to immediately say, right, well we disagree with everything she says but she’s in charge now so now we have to agree with it completely. No one is going to do that. And no one should do that. That’s not what it’s about.

What’s behind the whole disagreement weakens us – the converse is therefore just do what we tell you to do. And agree with what we say. And I think that’s terrible. It’s particularly terrible for a writers’ union when the whole point is that our livelihoods are based on a kind of necessary free expression. So, I believe actually disagreement, public disagreement, rigorous discussion makes us stronger and actually makes our union mean something. As opposed to a kind of compulsory solidarity which is nothing more than a lot of people being ordered to drudge in together in the same direction.

I don’t want to be drudging in the same direction. I want us all to be running in the same direction thrilled. So, I think we get this from this agreement. That’s why I’m supporting this group. John, the floor is yours.

**John:** I disagree with this characterization that the folks who are supportive of the current agency action are poisoning everything with their trying to ask questions of the dissenters. What I’ve seen again and again is at any time that the folks on the Nagy slate are questioned or trying to hit down at specifically what they’re trying to do that theme portrayed that you are being too aggressive, you’re being too lockstep with the guild. I don’t see that actually being the case. But in terms of the folks I’m supporting, listen, I was part of the group that is prosecuting the agency campaign right now. So I’ve been in all those rooms and I sort of know what’s actually happening. That’s why I think the incumbents that I’m supporting are fantastic because I’ve seen them do the work day in and day out.

The folks who are not incumbents who I’m supporting I also saw them sort of independently reach out and do a lot of really amazing things for writers during this time. So that’s why I picked the other writers who I’m supporting. So voting is really important. I think it’s great that everyone vote and a big vote this time will show both the guild and the town sort of how active and engaged membership is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think engagement is a sign of our power. The more we engage I think the stronger more formidable I think we are. And to be clear I would never ever defend anyone who has said, hey, you can’t question a candidate. Question them all you want. For sure. It’s just that there’s – it’s not even a support necessarily all supporters of the incumbents. It’s just a few people have made very public statements that no one should disagree openly with their leadership. I just think down that road is insanity.

**John:** I think it’s also unfair to put blame for that on the incumbents. Or that the incumbents are directing that kind of thing.

**Craig:** They are not. I would agree with you completely. In fact, I don’t think, I can’t speak for all of the incumbents but I can certainly speak for David Goodman on this because I’ve spoken with him. I mean, we talk all the time. And there’s no way that David Goodman would agree with that. I just don’t believe he would agree with that. I wish he would say it more. I wish he would directly rebut some of these people who do this in his name. But I agree with you.

I don’t think anybody that has gone through the process of being in guild leadership which you and I both know requires a certain kind of, oh, you know, magnanimity and responsibility to all would ever suggest such a thing. It’s really more kind of the people on the fringes or the edges of things. But, you know, that’s what Twitter and Facebook can do is they sort of magnify voices on the edges. And I don’t mean to say that the people are on the edges, but rather their positions where they’re staking themselves out in terms of political point of view is a bit far.

If anybody out there is feeling slightly guilty that they would disagreement with leadership please don’t feel guilty about that. You should always disagree with leadership. I’m an incredibly disagreeable person. My feeling is my job is to quiz and question leadership. I was doing that when I was in leadership. I think that’s how you get better leaders.

**John:** Cool. Two last bits of news. First off, Highland2 the upgrade to pro is on sale this week. So if you’re a person who has been using Highland2 and have been holding off upgrading to pro this is the week because it’s on sale. So you should do it. I guess it’s a back to school sale. I don’t know. It was Labor Day. We decided to put it on sale. We will do this like once a year. So this is your chance to get it for a break.

Also if you would like to order the NaNoWriMo classroom kit, so this is a kit that goes out to classes across the US, you can order it for your kid’s class or for some other class that you just want to have this thing. It’s a great program that gets kids writing in the month of November. It’s a really structured thing for teachers to use in grade schools and junior highs as well. Writer Emergency Pack is included is included in that. So if you want to get that for your school there is a link in the show notes to that.

And now it is time to get to our special guest. Alison Luhrs is Senior Narrative Designer at Wizards of the Coast where she works on properties including Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Welcome Alison.

