Search Results for: parenthetical

The oringinal post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 702 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We often discuss how to start a script. Today on the show, how do you finish one? We’ll discuss last looks, those final steps when you think you’re done, but you need to get your script ready to hand in. We’ll then apply some of those lessons to samples we’re reading for our new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at the first three pages of scripts our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. Today, we’ll have bonus feedback because our beloved Scripnotes producer, Megana Rao, is sitting here to the left of me to help us out.

Megana Rao: Hi. Thank you so much for letting me come back. I have so many questions on this topic.

John: You have a very specific question about last looks because that’s prompted the whole episode.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: I mean, we don’t let you come back. It’s not like you’re begging us all the time. We’re like, no, and then finally we let you. I personally want you here.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: I can’t speak for John.

[laughter]

John: It’s fantastic to have you here. Trying out some new stuff in the studio here. We don’t have headphones on, which is strange, but good.

Megana: I feel naked.

Craig: It is a little nudifying. Also, I have always loved the vibe of bald men wearing headphones because we all look like Lobot from Empire Strikes Back, which I think is amazing. It’s just regular.

John: It’s just regular. Yes.

Megana: Yes, it’s fun.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss musical scores and the function of the soundtrack in feature films. We had a question about that, and we haven’t dug very much into that. I want to talk about what we’re looking for in music, in the things we make. We have no items in the overall news category, but I want to talk about something new I learned this week. Not new to me. Craig, you understand the musical scale. As for you– I forget. Megana, what instruments did you play growing up?

Megana: I played piano, violin, and the recorder.

Craig: The recorder.

John: The recorder, absolutely. The recorder is a fundamental music education which actually ties into this.

Craig: It is. We all played the recorder or even its stupider nephew, the song flute.

John: I don’t know the song flute.

Megana: Oh, I did not play the song flute.

Craig: The song flute is for kids who struggle with the recorder. [chuckles]

Megana: Then I should have been on the song flute.

John: Craig and I, we went hardcore down the woodwind track, and we were both clarinet players.

Craig: Deep clarinet.

John: In our early music education, we learned do, re, mi. We learned that. What I learned from Mike this week was that in French solfege, which is the do, re, mi, they only use do, re, mi. They don’t have letter notes for C, D, E, F, G, A, B. They don’t.

Craig: When kids are learning piano, they don’t learn middle C? They learn middle do?

John: Do.

Megana: What?

John: Yes. Is that wild? Our international listeners are like, well, of course.

Craig: Wait, they say it’s in the key of fa?

John: Yes.

Craig: That can’t be right.

John: That seems impossible.

Craig: That’s impossible.

John: No, you actually look it up. There’s–

Craig: Because there’s things like Minuet in G. Do they translate that?

John: Different countries will do different things for how they handle stuff. In France, it literally is.

Craig: Did you fact-check them on this?

John: I did. I looked up, the answers here. It’s the system of a fixed do system. Fixed do is solfege. Do is always the root C. Whereas we have the movable do system, which is, I think, just so handy because that way we can talk about do is just like the root of whatever–

Craig: Of whatever it is.

John: It’s just wild. It’s assumptions I would have made about like, well, everyone, they must work the same way.

Craig: I got to tell you, when you look at the history of classical music in Europe, you see, obviously, great composers from Germany and Austria. You see great composers from Italy. You see a couple from England. France?

John: Oh, so that’s what it is.

Megana: [chuckles]

John: Yes. Send your letters into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll forward them directly to Craig.

Craig: Listen, I’m just wondering where are all the great French composers, the great classical French composers.

John: Did you see?

Craig: Okay, keep going.

John: God, the guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet. They’re all French authors.

Craig: That was Tchaikovsky. Russians, great.

John: Oh, no, no. There’s a different French–

Craig: The Russians had a ton.

John: They had a ton.

Craig: Tons.

John: What are you going to do other than compose music because it’s cold outside?

Megana: Do only French people have this system?

John: No, so it’s common throughout a lot of Europe.

Megana: Okay.

Craig: The other countries that don’t give us great classical composers. [chuckles]

John: You can also find a lot of Americans. It’s just strange to me that I would have assumed that everyone’s using the same A through G notation.

Craig: Do you think they’ll let me into France after this?

John: No, but this was not the deal killer.

Megana: You’ve been on their list for a while.

Craig: They’re the easygoing about people that criticize the French. It’s going to be fine.

John: Let’s do some follow-up. We had more advice for general meetings, which is our topic in Episode 699.

Drew: Alyssa writes, “I wanted to share a tip that’s helped my Zoom generals immensely, just in case it helps someone else. Before every meeting, I put my dog on the bed behind me. Without fail, he will be the first thing commented on. While his first couple appearances were a happy accident, seeing such a positive reaction to a cozy mini poodle with an underbite meant that I was happy to manufacture the situation if need be. In the Zoomverse, having something, anything bold in the background lays the ground for both an easy icebreaker and leads so naturally into a conversation about who you are and what you’re all about. It does mean I always have to make my bed before meetings and occasionally bribe my dog with a treat, but I think it’s worth it.”

John: I love this advice. I think it’s practical. It’s usable. Just having a first thing to talk about and having them compliment your dog. Love it.

Craig: You have to force that dog on the couch, though. He doesn’t want to go. “Hey, sit good on the couch. Mommy needs a job.”

John: Every dog wants to be on the bed, though, too. You let the dog up on the bed.

Craig: My dogs love being on the bed. You know it’s a sad day when your dog is too old to get up on the bed. I know. I have two dogs. Bonnie, the younger one, will spring onto the bed effortlessly. Cookie just stands there like, oh, and can’t get up there. She’s big. We can’t really get her up there. Then we got to get her down.

Megana: Do you have steps for her?

Craig: We don’t have bed steps for her. Maybe we should get her bed steps.

Megana: Yes, or a little ramp.

Craig: I’m not sure that she’ll still be here by the time it shows up. It depends on how fast the shipping is. She’s really old. Poor Cookie. She’s almost 15.

Megana: What?

Craig: I know.

John: She’s a big dog.

Megana: She’s like such puppy energy. I had no idea.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Cookie?

Craig: Oh, geez.

John: This podcast took a depressing turn.

Craig: Yes. Thanks for reminding me about your vital dog.

[laughter]

John: No, Craig. You need to put Cookie up in the background and then you can talk about how sick she is.

[laughter]

Craig: I just want to say that you guys are really lucky. This may be the last Zoom where Cookie’s in the background. All right, here’s my comedy.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic, which is brought to us by Megana Rao. Megana, can you remind us of what your question was that you wanted to bring to the show?

Megana: Yes. I have been working on this feature script and I was about to send it into producers and was really just taking my sweet time in the “polish phase.” I wanted to talk to you guys about what you do when you are doing your polish phase or your final pass on a draft. What sorts of things are you looking at? What questions are you asking yourself? I think there also might be a little bit of anxiety or comfort with me taking my sweet time during this phase because it’s like everything’s where it needs to be. Nobody has given me notes yet. How do you deal with that? How do you know when done is done?

John: How do you know you’re not just procrastinating?

Megana: Exactly.

John: Or that you’re just being OCD about stuff that actually doesn’t matter at all?

Craig: Well, I am OCD about stuff that doesn’t matter at all. It’s so funny. I was talking about this with Mehr, my new assistant, because she also works as the script coordinator for our show. It’s her job to go through the script right before it gets sent out through Synchronize as the official draft. If she finds typos, she fixes them. I’ve just let her know if, for instance, I’ve left out a letter and you stick a letter in and it makes the line go longer, which means the page breaks differently, tell me, because I will not turn a draft in with dialogue that is slopping over across two pages. I have a problem. I know that.

Megana: Wow. I thought that my question was going to be really nitpicky, but no, I had no idea the depths to which–

Craig: Scott Frank also has this. We’ve talked about this at length, and we know it’s dumb. We know that. I indulge it.

John: I’ve, over the years, started indulging it much, much less. I just turned in a script yesterday and–

Craig: All the dialogue broke across pages.

John: Every single line won. It was just little dangling lines. I did the spell check, drew right through it as well. I went through and I was looking for examples of I was using the same word too much. I was using the word processing too much. Because I was writing the scene separately and it’s like, oh, it made sense in each of the times I was using it, but collectively, like, oh my God, I’m using that word too much. I can take all those out.

I would look for, you sort of blur your eyes and look at the page. It’s like, is there anything that’s weird about it? Is there anything that just feels strange? It’s too dark. It’s too light. You’re looking for widows and orphans. Honestly, our software all takes care of those situations. What Craig is describing is, let’s say I have three lines of dialogue and it’s at the bottom of the page and the application may split it at sentence level, so the next sentence drops to the next page. You try to avoid that if at all possible.

Craig: I do. There are two things that I think about with dialogue as I’m going through. Obviously, part of the tweaking process is checking for typos and repeated words. I like to read the whole script through because sometimes I might think like, oh, I don’t need this paragraph, or I thought I did, but I don’t because something happens later and it’s fine. For dialogue, I try, again, avoid terribly, frighteningly avoid the continued dialogue on the next page. The other thing I look at is there are times where someone says something that follows another person’s line that should be together on a page.

John: If you were to page flip, you’d lose the context.

Craig: It almost feels like a drum roll, please, page turn, and it undermines it. There are times where I look for those things to make sure that it feels okay. Honestly, just reading it through and the usual stuff, I don’t get too crazy. What are you doing in your process there, Megana, that seems to be occupying so much of your time?

Megana: Well, I feel, okay, this is after I’ve had friends read it, and I’m going through and doing all of the stuff where if I have one word hanging off, can I rewrite the sentence?

Craig: Oh, big fan of that.

Megana: I’ll do a couple of command F passes for words that I feel like I’m using too much or I’m worried I’m using too much.

John: What are examples?

Megana: Here’s one that’s not specific, but I’ll do a just pass where I’ll command F for the word just.

Craig: Oh, you’re a big just person.

Megana: Yes. You almost never need it.

Craig: Well, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I don’t need it.

John: I can also imagine cases where you’re using it. It’s the right question to ask. Do I actually need it in this case?

Craig: If you know that you use a word as a bit of a crutch or a tick, then yes, it’s worth searching for. I’m not sure I have. Well, if I have them, I’m not aware of them, so I don’t do any specific word searching. Maybe I should.

Megana: Well, mine thankfully come from having John having read my scripts. I’ll do a pass for tries to, which I think is sort of like young woman hedging.

Craig: Oh, yes. I could see you hedging. I could see a hedge.

Megana: Thanks to John, I now go through and just make it a little bit more assertive, but that is another example of a pass I’ll do with a command F where I almost never need a tries to. The character just does the action.

Craig: Does the thing. Yes, if they try to and fail, that’s interesting. Tries to pour a cup of coffee and succeeds, [laughter] it’s not that interesting.

John: It isn’t that interesting. We had a guest on recently, and I’m forgetting who it was, that talked about doing a transition pass, which is basically, the day before you’re sending it in, you’re sitting down and actually just looking at, what are the transitions between all the scenes, and are they the best transitions we could do? Does it naturally flow from one thing to the next? Is there a visual? Is there a way that you can get the energy leaning forward at the end of a scene so it tumbles into the next scene with a lot of spark there?

I won’t do a specific thing for that, but I am always mindful of, is there a pre-lap that makes sense? Is there a way that I can carry the energy across that transition? The project I just handed in now is animated, and the transitions will be incredibly important. I wanted to make sure that you could always get a sense of, okay, this is how we’re going to move from this thing into this thing because it’s not going to be an accident. It’s going to be a lot of animators building stop motion stuff to make it all happen.

Megana: I was just rereading the first episode of Chernobyl and Go last night. You both use transitions a lot in the beginning of a script and you highlight it because I think you’re establishing visual language. Then later on, the story just carries itself. Is that something you’re aware of that you’re thinking about when you’re doing these sorts of last passes?

Craig: Well, the beginning of scripts tends to be a little more lyrical because it’s the beginning. We’ve talked about how in the first 10 minutes of sitting in a movie theater, the audience is accepting. They are welcoming everything in because they are learning. They’re new to this country and they want to learn. You can be a bit more lyrical. Once you’ve established everything, then like you say, I think people can put that visual language on top of the read as they’re reading it, and there’s probably less call for it. At the end, you’ll see a lot of lyrical writing come back, I think.

John: We’re going to get into the first three pages of the temples that people have sent through. I will spend a little bit more OCD time on those first couple of pages because you’re inviting somebody in and you just want everything to present itself well so no one has any excuse for stopping reading or setting it down. Making sure those first three, five, 10 pages just really read flawless and there’s nothing there that’s going to jump out is incredibly helpful.

Over the years, I’ve been less prone to the word Jenga or the word Tetris where you’re trying to make things fit exactly the right way so that the page breaks fall down. With careful work, you can almost always squeeze a page or two pages out of a script by just making pages break a little bit earlier and it ripples through the script. I just do a lot less of that now.

Craig: If I see a big chunk of white space at the bottom of a page, sometimes I’ll be like– but usually I’m okay with that, honestly. It’s funny, I don’t worry about length. I think it was much bigger deal in features. I never worry about length.

John: Well, you’re also the boss now.

Craig: I’m the boss. I also know that there are pages that look slow and they’re fast, and there are pages that look fast and they’re slow. The other thing I like to do as a final, what are we calling this, last looks?

John: Yes, last looks.

Craig: Is I read it as if I know nothing. I try and flush my brain of everything. I don’t know anything. Who’s this? Who is that? What are they talking about? I don’t know. Sometimes I will note, oh, you know. That’s not clear to somebody who knows nothing. I don’t love clarity notes because I try my best to make it as clear as I want it to be. There are times where I realize it’s not as clear as I want it to be. The reading as a tabula rasa is a good idea.

John: Agreed. Also, the tabula rasa reading may also help you. If you’ve moved scenes around, I think I’ve noticed that sometimes, oh, I moved this character’s introduction to here, but I didn’t end up uppercase in their name on the first time they showed up. It’s weird that the uppercase is showing up in the wrong scene. Stuff has moved around and there may be other dependencies that I’m not thinking about at the time, which is helpful.

Megana: How do you get into that mindset? I think when most readers are in this phase, they are probably very close to deadline. They have been reading this thing over and over again. In my case, I’ve memorized what it is, so I just start hearing it. How do you get to this point where you’re looking at it with totally fresh eyes?

John: Printing it out is a big help for me because I’m so used to reading it on the screen. If I read it, like what I handed in yesterday, I print it out and sort of did all my corrections in pen on the paper because I’m just reading it differently if I’m reading it on paper is a good way to do it. There’s people who will proofread by reading it all backwards. It’s like, I don’t get that.

Craig: [unintelligible 00:16:51]

John: I don’t know. That’s the thing people do for recognizing those mistakes. The obvious things, spell checking, making sure you’re spelling characters’ names consistently because if you have a weird character’s name, you may have made different choices for how you’re going to say that. The title page, so often I’ll focus on everything else and I’ll forget to update the date on title page.

Craig: Date on title page. One of the last things I do for an episodic script is figure out what the title of the script is. I don’t like to do that until I’m done with the script because I sort of want to think, okay, what’s a weird little moment or a thing or an idea from this script that then would make an interest-inspiring title? People wouldn’t quite know what it means until they’ve watched the episode. I have to remind myself to do that or else the title will be Untitled Script.

John: Yes, that’s not good.

Craig: Nor, nor.

John: It’s also going to sound stupid, but you need to– You’re sending in a PDF almost always. Drew was asking yesterday, how did you turn in scripts before? It’s like, oh. We should explain. It’s like we would call the studio executive and say, I’m ready. You can send a messenger to pick up a script. We would print up the script. We would put it in an envelope. We had to have lots of paper, brass brads, and envelopes. We could stick it in and a messenger would just show up at our door and pick it up. It was always whenever you call about the messenger, then you would find another typo and you’d have to reprint a page or to–

Craig: Scramble.

John: Scramble.

Craig: Scramble. Yes, absolutely. You would also have to make sure that your printer, you’d have to go through, flip, flip, flip every page because sometimes your printer would just like, I don’t like page 38. It’s blank. It would just do that sometimes.

John: I will say printers used to be more reliable than they are now. I have many more problems printing now than I did 10 years ago.

Craig: I’m not surprised because they’re no longer a vital piece of equipment. The divisions within, I don’t know, whoever owns Brother–

John: Brother or Epson.

Craig: Epson, this is like seven guys.

John: My Apple LaserWriter, it worked well.

Craig: I remember I had a Brother Daisy Wheel printer in 1985.

John: If you were to print a script on one of those things, that would be a three or four-hour process because you’d have to feed him. It was awesome.

Craig: A Daisy Wheel printer. Do you know what this is? Is this the one that got the little punch holes on the side? No. That’s a dot matrix printer. That’s different. That was a little thing that would go side to side, left to right, and put dots. Then the dots would create letters. It was like– That’s what that sounded like. The Daisy Wheel printer basically had what a typewriter has. It had physical things. It would spin.

John: It was a plastic disk with all the letters on it.

Craig: It would spin to the letter, and then a thing would go, bam, and hit it. It would go very fast. It was like the fastest typer, but it was still typing it.

John: It was incredibly loud.

Craig: It was so loud and slow. Those disks would, if you wanted a different font, you had to get a different disk.

John: Click in a new disk.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Wow.

Craig: I know. There was ink ribbons. It was madness.

Megana: It’s like a printing press.

John: Yes, it was a printing press.

Craig: Now, we talk about this as a horrible thing, but people in the 1500s would have thought literally God Himself had handed this to us.

John: Yes, but this was at a time when there were still script processing departments at studios.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Now, we send it in a PDF. My point is that you may have your own system for how you’re labeling your files, but whatever file you’re emailing through to your executive, your producer, whoever, just make a smart name for that, that makes sense to them. Like, title of movie, date, is a good choice. Don’t say first draft, second draft. Just say date.

Craig: Yes. If you’re rewriting and you’re not the first writer in, stick your name on the file as well, just so later when they’re looking through all the files, they’re like, “Oh, that’s the John August draft.”

John: That’s amazing drafting. That’s a smart choice. What else can we help you with figuring out in terms of last looks?

Craig: Or just your life.

John: We’re here for all of us.

Megana: We’ll do that offline or like bonus, bonus segment.

Craig: Oh, bonus, bonus segment. I like that.

John: Absolutely. For super premium members.

Craig: Yes. Oh, we should have a super premium.

John: Absolutely. A new tier.

Megana: Okay, here’s a question. You’ve written this thing. You’re sending it out to your producers. Stuff has changed between the last time you’ve spoken to them. Are you getting ahead of it? Are you annotating like, you gave me this note and this is the change that I made, or are you letting them figure that out as they read the draft?

John: That is a great question. If it’s the second draft that they’re reading, if you’re coming in with specific answers to things, this is like you responded to their notes, I think it is good in that email. If it’s just a few things, it can go in the email. If there’s a whole, here’s an explainer, I will put that in as a separate document just to walk them through what the changes are.

Megana: Oh, interesting.

John: Because you may have revisions turned on so they can see the stars, but they may not really get the context of what that is. That is a useful thing. For our first draft, before I turned it in yesterday, here’s what I actually said in it.

Craig: Here’s your stupid script, jerks.

John: Hello team, untitled maybe, excited to share with you the first full draft of this script. I say that because then if I’m looking for, why did I send that in? I can actually Google and search for that. No real warnings or disclaimers. I think and hope it feels like the treatment and subsequent discussions. Then I refer to one specific thing which we never actually discussed, but is a context kind of thing. We’re going to have to need to talk about this. Looking forward to discussing and digging in after the long weekend. Hope everyone has a great one. Files attached, goes through, happiness all around. If you’re sending through a multi-paragraph email with your script, I think it’s not helping you.

Craig: The person who’s making the decisions isn’t going to even see that email. I agree. I think if you’re doing a second draft and there are a lot of notes and a lot of changes, it could be helpful to turn revisions on. Give them two files. Give them a clean one and give them one with the asterisks. This way, it’s like, what do you prefer? Do you like to just read it through without knowing what changed or do you just want to go to the changes, up to you?

John: That’s a really good point. I will tend to do that. One file will be parentheses clean, one file will be parentheses starred, and then they can see both things.