**Alison Luhrs:** Hello.

**John:** Hello. Alison, where are we talking to you right now?

**Alison:** You are talking to me from a weird little phone booth thing inside of our office in rainy Renton, Washington State.

**John:** So Renton is near Seattle?

**Alison:** Yeah, it’s about 20 minutes south of Seattle. It’s sort of its kind of ugly cousin to the south. But I live in Seattle and commute down here.

**John:** Fantastic. So I introduced you as a Senior Narrative Designer. What does that actually mean? What do you do for a living?

**Alison:** So my job is to advocate for characters and story inside of the games that we make. So, it can be in the tabletop space for the tabletop version of Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons. But right now I work for digital publishing. So it’s my job to be in charge of expressions of story within the digital games that we’re currently working on.

**John:** Great. So you’re a storyteller. So like most of the people listening to this podcast you’re involved with characters and worlds and story, but in a very different sense than sort of a normal 120-page screenplay. You are dealing with whole giant fantasy worlds and then populating those worlds with characters.

**Alison:** For sure. It’s super esoteric and weird. So I kind of do everything from actual writing of scripts and barks and different communications between characters in the game as well as doing a ton of documentation on the designer’s end for what is the overall arc structure. What are the different narrative choices that can happen in the script? As well as world-building. So coming up with what are the rules of the world. What does it look like? What is the structure of the different cultures that inhabit this place? And using that documentation to hand off to the folks who are in charge of actually doing the art and the audio and the creative verticals for game design.

**Craig:** So basically you have the coolest job ever. I mean, that’s what I’m hearing. You have the coolest job in the world.

**Alison:** It is the coolest job in the world and I had no idea it existed until about five or six years ago. Yeah.

**Craig:** Now one thing that I imagine you have to deal with that would be blow my mind – I mean, you know, John and I both love Dungeons & Dragons and my son is a huge Magic player.

**Alison:** Awesome. Nice.

**Craig:** So we’re Wizards of the Coast people.

**Alison:** We’re all nerds here. Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re all wizards here. But I would imagine that one of the things that you have to deal with as a kind of burden is this massive quantity of canon and lore that you need to consistent inside of. How often do you run afoul of this where you step on a landmine you didn’t even know was there? Or you create a character and someone says, “Oh actually there was a character.” I mean, what’s that like?

**Alison:** It is something that is constantly on my mind. And luckily we have folks in the building who I can go to as the experts to ask. Like, hey, have we already done this 25 years ago? And usually the answer is yes. One of the nice things about working on properties like Magic or Dungeons & Dragons that have been around for so long is that there’s only a certain point where you can really be specific to everything. You know what I mean? Like you can only match canon so much of the time.

And so one of the ways that we kind of approach this is by recognizing that canon is something that has to grow alongside your audience. There are things that we would do for an audience today enjoying one of our games that we wouldn’t necessarily do 25 years ago, or wouldn’t even really be on our mind. So, when we are producing a new character or producing some sort of new world or new work the question that we ask first is how is this appropriate for the audience that’s playing it today. If there’s a way to tie that into the old lore without stepping on anything, cool. But if it does step on something that’s a point to pause, talk to the experts inside the building, and say how can we make this work. Or, what do we need to actively address and actively shift to move forward.

So we never really want to get pigeon-holed into wanting to be dogmatic about sticking to canon. Canon is the most important thing of all. Instead we have ways to work alongside it and move it forward to a modern audience.

**John:** It sounds like what you’re saying is that canon is an incredibly useful resource. You have all these characters and all these worlds and in the case of D&D decades of history going back to like these characters Mordenkainen who was back there from the very start.

**Alison:** Yeah.

**John:** But you have to always be asking what is that helpful for the game right now.

**Alison:** Exactly.

**John:** How does that character fit into the universe that you’re establishing right now and the stories that you want to tell.

**Alison:** Right. Mordenkainen is a really good example, too, because what’s his personality? Origin story? What are the bits about this character, one who has been around for forever? There isn’t necessarily a lot that’s been written about the guy.

**Craig:** He’s a spell brand name. I just think of him as he’s got his magnificent mansion. He’s put his name on spells. Him and Mordenkainen.