Craig: Then they have a choice. Because from the point of view of somebody that, as I start to take on projects as a producer, and I occupy the space of the evil ones, what I’ve noticed, it’s fun, is that there are times where I will read something and I’m not sure if it’s always been that way or if it’s changed. As writers, we are 100% masters of the script. The people reading these scripts read a lot of scripts. They have a lot of notes conversations. In their minds, it gets confusing sometimes as to whether this was always there, it’s an answer to a note. Yes, a little bit of extra helps.

John: In generating the clean versions of scripts, what I used to have to do was I would save the file again and then just go through and clear all revisions and save a clean version of that. In Highland Pro now, you can just tick the box, don’t print revision marks, and just export the PDF again.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can also do that in the software. I really should do that. Although, I don’t really do it now. Now, for television, I just send a draft in and then we just start. In feature land, it would make total sense.

John: Absolutely. Because you don’t want to send a draft that has star revisions all over it to an after. There’s something like that.

Craig: Exactly right. Of course, there are levels of revisions too. I don’t think I’ve ever used the setting where it’s like show all revision levels because that’s just, oh, congrats on your asterisked draft. I wonder why that’s there. Have you ever come up with a use case for that?

John: There were times, I remember on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there were a couple sets of revisions that went back and forth and they asked for, hey, can you give us a draft that just has this stars on it? I’m like, no. It wasn’t useful for my process, so I didn’t hold on to all those levels of revisions.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I do. I just go through and I just advance it. If I’m not in production, I can just call it level one, level two, level three, whatever it is, so that I can actually go back and say, here is what was changed, this date, this date. What I do is I name the revision instead of just blue. I edit the name so it’s blue and then I include a date. It’s obviously the date that it was turned over so that it’s not just also like, oh, what was level three? I don’t remember.

John: At a certain point, certainly on television, a script coordinator will be doing that work rather than the feature writer themselves. You still do it yourself?

Craig: I change the name of the revision. I try and do as much as, so I change that. I do that and I keep track of the revisions because as I’m writing, I want to make sure I know what changed. The script coordinator is going through to make sure that I didn’t screw that up actually because sometimes you get into things where you realize, oh my God, I was working out the wrong draft and it was the one that I blah, and then it’s a whole nightmare and then you got to go. There was one nightmare that I created that Allie Cheng had to un-nightmare for me. I got to tell you, it felt great not having to do it. I’m not going to lie.

Megana: Also, Craig, who is reading your drafts before you send them in to people?

Craig: My producing partner, Jacq Lesko, and this is the method that she and I have been using all the way back before Chernobyl even. Doesn’t matter what I write, whatever the day’s work is, I send it to her. She reads it, comes back, catches some typos, if there are any questions, positive comments, areas where she bumped, anything, I take that in. Every day’s work is read. She knows enough about me now to know that when she gets the next day’s work, she goes back for a good five, six pages because she knows I would have also tweaked earlier stuff. I don’t asterisk that, obviously. Everything is read every day.

John: Oh, wow. That’s not how we’ve ever worked in our office. Drew and Megana, when you’re working for me, I will tend to give you full drafts of things. Megana, did I ever send through scenes as I was writing them? At times, I’ve worked more scene by scene rather than the full thing. Have you proofed individual things?

Megana: The only thing that’s coming to mind is Arlo Finch. That, I was definitely reading chapter by chapter, unless you were doing a rewrite and there was a specific thing. Even then, you would send me the rewrite within the context of the full draft.

Craig: Well, you move around when you’re writing.

John: Yes, I do. You’re always page one, two page, whatever you’re at.

Craig: Exactly. Whereas I’m linear. I think if you write linearly, it’s easier to have somebody reading every day because it’s like a story being told very slowly to them. They’re getting like, if every episode were five minutes long, that’s what they’re getting. Yes, if I were to write, oh, here’s a scene that happens later, I don’t know if she would know what to do with it.

Megana: I was going to ask you this because in the first few pages of Chernobyl, it’s so specific. Each sentence is a very specific shot and it’s so detailed. Is that something that in your first draft you were doing that or is that like–

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Okay. Wow.

Craig: Absolutely. That’s why I talk a lot about directing on the page and how important it is supposed to win these people, so you shouldn’t. So much of what I’m trying to do, whatever that day is, is get as much out of my brain onto the page as possible that is of interest. That is of interest is the part that I think a lot of people struggle with because they don’t know which part would be interesting, which isn’t. Yes, I do that.

I think, in part, it’s because I’ve gone through that process, where I do hand over six pages and then she walks back in my office and says, “I was confused. You said this, but where are they or how is that different from this?” I’m like, okay. Over time, I’ve just gotten more and more detailed. Lindsay Doran also, a brutal where are they, why are they standing, what does the room look like person, which has been amazing.

John: The pros and cons of what you’re doing with Jacq Lesko is because she’s seeing it every day, she has a consistent vision for what it is, but she won’t have fresh eyes to look at a brand new draft. She’ll have to just sort of do a mind wipe on herself.

Craig: She will never get an episode the way that other people get it. That’s a great point. If it hadn’t been a successful process from the start, I’m sure I would have abandoned it. As it turns out, it has been.

John: It also feels like there’s just some accountability because you know you’re handing this in to her every day.

Craig: Well, that’s the other thing, is that she’s down the hallway like the Grim Reaper and I know she’s there and she’s waiting.

Megana: She’s so sweet.

Craig: No. No, no. Yes, she is. Just a reminder, you said that this draft would be done by April 15th. Are we still on track for that? I’m like, you know we’re not on track for that. What are you thinking now? I just know it’s like, there is a librarian asking for the book back. It kind of helps.

John: I do wonder if some of our listeners could create this situation for themselves where they just basically have an accountability partner where every night they’re sending through the pages they wrote to that person and vice versa.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. You don’t need to hear back from them. Just, here, I’ve proven to you that I wrote another– I think it would make a huge difference. If you have a choice as a developing writer between attending one of these script groups, which I think oftentimes can be corrosive, or having an accountability partner where you guys give each other zero notes, zero feedback. You just go, you owe me five pages. Where are my five effing pages? That will be helpful, I think.

John: If any listeners out there have tried something like this or are going to try this experiment, write back to us and tell us what happens. All right, let’s do our accountability, which is a Three Page Challenge. Three Page Challenge for people who are new listening to the podcast, so often we put out a call to our listeners saying, “Hey, send in the first three pages of your script.” It could be a screenplay. It could be a pilot. We will give you our honest feedback. Just make sure it’s clear to everybody. People are asking us for this feedback. For harsh moments, it’s because people asked for our honest opinions.

Craig: They asked for it.

John: We have three very brave writers who’ve sent stuff through. Let’s start with Katie Seward. It’s a pilot for The Thin Place. Drew, can you give us a quick synopsis for folks who don’t have these pages in front of them?

Drew: San Francisco, 1924. A herd of bison break out of their paddock and move down the city streets in the middle of the night. A lone bison lags behind and stops under a streetlight. We then cut to present day where, in a hotel bar, Connor Sullivan, 36, is trying to tell his friend his theory about how time is controlled by capitalistic forces. His friend, Francis Dunn, also 36, keeps showing him pictures of the Olsen twins, marveling at his ability to correctly tell them apart. They negotiate who’s going to buy the next round of drinks.

John: Great. If you want to read these pages yourself, look at the show notes, and we’ll have a link to the PDF so you can read through them with us. Megana, you’re our guest here. We start with you. What are some things you enjoyed or stuck out for you as you started reading through these pages?

Craig: In a non-enjoyable fashion as well.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: I loved the setting. I was really excited about Golden Gate Park, the bison paddock. I love that park and I love the bison that are in there. I was very interested to read more about 1920 San Francisco. We quickly shift away from that. I was also really excited by what this guy was saying, this character, Connor, was saying about satellites and time and what seems like it’s going to lead to a conspiracy theory around that. I found that really fascinating. I thought that the Olsen twins game was clever and cute and I enjoyed reading that.

John: I liked the Olsen twins as well. I liked the idea of starting with the bison in the paddock. That is an opening image. I have many criticisms of how it was done, but that as an opening image is really good. I was a little frustrated that I didn’t feel like how this was going to tie in by the end of these two pages. I wanted a little bit of a better sense of what is the juxtaposition of these two things mean for us. Let me just dig in with some of the things I noticed from the top here. A monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath, giant bodies pound against wood. Again, this is all done over black. Something cracks. In the darkness, we see– Wait, what? How do we see something in the darkness, Craig?

Craig: I got there and it was, listen, Katie, this is what you wrote. In the darkness, we see a massive bison in the dark.

John: I see at least two problems with that. First off, we can’t see in the dark.

Craig: Correct.

John: From the darkness, ventures a massive bison.

Craig: Then we mentioned dark redundantly. This is all over black, so we can’t see anything. Now, if you want to say over black, also, I would say a monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath. Those are sounds. We don’t have to indicate the sounds. Then it says giant bodies pound against wood. I would write the sound of giant bodies pounding against wood. Again and again, something cracks. Then how do you want this to be? Tell me this movie, do you mean when it cracks through, that’s what makes light flood in from the moon or a street lamp or something? Or do you want to just go exterior Golden Gate, boom, bison explode out of their pen? Yes, the way this opened is confusing.

John: Here’s why I think it’s relevant to today’s episode. This feels like a last looks thing. You need to notice that what I’m saying, over black, darkness and dark, back to back to back in these first couple lines. You got to pick where you’re going to do this and sort of where to move on. This is a thing I think you could notice in that last step here. In the next block here, where exterior Golden Gate Park, night, the entire herd streaming out of their paddock, trampling over the battered gate. The entire herd streams out of their paddock. Again, there’s no reason to go for the gerund here when I feel like it just gives us a simple verb. Next block here, but our bison lags behind. Capitalizing the hour felt like a weird choice too.

Craig: Very Trumpian tweet style. Yes, sorry, truth. Is it a truth? Is that what he does?

Megana: Truth social?

Craig: Yes. He tweets a truth, he truths.

John: He truths. Whatever that is.

Craig: That’s a great word for lying. I love it.

John: Then we get Connor’s pre-lap. A pre-lap, valid choice.

Craig: Yes, but I suspect that this may be what’s on your mind. You tell me if I’m right. If you pre-lap somebody who is in a bar or a crowded restaurant, that sound will be with them also.

John: Yes. It’s not a clean sound.

Craig: It’s not.

John: As I started reading this pre-lap, I assumed that this was somebody on a microphone or was sort of a voiceover.

Craig: Exactly.

John: A clear space.

Craig: You may wonder how I got here. Yes. The issue is, you can’t do this. You literally can’t do what she’s trying to do here. What you can do is show this bison dazed, frozen, staring at us, and then, boom, smash cut to a guy, a crowded happy hour hotel, and we’re hearing him before we see him. Then we see him because the sound will be accepted.

John: Yes, but you could have or you could have pre-lapped the sound of the hotel bar. That could also have been interesting too. Why are we hearing this background noise that doesn’t match with what I’m seeing on screen?

Craig: Then you’d barely get a few words. The point is, and this is why this is important, Katie, the point is when you do this as a screenwriter, you are ceding way too much control to a director because the director’s going to go through this and go, well, this person didn’t write things that are physically produceable. Let me start fixing it. You want to fix it. You don’t want them fixing it. Fix it.

Megana: If Katie wants to keep this dialogue over the image of the bison that we’re seeing, what should she write instead?

John: You can’t. Connor could do it as a pure voiceover, but then it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t track quite right here.

Craig: You literally can’t do it unless you wanted to have the noise of the hotel and the bar with him, which would ruin this moment because you’d be staring at this bison and hearing a bar for some reason. It just doesn’t make sense.

John: I think there’s a way you could sell that, but it would be a different feel for what this is. It just doesn’t–

Craig: Especially because there’s continuous action. We’re looking at a herd and then suddenly we would hear. Like John says, you can get away with a slight prelap of the noise of the bar and maybe even one thing. This bison and then the sound of a bar starts to fade in and we hear a woman say, Mary Kate or Ashley. You could do that and then, boom, we’re into the bar and he looks in and goes, Mary Kate. You could do that, but you can’t have this run.

John: I like the idea of the Mary Kate or Ashley runner. I like the frustration that he’s feeling that this is just a parlor trick he can do. He doesn’t actually care. He actually is trying to engage on conversation. The challenge I ran into is that the scene descriptions, the actions in between, like momentary pain flashes across Connor’s eyes, but it gives in. No more physics talk. It felt out of scale with what was actually happening here. In a scene that really should just be dialogue, boom, boom, we were stopping a lot to address people’s reactions to things.

Megana: It was just hard for me to believe that these two characters, if I am to believe that they’re old friends and went to grad school together, are having the conversation that they’re having.

Craig: Right. It feels like they just met.

Megana: Yes. It’s like a first date or like a blind date, a setup, I believe it. If my friend could do this, I would never bring it up again.

Craig: Right. You mentioned it’s somebody else, but you wouldn’t suddenly discover they have this parlor trick after all these years. To me, it felt more like he was in the middle of picking this girl up and he was trying to impress her with what he’s impressed by, but she only cares about this other thing that he can do that isn’t that impressive, except that when you’re trying to pick girls up at a bar, anything that impresses them is great. Anything, right? That’s the point of learning this parlor trick.

You mentioned pace, I think, John, is what you’re referring to. Everybody knows the wonderful scene that opens the social network, and this has a slightly social network opening scene vibe to it. There’s a questionably spectrum-ish sort of guy, and there’s a girl, and they’re not quite connecting verbally. That scene is notoriously fast. It is paced faster probably than any dialogue scene ever, and I’m throwing in all the screwball comedies of the 30s.

When you are pacing, and this feels like it should be paced that quickly. Honestly, what I would do is have him say less stuff like, Mary Kate’s on the left. It should always be like, Mary Kate. So, dadadadada, Ashley. Dadadadada, Ashley. Nope, Ashley, and then Mary Kate in the same dress. Dadadadada, but make him– I don’t think he would use extra words because he’s so interested in talking about what he wants to talk about. All the stuff in between, the description, shorten because you want to keep the pace.

John: If you absolutely need it, you can pull it into a parenthetical for when the dialogue blocks rather than having it be its own separate thing because every time we stop reading the dialogue to read the scene description, we’re losing the sense of the pace of whatever we really feel like on screen.

Craig: Right. We have, that’s Mary Kate. Action. Dejected, Francis returns to scrolling through pages of images of the Olsen twins. Then the dialogue continues. Francis holds her phone up again, a picture of the twins in their Full House days. Connor examines it carefully, then we complete. I think he’d like, it wouldn’t take that long. It says Francis. In the dialogue, it says Francis, in parentheses, not listening. She’s not listening. I’m not sure I need a lot of description also showing that she’s not listening. It could say in parentheses, looking on phone, Jeff Bezos. I also did not understand this.

This is important because Connor’s making this interesting point that theoretically will either be relevant to the plot or just an interesting window into his personality. He’s talking about time and he says, the satellites we use for Google Maps have to get the time beamed out to them from Colorado. I think beamed to them or sent to them from Colorado. The next brick of text is, or dialogue, the clocks they have on board gain so much time, our GPS would go off by six miles a day otherwise, exclamation point. I don’t understand what that means. What does that mean have so much time and what is, and go off by six– Our GPS would go off by six miles a day, otherwise is incredibly unwieldy. It’s very clunky. It doesn’t sound easy to say.

John: It would drift by six. There’s ways to get to it.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

John: To Katie’s credit here, I feel like if you do the blur of the eyes test and look at the pages, they have a good balance of light and dark.

Craig: Yes. Absolutely.

John: There’s not chunks that are impenetrable. There’s no road blocks in your reading, which is nice.

Craig: Can I pull one more thing out?

John: Please.

Craig: This tends to stop me, and I see it quite a bit. Francis, in this kind of not horrible expositional way, says, which was harder, your PhD in science, which again is crazy because they literally lived together in grad school. How does she not know? That just seems ridiculous. We’re developing this expertise. To your point, this should have already been covered by their friendship. He says, my PhD is in quantum mechanics and we lived together when I was in grad school, you bitch. She rolls her eyes.

John: Yes, I wrote, ouch, on that.

Craig: That’s just aggressive.

John: It’s aggressive, but it’s also, it feels expositional. It just feels like, oh, this is not for us. This is for the–

Craig: A, expositional. Very expositional. We lived together. This is an, as you know, I have a degree in– B, if it’s two women calling each other a bitch, sure. If it’s a straight guy and a girl in a bar and he just casually calls her a bitch, it feels aggressive.

Megana: I guess I didn’t mind it so much. It was more offensive to me that she said science instead of–

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Science?

John: Science?

Craig: Do you stuff with numbers?

Megana: If she said quantum mechanics or some sort of physics and it actually was theoretical physics or whatever niche thing, that would make more sense to me. Yes, it was just more offended by the science part.

Craig: Yes, they’re both stopped me in my tracks. Then why is she saying, I’ll buy the next round if you know what I do? They lived together. They lived together. Anyway, this is trouble. The last line also, Francis goes to buy him another drink. As soon as Francis turns her back, Connor’s face falls. Is cheerfulness a performance? He’s barely holding it together.

John: I wasn’t reading as being cheerful.

Craig: Also, I don’t believe he’s– How do I know he’s– If he’s barely holding it together, this was a lot of talking. He seems quite activated and passionate about this topic. If you are barely holding it together, you’re probably listening more than talking because you’re barely holding it together. These are things to think about, Katie, but interesting stuff. There’s obviously a lot going on here, which I want to know more about.

John: Yes, we can know more. Tell us about the long line for this pilot.

Drew: A millennial fundraiser can’t accept her best friend’s alleged suicide, so she digs through his San Francisco apartment full of mysterious scientific instruments, dives headfirst into nostalgia for their wild 20s, and unravels a conspiracy that goes further into the past than she ever imagined.

John: All right, so she is the main character and he is going to be dead.

Craig: Well, guess what? In these three pages, they are screaming to me that he is the main character. The perspective is entirely his. Entirely his. She walks away, we stay with him. If she’s the main character, I think this needs to be reconsidered.

Megana: I also want his dialogue, like what you pointed out with the six miles off the GPS or whatever, I want his dialogue to be a bit wonkier and more esoteric in that case, like he’s more misunderstood.

Craig: If he’s barely hanging on and there’s like a maniac to what he’s saying, a little mad scientist-ness, I need to see her being like, are you on coke? What’s going on? She needs to notice. I think that something’s going on because while one can make the argument that people who have depression often present as normal, the problem when you’re dramatizing it is that it just seems like you cheated, that you didn’t give us anything of interest and then they kill themselves. They’re not around to say, oh, let me explain. That was all an act. You know what I mean?

John: One possibility here for Katie to consider is if it’s not just the two of them at the scene, but there’s a third person that like, so her showing off her friend’s ability to tell the– She just wants to show off his freakish ability to tell the Olsen twins apart, whereas he’s trying to communicate important stuff to this third person, could be really interesting and just gives someone a point of focus.

Craig: That’s a great idea. If I were writing this, I would have, yes, I would make it from her point of view. She’s trying to understand what he’s saying because what he’s saying is provocative. She’s like, I don’t, but how? How is time part of capitalism? Explain that. There’s this other friend who’s like, Mary Kate and he’s like, Ashley, and she’s like, just trust that he’s going to get them all right. It’s what he does. Go back to the thing about the– so she’s interested and she has a want and her want is to understand him. The other friend is doing Mary Kate and Ashley, which is interrupting and creating frustration with her. Then I would know it’s from her perspective.

Megana: Because this isn’t setting me up to like Francis very much.

John: No, it isn’t.

Craig: No, it’s setting me up to like Connor, and then he dies. Oh, no, he died.

John: Oh, no, he died. Our next script has an arguably protagonist on the spectrum as well.

Craig: Oh, fun.

John: Let’s talk through Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter. Can you give us the synopsis, Drew?

Drew: Eric Bond, 27, is at a job interview. We see a balance superimposed, $2,743. The interviewer, Casey, asks him where he sees himself in 10 years and his greatest strengths and weaknesses. Eric gives a very confident answer. Later, Eric walks through a park with Jane, who asks him how the interview went. Jane is excited to hear that he got the job and the interviewer asked all the questions Jane had prepped him for. Eric Venmo’s Jane $10 and the balance goes down to $2,733. We learn that Jane works at Casey’s company and tells Eric all about his future coworkers. Eric asks Jane if she’s told the company they’re a couple.