**Alison:** Yeah. They’re both very busy dudes.

**John:** But I can imagine looking through the more recent hard cover books you’ve done on Mordenkainen is it’s a character who kind of feels like a Doctor Strange in the sense that he’s an incredibly powerful magic user and also bridges between different universes within D&D lore. So, he actually seems to have an awareness that there are other dimensions and other possibilities. Like he can talk about the elves in this universe versus the elves in that universe. So it’s a way of sort of bridging across things.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Right. And the really convenient thing as a creator is that that’s about as much as we have on him. With D&D specifically there’s a huge breadth of knowledge about these worlds and about all the space that D&D has to play in. But it’s very flat. There isn’t a lot of depth that’s been done about specific places. Because it’s been added to so many times by so many hundreds of creators, it’s very horizontal and not necessarily deep. So even though there is a lot of different things that you can cover, because there’s so many different things there’s a lot of chances to go really deep on character. So even though there hadn’t been too much written about Mordenkainen before, a lot of the textbooks about him recently came out, it was a chance to really explore the depths that hadn’t been established yet.

**John:** Let’s talk about the work you’re doing. So what kind of documents are you writing? And are these things that are just internal? Because we’ll put in links to some of the stuff that shows up on the web. So these are short stories you’ve written. They are explanations of new Magic: The Gathering cards or sort of the backstory behind this new character that you’re introducing into the world. But does the actual document look like? What application are you in? What is your cursor blinking in as you’re doing most of your work?

**Alison:** Sure. So when we’re developing a new set for Magic: The Gathering or a new world for D&D a lot of the work that we’ll do is creating the world guide. So the world guide is documentation not just for us narrative designers but it also guides our visual artists, our game designers to help come up with mechanics later. And these world guides are around 40 to 60,000 words. It’s kind of a Wikipedia article. The imaginary world that we’re coming up with.

So the world guide will go over not just visually going through the different cultures and environments and biomes look like here, but what are the cultures that live here. What are their real world inspirations? How do they function with inside the world itself? How do they operate with different cultures? What are the economies that work here? It’s really just like picking up on a Wikipedia article about a country and then translating that to a fictional place.

So even though it sounds really minute that we would need to know the tiny specifics of how an imaginary culture works within this world, we’re creating experiences that our fans will enjoy for 60 hours at a time. So we need to have all that information in our back pockets so that we can develop those long experiences they want to come back to again and again.

**Craig:** So you’re leaving room ultimately for everybody participating to do their own storytelling. I mean, that’s kind of the point of Dungeons & Dragons. So you’re creating all the details and the playgrounds and then people can come along and sort of grow inside of those things.

**Alison:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But there is – I mean, I know they’re trying to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie. And they tried that for a while. And there are some properties where I guess you can – you have two spaces. You have the space where people make their own stories inside of like the world guide. So I understand right now we’re running Dragon Heist. So, I can—

**Alison:** Oh fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I can tell these guys a lot about the city because I have the guide to Waterdeep and I can walk them through things. The stories inside obviously I’m playing off of the narrative prompts, but they’re kind of making the story as they go. That’s how Dungeons & Dragons works. You know that. I’m just telling it for people at home. But then there’s like living next to that is the opportunity to do fixed narrative where you’re telling stories, beginnings, middles, and ends, and people are absorbing it passively like they would a movie. Do you have interest in that? Do you think that Wizards is going to be doing more of that? Or are they going to kind of stay in that sort of hybrid space where they create a world and then they invite you to tell stories within it?

**Alison:** Our plan is to feature a variety of trans-media experiences. There’s going to be a world where we do have beginnings, and middles, and endings for experiences. And in narrative design the thing that makes it different from sitting down and writing a screenplay or writing a novel is the element of choice. There always has to be room for our audience to choose what happens to them. And the trick as a narrative designer is finding ways to make all of those choices feel like they were intentional and feel like they’re part of the experience.

And so the way that you nail that is by aiming for tone and theme rather than for specific arcs. So that way you can build in lots of different endings for your player experiences but they all still feel like they were intentional and part of the experience because they match the same tone. So, when we do end up doing some kind of TV show or a movie or whatever for any of our properties we would be aiming to match that same tone that we have when you sit down at the table to play with your friends. Or when you are playing a game of Magic against somebody else.