John: Great. We officially have a trend, which is two scripts that open over black.

Craig: Over black, which is fine.

John: I think we need to find it and go ahead. Just like a Stewart special, it’s a Three Page Challenge that opens with a flash forward and it comes back in time. Let’s workshop a term for opening over black.

Craig: Well, it’s going to have to do with Drew. He’s the one thinking that.

John: It’s like a Drew noir.

Craig: The Drew darkness.

John: The Drew darkness.

Craig: This is a Drew darkness.

John: Just some Drew darkness. His voiceover is, where do I see myself in 10 years? We open in a pretty classic job interview. I’m not mad at it. It’s a familiar scene. I found myself in the last script where there were a lot of scene descriptions interrupting the dialogue flow that weren’t actually helping me out or telling me more about what was special about what I was seeing.

Megana: I think a lot of the action lines that were describing Eric’s character confused me more.

John: Yes. It happens to Casey as well. On page one, Casey is stunned and surprised. Really, you’re stunned in a job interview?

Craig: And surprised.

John: Both. As people who play Dungeons and Dragons, we know they’re incapacitated and paralyzed. There’s a very specific condition for a specific thing.

Craig: She has the stunned and surprised condition, which now they took away the surprised condition in 2024 rules, as you know, Drew, and I’ve talked about that at length on a different podcast. A great choice to do that. If they’re playing 2014 rules, stunned and surprised, Casey will not make it through this combat.

John: No. 100%. Here’s the thing that is unique to the script I do want to talk through.

Craig: Megana is so bored with us. [chuckles]

John: The fourth line down on the first page, text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, then fades slowly after. An interesting idea that they’re basically constantly showing his Venmo balance, but you’ve got to make that more clear of what we’re seeing because I had no idea what it was.

Craig: I thought the chair was worth $2,743. That’s what this is telling me. Text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, fades away slowly after. That’s after a sentence that says, “He adjusts his chair in an awkward motion slowly.”

John: My focus is on the chair, the actual object, and so I’m thinking, well, that dollar figure must have pertained to that chair. Also, his age was 27, and the text is 2743, so I kept thinking like, wait, are those numbers connected somehow? Is there a purpose here? I think it’s an interesting idea to show that we just got to set that up really cool and clearly from the beginning.

Megana: Just why not clarify that that’s his bank account?

Craig: Net worth.

John: Net worth.

Craig: You can even say his name, Eric Bond Net worth. I don’t know. What does fiddles with his lips mean? How do you do that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: What is that?

John: It was one of the things that was making me think from the start, like, oh, this could be like a spectrum-y thing here that we’re trying to– Because his dialogue choices felt a little spectrum-y, and so I wondered whether that was a physicality that we’re–

Craig: Well, it says, “Eric fiddles with his lips and takes a sip of the water cup in front of him.” Now, you don’t take a sip of a cup. Takes a sip of water from a cup. Also, this is like one of those ventriloquist gags where they drink milk and make the dummy talk. [laughter] How are you doing both of these at the same time?

John: We’re also missing a from. Eric sits across Casey Morgan. Again, this is your last look, so you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have stuff missing out of here.

Craig: He says, “Well, okay, where do I see myself in 10 years?” Well, that’s a great question. Then she says, “Take your time, dear.” Which is a very nice thing to say. Casey looks down at her notepad. Eric flutters and rolls his eyes. What an idiot. Why after take your time, dear? Super nice thing to say. Why is he rolling his eyes?

Megana: Rolling your eyes in an interview is so rude.

Craig: It’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do, and it’s not even called for.

Megana: I also don’t really know what flutters means.

Craig: It’s like this. It’s a thing.

John: The fact that it stopped us to think, what does it actually mean? What is it doing? It’s the wrong line there. Cut it or find a better way to get that in there. I think you cut it and get more into the meat of it.

Craig: “Well, if hired in 10 years.” You want well, comma, if hired. Well, if hired is a strange phrase. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t have this job. I think it’s an interesting concept. It’s an interesting interview gambit. You probably want to- because I don’t have this job. What job? We don’t even know what the job is. It hasn’t been mentioned yet. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t be working here. Then Casey is not surprised.

Now, my biggest issue, Holden, is that we are forced to watch two people sitting across from each other talking, which is my favorite thing to write. I love two people sitting across from each other talking, but when two people are sitting across from each other talking, it must feel like an action sequence with dialogue and emotion, or in this case, one-upsmanship, lying, concealing, different wants, different–

John: Surprise, seduction.

Craig: It’s just rambles. He just talks. The point he makes, it takes forever to make it, and it’s not a particularly fascinating one.

Megana: Also, in that part that starts with, “If you look at my resume,” I don’t understand why, if this was a question he was expecting, he’s umming so much, and that’s written out in the dialogue. Then I think this is the last looks thing. If Holden would have read this out loud, he starts two sentences with now, and then he says grow and no. I think that’s just a little too rhymey and awkward for an actor to say.

John: That’s good advice.

Craig: Also, why would somebody in an office care why you left a job in a mini golf course? You worked in a mini golf course, because no one wanted to hire you for an office job. That’s fine. Or you love mini golf, but I don’t care why you left the mini. You left mini golf because it was mini golf. You’re getting minimum wage. Of course you left.

Megana: A bigger note that I had with these pages is that these questions are so basic, and they’re so generic that Eric being surprised about it or them betting on it was upsetting to me. I feel like if the questions were more specific, I’d learn more about Casey and just have more respect for how odd the situation is. Someone being surprised that you’re being asked your greatest strength at an interview was baffling to me, whereas–

Craig: Right, or where do I see myself in 10 years? This is the most–

Megana: I think you could just say something so much more interesting about corporate America or interviews by the questions you’re asked. At Google, I was asked so many times what my death row meal would be or what my walkout music would be. I think there’s something so bleak in those questions and how standard they are.

Craig: Something so horrible and pointless. I’m here to code stuff. Who cares? Who cares what I eat when I die? My walkout music? I don’t have any. I like coding. [laughter] Am I getting this job or not? We all know you’re not going to decide it based on my walkout music.

Megana: There’s something cutesy that you could do.

Craig: Now here’s one other thing that’s important. Jane makes a point of saying, I’m assuming she said, “Is that right?” Which is not a particularly–

John: Not memorable.

Craig: The biggest problem is on page 2, they chuckle. Not sure why. Casey looks down back at her notepad. Eric cringes and his posture sinks. I don’t know why, because she just chuckled and he said what he wanted. Then she says, “Okay, is that right?” Why is she saying that?

John: I don’t know. I don’t know the context.

Craig: It doesn’t follow from-

John: Big question mark with that.

Craig: -what she said, what her attitude is.

Megana: Then we come back to it, right?

Craig: Then Jane’s like, did she say it? Did she say the thing? Yes. I would have had him like, okay, is that right? I think that’s an interesting thing. If an interviewer suddenly asks a question that shouldn’t be asked because it doesn’t follow for you to be like, “Yes.” Then later like, yes. For no reason. It didn’t belong. That would be interesting to note.

John: To Megan’s point, if she asks a really weird question, then the recall on asking the really weird question makes sense.

Craig: It makes sense.

John: More last looks things here. On page 2, exterior Loose Park afternoon.

Craig: What’s a Loose Park?

John: I assume that’s a place.

Craig: The name of a park?

John: It reads here.

Craig: I think there is a park named Loose Park, and you don’t live in the US. It’s like a famous park in London, which I don’t think it is. You need to say the full name of it or just name it something else. Loose Park sounds odd.

John: The Loose Park here, Holden is using double dashes before the time of day, which is not common, but it doesn’t bug me. On the first one, there’s a space between the place and the hyphens, and now there’s not. Just be consistent.

Craig: Consistency. Check my list and see.

John: Here’s the description of Loose Park. Ducks in a pond. An older gentleman feeding the ducks. A woman walking her dog. A couple walking by the water. Have you ever been dealing with stress where you’re supposed to just look around the space and just identify the name things in the room? That’s what it felt like to me.

Craig: You have to repeat them to make sure you remember them. Yes, this does feel like a memory game. How about just an older gentleman, not an older gentlemen. There’s only one of him. That’s a mistake. An older gentleman feeds ducks in a pond as a couple strolls by. A woman walks her dog.

John: If you want to go with a couple walks by the water, Jane, you got it. Then it’s Eric and Jane.

Craig: If we know him, we don’t say a couple walks by and then cut to the couple, and it’s Eric. Reveal the couple as them. I can see them, because you just said a couple–

John: We have eyes.

Megana: Also, the office chatter and machines began to drown out the interview on the line before I felt like was unnecessary for cutting to a park.

Craig: Then suddenly it’s quiet. Yes. If it said, “As his anxiety rises,” but he’s done talking, so there’s nothing left for him to say. It says, “I don’t quit, no matter the obstacle–” Then he stops talking. The sound rises. What is the actor doing while that’s happening? Just uncomfortably run out of dialogue? This is one of those things where you have to just say, how do I do this? Holden, you are going to make this movie. I want you to make this movie. You’re going to go out with your iPhone and shoot it. Can you shoot some of these things the way you’re describing and go through that exercise? It’s important.

John: Last looks, page 3, both laugh. That laugh was capitalized for some reason. Not the whole word, just that the L was capitalized. Eric asks, ?Seriously though, am I going to like it there?” is a question. Yes.

Craig: Jane.

John: Who is Jane? Jane is 26.

Craig: This is what I know about her. 26. I know what shirt she’s wearing, which is not important. I know that when Eric says, “She did ask every single question you’d say she’d asked,” instead of every question you said she would ask, which is more, I guess, grammatically correct, Jane jumps up and down. I know that she is slightly insane, because she’s jumping up and down at the most mundane thing possible.

John: Let’s back up a sec here, because they came from someplace. They didn’t just start walking. Just now, we’re going to say that what–

Craig: What were they talking about before this? How is this possible? You’ve got to make this movie in your head. You’ve got to imagine it. Jane needs to be a character. There’s something off about these. They don’t feel like full people. Maybe they’re not. What if they’re AI robots?

John: Could be.

Megana: I wrote, seems like they don’t know each other.

John: They’re dating.

Craig: Or they’re AI robots.

John: Or they are.

Craig: Well, let’s find out.

John: Let’s find out. Well, actually, one last thing.

Craig: Sure.

John: Title page, all looks good, and the email address is there, but just also like the full mailing address. No one’s going to send you a postcard. I don’t think you need your mailing address there. Phone numbers, I wouldn’t put my phone number there. Just so you know, randos are going to call you.

Craig: It’s a fair point.

John: Tell us what’s actually happening in this full script here.

Craig: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

John: A character is Anne Sheeran, who’s not been introduced yet, which is fine. It’s three pages in. I’d like that his declining balance is going to be a recurring thing throughout this. That makes sense. You set that up on page one. Great. I don’t know.

Megana: I think that number should be lower.

Craig: That’s not a horrible number.

John: For a 26-year-old, no.

Craig: No.

Megana: If he just got a job, I’m not that worried about him.

John: [unintelligible 01:00:55].

Craig: Maybe he didn’t get the job.

John: Maybe soon.

Craig: Can you read that again?

John: Yes.

Craig: I just want to hear it again.

John: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

Craig: I’m not sure a movie about somebody learning to save time and money is going to be particularly interesting. I don’t feel like this character is just bursting with authenticity. More importantly, I’m not sure how to portray Anne Sheeran, the firefighter, in a way that posits that she is inauthentic and wants to be authentic. If you want to be authentic, just stop pretending and lying, I guess. I’m not sure how Kirk is going to help her with that. This may be trouble.

John: It may be trouble.

Craig: It may be trouble.

John: Holden, thank you for sending it through. Let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker. I will say from the start here, it’s leveling with two Ls.

Craig: She’s British.

John: She’s British. I looked it up.

Craig: She’s British, and there’s so many Britishisms throughout. It was almost like I got a feeling she was like, no, seriously, I’m British. I am so British.

John: Story with me.

Craig: I trace back to the Saxons, like the early Saxons.

John: Those angles. I hate the angles.

Craig: I love the Saxons.

Megana: Putting a U everywhere.

John: Talk us through, if we were not reading the pages, what we would see.

Drew: After a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., the sound of choking takes us to a bathroom where a woman is being drowned by an unseen assailant. We then cut to that same woman. It’s Grace Tierney. She’s in her 50s, and she’s Black, waking up on a London tube from her nightmare. She grabs the arm of another passenger who pushes her away. Grace gets off at the next stop. We then cut to a tower block in Hackney where Jeannie, a 20-something white woman, discovers her heat isn’t working and brings her 60-something father a blanket.

In a podcast studio, Grace interviews Cameron Stonely, the minister of a new program called Levelling Up, aimed at reducing economic imbalances across the UK. When Grace presents him with numbers that prove a widening disparity, he tries to spin his way out of answering her questions. Grace’s boss and producer, Dennis, watches from the other side of the glass with a look of pain.

Craig: This is the opposite of true darkness. This is white

John: Okay, I’m white. A white screen.

Craig: This is true whiteness.

John: We’re opening with a nightmare image again, a thing we’ve seen before. This woman is being pushed underwater. Let’s talk about a woman, (Black), versus a Black woman.

Craig: It doesn’t bother me.

John: Doesn’t bother you?

Craig: No. What bothers me is that it’s a woman. I don’t know how old she is.

John: Ultimately, we’re supposed to be matching that up to Grace herself.

Craig: It would be good if you just put a 50-year-old woman just so I just know what I’m dealing with there, because it’s all about the imagery.

John: When we actually get to revealing her, it says, the woman Grace Tierney 50, which is just an awkward construction. I might try the woman– Grace Tierney 50– just to separate it off because- to make it clear this is the woman we just saw before.

Craig: A positively.

John: A positively.

Craig: A positively.

John: Good choice. Megan, what was your reaction to these pages?

Megana: I really enjoyed these pages. I liked this character. I am curious about what this nightmare she’s having in the middle of a pack tube is. I love a podcaster going after a minister. I’m excited about that. I just felt like things could be a little bit punchier, but I’m excited about the potential of this.

John: I am too. The idea of we see Grace. We don’t know her context, and then we see her in a podcast situation, feels right. My assumption is that we’re going to find that the tower block apartment and the heat not working is related to levelling up as a program.

Craig: I hope so.

John: I hope so. I had to reach to get myself there because I felt like, why am I seeing this here now, and why am I not continuing to see Grace throughout this?

Megana: It felt unnatural for that. If I’m watching her on the tube going to work to then cut to this woman, Jeannie, and I also just felt like that scene with Jeannie could be more dramatic.

John: There’s no dialogue in the scene. We can’t tell if this may be a postcard image, because there’s no actual real action happening in them. You’re looking at this stuff, and you’re not sure why we’re here. We’re seeing a tower block, literally just an image, and then we’re inside that apartment and just seeing an old woman. There’s no dialogue. No scene actually happens.

Craig: That just doesn’t work. You can’t do it, really. What’s going to happen is you’ll cut it out. If you want to be there, there needs to be at least one line of dialogue or something to say, “I understand why I’m here.” If there’s not a line of dialogue for us to push past the dad through the window and see Grace walking to work or something just to connect it somehow, otherwise, just this floating scene that could go anywhere just doesn’t fit.

I want to talk about the very beginning. In the very beginning, there’s this stylistic choice to start with a white screen and then the sound of typing and then see text typed onto the screen. It’s this visualized act of typing a sentence. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized- now it’s a quote from an American, so I don’t know, maybe I would put a Z there, but whatever, realized that we were the victims. The typing stops, resumes, of a broken promise, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a really cool quote, and it’s a really cool moment where it pauses.

My issue is we go from that, which is this stylized thing, to another very stylized thing. It’s like I started with two desserts, and I feel like you can do one dessert. I’m not sure you can do both of these things. It’s such a great image to start with somebody drowning. That’s, whoa, I’m in it. That’s exciting. I would argue that maybe that’s the way to go here. The quote is really cool, but I would sacrifice it.

John: Let’s imagine the opposite of the case where we keep the quote and then just come to Grace on the tube.

Craig: You could do that.

John: What resonates for me about that is it’s just like, oh, how does that tie into this? I’m curious how that ties into this next thing.

Craig: You wouldn’t be able to have her waking up out of a nightmare, I don’t think.

John: No.

Craig: Let’s talk about waking up out of a nightmare, which is something that happens all the time to us in life, and it happens all the time to characters on screen. It’s just that it happens very differently to those of us in life than on screen. When you wake up from a nightmare, your eyes open, that’s pretty much it. That’s how I do it. Here, it’s really tricky, because we show her with her mouth wide open, which is meant to match her drowning, I guess. Then she sits up in her seat with a start, breathing heavily from the nightmare. Without looking, she grabs hold of the arm of the male passenger, Black, 30s, in the seat next to her and yells, “Marcus.”

The passenger roughly pushes her away because he’s not Marcus. Then she realizes, I don’t believe that at all.

John: I don’t believe it.

Craig: She wakes up and immediately knows she’s in the tube, by the way. She’s on a train. She reaches without a no-look reach to her right, yells somebody’s name as if she needs that person without looking at them. No.

Megana: As a nightmare queen, I have startled awake and grabbed the person next to me on a flight, but my eyes aren’t open yet.

John: That’s a crucial difference.

Craig: Have you woken up? You see what I’m saying? You’re not there yet.

John: You grab the person and then you wake up. I believe that.

Craig: If your eyes are closed and you grab the person next to you, in my mind, you could be grabbing them in front of you or turning to them and staring in their face. It could be anything, but the no-look grab and the no-look name while the eyes are open, is not a realistic thing, nor is it necessary. I know she wants us to know that Grace had somebody named Marcus who was important to her, a husband, a son, a boyfriend. We don’t know. There are other ways to get that.

Megana: Just before that also, we cut from this image of the water going into her mouth, and then she says, fast cut to a packed carriage. I would prefer a fast cut to mouth wide open, and then we get the packed carriage later.

Craig: Absolutely. If you’re going to cut to her, you’re going to cut to her. You’re not going to cut to a wide shot of a train and then cut to her. You have to think about how would I actually edit this? I want to talk a little bit about the interview, because there was something about it. First of all, when somebody has a disturbing experience, if they are then the next thing we really see is them doing their job, it feels like there needs to be a moment where we’re with that person and understanding that they’re taking a breath, having a drink of water. Flushing that out of their system, and then focusing in.

It says, “Grace dons headphones, ready for work. Grace is dedicated to her job. She’s damn good at it, and she knows it.” Which, by the way, I hate. I’m just going to say it. I hate she’s damn good, and she knows it. I don’t know that she’s damn good, and I don’t know that she knows it. If she’s damn good, why does she need to know it? That just feels overconfident. Kind of an annoying characteristic. I’d rather other people tell her she’s good at it. The most important thing is I would prefer a moment here where Grace dons headphones. She’s not ready for work. She just had a nightmare about drowning.

Take a breath here. Have somebody say, okay. She’s like, “Absolutely.” Then it’s gone. Then the red light comes on, or she’s not okay, and then the red light comes on, and she changes, because she’s– Last thing, we are in East London, which is one of the poorer areas of London. It’s where a lot of these council housing, and they call it quick-build, multi-occupational housing, ugly blot on the landscape. There is this prior scene that we’re discussing where there was somebody trying to warm up her father, a flat tower block, Hackney, London, so East London.

Then she interviews this guy, and the point that she makes is hospital waiting lists currently stand at 7.46 million cases in the north of the country, as opposed to 4.27 million in the south, highlighting the north-south divide. London is in the southern part of England. Why is her point here that the northern– By the way, the northern part of England does get the shaft relative to this big city in certain cases, but that doesn’t seem to be what we’re talking about here. Why are we spending so much time in East London, but then worrying about the folks up in, I don’t know, Yorkshire or Newcastle?

John: I want to talk about the actual flow on the page of this, because reading through it a second time, you realize like, oh, it’s meant to be that she’s just talking over him, but it’s not clear on the page that she’s talking over, because right now we’re seeing Cameron suddenly, it’s all dot, dot, dot to connect through the things. Visually on the page, it looks like they’re each taking their turn, and that’s not the intention here. I think this is a case where you do need some smart dual dialogue to show that this is simultaneously happening.