But the trick is managing to find a way to replicate that experience without having to have the same pitfalls. Like I said earlier, because D&D is so horizontal we don’t really have a ton of named characters. Those characters that everybody knows off the top of their heads. And so there’s our chance to establish that when we do eventually go down that path. But until then it’s my job to make sure that we’re maintaining the same tone that you have when you are playing at your kitchen table with your friends as when you sit down to a console game to play D&D or to play Magic.

**John:** So obviously in the fantasy space we think back to Tolkien who wrote the novels Lord of the Rings but also really did the rest of the world-building there. He was drawing his own maps. He was sort of figuring out everything around that, even if it didn’t necessarily directly fit into the books. Here it’s sort of the reverse situation where you had a lot of the landscape and you kept filling out the landscape, but now you’re trying to find who are the characters and what are the stories that are pulling us through this.

I feel like so many of our listeners probably kind of want your job rather than our job, because it’s a chance to sort of just really – you have this giant sandbox so you can just build and build and build and build and there’s not this responsibility that everything has to fit neatly into a two-hour chunk of entertainment.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Sometimes the challenge with doing this is remembering that you have to create a 60 to 80-hour experience. You know? Like there are people who play campaigns for years at a time. Or folks who return to the same Magic set again and again and again. I think that a lot of folks who want to create for the sake of constantly creating would thrive in this career. I had no idea this existed until a couple of years ago when I was inside the building.

There isn’t really a class structure that you can take to get in here. There’s no real college course to major in narrative design. It’s still a really young field. And what my job looks like from company to company is vastly different. So even though I’m writing world guides here inside of Wizards, if I were to go to another study I would likely be doing a much different job just because these two companies are different. And the value of narrative design inside of videogame design is still really undervalued. It’s usually not something that’s added to a game until it’s nearly out the door.

Narrative is the most flexible part of game design. You can change what the word in a sentence is while you’re having a conversation a lot more easily than you can change the mechanics of a how a videogame is actually played. So frequently a narrative designer won’t even really be brought in until they’re at the very end of the process of development.

**John:** Yeah. They may have figured out the art before they actually figured out the story that was really behind that art. And that’s a huge mistake. That’s an opportunity that’s missed.

**Alison:** Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean one of the secrets to Wizard’s success is that we include story from the very beginning. So my job has to always be ready to adapt to whatever the developers change. It’s kind of my job to sort of think on my toes and change whatever I need to change at a moment’s notice. So I can imagine that would be a little off-putting to someone who is more used to having story be the thing that’s driving the car.

**John:** Now talk about sort of you’re working with a team because some of what you describe sort of sounds like the experience of being in a TV writers’ room where there’s a bunch of people and there’s probably a whiteboard and you’re thinking through stuff. But I’ve also done some work with videogame companies and ultimately they might sort of – you describe it as sort of being like a Wikipedia article, ultimately their source of truth is this internal Wiki that basically lists everything and every character and everything that’s been established.

Obviously it’s collaborative, but is it collaborative with a bunch of folks in the room together, or is collaborative in the sense of someone breaks off a chunk of the world and goes off and does it and it falls into a bigger document? What is the work flow?

**Alison:** So the way that we work internally is that I typically will do world-building alongside other members of different creative verticals. So I’ll usually do it alongside maybe a member of the D&D team or the Magic team, but also our lead art director and our lead producers and the members of the creative team who are going to be involved with creating other aspects of the project. I want to make sure that their brains are in the room because they’ll usually be thinking about something that I’m not necessarily.

So, when we do those big brain-stormy meetings I’ll usually take the notes and then go back into my desk and dive in the writer hole for a few hours. And emerge, you know, days later with a couple 10,000 words worth of stuff that we just discussed.

My goal is to usually have that documentation finished early that way when folks are developing stuff later on they can refer to it and hopefully I was smart enough to include something that they’ll need an answer to later on. But if not they’ll come to me directly and say, hey, we want to have this kind of feature in the game. Can you find a creative reason why it makes sense we would ask the player to do X. And so it will be my job to kind of figure out, OK, what’s the high level creative of what we’re asking the player to do. How can we fit that in to what we’ve already established?