Craig: I think you could do this in this dual dialogue, and whenever I can avoid it, I do, but there is a way to do– Well, first of all, Cameron Stonely is just talking. He’s doing this thing regardless of what she says. I think ending each line of dialogue with dash, dash would be better than dot, dot. Dot, dot is a trail off. Dash, dahs is on cutoff, and then just a simple Grace parentheses cutting him off. How do the figures differ? Cameron Stonely rolling ahead. This government is doing, and then you understand that she’s going to keep cutting him off, and he’s going to keep rolling ahead. This looks a little bit like a page of Morse code because of the amount of dot, dot, dots.

John: I think the intention here is that she’s not backing down. She keeps going, but she’s also not letting him ever attempt to answer the question. I want to make sure that as an audience, we see that she is both listening and pushing through.

Craig: That’s where I think this could be broken up a touch with single lines of Grace lets him go on for another second, then enough already or whatever, so that we’re with her. We end with her saying, “Are you simply lying your way out of answering the question?” That is not necessarily a more aggressive line than, “Are you able to back up your claim with concrete evidence? Please answer the question.” Stonely’s stream of spin is brought to an abrupt halt. This guy is pretty good at just ignoring what you’re saying, and I’m not sure why that would bring him to a halt.

Through the glass, into the control room, comma, we would want there, Grace’s boss, producer Dennis Reardon, 35 white, old head on youngest shoulders. What are youngest shoulders? What is an old head? You mean older than he looks or looks older than he is?

John: I think it’s his experience. It’s like why he’s beyond his years.

Craig: Maybe that’s a British expression.

John: Oh, it could be.

Craig: It might be a British expression. Old head on your shoulders. Looks on with a pained expression. Why is he pained?
John: Good question, because we don’t know. Is Grace being too aggressive? What’s going wrong here?

Megana: To Craig’s point about the line of she’s good at her job and she knows it, I want to see how she’s good at her job in this versus that line.

Craig: I think that she doesn’t take any crap, and she really wants these people to answer, but if this is who she is, and this is how her podcast works, why is Cameron Stonely going on it? If this is what she does, why does Dennis Reardon suddenly seem pained as if to say, “Oh, no, she’s doing it again.” This is what she does. If she were doing the normal, okay, interesting, and then just something snaps and she just does something really aggressive and then he’s pained.

John: We’d have to see what normal is before- because we have no–

Craig: She just jumps right in. I’m not sure why he’s pained here. It would be good if we saw him earlier, not pained, and then she says something, and then he reacts so I know what it was.

John: Well, to your point, if he’s the producer asking, “You’re good?” She’s like, “Yes, you’re good.” Just establishing him earlier could help a lot. Title page looks great. A date on there would be helpful just so we can see when this is from. It’s not essential.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. Capitalized her name. You normally don’t, but-

Megana: I like it.

Craig: -I think it’s like, “Hey, I’m Sylvia-Anne Parker.”

John: You’re going to pay attention.

Craig: You’re going to pay goddamn attention to me. I want to find out what this is.

John: Oh, please, yes.

Craig: When a campaigning journalist confronts a government department over its socioeconomic policy, she discovers that the ministers in the department are the target of a serial killer.

John: Wow, a serial killer was not something I was expecting.

Craig: I wasn’t expecting that based on I thought maybe a supernatural thing possibly was going on.

John: I would say that the drowning thing does not feel connected to that premise that I was just given.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: I thought it was going to be more of like a get out experience of drowning. I didn’t think there was going to be actual physical violence.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. This is a movie that is criticizing the government for failing to achieve their promises of leveling people up and helping them economically, but the serial killer is going after those people. I have to stop the serial killer from killing these ineffective government people.

John: We’ll have to read the description to know what’s happening.

Craig: I’m sort of rooting for the serial killer. Not really, but I’m not like, “Oh, no.” That’s an interesting choice.

John: We want to thank these three writers for sending in their pages and everyone else who sent in their pages. Drew gets hundreds of these. If you want to send in your pages, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form you read through. You click the button. You attach your PDF, and we look through them all. If you want to read through these pages with us, remember that they’re in the show notes. Just click the links there, and you’ll get the chance to look at those PDFs.

Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a blog post by Hollis Robbins. The title of it is How to Tell If Something is AI-Written. I try never to use the word writing with AI, so AI-Generated. Hollis makes really good points that for us, for humans, language represents a signifier, so a word like a tree, along with a signifier, the actual real or imagined tree. Because we exist in the world and have concrete examples of things around us, we’re talking about those concrete things, versus LLMs don’t have any of that. They just can generate a string of patterns that match to other language that they see, but they don’t actually know what things really are.

If you’re reading it through text and you’re wondering, did an AI do this? Is this real or something? Some tests you might try to do. If you can’t see anything, nothing springs to mind, it’s more likely going to be AI. All these tests are also, it could also just be bad writing, but good writing will tend to have concrete things that evoke an image in your head. If you look for a naturally perfect balance where every point has a counterpoint, where every advantage has a corresponding challenge mentioned there, so they’re always balancing the pro, the con.

Craig: They’re both sidesy.

John: They’re both sidesy. In the absence of concrete details, they’re not giving an example of an actual, real person or actual thing in the world, but it’s a hypothetical, because they don’t actually have a reference to a thing. AI can be good at persuasion, because it has learned a bunch of rhetorical patterns without having to believe the actual argument underneath it. I think the converse of this is looking at, well, how do you write things well? It’s something we talk about so often in screenwriting. It’s like you’re creating a visual for the reader, so the reader sees something in their head as they’re doing that. That’s what we talk about in these three-phase challenges. It’s what we talk about every week.

It’s how are you evoking the experience of sitting in a place, hearing the sound, feeling things? That’s why we say we, because we are putting ourselves into these things.

Craig: Never say we, John. I saw that on Reddit.

John: Absolutely. Two examples that Hollis makes is of things that create a visual. Instead of apologizing, she brought donuts. I get that. I feel the donuts. I see that. I understand what you’re saying. His idea of teamwork was to circle my title and draw a sad face. Again, you’ve created a visual. You’ve created a moment. I believe that in a way. I just think the lesson here is just make sure you’re not detecting AI stuff, but also just don’t write like an AI.

Craig: Don’t sound like AI. It’s funny. As you were talking, I never considered this before. Do they still do standardized tests for college?

John: They still do. [crosstalk]

Craig: The SAT section where you would read some sort of three-paragraph narrative about some historical event, and then you have to answer questions about it.

John: It was boring writing.

Craig: That was basically early human AI. Just a blunt, featureless, both sidesy, just unflavored oatmeal writing.

John: It really is.

Craig: AI certainly does that well.

John: I just had some really good observations in there, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Megan, what do you have to share with us?

Megana: My one cool thing, does it still count? I haven’t done this thing yet, but I’m going to do it.

John: You absolutely could aspire to a thing.

Megana: I am going to the Pageant of the Masters tomorrow. Have you guys heard of this?

Craig: Of course.

John: I’ve been to the Pageant of Masters.

Megana: You have?

John: I went last year, and I’m so excited for you.

Craig: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been to it.

John: Do describe it.

Megana: You are also welcome to describe it, because you actually know. I’m going tomorrow. It is this festival in Laguna Beach. They’ve been doing it for the last 90-something years. It is a living art show. Have you seen the rest of development?

Craig: Of course.

John: There’s an episode where the Bluth family does the equivalent thing where they all dress up and recreate a work of art, a painting, but they’re there in person and filling the roles.

Megana: It’s a fantastic scene. It’s one of my favorite episodes. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that this was a real festival that they were referencing. Tomorrow, I will go down to Laguna Beach, take the trolley from downtown, which I’m so excited about. I think there’s something like 50 artworks that they recreate.

John: What is the theme this year?

Megana: It’s Road Trip in California or California Masters. It’s all paintings that are in different California museums. It ends with Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

John: Oh, yes. I think it always ends with it. I think it was a comment.

Megana: Oh, does it? Because I was like, I don’t know that that is in any California museum.

John: That’s not in California.

Craig: Oh, no, that happened in California, Jesus. According to the Mormons, I think it happened in Missouri.

Megana: There’s apparently music and narration, but please tell me, John.

John: It really is remarkable. It’s a thing that everyone in Southern California should at least go to once. The year we went, fashion was the theme. It was fashion throughout the ages. The curtains close. The curtains open. A work of art is there, giant-scale work of art, but with actual actors in there who are painted to look like the thing. It’s a wardrobe, but it’s also makeup. You don’t believe that it’s actually human beings doing it. The changes between them are so quick. How did they possibly do that?

Craig: Do they have two stages in the alternate?

John: No.

Craig: They have people waiting to run in.

Megana: They have thousands of volunteers.

John: It’s a huge thing that happens. There’s some stuff off of this.

Craig: Is the audience just a mass of people with their iPhones out taking pictures constantly?

John: Oh, you’re not supposed to take pictures.

Craig: Oh, thank you, Pageant of the Masters. I can’t stand it. Just watch the thing. I told you I went to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. I think it was awesome. It was fantastic. So many phones out. I’m like, just live the moment. Be in the moment. Then grab a video from one of the 14 million people that took a video.

John: I’m so looking forward to your report on what you think, because it was really great. The narration was really well written. All the music stuck together, which was great. Tickets are expensive, but–

Craig: Sounds like they would have to be for all those volunteers. Wait, volunteers?

John: Volunteers, but also other people. Everyone I think you see on stage is a volunteer, but the staffing behind everything else is incredible. There’s a whole orchestra.

Craig: Oh my goodness. I assume it’s a nonprofit venture.

John: It must run it all. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, this is a repeat, but I try and do it every year at this time, because as we record this, we are two days away from what David Kwong and I refer to as Helpenmas. This is our friend Mark Helpen’s puzzle Labor Day extravaganza. David Kwong has flown in. We will be solving together over the course of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That’s usually when we finish. Our goal is to finish on Sunday. We never do. We’re usually top 20. By the time you hear this, we will have solved it, because it’s a Tuesday. However, not too late for you to jump on this. It is free. If you just Google Mark Helpen puzzles, it’ll take you to his puzzle page where all of the Labor Day extravaganzas are listed.

Fair warning, it is hard. It is not what I would call extremely hard, because I’m not good enough to do extremely hard. There are some MIT puzzle hunt stuff that are just extremely hard. This is hard, but so beautifully crafted from a puzzle construction point of view, so elegant, so much attention to detail. There’s always a theme and he writes beautifully. There’s always beautiful flavor text leading into the puzzles. There’s a tip jar where you should leave a tip. That is always my one cool thing as we approach the Labor Day weekend.

John: I’m going to repeat one of my other one cool things, which is to get your flu shot. Flu shots are now available. The flu sucks. Don’t get the flu. Get the flu shot.

Craig: I was talking to my doctor, one of my doctors, because I’m a middle-aged Jew. I’ve got like 100 of them now. She said her thing was to wait until the end of September to get the flu and COVID booster because you get about three to four months before the vaccine doesn’t quite have the same potency. The flu and COVID will probably peak around December, January. That was her.

John: I love that she still believes that we’ll have flu shots.

Craig: She told me that the flu shots were locked in in terms of the strain and the production of them before the brilliant Trump administration decided that we don’t need to be healthy as part of their Make America Healthy Again thing.

John: I just believe that tomorrow they could come down and say, “Oh, no, we’re banning flu shots.”

Craig: I don’t think they’re going to ban flu shots. The bigger issue is next season, they will not provide the flu shot makers with their evidence for which strain will be predominant.

John: We’re getting way off topic. Even this last time, they did not convene the meeting that they were supposed to do. The manufacturers just had to figure it out themselves.

Craig: They did for this time, but next time is in question. I am the most pro-vaccine person on the planet. Maybe you’re right there tied with me. Megana, as we know, anti-vaxxer.

John: Stipulating that is not correct.

Megana: I love vaccines. Give me as many as you can.

Craig: Give me as many as you- I love a vaccine. I’ve always loved a vaccine. They now have, I think, their first measles death in Mississippi. Pointless measles death. Pointless. Heavy sigh. Anyway, Labor Day puzzle extravaganza, everybody.

John: That is our show for this week. Script notes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer many weeks. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. If you’re following us there, you may see more stuff from our show in the weeks and months ahead.

You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today, including the PDFs for the three-day challenges. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all these premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have new chairs in this office because of our premium subscribers. Thank you.

Craig: That’s why I’m sitting on this nice chair?

John: Yes.

Craig: Thank you, premium subscribers.

John: You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Film Scores. Megana Rao, thank you for coming back on the show.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Craig [unintelligible 01:28:23] question. Thank you, Megana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Coming off of that outro music, let’s talk about more music. Jenny wrote in with a question.

Drew: From your perspective, what should a score aim to accomplish in a film or show? What sets a good scores apart from great ones? To what extent are you working with composers to capture texture or tone that you’re imagining versus leaving it in their expert hands? What are your thoughts on temp tracks? Are they a helpful tool or a creative hindrance?

John: Last week, we went to see John Williams’ show at the Hollywood Bowl, which is always great. One of the pieces was introduced as Adagio with motorcycles. Basically, John Williams had written this brilliant, clever piece of music, and then you basically can’t hear the music at all because there’s just motorcycle sounds over the whole thing, which raises the question like, oh, did he need to write that clever piece of Adagio music? The music’s great. Music is essential.

I love music in the movies I watch and the TV shows I watch, but there’s two very different patterns I notice. One is the music is there to support and it’s there so that there’s not silence. There’s a thing. It’s just filling some space. Then there’s the music that’s like, pay attention to this music. I’m thinking Blade Runner 2049. It just starts big and loud. The music is always a big part of what’s going to happen here.

Craig: There are so many different ways to explore how this works. To me, scoring is like writing again. It’s another chance to write. To answer, I guess, the last question, how important is temp music? Incredibly important, because when you’re editing, you know you’re going to need score in certain areas. You want it, and you want to make sure it’s working, and you want to be able to create something that feels like it’s being supported by the structure that music creates.

I think of scoring in two ways. There’s scoring that is connected to and consistent with what is happening on screen, and then there’s scoring that I just refer to as underscoring, which is scoring that punctuates or emphasizes what’s on screen. Somebody says something dramatic and the music goes, [mimics] that’s underscoring, which I tend to avoid, but some things it works great for. There’s also what I call, “Funny music,” which is never funny. It’s music for comedies, and it always sounds something like this. [mimics] I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It destroys everything in its path.

Scoring is essential. It’s an essential part of the process for me, whether it was Hildur Gundadottir on Chernobyl or Gustavo Santaolalla on The Last of Us and David Fleming on The Last of Us, we do a session where we just talk through scenes, and then we let them do what they do, and then it comes back. I listen, and they send it connected to the scene, and I watch it. I listen, and then I give my thoughts. They’re always how it made me feel. I didn’t want to feel like that, or, oh, you’re making me feel like this, but I actually want to feel like this, and it’s all about the language of feeling. It’s exhaustive and exhausting and leads to some of the most beautiful stuff imaginable. I love score. I love it.

John: It reminds me of costume design. There’s some projects in which you want to notice what people are wearing. It has to stand out. It’s a big part of it, and there’s other ones where it’s just like everyone should plausibly be wearing what they would be wearing in real life. I don’t want to pay attention to those things. Music can work the same way where there’s times where it’s just supporting. You’re not really paying a lot of attention to it. Then there’s The White Lotus where it’s just like this whole scene is just this wild, crazy music, and that’s part of the delirious joy of that show.

Craig: Completely. There’s music that is more sound design than music. In Chernobyl, I think the first music we hear is when Legasov walks outside. He makes his little recording, and then he walks outside to go hide the audio tape and the scores. [mimics] That’s it.

John: The Hans Zimmer race. Something has happened there, yes.

Craig: It’s Hildur Gundadottir on a cello that has been distorted and lowered and all sorts of cool stuff, but it’s not melodic. I’m not even sure how you would notate it. It is sound design. Sound design and score often blend. With particular composers now, when you look at stuff like, for instance, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that line between sound design and score, again, can get a little blurry, which is fun. Which I love.

John: Now, if we had the comedy music underneath, like Tron: Ares, that would be amazing. [mimics]

Craig: Brutal.

Megana: I was going to ask, since both of you have directed, and Drew is directing your first short.

Drew: Not first but a short.

Megana: A short this week. What questions are you asking yourselves when you’re meeting with your sound designer, your composer? What vision do you have going into it?

John: You have to speak to references. You can talk about your script, obviously, like what you’re feeling here, but you’re going to have to use metaphors. Working with Alex Wurman on the music for The Nines, we had to come up with the main theme before the frame was shot, because Ryan Reynolds plays it on the piano. We had to figure out what is that longing theme? What does it sound like? We know it’s going to be on a piano, so it has to make sense on a piano. How are we going to do that? [mimics] Figuring out what that was, was a very early part of the process.

That’s unusual. In most cases, you’re giving a sense of the overall space for something, and you’re probably casting that composer based on their previous work. You’re using their previous work to temp score it.

Craig: Absolutely. You don’t want to be talking to composers that have no evidence that they can do something like what you’re doing, but you, of course, don’t want them duplicating anything they’ve done. You just want to know you’re generally what I’m looking for. Then I think one of the things that helps is to say, “Look, here’s what I don’t want. Here’s what I don’t like. Then here’s what I am looking for and what I do like.” Then you just vibe it out. They should ideally read the script and have thoughts, but I will say some composers work very differently and achieve brilliant results.

The aforementioned Gustavo Santaolalla, Gustavo likes to score without looking at what’s on screen. He just knows, okay, this is what the scene is about. This is what the feeling is and the emotions are. I’m not going to watch the scene. I’m just going to write a piece of music. Let’s see if it fits. A lot of times it does. You make adjustments here and there, but that is specific to him. Look at process. I think when you talk to him, look at their prior work. Talk about process. Talk about your goals and your aims, and talk about the things you don’t want, and then pray, because God’s honest truth is you don’t know until you start getting stuff back from them. You just don’t.

John: You’ll hear stuff. Are you ever hearing music independent of picture? Are you sending your tracks and then you have to–

Craig: I never listen to music independent of picture. What I ask for is music when they send it to me– Scott Hanau, one of our music supervisors, is amazing this way, because he coordinates all of this. What I used to get back was the standard thing, which is here’s the scene. Here’s the cue. We’ve cranked the cue up to 11, and the scene is down to a 2, so that you can hear the music. My problem is that’s not how anyone’s going to hear this music. What I ask them is to also send me a version. Much like Scott, just do a basic shot in the dark mix here, so I generally know how this will sit. If I can’t hear a moment properly, I’ll go to the other one. I want to see how it sits.

John: Sometimes you have the luxury, just like you’re writing for an actor, you know in advance who the composers are going to be. The movies I’ve done with Danny Elfman doing the music, I have a sense of the world of his music and it’s just so helpful. I know, okay, I’m actually planning out for some space where we can get the– If I bring that in there, that’s going to be great. The opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I knew I could really hear what the opening title sequence was going to be like, which is we’re in the factory assembling the chocolate bars and all that stuff. I could hear it even before he’d written a note of it.

Craig: That’s the joy of working with an established composer, because you know– I remember when I was reading the script for Dune, I don’t know if John Spitzer at the center or Eric Roth, but I think it was probably Denis. I think it’s when we maybe first see the worms, he wrote, in all caps, full Zimmer power. You know, okay, I know it’s full Zimmer power. It’s full Zimmer power is like [mimics].

John: You’re going to feel this in you.

Craig: It’s just like a thousand horns at the same time. When you’re starting out, and you’re talking to people that are also starting out, it’s a little tricky. You just got to vibe it out. If you have some temp pieces that are in the world, you can make a little mix tape of like, here’s the world that I’m thinking about.

John: The other thing that’s helpful, if you’re starting out and you’re making a lower budgeted film, you’ll have a conversation with your composer about like, what can we actually afford in terms of real instruments? My initial conversations with Alex Wurman were about like, well, piano, and he’s like, accordion. Hear me out because accordion can actually sound like a lot. It’s a much bigger sound than the one player would ultimately give you. It’s like, yes, you can digitally do a bunch of stuff, but we wanted some real things in there. Piano, accordion, harp actually gives you a lot of things, and then we can figure out, okay, what are the wins that are actually important and what are not important?