**Craig:** So I have a question about your audience, because I think that every writer should be and naturally is consumed with what the audience is going to think. You have a very particular audience. And I mean they are particular. At the same time I feel like Wizards is doing a really good job of kind of progressing. They’re moving the ball forward. I mean, classically speaking all of the kind of Dungeons & Dragons stuff was an echo back to European Middle Ages, just like Lord of the Rings was. So white guys with swords. And scantily-clad women being rescued from mythological creatures.

And it’s not that anymore. But as you—

**Alison:** No it’s not.

**Craig:** But as you go through and you tell your new stories how do you manage – this is really a personal question. It’s not about the company. It’s actually just about you as you’re writing. How do you manage the kind of push and pull knowing, well, I’m dealing with some people that may be resistant here so I have to figure out how to move the ball forward without freaking people out? But still I don’t want to be regressive. Talk me through that process.

**Alison:** I believe in listening to what the audience at large wants. We often talk inside the building about the bell curve of fans. So, on the left side of a bell curve that will be folks who don’t really have any knowledge of the lore or the stories that we already tell inside the building or in our games. And on the far right end you’ll have the people who know absolutely everything about it. And the bulk of your fans are going to fall a little bit to the left of center in this curve. Most people don’t know everything. And most people know a little bit more than the folks who don’t know anything about the game. But the folks that we’re aiming for live in that part that isn’t going to be angry at every major change and isn’t going to be upset that we aren’t featuring women being rescued in every single adventure that we have and having every single major character be played by a white guy.

What we’re aiming for is what the culture at large is moving towards. And I like to hold an audience responsible for keeping up. It’s our job to make sure that we bring in more people and we do that by listening to what the trend of the audience is moving towards, not trying to hold on to what it used to be in the ‘80s and the ‘90s.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s great. I mean, I’ve noticed even as we’re running Dragon Heist that there are characters that are just casually gay couples. And what I liked is it wasn’t part of the story. It’s not particularly relevant.

**Alison:** No.

**Craig:** We just make note that he works as a blacksmith and his husband is in the back helping. So it is interesting to see how in a strange way – and I don’t know why it is that in imaginary world – imaginary world should be more progressive than our world. I mean, that’s the point, right?

**Alison:** Yes, they should. Absolutely. The last thing I want to do when I’m playing pretend is imagine that I’m in a world where I have to deal with sexism on a daily basis.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Alison:** Why would I want that to be part of my fantasy?

**Craig:** Right. And there’s more room in a fantasy world to do these things. And yet oddly, traditionally fantasy rooms have been more restrictive and more regressive in that regard because they were, I don’t know, this is like strange fake nostalgia for a time that really didn’t even exist.

**Alison:** No, that’s totally what it is. And a lot of it, too, has to come with who was creating that fantasy and those worlds. When you have creators who are from a background that hasn’t been traditionally represented you’re going to have fantasy that is more deep and more complex than you ever would if it was written by a specific kind of person.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s great.

**John:** So, Alison, there’s maybe a new world or a new sort of section of an existing world that you want to sort of explore, so maybe thinking about it for a campaign or for some other materials. It could be based on some sort of world mythology or some idea that sparks for you. What would be the process of pitching that idea internally? Would it be just you coming in with an idea? Do you enlist artists to help you draw stuff up? What is the process of developing a new world or a new section of world inside the company?

**Alison:** Yeah, so we’re fortunate enough to have a couple of concept artists inside the building. So if I ever have an idea for something I’d like to do in the future usually I’ll find a concept artist that I get along with and sit down for a couple hours and just jam out some ideas. Like think what are some different visual approaches that we can use. What are some cool narrative approaches? How can we marry these together so we come up with an elevator pitch that everybody thinks is super rad?

A couple times a year we’ll have opportunities internally to pitch those kinds of ideas depending on what game that you’re doing. We usually plan out our products a solid three or four years into the future. So, when we are pitching and developing these ideas it’s for way, way, way down the line.