Craig: This is an ongoing battle. It’s been an issue also on Broadway as well where they have very strong unions that are protecting real players. The golden days of going to see John Williams and the LA Philharmonic doing the score for you and watching it live are slowly diminishing or rapidly diminishing, because you can create very accurate sounds with synthesizers and samplers. For what we do, maybe some of the bigger action cues rely on that for budget. I stay out of that discussion. I’m really just listening.

Happily, for Chernobyl and for a lot of stuff on The Last of Us, it really comes down to a person doing weird stuff in a room with Cellos. Gustavo loves a plastic tube. He loves a PVC pipe and his Ron Rocco, which is this very specific South American stringed instrument. I’m always just making sure it doesn’t sound synthy, because bad synthy sounds synthy unless that’s what you want, and then it’s great.

John: Going back to my wonderful thing in terms of when things feel artificial, you feel like there’s nothing really there. We do have a sense that there was an instrument. There’s something underneath that thing. It’s not just a waveform. It really was something that created that sound. Thanks for the question. Thank you, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

I love talking to screenwriters about their experience getting their first movies made because it’s the difference between writing a script and actually creating a movie. Last year, we had Justin Kuritzkes on to talk about his experience with Challengers and Queer, back-to-back with Director Luca Guadagnino. Today, we’re here talking with Nora Garrett, the first-time writer of Guadagnino’s current After the Hunt. Welcome, Nora.

Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I think one of the reasons why I love this as an example is we have so many listeners who are working on their scripts, they’re aspiring writers, they’ve written some scripts but they’ve never gotten a thing made. And so that transition point between like, these are all the words I have on paper and this is a movie that’s actually existing in theaters, just talking through that process gives people a sense of the journey. Craig and I could talk about it and our experiences, but that’s not what happens in 2025 and you have just gone through this process.

Nora: Yes, that is true.

[laughter]

John: I’m sure there were moments that were great and moments that were surprising and fantastic and also terrifying.

Nora: Yes. Oh, I mean, there were so many moments of abject terror that I felt like I was just in a complete state of disassociation watching myself go through it and be like, be cool, relax. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, it happened really fast. It’s interesting to be on the back end of it now looking back.

John: Cool. I want to talk about your journey as a writer, sort of getting up to this point, getting this in the hands of a director who actually made your movie with Julia Roberts starring. Because we have the actual script in front of us, I want to talk a little bit about the words on the page and your experience writing those words, but then seeing like, oh, those actual actors have to do these things and that whole process.

Nora: Yes.

John: And revisions, probably the most revisions you can also imagine. I saw from the cover page, you went to double white, so you went all the way through the colors.

Nora: Yes, we sure did.

[laughter]

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about day jobs, because until very recently, you had a day job doing other things, and I want to talk about what your experience has been trying to have an identity as the person who is a screenwriter and a filmmaker and an actor, but also the day job of it all.

Nora: Of course.

John: Cool. Well, let’s get into it. You and I are both from Colorado, so.

Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?

John: Yes. I saw that you were born in New York. Were you raised in Evergreen?

Nora: Yes, I was raised in Evergreen. Wow, where are you from?

John: Boulder, Colorado.

Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.

John: Talk to us about Colorado, because my experience of Colorado was that I had no idea how lucky I was growing up there. Then you go back and like, “Oh, my God, this place is so pretty.”

Nora: That was exactly my experience. Exactly. We moved from New York when I was four, but I was adamant that I was a city girl to the point where I have vivid memories of touring the houses that we eventually lived in Evergreen. I was telling the real estate agent, I was like, “I’m a city girl, I don’t belong here.” [laughs]

John: You’re four. Yes.

Nora: I’m four. I’m four. I think my father at that point was like, that’s when he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do with this girl.” It wasn’t until I left Colorado to go to NYU and then came back from the city that I realized that this is such a gorgeous, bucolic place to live. My experience of Colorado, and I think it’s still true, is that it’s a pretty big artistic town in the middle of the country.

John: I grew up in Boulder. We had the Shakespeare Festival. For not being at a hub, we had a lot of cultural things.

Nora: Exactly. I was dancing at first at Colorado Ballet and then I transitioned to acting and I went to Denver School of the Arts, which is a local magnet arts high school. I think that there was a lot of local theaters and a lot of local theater that I was able to be involved in alongside the Thespian Convention and the Shakespeare Festival. I always felt like Colorado had a liberal and an artistic bent to it, even despite being in a landlocked state. [laughs]

John: Can you talk to me briefly about dancing? Because you’re the only person I know who’s gone from dancing to screenwriting. Dancing, my perception of it, especially ballet, is that it’s all about reducing differences between things, being flawless, and practicing thing until it’s absolutely perfect. Then I don’t want to say you’re interchangeable with other people, but there’s just no flaws to be seen. Did you love it? Why did you stop dancing? What got you out of dancing?

Nora: Sure. That’s a very astute observation. I think that I loved ballet. I loved it so much because of the regimentation that you’re talking about, I think. I think I was someone who really responded well to structure and that’s been true throughout my entire life. I responded really well to six days a week, very rigorous, two to three hours a day of ballet. I responded to the same rigor when I went to school and took that really seriously.

I think having parameters was important to me, but it’s a ruthless job. Ultimately, I stopped because I had sort of a prescient notion at the age of 13 that I was like, I’m never going to be a prima ballerina. The best I can hope for is corps de ballet. Just because my body simply didn’t do the things that they needed. I didn’t have clean lines. I don’t have hyper-extended elbows or knees or really good turnout. What I did get from that experience was a certain amount of discipline, regimentation, but also it was very performative. There was a lot of opportunity for performance at Colorado Ballet because it’s not like ABT where it’s super competitive to get in the nutcracker.

John: I shared your love of just being, for me it was like testing and standardized testing in school. I loved actually just being right and knowing that I finished the thing and I was done and I’ve gotten the correct answer. I loved that there was a correct answer. While I was always good at writing, and I loved being praised for writing, there was something just really comforting and nice about just like, oh, no, I got like 100% on the test, and that was really easy.

So much of what we’re doing now, there is no right answer and there’s no perfect word for this thing. There’s no perfect scene. You’re always dealing with the imperfection of it all. Going from ballet, which you’re right or you’re not right to acting, there’s no right performance. What was the transition there?

Nora: Yes. Again, really great questions. I feel like the ballet of it all, I mean it’s really just containers, right? I don’t know. I got familiarized with Anne Bogart’s work in college, but she’s a director who talks a lot about the container of something and specifically the container of archetypes. I think with ballet, there’s a really rigid container of steps, but there’s still room within those steps for expression.

A lot of ballerinas take acting lessons because you don’t have words, so you really have to give an ontological experience of emotion to the viewer. I think that with acting, I thought there was a right way, for sure. I was not able to enter into going from pretty much regimented dance to regimented acting classes. I was not able to segment my brain and be like, okay, there were steps that I learned and there were perfect ways to do things in this medium and there’s not in this medium. I thought those two things were transferable to my own detriment, really.

John: To some degree, in musical theater where there’s a track, and to learn a track, you have to drop in that thing, I have such respect for the swings who can come in and just go through any track and a thing, but it really is not directly comparable, the experience.

Nora: No.

John: We have a lot of guests on the show who’ve gone through improv classes. They always were recommending improv classes. The thing about that is there’s no time to stop and make the perfect choice. You just have to continue with what you’re doing.

Nora: Absolutely, yes. I think for acting, it’s something where you can really get into a point where I’ve certainly been there, where you just belabor the thing. I think that it took me a long time to realize that sometimes, especially for someone who can be really cerebral like me, it’s better to just get yourself into a different track and just go with the first instinct as opposed to trying to find the perfect choice.

John: We had Greta Gerwig on the podcast a while back and she was talking about coming out of the mumblecore tradition and how she loved and respected a lot of it, but she got really frustrated that there wasn’t a text to anchor yourself back down to. You felt like as an actor, it was just too terrifying to have nothing underneath your feet to get back down to and that she felt like she could actually push much further once there was a text underneath there.

I hear some of what you’re saying there. It sounds like ballet, yes, you’re getting every step right, but then you’re finding ways to express yourself within that. As an actor, if you have scripted lines, you know those scripted lines, you’re making choices about that rather than every other moment.

Nora: Right. I think that the best-case scenario as an actor is you get to the point where you know the lines so well that everything feels spontaneous within the structure of the memorization and within the structure of having the understanding of your character. Everybody gets to that point differently, which I think was something that took me a really long time to understand. Some people really need to focus on every single line and the motivation behind every single line in order to trick their brain into being spontaneous, and some people can’t do that. They have to just veer straight into the spontaneity. I think I was very convinced that I was like, no, there’s one method and I must find it. [laughs]

John: Was that the reason for going to NYU was to find that method, to find that answer?

Nora: I knew I always wanted to be back in New York, which based on my four-year-old dictums, I think.

John: It’s Eloise returning [unintelligible 00:09:52] and stopping that, yes.

Nora: Exactly. I read all the Eloise books. I read Eloise in Russia. She went to Russia.

John: Of course, she did. Yes.

Nora: Of course, she did. There’s hotels in Russia. I was very adamant that I was like, I’ve got to be back in the city. I belong in the city enough with like, I don’t know if you felt this when you left Colorado, but I met people who didn’t know what elk were.

John: Oh, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. They’re not necessarily like, no, they’re these giant wild creatures who doesn’t wander through your backyard. Yes.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They’re bigger than deer. I was like, “Oh, yes, everybody knows what an elk looks like.” My first friends at NYU were like, “No, you know what an elk looks like. We do not.” I think I was in high school looking back on it. I think that I was told I was a talented performer. I don’t think that I was going off of a feeling of like, wow, I love this and I’m obsessed with this and I just want to follow this. I think I was chasing the feeling of being good and of being someone who was talented and had that sort of external validation. It wasn’t until I got to NYU that I was like, “Oh, I really love this.”

John: Can we talk about NYU? Because I visited New York in college and was like, “Oh, this is overwhelming.” Specifically, the NYU area is just an overwhelming place. My daughter did a summer program there in high school. She’s a city kid. We lived in LA and Paris. She’s like, “I can’t handle the street harassment. Just the daily life of it all was tough.” What was your experience coming from Colorado to a place like NYU?

Nora: My family lived in New York for a really long time, like my extended family. I would go back and visit. I think what I was super attracted to was the autonomy of it. I’ve always been someone who was like–

John: Yes, developing quickly.

Nora: Yes, very quickly. I think that I felt like a person who was an adult faster than other people, which not true, but I felt that way. I’ve always been really attracted to the notion of being there and you can get yourself wherever you want to go and you’re not reliant on anybody else to get you there. There’s a certain amount of autonomy in that respect that I wanted to have. I was desperate to get out of home. Not because of anything bad, but just because I was like, I want to be alone.

John: Also, you’re like the protagonist in your own story and you recognize that you have to leave home in order to have your great adventure.

Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.

John: When did you read your first script? You probably read some plays in high school, but when did you get the first sense of that when it wasn’t like another classic play that you’re reading?

Nora: That’s a good question. I have to think about that. I read a ton of plays for a very long time, but also read a lot of books. That was my first introduction to writing was just being a huge nerd and reading a ton. I remember very distinctly learning how to use a parenthetical for the first time as a very young kid. [laughs] I think that it must have been in college because of– I want to say that I’ve read a script before this, but we did have a class I think my sophomore year of college, where it was acting for film within the container of, you’re at a school for acting for the stage.

We read The Talented Mr. Ripley. The goal of the class was to learn a certain filming technique as opposed to a theatrical one. We read The Talented Mr. Ripley seven times, I think, back-to-back. That was probably my first experience. I remember being really struck by how little was on the page compared to plays.

John: Let’s talk about that, because classically when I look at plays right now, there’s sometimes a lot of scene descriptions where it’s setting up to look at the thing, but then there’s pages and pages and pages of dialogue. What you’re saying, it’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this is for an acting exercise, so it’s really about how are you able to communicate to when the camera’s enclosed, what is the edges of your frame? What was not there on the page that you were expecting to be there?

Nora: More, I think. [laughs] I just thought–

John: You thought it would be much more scripted in terms of every little movement, every step?

Nora: Yes. I thought it would be– it’s not only about stage direction, because I think also, I was very obsessed with the canonical plays. I loved Edward Albee. I loved Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams stage directions are verbose. It is just like a stack of stage directions or very stacked, rather, I don’t know. I think that going to reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, I was like, “Oh, this is so much about the actor’s performance.” I think that that varies script to script, because now I’ve read so many. In that one particularly, I was like, oh, wow, it really is about who you are as an actor bringing yourself to this, because it’s not the same type of roadmap, I think.

John: Also, you look at the differences between a stage play and a screen play. A screen play only needs to be filmed once. It only needs to be actually acted once. Those scenes, they’re going to do it once and they’re going to be done. You can experiment with that versus stage play. In theory, this is a set of instructions for creating basically the same experience again and again and again, no matter who’s in those tracks and who’s in those roles.

Nora: Exactly.

John: That’s an inherent difference between those two things. You’re reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. You start probably reading some other things. When did you start acting in people’s films? Were you acting in shorts while you were at NYU? What was the first time that you were on a set with a camera aimed at you?

Nora: Sure. I did start doing short films in school. I think they really started kicking off probably around the summer after my junior year because NYU and specifically Stella Adler, where I was studying, they have a very rigid– It’s so funny to look back on it now because the stakes felt so high, but they basically were like, “You’re not allowed to act anywhere beyond the confines of this school until your junior year,” which not everybody subscribed to. Again, I was the rule follower and someone who was very serious about this education. I felt like, okay, I’m not ready. I’m a nascent creature. Then I have to wait until one teacher tells me I can go off.

Yes, it was probably around summer of junior year. I have done so many short films, some of which have seen the light of day and some of which have not. I think that I’d probably be terrified watching them back now. I think it all started because I was dating a guy who was very into film. I think his friends were also very into film. They were these people who were involved in the acting school, but they knew they wanted to go to Hollywood. They knew that they wanted to be screenwriters. They had a–

John: They’re the worst. They’re terrible people.

Nora: I believe the term is film bros now. If I’d had that verbiage, I would have used it back then. They’re still my friends to this day, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. I grew up watching Legally Blonde, Charlie’s Angels, Liar Liar, and The Big Green on repeat. I was like, those are my four. That’s what I’ve got.
[laughter]

John: [unintelligible 00:17:01] right.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They had seen everything. I felt like, “Oh, those are the people who make this,” but they were also very committed to making short films. Because I was dating this guy, and I was an actor, I got into that web.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are making short films. What advice could you give to them about having been in a bunch of short films and student short films and posts? What are good experiences? What are bad experiences? What are things you wish those directors had a better sense of when they cast you in something?

Nora: Great question. I feel like I would say really use short films as a sense of experimentation. I think I took everything very, very seriously. I felt like I never knew what short film was going to catapult me to fame. [laughs] That’s what I felt like. Honestly, I was like, “Someone’s going to see this, and then I’m going to be famous at the age of 20.” It’s just not that. You’re making stuff with your friends, and it’s really, truly a time to learn and expand and make really bold choices that may or may not work.

I think that when no one’s watching, it’s really the opportunity to veer into that and steer into that scope. I think as an actor, it’s a great time to learn about your own process and what works for you and watching yourself back, and trying to figure out the dissonance between, oh, this is what I meant to do, and this is what’s actually on the screen. I think everyone in the short film process probably feels that way. Yes, that’s what I would say.

John: I’m friends with some folks who’ve been making a bunch of short films using folks who are very good at social media. These are folks who film themselves constantly. I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be fascinating to watch 10 years from now is how many of those people graduate towards doing bigger, longer, expanded things. These are people who get a chance to iterate all the time.

I think what you’re describing is that they can just constantly experiment, but they’re not used to the sense of an ongoing narrative. They’re used to a 90 seconds, but if you have to tell a story in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it’s just a different beast. Or if you need to work with a larger, more experienced crew, it’s not just you setting up lights yourself. It’s a different thing. I’ll be fascinated to see how that works.

I’d love to just push a little bit more on, you’re an actor who’s agreed to be in a short film. What are your expectations going in? What do the directors and people who are helping out to make the film need to know about? How do they make it a good experience for an actor?

Nora: Sure. Okay. I feel like some of my best experiences were when you knew that– It’s a couple of things. I think you want to feel like, especially with short films where it’s sort of run and gun and everybody’s doing a lot of different jobs, I think you want to feel like your voice is being heard and you’re being valued as a creative entity within the film.

I think it’s important that you know that you’re going to be taken care of throughout all the process, throughout all the extenuating processes after you film. I think it’s important to, and again, this might not be important to everybody, but I think it’s important that you know what cameras you’re shooting on and you know that those cameras are going to look really good, that even if this isn’t a perfect product, you’re going to have something that’s really good for your reel and that it is going to be edited and that there is going to be a final product that you can eventually see.

John: That it actually goes to you and it disappear.

Nora: Exactly. That’s happened to me before. I’ve shot shorts that never seen the light of day. I think it’s much more holistic when you understand that this is going to be something that you can watch because everybody needs it at that point. It’s not the same thing where you’re like, okay, well, I committed my time and energy for free. The promise of that is I’m going to have something to look at at the end of the day. I think it’s a matter of short films are so stressful. I do think there’s a certain way that you have to protect your cast from that stress.

John: Some of these short films you were making with friends, which is great and that’s a safer experience, but were there things where you just auditioned, like you saw, noticed, and you went and auditioned for, you submitted for, and you were just working with strangers?

Nora: Yes.

John: What is that like as a person? You probably didn’t have reps or you had no one on your team at that point. How are you making sure that this is going to be a good situation that you’re actually safe?

Nora: [laughs]

John: For example, would you only meet in a public place or would you go to a place-

Nora: Oh, sure.

John: -where there’s an apartment? I would just love some good advice.

Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–

John: I’m not thinking just for our actors who are listening, but for filmmakers, make sure people feel good about the experience.

Nora: I think something looking back on my experience, especially immediately post-collegiate when I was auditioning a lot for these– I was on Backstage, I was on Actors Access. I did a big cattle casting call for Columbia Film School, which was actually one of the best. I did the same thing for USC when I moved out here. Those were some of the best experiences because you’re meeting film students who are doing their MFA and you’re auditioning in Columbia and you know that it’s the container of the college, so you know that all these people are very committed to doing something and making something and have the resources.

I don’t know if I ever auditioned in someone’s living room. I’m sure I have, but I think for Friends, I think there’s a certain desperation of a young actor that really, at least for me, I would have done anything. You know what I’m saying? I think I would have gone anywhere, seen anybody, done anything, because I was like, again, I was just like, put me in pictures kind of thing. I was just like, “I’ve got it.” I think also there’s a lot of stuff told to young actors that is really hard and harmful. I don’t know if you watched The Rehearsal.

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, but I was watching it this most recent season and it just broke my heart, because I was like, “These people just want the opportunity to be on HBO and it feels like, God, I really recognized myself in that.” I was like, “I would have done anything too. I would have made out with someone for 12 hours on a soundstage.” Because there’s a certain amount of you just really– you’re told for so long that this business is impossible and you’re told that you have to do whatever it takes and you’re told that no one’s going to make it. Part of doing whatever it takes is sometimes, I think, hopefully now it’s different, but compromising what you believe to be artistic integrity or just the integrity of self. Yes.

John: As an actor, you’re constantly waiting for someone else to pick you to do a thing. As a writer, you can just write your own thing. When did you start writing in screenplay form? When did that start off?

Nora: I always wrote since I can remember, and started with prose and really bad poetry. Got into slam poetry in high school, which is embarrassing, but I feel like I should say it.
[laughter]

John: If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. This is a part of your identity.

Nora: Exactly. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that if I say it-

John: Slam poet.

Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–

John: Former slam poet, Nora Garrett. Yes.
[laughter]

Nora: If you only knew. Yes. I got really deep into it.

John: Oh, yes. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. [crosstalk]

Nora: Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing, but I loved it. I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series, and so I wrote a couple of web series. They were just bad. They were bad. I think it was also the Girls’ renaissance.

John: Oh yes, of course.

Nora: Everything was that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. It’s only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is and how you can’t repeat that. That’s what we were all trying to do. Yes.

John: You’re writing those things and you’re writing stuff that you would shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say like, oh, this is what was on the page. This is what it’s actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. You do get a lot of experience that way.

Nora: Yes. My last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. That was really like we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. They looked horrible. They were just awful. I would love to think that I had the cognition at the time to have any creative feedback about the artistic process, but I think I was really just caught up in how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time. I think it’s also when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you’re just like, oh, this isn’t even that art form.

John: No. [chuckles]

Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s an image on a screen, but that’s really about as close as we got there.

Nora: Right, exactly. You’re like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they’re supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes.

John: When did you write your first full-length feature-y script?

Nora: The truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature.

John: That’s great.

Nora: Yes, that is the truth. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the idea of it and going into it. I guess we should say that I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won’t have seen the movie yet. How do you describe it? Maybe describe what your initial intention was for it, and if it’s different than the final thing, tell us what changed.

Nora: It all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. Again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a character who had, at the core of their identity, a secret? This secret is something where I thought it could go one of two ways. I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long, and I was trying to gamify the system in a way, but I was obsessed with the price of it, and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price.

I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of This American Life. Basically, the upshot of that was that statistically, people who are more successful in our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. That can ensure more success. I thought, A, I felt validated by that, but B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion? Again, what’s the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.

Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you’re coming online enough to understand what you’ve done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life and specifically when you start having adult relationships? Then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help, or is there an eventual consequence?

John: From that initial instinct, were you trying to feel like, well, what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to explore this thing? The Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. She’s uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth, how do you live an ethical life? She has this secret at the start of it. Was that baked into the idea initially?

Nora: Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first logline, I did think about the professor and student relationship. Having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself. It was the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience.

John: Yes, so very classically, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they’re wrestling with and digging through. It makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there’s a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies.

The thing we always do for [unintelligible 00:30:09] is about Episode 483, Philosophy for Screenwriters. We were talking through that and that we don’t see it. In this case, your creative character was just so exactly wrestling with that situation. Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I’m not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie?

Nora: Yes. I think the genre that it started out initially was the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real? I think that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, when you’re like sort of what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true, and what is false in what’s happening right now, that to me is the source of that almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? Then I think Luca was more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama?

John: Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that has a negative connotation right now, but we used to make melodramas. Is there something delightful about the drama is the drama in a way?

Nora: Yes, of course. Yes. I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yes.

John: Let’s talk about Alma and all the balls you have her juggling. She is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. There’s that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student who is daughter-like to her, but also obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage which is okay but has some weird dynamics and strains in it. Her husband is a psychiatrist.

She has a best friend who’s also in the department and they have a complicated relationship, an Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition, which I’m not quite sure what it is weighing on her. She has a secret. She has a secret from before. She has a comfortable life, but a lot of things pull in her in different directions. In other stories, one of those might be sort of enough, but there’s a lot happening there. Then these aspects conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper?

Nora: I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that I was part of a group of female writers who we’ve all share our work with each other. One of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you’re just going to finish your first draft in 12 weeks. Basically, the idea–

John: That’s a classic sign-up kind of thing.

Nora: Yes, exactly.

John: A boot camp, like you’re just doing it.

Nora: 100%. You’re just doing it. I thought, okay, I’ll do that. That could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.

John: [unintelligible 00:33:26] containers I’ve heard so far.
[laughter]

Nora: Yes, containers. [laughs] I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer myself. [laughs]

John: Oh, okay, great. Yes. We’ll get to that in the bonus segment.

Nora: Yes, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. Part of that was really beneficial because you just got out of your own way. I think that it’s hard to look back and narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the triad of Julia Roberts’s character, Ayo Edebiri’s character, and Andrew Garfield’s character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.

I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to to see if this was someone who was very calm, cool, and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of.

I think also I was interested in substance use. I don’t know, just sort of that as somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being degrading to their body. I think especially as a woman and especially as a female character, women’s bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. I was interested if you can take the Brad Pitt character where he’s constantly eating in half of his films and give that trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. [chuckles] That notion of just hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind.

John: Great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. Over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script? Did you get through it?

Nora: I did because, again, I love rules. I did finish it. Again, it was just really bad. I think all of it was a really good exercise in learning that just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it’s not the final iteration by any means.

John: Let’s talk about that, getting it from it’s finished to actually to good. What was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?

Nora: I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belonged to the cabal of people that I went to college with. I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was very financially stressed.

Part of that was by necessity and then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. Then I re-outlined, re-broke the second draft, re-wrote it, and then started sharing it. I started sharing it with a group of just really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected. Then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends.

John: Yes, I was going to ask. Knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to hear some stuff and see what’s working there. What did you learn in that reading?

Nora: I don’t know if you have this, but there’s an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud. [laughs]

John: Absolutely. All the things you’d never notice were like, oh, my God, that actually isn’t the text. There’s a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work.

Nora: Yes, 100%. Or I’m like, “God, I use that word so much, like container.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? That makes no sense.” It’s, yes. After getting over the initial hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing, after that, I tried really hard to just step back.

I think it’s really important when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it’s like I had actors who, it was during the actor’s strike, and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other job. It was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors. If they are struggling with this moment or if this doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth, then I know something needs to change.

John: Yes, if they can’t sell it, it probably is the line.

Nora: Exactly.

John: It’s not the person reading the line. Through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of Imagine who ended up taking it? What was that process of I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?

Nora: It’s so funny looking back on that version of myself because I feel like–

John: Looking back, what, two years?

Nora: Yes, [laughs] looking back. It’s not long ago.

John: The younger me.

Nora: The younger me. No, but I think it’s– I’ve had for so long, I’ve been really timid and skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. All of my friends, for the most part, there’s obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. You have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place and then suddenly you’re seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you.

Again, that gap is one that can be difficult to close, but also, it’s that awkward thing of I don’t want to ask my friend to help me. I don’t know what, I really don’t know what changed. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I had this script, and two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, “I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions.”

I submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. [laughs] I remember reading it and I was just like, “Whoa, okay.” [laughs] I think they issued some boilerplate statement that’s like, “We suggest you reapply or suggest you take this writer’s notes.” I don’t think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, “This is bad.”

John: You’re on the website now.

Nora: [laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it. There’s something crazy making in that because you’re like, “What is good?” I can’t say what’s good.

John: It’s a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure, and that there’s just no objective measure of any of it.

Nora: Exactly. It is that thing where it’s like okay, obviously, when the film comes out, we’ll see. There’s a big feeling of just like, “Okay, you hate my writing, and this person doesn’t hate my writing.” I think that I read the feedback, and I had that moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m horrible. Everything I do is bad.” Then I thought, I don’t know, my friends like this, and I trust them, so I’ll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I’ll just keep going. Again, I think that that’s an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, “You’re right, blue cat.”
[laughter]

John: “I’m embarrassed to tell this to you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

Nora: Yes, exactly. I asked a friend of mine who was representative. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me, and he set me up with my now manager, Sidney Blank. I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother’s house in New York. I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta. I took off of Meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting.

I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it’s the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it’s really talky. A lot of conversations, there’s a lot of $5 words, it’s very cerebral at times, there’s no major set pieces. I was pretty certain I was like, this would just be a really good sample, and I’ll be able to get in rooms, hopefully.

John: Getting a room on a succession-like show would be a dream with a script like this.

Nora: That was the dream, 100%. I was like, “Hopefully, I get a manager, and then hopefully, I start working in rooms.” Sydney was the first person who said, “I really think we can make this into a movie.” That was, I think, December of 2023, I think.

John: Yes, so recent.

Nora: It’s so recent or maybe two. I don’t know.

John: What are years?

Nora: What are years? It was very recent, though. Then that next year, which I think it– yes, God, I think it was 2023. Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. Incredibly lucky for me that she was right.

John: That’s great. Imagine read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process?

Nora: I remember that meeting really well. Yes, they met with me, and I met with them, really. It’s also so funny going from auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people’s offices. I had a meeting once in like an ante room of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at 6:00 AM. It was so bad. Then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, “Oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship.” Whereas before I’d been in the position of me trying to really sell myself.

It was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi. Immediately, Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can’t believe any of this is happening.

John: My first paid job was also Imagine. I went through there. Colorado and Imagine. Time shifted or something.

Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.

John: It’s so good. It’s rising up the charts quickly. At this point, they’ve purchased your script, they’ve optioned your script, or what it will be?

Nora: No. It was just a meeting of– Then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him. I had a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it, so we decided to go with him.

John: That’s great. Did you do drafts for Imagine before you went off to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened?

Nora: No. I think this was so atypical across so many different lines. It’s hard to say that because obviously, I don’t have another experience to draw from. I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. Once he signs on to something, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it. He’s like, “This is getting made. We’re going to get it made within the timeframe that I have.”

The process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience where I didn’t even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine’s repped by CAA. Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. Luca’s name was right up there at the top. They asked me after we decided to work together to hone in and find a smaller list of directors. I made a list of four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it’ll be the best day of my life, and Luca was in that little grouping.

We sent the script to his agent who happens to be married to Julia Roberts’s agent. Imagine really wanted things to be we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. The way it happened because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. Then she actually came on first because initially, Luca had a scheduling gap. No, he had a film that was going. Then that film, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. Then he came on.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia, for which she was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. You feel lucky to be in the room, but also, you’re trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make?

Nora: I think it’s really difficult being a first-time screenwriter in some ways because– especially coming from the acting world and just having zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms. I think I felt like, “Wow.” I feel so lucky to be here across the board. Again, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to look back and be like, “Oh, what was–” It just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now. I think it would have been insane for me to, at that point, be like, “Luca, no thank you.” That’s crazy.

I think that the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. I don’t want to spoil things, but I used to work there, and he was staying there at the time. Our first meeting was there, and my old manager was there. I remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1:00 AM every night, and he was there. I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino and he was like, “What?” This is a crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I’ve been so many times in such a different capacity, and now I’m meeting with this person here.

I love Luca as a director, and I’d seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. Then, of course, the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash.
[laughter]

Nora: I was like, “Oh, no, I knew it.” I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you’re just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect and I have no idea.

John: It should be obvious, but you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” I’ve actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I’ve been inside this entire movie for years, and so I really can describe everything that’s in here and why everything is in here. I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. It’s not like if this script had plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn’t have the ability to talk about what’s really inside it. You’re the only person who’s already seen the movie, which is- A hard thing to remember.

Sometimes as you’re talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” They’ve never been inside this. They’re just trying to find their way in. You had this meeting where they’re immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we’re going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with them?

Nora: I think Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the thorny social dynamics and really exploring the socio-political world in which these characters were in. I think that something I was scared of when all this was initially happening is I’d heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting denuded and the teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized.

I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he’s really able to silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.

John: Entering the movies, if it’s worth the psychological thriller, there’d be probably a clean answer to how somehow these things sort out. My experience with watching the movies, I went to a 10:00 AM screening in Culver City with just myself, and I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with afterwards.
Fortunately, I grabbed a sandwich nearby, and there were three women who’d just seen the movie, too, and I heard them talking, so I could join their conversation as– Let’s talk about these three things because it very much is one of those movies where you want to have some discussion about what really happened there. For a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places they got to.

Nora: Yes.

John: Can we take a look at some pages from the script? This is how we’re starting the movie. This is the initial scenes as they’re meeting all the different characters. I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. Emma Hoff, the Jill Robbins character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don’t give any specific more information with her at this point, but we’re going to see a lot of specific behavior from her. Frederick Mendelson, her husband. Can you read the description for him?

Nora: Sure. Frederick Mendelson, Alma’s husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over.

John: Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. We meet him in that parking lot.

Nora: Hank Gibson, 40, Alma’s colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower-class background.

John: That last clause, having worked his way up, that’s not evidence that we can’t see that on screen, but we’re going to see it in his behavior later on. That’s just the cheating that we embrace in a screenplay.

Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]

John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.

Nora: Maggie Resnick, mid-to-late twenties, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy.

John: Cast in the movie, played by Iowa Deberry. Her being Black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the screenplay, you didn’t know that.

Nora: No, I didn’t know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn’t any specific notion of race.

John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.

Nora: Forties, a professor, emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.

John: Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. It’s delightful. Again, it’s the specificity that I’m loving about these things. Then we’re meeting her almost in class. We’re going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. We’re meeting Fabiola, not a housekeeper. She’s hired to help. She’s to do everything in person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don’t have kids. We’ll try to put this first three pages up, so people can download them.
There’s a lot of behavior, a lot of setting of worlds and establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven’s apartment life, which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London?

Nora: It was actually in London, yes. Something that Luca is very rigorous about research. He has a research that he’s used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. He is very adamant about verisimilitude. He is a wonderful set designer who makes-

John: The sets are incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. They’re always jammed. All these people are hoarders until you get to one point very late in the movie where we’re at a place that is incredibly spare and spartan.

Nora: Yes, exactly. That was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, where it’s like you’re walking-

John: You’re asleep no more.

Nora: Exactly. You’re walking around the sets and you’re opening drawers and you’re like, God, there’s actually what you would have in your drunk drawer if you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019. This was what it would look like. He was very meticulous about that. I think that that’s a wonderful thing for actors to have, for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to set up entering into these characters’ lives prior to feeling like, oh, we’re just at the fulcrum point.

John: Talk to us about the language, because we’re catching glimpses of them in class, and they’re just talking in what’s almost– It’s legalese or medicalese. It’s almost incomprehensible to what they’re saying to each other because it’s all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. To what degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft? How much of this came in later on? What was that process?

Nora: My cousin is getting her master’s in philosophy at Stanford. I really plumbed her experience and also literally some emails that she’s gotten from professors about announcing talks. The language that’s in the script is a very sanded-down version of the opacity that exists in that world. It is legalese. It’s jargon. Something when I was taking philosophy classes ad hoc, postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. The barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose.

There’s a part of me that loves the idea of you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences, but there’s another part of me that feels like, “Come on, guys, just say the thing.” I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. That was something where Luca really thought if this is someone who’s supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. That required a crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself.

John: It also creates structural issues because you need to find where do those scenes go in a natural way that’s advancing the actual overall plot that we believe that she’s teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and are happening after this.

Nora: Exactly, yes. How can we use those scenes that otherwise would be cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add drama?

John: The tension reaches the boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma just outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie who’s talking with their partner Alex and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It’s a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is that the thing that came along in the process?

Nora: Portions of it were always in the script, certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals.

John: Oh, great.

Nora: Yes.

John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.

Nora: Talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you’re just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals.

John: Is it in New York City?

Nora: No, San Francisco. She’s lovely and so warm and disarmingly so. We had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script, so it at least wasn’t like a complete cold meeting. Luca basically ran it so that obviously, the actors were all very busy, so we had to stagger who was involved in rehearsals. Sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. It started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I, and then slowly but surely, then Io came, and then it was Chloe, and then it was all of us.

John: How far in advance of production was this? Months?

Nora: Gosh. Not terribly far. I would say May, and then Luca went into prep in June. We started shooting early July, I think.

John: I’d love to read through some of this back half here because you’re at the point in the movie where people can more clearly state the themes and what their actual thing is. It’s not couched in specific language, or it could be a little more direct. If you put me at page 82, I’m nowhere near the actor. Anyway, Deborah is. I just want to read through some stuff here. She says, “I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.”

Nora: “Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown.”

John: “There are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible.”

Nora: “You’ve constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. You, you lie all the time, living in an apartment 10 times cheaper than what you can afford, dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting, fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility, another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It’s all a lie. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank, too.”

John: Again, it’s a moment where you actually can pull off all the niceties and things. You’re also answering an audience question. I was watching like, “Wait, if she’s rich, why is she living in that crappy apartment?” It’s rewarding the audience for that question you asked. You’re actually answering that question that was never audibly asked before. It’s like, “Why are you doing this thing?” Getting to express these, you’re not entitled to comfort, is an aspect too.

It’s almost like the audience is not entitled to a nice, tidy ending. It’s setting up, hopefully, the right invitation for the audience about what they’re going to get to because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was and stuff like that, they’re going to be answered but not answered to the degree that here’s the clear, it’s not the sixth sense. It’s not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It’s not that kind of clear answer.

Nora: Initially, it was. Certainly, the drafts that were circulated was very much like you got the answer. I think you’re absolutely right that it is a sense of a metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having.

John: Well, congratulations on the script and on the movie.

Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.

John: We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer.

Nora: Great.

John: Anita writes, “When is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? How long can you go with a character who’s talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to show that?” A script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It’s like, okay, what’s too long where I don’t actually need to show the thing? I don’t know.

To me, it’s just, it’s the instinct. I’m like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and show the story, but there’s other times where you just tell the story. If it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on to the after that long, I think my instinct is to stay. What’s your instinct?

Nora: I think it’s a difficult question. It was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there’s that feeling of how long can you hide the shark in Jaws. You know what I’m saying? How long can you make it? There’s going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually, you move towards satisfaction in the end. There’s a sense of what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying.

John: The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, there’s still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not? Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it’s trusting the filmmaker. It’s showing the actual real truth. That’s not the case. You’re going to have to do a little more work to undo that dialogue.

Nora: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s about rewarding people’s faith while creating as much tension as possible.

John: Let’s take one last question here from Nami. “I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.”

Tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s the buildup to a sneeze. It’s the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, “Oh God, something bad is going to happen.” It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there’s a bomb underneath the table, and you see the countdown underneath the table, or a longer-term thing where you’re just like, oh, there’s this sense of dread.

I think one of the issues that we’re living with as a society right now is that sense that there’s an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment. You’re just not quite sure when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like. In movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you’re cutting into something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we’re still worried about what happened before, or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment?

Your movie has a lot of tension in this building up to just mysteries that we’re trying to figure out. A lot of checkouts guns are being loaded in your movie. Any more instincts about tension and suspense?

Nora: First of all, I love The Twilight Zone. Again, I think it’s a delicate dance between feeling like what you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging, or what can you get away with not paying off and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience?

Nora: Sure. I’ve been really interested in Substack, recently. I think that it’s a great little corner of the internet when there’s a lot of scary corners of the internet. I also think it’s really great to just read Flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. Jessica Tofino is a writer who runs a great Substack called Flesh World. It’s a lot about the beauty space. I’m really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. There’s another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. He writes flash fiction. I just started reading him, and I love it. It’s really tightly told and very evocative.

John: That’s great. A couple of things to respond to on there. Flash fiction as a concept can be great. These are little short bits. It’s almost the textual equivalent of TikToks where it’s just like, here’s the idea, you’re in and you’re out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. I respond to it the same way. It’s like, just one more, just one more, just one more.

Substack is so fascinating, too, because there’s so many really good writers on Substack. Anytime you mention Substack, people are like, “But what about the Nazis?” It’s a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and that it’s corporatizing a bunch of independent voices, and yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating.

Nora: See, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn’t even know about any of that. [laughs]

John: Oh, that’s great. Literally, I’ll post something on Blue Sky about this post that I really liked, and the first comment will be like, “Oh, too bad. It’s on that Nazi platform.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Nora: Oh God. No, everything is ruined. I have to think of a new, cool thing.

John: The scolding that happens in popular culture is true, and that’s also part of your movie, too. Your movie is building off of reactions to me, too, but just the general sense of there’s no good way to be a decent person in the world.

Nora: No. I think it’s also a certain sense of, God, there’s nothing that seems particularly clean in this world now. Everything is touched, everything is tainted in some way, and it’s like how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy?
[laughter]

John: Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One podcast by Jesse David Fox. We had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. The Good One podcast, it’s scripted, but it’s talking with- funny people about how they do their work. One episode I really liked recently was Ben DeLaCreme’s episode.

Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.

John: He’s an incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but talking through the behind-the-scenes of RuPaul’s Drag Race but also the bigger issues of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we’re trying to do. You’re always grappling with, well, what is drag anymore? If drag isn’t dirty, is it still drag? All these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. One of many good episodes of The Good One podcast.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we referred to and the new one, we’re about to record on day jobs. Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes.

Nora: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Let’s talk about day jobs because you are now a produced screenwriter, but for a long time, you were doing other things along the way. Let’s talk about some of the different day jobs you’ve had, some pros and cons of a person who needs to keep a roof over their head but also have brain space and time to do the things they want to do. What day jobs have you had over your life?