But that collaboration between narrative and art is what makes for a really cohesive experience. And so after we come up with the pitch for what a world could be we’ll typically bring on a game designer fairly early so we can try and figure out, OK, what’s a cool mechanical hook based off of these things that we know are happening creatively. And from there it can ideally enter into the development process for whatever game that we’re attaching it to.

**John:** Yeah, so for example if you want to bring back a Psionics mechanic there might be some interesting world in which the Psionics makes a lot of sense even though it’s not most of what we’re seeing in Fifth Edition.

**Alison:** Right. And Magic is really easy for this, too. So maybe I could go back and say, hey, you know what? I miss Morph. Morph was really cool. Let’s find some way to bring it back for a different setting. And then we’ll use that as kind of the jump-off point for, OK, we know that we want to use this kind of play style or this kind of mechanic, what creatively facilitates that in a fun and interesting way. And sometimes that’s how different world ideas start off.

**John:** So I bet we have a bunch of listeners who are eager to get your job. Let’s talk through how did you get hired into doing your spot? You were a community manager? What was your responsibility before then?

**Alison:** I was. I did social media management for my day job. But my background is in theater. So after I graduated from college me and a couple friends of mine cofounded a theater company up here in Seattle. And so while I was doing my crummy day job of slinging social media tweets and dealing with the masses, in my evenings I was playwriting and I was collaboratively creating. And I was working alongside a team of different artists to create and write different things.

So, I was playwriting. I was writing long-form fiction. And once I got inside the building at Wizards doing social media I remember learning that there were people who were paid to write about dragons and elves. And I said, well, I can do that. That’s easy. And it’s only because of all that time I’d spent creating with a team and grinding my narrative skills on my own and with my own play groups that I was able to kind of bring to the table and say, hey, I can do this too.

There really isn’t a straightforward way into doing narrative design professionally. You kind of have to do your own thing on your own and then make opportunities happen for yourself by applying smaller gigs and working your way up. I think a recommendation if someone wanted to start doing narrative design would be to just start DM-ing. Start running your own play groups.

**Craig:** DM-ing.

**Alison:** DM-ing will only make you a better storyteller no matter what medium you are writing in. You will learn everything you need to know about narrative by sitting down and forcing your friends to play through whatever you came up with.

**Craig:** And then being accountable to whatever they come up with.

**Alison:** Yes. Learning how to listen to other people’s ideas and respond to that and find ways to solve narrative problems. It’s the most valuable skill you can have. For something actionable that you can do right now if you want to practice using choice as an element of writing, Twine is a really excellent program. It’s free to download and you can use it to make sort of text-based adventures. So you know like Choose Your Own Adventure style narratives? It’s basically that. When hiring for narrative design jobs often we’ll ask people to just submit a short like 10 or 20-minute Twine game. And usually that can show how good you are at integrating choice into the narrative experience. And showing that you understand how different trees of narrative work.

So, start building a Twine game. It’s super easy and super-fast. And it’s industry standard for applying for a job.

**Craig:** I want to do it now.

**John:** It definitely feels like we’re at a moment—

**Alison:** Do it, yeah!

**John:** We’re at a moment where there’s a tremendous intersection between what we think of as cinematic writing, with film and television, and game writing, and comics, and other sort of fiction stuff, where people are building out these bigger things. And university programs haven’t quite caught up. USC’s School of Cinematic Arts has game design and has some aspects of this, but it’s really much more steered towards videogames.

**Alison:** Programming, yeah.

**John:** Programming and sort of animation and that aspect of it. But it’s really this meta concept of a sort of what is the universe of this idea and then what are the physical things we’re going to see come out of it. And balancing those two things is tricky but I think we’re going to find a generation that has less of a distinction between this person is this kind of writer or that kind of writer. They’re all working together to sort of make a cohesive thing.

**Alison:** Absolutely. It’s just different mediums. And being able to understand the rules of one will only make you stronger in the other. It bums me out that there aren’t a lot of opportunities, especially for college kids, to really learn these skills and develop them if you aren’t going to a game design specific school. But as far as like what kinds of writing that you can get good at if you want to do the things that I do, dramaturgical writing which is something that a lot of folks outside of theater don’t really know about is probably the closest thing.

So dramaturgy is the person in a usually well-paying show whose job is to research the time period that it takes place in or the world that the play is set around. And come up with a sort of similar document that I do for that specific experience. Weirdly enough there’s a lot of crossover between the skills that are necessary for theater and live performance and for videogames. And I think it’s that presence of choice or presence of an audience that you’re always trying to work around into your experience.

But, yeah, dramaturgy weirdly enough has a lot of crossover. I would also recommend studying screenwriting as much as possible since that’s still kind of the format that most people in the game industry use for writing scripts and such. But instead of a fairly easy to hold in your hand script we usually churn out one that’s a couple hundred pages long rather than a couple dozen.

**John:** Cool. Alison, thank you so much for this overview. I think we’re going to have a lot of follow up questions for you down the road. But if people need to find you on Twitter where should they reach out to you?

**Alison:** My handle is @alisontheperson but I usually answer work-related questions @alisonthewizard.

**Craig:** Of course you do.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course you do.

**John:** We do a segment on the show called One Cool Things and so I’m going to start with my One Cool Thing. It is a book I just finished called Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch. It is just terrific. It is a look at sort of how English is changing with the rise of the Internet. And in a weird way you’d assume like, oh, it must be changing faster because of the Internet, but she also points out things like spell check are slowing down some of the changes that would naturally happen. So it’s just a really great funny overview of what’s happening in our language right now, the rise of meme culture. So, Craig, you will love it because you love John McWhorter. Through him I found this book.

**Craig:** I do. And I read a fairly thorough article by her that was sort of I guess a chapter and it seemed great. By the way, did she talk about Grammarly? Because if I see one more damn ad for that stupid thing I’m going to lose every ounce of S in my body. I’m trying to stay Internet safe here. I can’t handle it.

**John:** Craig, we should put the transcripts of this show through Grammarly and see if they have suggestions for improving it.

**Craig:** F-in Grammarly. It’s like “Writing is hard. Sometimes you…” Shut up. Shut. Up. Also, your stupid program isn’t going to change anything. If you don’t know how to write you don’t know how to write. I swear to god. So, anyway, there’s my umbrage for that. I haven’t gotten angry in a while. Weird that I would pick a—

**Alison:** No, feel it. By all means.

**Craig:** Now Grammarly of all things is getting it.

**Alison:** Stand in your truth, dude.

**Craig:** Thank you. Thank you. Freaking Grammarly. So, the first thing I do when I install a fresh copy of Word or something like that on a computer I’m like turn off the stupid green underline. I don’t need you to tell me how to structure a sentence. How dare you, Microsoft Word.

**John:** How dare you.

**Craig:** How dare you. My One Cool Thing this week, it’s a little pricy. I’m just going to be honest. It’s a little pricy. But Thanksgiving is not so far off. We’re a couple of months away. Three months away. Why am I starting to talk about it now so early? Because if you were going to get a Heritage turkey you would need to think about ordering it now. What is a Heritage turkey? Have either of you had one for Thanksgiving?

**John:** I’ve had a Heritage turkey. It was delicious.

**Craig:** Alison?

**Alison:** I have. Yes.

**Craig:** Great. Well, you two are freaking cool. So here’s what’s up. The regular turkeys that you get in the store are – and I didn’t know this – there’s a name for them. They have a breed name and it’s called Broad Breasted White, which sounds—

**Alison:** Typical. Typical.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just sounds dirty. So, Broad Breasted White turkeys were literally manipulated in a laboratory by USDA scientists and the point of them was basically Americans like white meat turkey. Apparently. I’m kind of a dark meat guy myself. But regardless, they like white—

**Alison:** The same. It’s a shame.

**Craig:** It’s a shame. They like white meat so let’s come up with a turkey that has this massive breast and also grows really fast so we can make a lot of them and they’re huge. And that’s what they’ve done. These companies that sell Heritage turkeys, they’re basically unmanipulated turkeys. They’re the original breeds. They tend to be a bit smaller. Well, some people think of it as a gamier taste. I think of it as a more flavorful taste. There’s less white meat. There’s more dark meat. There’s lots of different kinds. They come in all sorts of sizes. But they’re expensive.