Nora: What day jobs have I not had? I was a personal trainer. I was a personal assistant. I was a professional organizer. I was a data analyst. I was studying to be a paralegal. I was a waitress and a cater waiter and a hostess.

John: That’s good. That’s a whole range of things. Let’s talk about the service industry side first, because you mentioned how at Chateau Marmont, you had been a hostess at Chateau Marmont. Then you’re going there for a meeting, which is a very classic moment. That’s a movie moment right there.

Nora: Very movie moment, yes.

John: As a hostess or as a waiter, some pros I can imagine is you leave the job, you’re off the job, you’re done. Great. You probably have a little bit more flexibility when it comes for auditions, which is the thing you were having to do.

Nora: Yes. Being a waiter was one of my favorite jobs.

John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?

Nora: I worked at Dominic’s before it closed down, may it rest in peace. It was a great restaurant. Then I worked at Crossroads, the vegan restaurant, which was– That was one of those environments where the chef was really totalitarian. You had to call him chef. That was my first experience of that. Then I worked at Little Dom’s and Chateau Marmont.

John: In picking those jobs or in giving those jobs, were you trying to optimize your hours to make your life manageable in a way that you could also write and do other things? Talk to us about that decision.

Nora: Yes. I always really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to be on a schedule that wasn’t a nine-to-five because not only could you get everything done that one needed to do during the day at a time where it wasn’t completely clogged with other people, but also, I liked being able to have my days free to write, to audition. The hard thing about working in the service industry is it’s like your days are free, but also, you’re working very late. There is that counterbalance of like there were times that I would write when I got home from work because you’re just so wired. You’re up until three, and then you’re sleeping until noon.

John: Talk to us about you’re waiting on these people. You’re waiting on decision makers. You’re waiting on parents, people who could be reading you, who could be casting you and things. To what degree is that a factor, or you just stop thinking about it?

Nora: I think the great gift of entering into this industry as an actor is the lack of control that you have in that profession is huge. The amount of control you have as a writer feels like the greatest relief in comparison. The thing that was always really difficult for me about being an actor was this feeling of like I can’t just go home and practice my instrument. I can’t go home and play violin, but you can go home and write. Then you have a product, and you have something that you can look at and read over and edit, and it’s immediate and pleasurable in that way.

There was a huge sense of frustration and a huge sense of, I think, impotence. Bradley Whitford, I think, talks about that. I think it was a commencement address at Juilliard or something like that. This idea that you have so much passion and desire and drive and need, and then you have this blockade of being like, “Well, if no one’s going to let me do this, I can’t do it.” I think it’s important to find something that’s lovely about working these type of day jobs in this city of Los Angeles is that almost everybody is trying to do the same thing as you. That can be demoralizing at times, or it can be really lovely to think like we’re all in the same boat, and so we might as well try to do something together.

John: If you were a waiter in Denver who dreamed of being a professional actor, well, you’re just delusional.

Nora: It’s like you’re in the wrong city.

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk through some of the other day jobs. Personal trainer? Was it personal shopper or a personal assistant?

Nora: Personal assistant. I wish I was a personal shopper.

John: That would be incredible. Personal trainer, I have many friends who are trainers, like my trainer, but other friends who train folks. Yes, you can set your schedule to some degree, but you’re always relying on other people showing up, not showing up. It doesn’t stop, I suspect.

Nora: No. Personal trainers do not get paid enough to teach classes. The people teaching your Pilates classes, your HIIT classes, they do not get paid enough. I was teaching a class that was-

John: You weren’t doing one-on-one clients. You were doing classes.

Nora: No, because I worked at a very fancy place where you had to teach the classes with the students. It was dance cardio because I used to be a dancer. It was very Jane Fonda adjacent. The reason I stopped is because I got a stress fracture in the middle of one of my classes. Being a dancer, I was like, it’s fine. I’ll go for another hour. I did. I was like, I’m in a lot of pain. That was the reason that job ended because I had to be in a boot after that. That was a crazy experience because it’s just I’ve never worked out so much in my life.

John: I have actor friends on Big Fish who would teach spin classes and things like that. It’s like, Jesus, your body.

Nora: You don’t even feel good. You’re a receptacle for food, and then you’re just constantly sweating.

[laughter]

John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.

Nora: This is at Meta.

John: Was that your last day job?

Nora: That was my last day job. I had taken a break from working in restaurants to be an assistant for the longest gig I had an assistantship for, which is about five years.

John: Assistant to what kind of person?

Nora: I did a couple. I did actresses, and then I had a stint with producers at CBS and then produce director. I bobbed around.

John: This was personal life stuff? Basically, get me this thing, deal with the plumber, that kind of assistant thing?

Nora: It was both personal life stuff, and it was also all of my on-set experience. I’d been on set a lot, which was invaluable. It was also partially writing experience as well and staffing and reading and coverage and all of that kind of stuff.

John: If you’re working, imagine like an actor on set and you’re a personal assistant for them, what is your relationship between it? Your first responsibility is to that person, but you also have to deal with the crew and production itself. How does that interface work?

Nora: It’s really difficult. I think being a personal assistant is one of the most fraught jobs because it’s all of the intimacy of an intimate relationship without any of the perks. I think it’s really difficult to hire someone to basically be a facsimile of you. Once they get good at it, I think there’s all sorts of identity politics that happen where you’re like, “I want you to be able to write my emails,” and you’re opening up your life to someone. I think it’s really difficult on both sides.

John: This does tie back into your movie then, of course, because I share everything with you. You don’t share anything back.

Nora: Exactly. This notion of like, oh, I’m being collected in some way, but I’m also collecting. I think the weird, tacit understanding of being a personal assistant is that obviously, most people who become assistants are trying to replicate a guild thing where you’re like, okay, I’m going to learn from you.

John: I’m the apprentice and you are this.

Nora: Exactly. That’s a difficult thing because you have to, I think as a boss, have to understand that your assistant has ambition. At the same time, if they’re really good, you don’t want to lose them. It’s a really strange dynamic. I think it’s difficult on both sides.

John: That gets us to meta. You just apply to an open job?

Nora: I went down the LinkedIn rabbit hole where I was– I mean, God, just throwing cover letters into the void. I think I was just at a point where I went back to restaurant work. I went back, and I was a counter service waitress at Pine & Crane.
Going back to a restaurant at 31 is much different than in my twenties. My body was just getting wrecked. I was getting really mentally exhausted and feeling really bad about myself, especially compared to my friends who had enough disposable income to go on vacations and do fun things. I was like, “Okay, someone’s got to give. I’ve got to figure something out.” I started the LinkedIn route. I was actually recruited by meta because of some editing work that I had done for a nonprofit.

John: Some video editing or some text editing?

Nora: Some text editing. Yes, some text editing and development that I had done for a nonprofit. They’ve recruited me to be a data analyst.

John: Let’s talk through your advice to, let’s say, the next Nora is moving out from New York to Los Angeles and is looking for a day job so that they can act or write. Where to first? Do you think restaurants is the right, best first place? What’s your instinct?

Nora: I love restaurants. I think especially because it’s where I earned all my friends. It’s where I earned. It’s where I met all my friends. I had to work. I think especially most people who are attracted to this business are people who really thrive on novelty. The lovely thing about a restaurant is that every day is different. You really observe human behavior from close proximity. It gives you a lot of wonderful skills of memorization but also performance. As depressing as it is to have spaghetti sauce on your hands and under your fingernails for five days out of the week, it’s like there’s also some type of brilliant resilience in that.

John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.

Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Links:

• Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
• Nora Garrett
• After the Hunt
• Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
• The Rehearsal
• Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
• Big Reader Bad Grades
• BenDeLaCreme on Good One
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
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• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 698 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss movies that never existed, from high-profile projects that got shelved at the last minute, to our own experiences with unmade projects. Then, it’s time for some listener questions covering multi-language dialogue and multi-part movies, among other things.

In our bonus segment for premium members, if no one paid us to write screenplays anymore, Craig, if they would never get made, would we continue to write them as a form?

Craig: Uh. [chuckles]

John: Yes, you have an hour to think about that.

Craig: I don’t know if I need an hour, but all right.

John: We’ll talk about the pros and cons of the screenplay format. It’s a literary thing independent of a way to make a movie. Craig, this last week, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon.

Craig: Congrats.

John: Which was really fun. I’d done the second half of it six years ago. This week, I did the first half. As I was running it, I was thinking like, “I wonder if Craig knows these things.” How do they know when a racer crosses the finish line? How do they know the time of a racer?

Craig: If I had to guess, I don’t think it’s as fancy as like an RFID tag in a bib.

John: It is an RFID tag in a bib.

Craig: Oh, it is? It is as fancy as that.

John: The day before the race, you go and you pick up your bib, and that’s the thing you have paper-clipped onto your shirt, or we have little fancy magnets now because we’re fancy. On the back of that bib is an RFID tag, and so as you’re running the race, you’re constantly passing through gates that are tracking that you ran through. There’s an app that you install on your phone-

Craig: For friends and family to follow on.

John: -to find you, but also, it tells you in real time what your pace is.

Craig: Oh, so you actually carry a phone with you as you’re running?

John: I do carry a phone with me as I’m running.

Craig: Because that’s extra weight.

John: It’s extra weight, but it’s fine. Most people are, I think, are running with phones these days.

Craig: Running with phones, yes. It would be rough if you were tracking this, your loved one is in a marathon and they just stop.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: They stop for a long time, then you hear sirens. It’s rough.

John: It’s not good.

Craig: No.

John: It’s helpful for your friends and family because that way, they can figure out where you are on the race, so they can come and cheer you on on a certain place.

Craig: Yes, that makes absolute sense. It’s a nicer scenario than the one I suggested.

John: The whole idea of RFID and tracking leads to a bigger question because earlier this summer, I was on a cruise in Alaska. On this boat, you wear this little medallion that has an RFID with you, and it’s super handy because, again, you pull up the app and it’s like, “I want a cup of coffee.” Wherever you are on the boat, [crosstalk] press one button, they find you, they bring you this stuff. It’s nice.

Craig: Oh, they’re bringing it to you?

John: They bring it to you, not to your cabin, just to you-

Craig: To you.

John: -directly, wherever you are.

Craig: Yes, right now, I guess our phones are that thing, but eventually, we’ll all be chipped at birth.

John: Both the race and the cruise ship were cases where that kind of constant surveillance I liked, but I don’t want to have it everywhere all the time. I don’t want to be forced into it.

Craig: No, I don’t want to have a situation where a corporation can track me wherever I go, although, currently, that is the situation I have. Let’s face it.

John: It is, yes.

Craig: They know everything. I was just thinking in my mind, if you did start to chip human beings at birth.

John: Yes, because you’re a parent who wants to know where your kid is.

Craig: Let’s say the state has decided. In our rougher scenario, every human shall be chipped. I’m trying to think biologically where to put this so that it won’t be dislodged by growth. I’m struggling. I think everything grows. Nothing is fully sized when you’re born, not even one little tiny thing.

John: Yes, your eyes are bigger, proportionally bigger, but the eyes are still going to continue to grow.

Craig: Everything grows, so I don’t know where to put it.

Drew Marquardt: With animals, they’d put it under the skin and it sits on top.

Craig: Animals grow, yes, and they don’t grow as much as we do. Humans are ridiculous. We’re born so stupidly small compared to–

John: Early because–

Craig: Early, because of our dumb heads.

John: Otherwise, we wouldn’t fit through the birth canal.

Craig: Yes, but I think you could put it under the skin, I suppose. I just wonder if it would get irritated, or it could move, it could shift.

John: Yes, you might swap that at a certain point.

Craig: Yes, maybe you do like a little baby tag. Then you do a kid tag. It’d be great. Kids would love it.

John: Oh, fantastic. Alrighty, the issue of tracking your kids and turning on Find My Friends and Find My is a thing. I remember talking with you at a certain point, and we realized that I think our daughters are at the same concert in Boston. You’re like, “Let me pull up,” and was like, “Oh yes, she’s there.” You did that. I didn’t do that because I sort of have an unspoken thing that I don’t find my friends when she’s not in Los Angeles.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I never have to look at it, but when Jessie was in school in Boston, I never went to go look for her. I would look for Melissa, like, “Where’s my wife?” Always at the tennis. The tennis is where she is. It has a list. It’s like, “Melissa is 8 miles away. Jessica is 3,000-something miles away.” Then I’d be like, “Oh yes, look, there she is in Boston somewhere.”

John: I only share location with family. I don’t share with

Drew. That feels like–

Craig: I share my location with Drew, which is weird.

John: It’s just strange. Yes.

Craig: I just want him to know. No, just family. Just really, just actually, not even my full family, just Melissa and Jessica. You know what I don’t use enough? When you are meeting somebody somewhere in a large public place, you can share your location with them, which obviously Drew and his generation does constantly. I’m like, “Oh yes, I forgot.”

John: Yes. I will do that temporarily, but I don’t do it with friends. Drew, do you share your location with any friends?

Drew: I only do the temporary. Even me and my wife don’t share. We don’t have Find my Friends.

Craig: What? Oh wow.

John: Wow.

Drew: Pure trust.

Craig: It’s not about trust. It’s not like I think, “Oh, she’s going whoring again.” I–

John: To me, it’s always like, how close is Mike to being home?

Craig: Yes, exactly. If I’m going to order food, should I see if she’s going to be here or–?

Drew: I don’t know. It feels like a threshold that because I haven’t crossed it yet, I don’t want to cross it yet.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: You’re up to something.

Drew: [laughs]

John: It’s all– [crosstalk]

Craig: I am absolutely [unintelligible 00:06:01] Drew is up to something.

Drew: I’m whoring.

Craig: You’re whoring?

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I love whore as a verb–

John: He’s a secret assassin. He’s out there killing people.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Not anymore. Some follow up. Hey, remember we wrote a book?

Craig: Oh my goodness. We wrote a book, and John, I have an author page-

John: On Amazon.

Craig: -on Amazon, which as you can imagine is populated with almost nothing. It’s got my picture.

John: Yes, got your picture. People have been sending Drew their pre-order receipts, which is great.

Craig: Amazing. How are we doing? Are we going to be doing a lot of signing?

Drew: We have about 150 so far.

Craig: Oh, that’s pretty good. Of just people that sent receipts?

Drew: Just people who sent receipts.

John: Oh. A reminder, if you pre-order the book from wherever you order it from, so not just Amazon, but any place– [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure, anywhere.

John: Send your little receipt through to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. We’re not quite sure what it’s going to be yet. It could be a bonus chapter. It could be some successful video report.

Craig: It could be a brand new car.

John: It could be something cool, but we’ll send that out well before the book comes out.

Craig: Do we have any sense, other than the receipts that you have received, does Amazon tell you how many people are buying it or–?

John: Pre-ordering it? I think Crown, our publisher in the US, has had this,-

Craig: Oh, they got– [crosstalk]

John: -and so at some point, they’ll tell us.

Craig: At some point they’ll give us the bad news.

John: They’ll say, “We’re really worried, John, Craig.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: No, I think they’re happy with almost anything.

Craig: Wow.

John: No, because here’s the thing, it’s–

Craig: That’s a low bar.

John: There are books that need to be giant hits out of the gate and needs to hit those lists. We are a catalog title, where there’s like, we’re evergreen.

Craig: We are not the latest Stephen King novel.

John: Yes. Questions that I got off of Reddit and other people asking, audio book. Yes, if you see, there’s a listing with a little button for audio book, there’s plans for an audio book. There’s nothing to announce yet, but there’s going to be an audio book. It’s not me and Craig talking.

Craig: Should we just get Ryan Reynolds to do it? [laughs] Just hold Ryan down and force him to do it at some point?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’ll be fun.

John: Yes, good.

Craig: Because occasionally, in the middle of an audio book, you get the sense that the person reading it is a hostage. [chuckles] They try and run, and there’s scuffle, and then they come back and resume reading.

John: For the podcast, they did lauch about the [unintelligible 00:08:02] books. The episode I did about the audiobook was actually really fascinating because I met the guy in LA, who actually recorded the book, and just his whole process was great and crazy.

Crown came to us and said like, “Hey, do you and Craig want to record the audiobook?” I’m like, “No. We record a podcast every week, and that’s plenty. No. No, thank you.

Craig: Yes, it’s too much reading.

John: It’ll be great to have a real professional do it.

Craig: Yes, terrific, so Ryan Reynolds?

John: Or somebody like Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Yes, somebody bigger.

John: Yes.

Craig: Tom Hanks? [chuckles]

John: Yes. Crown said we should go for Tom Hanks.

Craig: Tom Hanks would be great.

John: Yes.

Craig: is he doing stuff? We’ll check into it.

John: I’ve heard that the Britney Spears biography that is read by Michelle Williams is incredible, so maybe Michelle Williams should be the choice.

Drew: That would be perfect.

Craig: That’s kind of amazing.

John: The person who I think is actually going to record it, is actually listening to the podcast right now, and he’s so upset that–

Craig: He’s like, “I’m an effin’ person.”

John: He’s an effin’ person in the world.

Craig: I’m an effin’ person.

John: Other questions were about the international versions, and so, there are no plans right now for a translation, probably because if you’re listening to this podcast, you speak English, you can probably read English. People ask about like, “Oh, I want to buy it in Europe. I want to buy it in Asia. Where do I get it from?” I asked, and the real answer is, wherever you get your English books is where you should go, so go to whatever bookstore or whatever online site is that you buy books in English, because they will have it. They’ll either get the US or the UK version. They’re both basically the same.

Craig: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that the marketplace will determine these things, if there’s a clamoring from a particular country. I’m looking at you, Brazil.

John: Yes, my agent was saying that there are cases, you’ll be in India, and you’ll see the US and the UK version side by side on a shelf. That’s just what happens.

Craig: Does just that color is spelled differently?

John: No. Honestly, the UK version is not changing our spelling.

Craig: What is the difference? Page size?

John: I think page size and slightly different pricing.

Craig: Oh.

John: Because of imports and–

Craig: What, tariffs?

John: Tariffs and things.

Craig: What? What? What?

John: What? What? What? Books are physical things that are printed in places. Other bits of follow up. My game Birdigo that I made with Corey Martin is out now on Steam. It’s a whopping $8.49.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: It’s a huge burden.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Ugh. We’ve gotten so many good reviews in the press,-

Craig: Great.

John: -and we’re currently 100% positive on Steam itself, which is great.

Craig: Only 100%?

John: Only 100%.

Craig: If I go in there just as a jerk, I can get it to 99%? [chuckles]

John: Weirdly, it would actually help us a little bit because how Steam ratings work is that it’s based on total number of reviews. We’re at the threshold where we’re listed as positive, but once we get to the next threshold of reviews, which is 50 or 100, then it becomes very positive.

Craig: I see.

John: Then it becomes overwhelmingly positive.

Craig: I see.

John: If you are a person like Craig who has played the game and enjoyed it and want to leave us a review, leave us a review because it actually does help.

Craig: That makes sense because if you put something on there, you could say, “Hey, I’m going to get 50 of my friends to do a review.” They need to know that it’s more than just the friends and family. I get that.

John: Yes, so that’s what–

Craig: That’s fantastic.

John: Yes, that’s good news.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: More follow up. Last week, we talked about Solar Storms as part of How Would This Be A Movie. Drew, what did we hear?

Drew: Multiple people wrote in that it sounded very much like the novel Aurora by a former Scriptnotes guest, David Koepp.

John: David Koepp, that hack.

Craig: Koepp, what can he do? By the way, David Koepp has quietly crushed the Summer Box office. Everyone was going on about Superman and Fantastic Four. Meanwhile, Jurassic, Jurassic-ness?

John: The Jurassic World Rebirth.

Craig: Jurassic World Rebirth has done better than both of those movies. It’s just massive.

John: Massive. Massive.

Craig: It’s like it’s grossed like almost $800 million globally. That’s David Koepp still doing it.

John: Also, Presence, a movie that Drew and I both saw, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Drew: Black Bag too.

John: Yes, Black Bag also.

Drew: Black Bag is great.

John: Just killing it.

Craig: Just Koepp, just–

John: Keopp it in. Koepping it real.