So it’s a little bit of a thing. If you’re feeling fancy for Thanksgiving, you know, I honestly say I think they’re way better. Brine it. You know, brine it. Because they can tend toward the dry if you don’t. But lots of places to buy them. I won’t recommend any particular place. I’m sure they’re all excellent. The one place do not get a Heritage turkey from Grammarly. Because you know what? Screw Grammarly. Honestly. How dare they?

**John:** I think we’re going to do a search through the transcripts to find how many times Craig has brought up turkeys on this podcast. Because I feel like it’s got to be at least 10 where you’ve mentioned something about Thanksgiving or brining turkeys. It feels like it’s a subtext for so many episodes.

**Alison:** It’s a really important topic. I’m glad someone is talking about the turkeys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Someone has to talk about them.

**Craig:** Well Alison and I have our own podcast called Brinecast where we just—

**Alison:** Brinecast. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Where we talk about different brines. Wet brines. Dry brines. There’s a lot of different kinds.

**Alison:** Buttermilk.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Alison:** Apple cider vinegar. There’s a million different things that you can pour on your dead meat.

**Craig:** Correct. And you can also kind of go sous-vide to maybe avoid the brining. That’s an episode.

**Alison:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** That’s our show.

**Alison:** It is.

**John:** Alison, do you have a One Cool Thing that you can share with our audience?

**Alison:** I do. Yeah. So, Airbnb has a search function where you can look for offbeat houses. So eight of my friends just went to Ireland for a friend’s wedding. He went to Dublin, found an adorable Irish lady, and they got married. Yay for them. And we just came back from staying in a castle for two or three nights. So, on Airbnb you can search to stay in an actual castle. And with eight of us staying in the same place at the same time it only came out to about $110 per person per night.

**Craig:** What? [laughs]

**Alison:** Yeah. It’s way more affordable than you think. You can live and sleep in an actual castle. Please do it.

**Craig:** Hold on a second. Is this castle like the one where Sauron is slowly regathering his strength? There’s got to be a reason that—

**Alison:** No. It was like a cozy Downton Abbey style. This used to be one tower and then someone added on a fancy estate. We had the whole run of the place. So we got out the nice goblets and celebrating in the dining room.

**Craig:** Did you guys LARP? I mean, you were in a castle.

**Alison:** No, we did not LARP. We did play hide and seek. Yeah. Had a really, really fantastic time celebrating in a fancy ass castle. Highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Wow. All right. That’s way cheaper than I thought it would be. Nice.

**Alison:** I know. I know. That’s why we did it.

**John:** Nice. Cool. And that’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. But for short questions I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Alison you can find @alisonthewizard.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You can also find transcripts. Those go up the week after the episode airs.

Alison, thank you so much for talking through your job. I think there’s going to be a whole new generation of senior narrative designers in the making who are going to be coming after your job hard. But you helped inspire them. So thank you very much for talking through.

**Alison:** I look forward to sharing the stage. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Alison. Thanks.

**John:** Thanks. All right. Bye.

Links:

* [The Shadows Casting Call](johnaugust.com/casting) John is looking for a 15 year old blind actress for the lead role — please help by sharing this link with anyone who might be a good fit!
* [The Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit: The RespectAbility Guide to Inclusion in the Entertainment Industry](https://www.respectability.org/hollywood-inclusion/)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 315: Big Screens, Big Money](https://johnaugust.com/2017/big-screens-big-money)
* [NaNoWriMo classroom kit](https://store.nanowrimo.org/products/d5ce724ee44c89b2d2240da73f117eebf329e3364f629f8f-23)
* [Comfort and Joy](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0087072/)
* [99 Problems](https://www.99problemsfilm.com/) by Ross Killeen
* [The Black Mambas documentary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8430900/)
* [Wizards of the Coast](https://company.wizards.com/)
* [Twine](https://twinery.org/)
* [Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language](https://amzn.to/2Z4gpLg) by Gretchen McCulloch
* [Alison Luhrs](https://twitter.com/alisontheperson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) on Twitter or [here for game related questions](https://twitter.com/alisonthewizard?lang=en)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_416_fantasy_worldbuilding.mp3).