Craig: You cannot beat David Koepp. Also, side note, and we’ve had him on this, one of the loveliest people. Just incredible guy. Love him.

John: Love it. I should not be surprised that he saw the scientific thing that exists in the world. It’s like, I should–

Craig: Of course he did.

John: I should write a book about this.

Craig: Yes, he’s sort of casually predicted that we would eventually get that and fumble it. Although, if you have a David Koepp novel, and it has not yet been turned into a movie, that is an indication that it should not be a movie because you know people must have tried.

John: Yes. What’s wrong with a book that it’s not–?

Craig: I think the book is probably great, it’s just that it’s not movie-ish.

John: Maybe.

Craig: How does that not happen?

John: He’s so angry now listening to this podcast.

Craig: I hope he is.

John: Yes. We were talking back in Episode 675 about lost genres or genres that people should see at least one example of a movie in. A bunch of people wrote in with recommendations for genres that people need to at least see one thing in. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Andrew writes, “Yakuza films, they are more often than not just as economical as noir films, but even more stylish, cynical, and tragic.” He recommends Pale Flower from 1964.

John: I’ve not seen any of these in the genre, and I think it’s a good recommendation.

Craig: Sure.

John: What else do we got?

Drew: John James recommends giallo, which is Italian horror.

Craig: Of course, yes, no.

Drew: Dario Argento’s Deep Red.

Craig: No.

Drew: No?

Craig: No. Not for me.

Drew: Not for you?

Craig: I’ve seen some of it. It’s not for me. It’s gross.

John: I’ve seen an Argento movie, and I do understand it as a genre. It’s just nothing for me. Either too, but it’s–

Craig: Right, other people, sure.

John: Should see it.

Craig: I think Suspiria-

John: Suspiria, yes.

Craig: -that’s the one to see, and then you would know.

Drew: I think nerds say that that’s not quite a giallo for some reason.

John: Oh.

Craig: No.

Drew: That would be my pick.

Craig: Nerds say that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: I’m not going to listen. Let’s see if some of them write in. [chuckles]

John: What if we said like, David Koepp’s genre is dinosaurs, and then it’s just like, “Oh, but I also made Black Bag.” There’s no dinosaurs in Black Bag.

Craig: Black Bag’s not quite a dinosaur film. Then we’re like, “Yes, it is, nerds.”

Drew: [chuckles] Absolutely, and they just get angry.

John: Because this is about old spies and young spies.

Craig: Yes, it’s dinosaurs.

Drew: Dwayne writes, “Post-Michael Moore Americana documentaries, featuring cheeky editing, eccentric people, and small stories about the alluring weirdness of pre-9/11 Middle America. Documentaries like Hands on a Hard Body, or American Movie, or Wonderland.”

Craig: You know what? I’ve seen two of those movies. Yes, they were both interesting snapshots of a time.

John: Yes. Also like a style in editing. It’s good to point out what it is. It’s not that Michael Moore’s sort of like, “Here’s a broad statement about a thing.” It’s very specific on people and behaviors.

Craig: Hands on a Hard Body probably got 40% of its audience just from title confusion. Just brilliant.

John: Love it. So good.

Craig: Do you know what Hands on a Hard Body is though?

John: Absolutely, it says something about–

Craig: Oh, you might have seen even the show. They made a show.

John: Yes, they made a Broadway show of it.

Craig: Yes, I saw that show.

John: I never saw the show, but how are the songs? Were they–?” [crosstalk]

Craig: I remember there was one great one. I remember that. There was one really good, like eleven o’clock-ish kind of number.

John: How was the truck? Was the truck good?

Craig: The truck was great. They had it on a turntable, and the cast had to keep their hands on it. Although they were allowed to sort of like astral project forward to sing their solos and then move back to the truck.

John: Oh yes, that makes sense.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes. Did you ever see Waitress either on stage or-

Craig: No.

John: -the musical version? It’s one of the rare cases where they captured the Broadway version and really filmed it in a way that’s impressive. I’d recommend it for people who want to see it. Last one.

Drew: Last one is Aldo says, “If John likes Memories of a Murder, he’ll probably dig Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the Japanese horror genre.

John: I don’t know very much about Japanese horror, and that’s another good recommendation for me. If we could combine Yakuza horror,-

Craig: I’m sure that’s good.

John: -that’s has to have– Oh my God. As I said the sentence, like that one can happen.

Craig: Japanese horror is pretty cool. I had a pretty cool moment. Then Korea came along and just ate its lunch-

John: Yes, crazy.

Craig: -for East-Asian horror films. Kairo, aka Pulse is Japanese, they tried to– Well, they attempted to adapt it here in the US. Didn’t go well, but that movie has one of the scariest single scenes in it where basically, nothing happens. Totally worth it for that. Just the scene of a ghost walking down a hallway. It was very cool.

John: Love it.

Craig: If you know, you know.

John: Some more follow up. We had Scott Frank on and we’re talking about writing education.

Drew: Tim says, “I’m a high school film and TV teacher, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of teaching structure as a shortcut to storytelling, mostly because I don’t get much time with my hundred plus students before we need to move on to the rest of film and TV production. The conversation about craft versus voice really landed.

The Scott Frank school of screenwriting seems to emphasize practice as a path to discovering voice, which also helps to answer a question I’ve been wrestling with. Why teach students to write screenplays if AI can do it better than most of them? The answer is ChatGPT doesn’t have a unique voice, we do. This year, I hope to shift my focus to helping students find their voice and maybe a little less on the proper use of a parenthetical.”

Craig: Oh, wonderful. That sounds great. Because structure and all the rest of it, these parentheticals, margins, rules, format, all that stuff, you can pick that stuff up in three days if you feel like it. What you can’t pick up in three days is knowing what to write. I could certainly see a class where everybody has to write the same scene, and they have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, until it’s something special. This is how you find your voice.

John: Love it.

Drew: More follow up, this one from Kate. “I’m a playwright and I teach theater at a small high school. I actually had to step into this job mid-year when the other teacher had to leave unexpectedly. I was so excited because in addition to my theater classes, I’d be teaching a screenwriting and playwriting course. The previous teacher had focused a lot on pitching outlines and working on index cards. Students wanted to talk about their ideas, but had trouble putting anything on the page.

I often got the feeling that students felt stuck or afraid when it was time to write their projects because they had an outline that they had to follow. Almost like they were afraid to write a scene because it may be wrong or different from their original outline. When you suggested writing short scenes with no pressure to be part of a larger script, I was practically fist pumping in my car. Yes, short exercises give young writers permission to experiment. Be messy, make mistakes. This is how we learned to write.”

Craig: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Look, we may be changing things one teaching program at a time. Again, here’s your assignment, a scene. Write it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. Have your classmates perform it. Rewrite it, rewrite it, rewrite it. If you could take a class where you end up with one great three-page scene, you’ve come so far, baby.

John: Absolutely. Because you would probably have started this class thinking, “I cannot do this thing. I have no idea what this looks like in my head,” but the ability to actually visualize, “Okay, this is what’s happening in the scene, that I can picture the whole thing. I can hear the whole thing. Now I’m going to capture it down on paper in a way that makes sense,” is so crucial.

A thing I did for myself when I was in high school, I think, is I had an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had recorded on probably VHS. I just went and transcribed it, and then actually tried to write what the actual scene would look like on the page. That’s a good practice too, just like how do you– You see a thing, but what does it actually look like in words on paper?

Craig: Yes. The iteration, I think, is an incredibly important thing. I think that that’s not given enough attention. Being forced to rewrite the same thing over and over, it sounds bad, except you write a scene and then you share it. It is exposed. You learn how it’s landing. People give you feedback. Are we bored? Are we interested? Do we have questions? This doesn’t make sense. Or I’m just bored. What else could you do here? How could this be richer? What does the room smell like, look like? All those wonderful things we do. Then you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. At some point, you’re going to find something.

John: Yes. As you talked about in the episode, acting classes are so helpful because that paradigm of just like, you have to be on your feet and doing a scene and you’re getting feedback on it. It’s just like, you just have to do it.

Craig: You have to do it.

John: You can’t talk about acting a lot.

Craig: Because you’re performing the scene, you are required to think about the things that happen in between your lines. Where were you the moment before? Massively important. How did that statement land with you? Are you lying? All these wonderful things need to be in the scene you write when people are learning how to write. If they’re concentrating on hitting the fricking midpoint, whatever the hell, they’re just not going to get it.

John: All right, let’s go to our main topic today, which is movies that never were. I’m not quite sure how this idea came to me. It could have been an article I read, but this week, I got thinking back about giant movies that never happened, things I sort of know about or I’ve heard about, but it never actually became movies that we saw in the theaters.

A lot of these are superhero movies. There was the Tim Burton version of Superman with Nicolas Cage.

Craig: Yes, I remember that.

John: McG Superman that had a script by JJ Abrams. Okay. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. I’d actually read that script a zillion years ago.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: It was a, Spider-Man versus Electro. There was like a–

Craig: Oh, which they ended up doing anyway.

John: Yes. There was a Justice League that was supposed to be directed by George Miller.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. I think it was around the time of the earlier Record strike. Of course the Batgirl movie that was actually shot, but then it got shelved.

Craig: It got shelved.

John: Which is a really rare situation. Superhero movies are really common for this, but also Jodorowsky’s Dune is sort of legendary. There’s a documentary about that. Then Mouse Guard, which was the very expensive adaptation of a beloved children’s book or middle-grade book that Wes Ball I think was supposed to direct. They pulled at it the very last minute.

Craig: There are also these movies that I’m sure you either wrote on or somebody asked you to write on them that have been floating around seemingly forever.

John: Yes. Did you ever work on Bob: The Musical?

Craig: No, but I know that Alec Berg did.

John: Yes, I wrote on it. The amount of money spent on scripts for that movie, it’s got to be astronomical. Real composers did songs for it.

Craig: There are things like this.

John: Here’s the good scene of Bob: The Musical, a man who hates musicals wakes up and discovers he’s in a musical and has to get out of the musical. It’s a comedy in the world of a Liar Liar or those kinds of things.

Craig: Sure. Which it sounds like the premise of Schmigadoon!, which obviously came after the 800 years of development of Bob: The Musical. Yes, they’re just these movies. I remember in the ‘90s working on Stretch Armstrong. There are movies that they really wanted to make out of a toy or an object. Eight Ball’s been floating around for a while, the Magic Eight Ball. Then Monopoly. Monopoly–

John: Oh, yes. There have been so many versions of Monopoly.
Craig: I think they announced a new one recently. Every year, a new Monopoly is going to not happen.
[laughter]

Craig: It’s actually kind of amusing that that’s the property that people lose so much money on. [laughs]

John: Let’s just talk about the pure development projects. Because Monopoly, as far as I know, never went to pre-production, never spent that money. It was probably just on scripts.

Craig: Yes, endless development.

John: The endless development things, sometimes it’s all with one company. Therefore, it’s one property that has hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of script fees against it. Some cases, which I suspect is the Monopoly case, they didn’t set up this place or that place or this place or that place. Those all become new projects, essentially.

Craig: The rights lapse.

John: Therefore, the studio burned a certain amount of money on a script, but they can’t make the property anymore.

Craig: Clue they’ve been trying to redo again. Risk is one that was going around for a while. What are you supposed to do with that exactly?

John: No. Yes. There’s a version of that movie that could have been terrific, but we never saw it.

Craig: Board games are not a great idea to adapt. I understand why everybody went for them.

John: Yes, it’s a recognizable title.

Craig: Clue–

John: Clue is a better idea than most. It actually has characters.

Craig: The Clue that was made is a cult classic and I love it. It is probably the one that’s most– Because there’s a narrative to it. Someone killed somebody with a thing in a place. Monopoly, Risk, they’re just words we know.

John: Here we’re talking about the IP that is just like, is that even a really good idea for a movie? In other cases, like they are good ideas for movies that are based on a really good book.

Craig: They just don’t seem to be able to happen.

John: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the things that don’t happen and why-

Craig: Sure.

John: -they don’t happen. Sometimes there’s a piece of talent who was keyly involved in getting it set up and getting the momentum going on it. Like a Will Smith. I’ve been on a couple of really expensive projects with Will Smith that didn’t go forward. He loses interest or another thing comes up in front of it. When a director or a star has like 10 projects, nine of those aren’t happening generally. Sometimes you’re one of those things. People are gambling like this is going to be the one that they’ll say yes to.

Craig: Sometimes there’s projects where everybody, it feels like, is tight. The pressure to make it, the costs of the rights, some sort of window to get an actor or a director makes everybody tight. Everyone’s tense. Everything is overexamined, overthought, overanalyzed, and nothing can survive that generally. Nothing is natural about that process. Everything is hyper-coordinated, and you end up with a hyper-coordinated script, which nobody wants to make.

John: Some cases it’s not the script that was ultimately the problem though. It was that to actually make the movie, it just became impossibly expensive.

Craig: There is that BioShock.

John: Yes, so BioShock is a great, great property, but the world building in it is so expensive that it’s hard to justify making that as the movie. They’re trying to do it as a series now, we’ll see what that is, but those are real issues.

Craig: I think now in the era of these big streaming shows, it’s doable to do BioShock, for sure. I do remember being on the Universal lot. There was a building that used to be Ivan Reitman’s company, Montecito. It’s a big building, and they had all this great Ghostbusters stuff in there, and then–

John: Was that the big blue house or a different one?

Craig: No, it wasn’t big blue house. It was more like this squarish modernish building. It was pretty cool. It was near the big blue house. Then it got taken over by Gore Verbinski when they were well on their way to making that BioShock. I remember going in there, I think to meet with Gore, and there was a big daddy– I don’t know [unintelligible 00:26:23] Just this big oldie timey diver suit with a drill hand, full life size in the lobby. I’m like, “Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

John: Then, it didn’t happen.

Craig: Then, it didn’t happen.

John: Let’s talk about that because more than I think the money you’re spending on scripts, that kind of R&D where you’re actually starting to really go into prep, that’s where you’re spending some real money. There was a project I was on a few years ago that I finally asked, “What actually happened?” I realized and I was told, they spent tens of billions of dollars that I did not know they were spending on storyboards and everything else.

That momentum, it’s a weird thing. You think, “Oh, it’s a sunk cost policy, so therefore, they’ll make it because we have to keep going because we already spent all this money,” but at a certain point, they realized like, oh, no, no, that the movie itself is going to be too expensive to make and we have to stop.

Craig: One of the things that is true about Hollywood, and I’m not sure it’s quite as true in other industries, is that there’s much more turnover. Now, Hollywood has actually been a fairly stable place leadership-wise over the last few years. When you look at how long Donna Langley has been running Universal, Bob Iger came back to continue to run Disney.

Generally speaking, every three, four years, somebody got kicked out and a new person got put in, and that was the point where they would sit down, look at stuff and go, “This isn’t my Concorde fallacy.

John: No.

Craig: -this thing is absolutely turning around.” They would just drop the axe on those things knowing full well that they couldn’t be blamed for the money that was spent. They could only be rewarded for not spending more money. In that regard, Hollywood had these weird safeguards against the sunk cost fallacy.

John: I’m sure there is a corollary to the sunk cost fallacy where if someone just recognizes it doesn’t matter how much we’ve spent before. With the project I see right now, is there a way to go forward and have this make sense?

Craig: Yes, that’s the fallacy part, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Somebody else comes in and goes, “Oh, I see we’ve all been engaging in the sunk cost fallacy on this. It’s over.” That’s a traumatic thing. When we talk about storyboards, and a large statue, and rooms of people that are trying to find locations. There’s a lot of jobs. A lot of those jobs at least used to be here too. Now, those too start to go away.

John: There’s other issues that come up. Once you think you’re making a movie, you’re starting to reserve a stage space, and so you’re like, “Oh my God, we need to shoot this in Australia. We need to shoot this in London. We need to scramble to get these things,” so you’re putting holds on things. I remember talking with a producer who coming out of the pandemic, it was like, “We have to reserve stage space, but I think we’re going to be okay to start shooting, but I’m not sure we’re going to be–“ Just having to make these calls, because it’s like, you can be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a stage that you’ve rented that you can’t actually use.

Craig: Stage space is probably the largest pressure behind ratings for any network streamer to decide if they’re going to renew a show. They may be on the fence ratings-wise, but while they’re there, somebody from that show is going to say, “If you don’t renew us in the next week, we won’t have stages and we won’t be able to make the show.”

John: No.

Craig: “Are we going or are we not?” Stage space is the thing that makes some places– As attractive as the tax credits may be. For instance, in Australia, not a ton of stages.

John: No.

Craig: UK, amazing tax credits but not as many stages as you would think.

John: When I was shooting my one and only TV show up in Toronto, it was at a Canadian boom. There were so many things shooting in Canada, we couldn’t find stage spaces, so we ended up having to shoot like a warehouse.

Craig: Warehouses.

John: That was not really meant to be this. I’m sure you ran into similar situations like Calgary was not intended to have as much production as you were doing.

Craig: No, Calgary had one facility that was actually constructed to be stage space. The other large facility was two massive warehouses that they had retrofitted, but barely. In Vancouver there are both kinds, but there are a lot. Part of our thing, we’re going to be up there I think going side by side with Shogun this time, so Justin, and Rachel, and I are like, “Hey, are you using this person?” “Yes.” “Can I have that?” “No.” Where are your stages? Who’s your makeup person? It’s been a lot of that.

They have constructed more stage space there. When you look at other places the other issue is size of stages. Northern Ireland built quite a few stages during the Game of Thrones boom, but size like sometimes you need an enormous. Then there are the specialty stages, like at Warner Brothers, which has 20-something stages that are currently sitting mostly empty. Just tragedy. They have one, I think it’s stage 16, with the floor actually, you can remove the floor and it’s got a pit, which is very cool for all sorts of interesting things.

John: Let’s talk about this from a writer’s point of view and how this matters and what to think about with this. Some of the properties you mentioned early on, like the superhero movies or the things that are based on titles, the reason why a screenwriter might pursue them and take them is because they will pay you money to do the thing. It’s not like some wildfire. They’re actually going to pay you your quote to do a thing, and that can be great and that’s fantastic. I always go into those jobs knowing it’s like I might so naive to think like I’m the one person who’s going to crack the Monopoly movie that everyone else has been trying to do.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. I remember I think somebody had asked Ted Elliott around the time that the third Pirates movie came out, and they were saying, “How do you pick projects? Because people come to you and offer you things. What kind of movie do you want to write?” He said, “Movies that are getting made.” [chuckles] That was it.

John: That’s always been my answer about what genre- [crosstalk]

Craig: Genre is movies that are getting made. Yes, when you take one of those jobs, you have to know I am seventh in a line of 14.

John: You have to go in both hoping and expecting that it’s going to work, and then also, holding your heart a place that like, I understand why it could not work.

Craig: Yes, it’s a job. Yes. Everyone’s looking at it that way too. Sometimes the executives are like, “We don’t know why somebody made some deal with a wraith and we have to make this film or we’ll be cursed forever. We don’t want to, so we don’t really care.”

John: I want to distinguish between those two things. Listen, this is the luxury of where I’m at in my career, that I don’t pursue those things that I just don’t care about. Like Drew will say, like a lot of stuff comes my way, and it’s like, “No, that’s not for me.” I’ll often say like, “That’s not for me, but there’s a writer out there who will love that, and I’m so excited for them to do that adaptation of–

Craig: Monopoly.

John: Yes. There’s somebody who said that’s their favorite property at all time, but I try not to approach those jobs with such cynicism. For a weekly, if I’m just going on to fix a problem for a person–

Craig: Yes, I’ll do anything for a week.

John: Yes. Oh I know some of the movies you’ve worked on.

Craig: I’ve worked on just Extraordinary Girl. I’ll work on anything for a week. What do I care? You know what? I can’t make it worse.

John: No.

Craig: I try, I do my best, I make sure to listen to everybody, and I improve it. I really do.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I do the job I’m paid to do. What I know is, and I’ve said this at times to them, I’m like, “I just want you to know I’m making this corpse okay for an open coffin funeral. That’s what I’m doing. Just so you guys know. This is not a patient I can cure, but you’ll be able to look at it.”
[laughter]

Craig: They’re like, “Great. We thank you. That’s what we were hoping for. We just want mom to be able to see her boy there in his little suit. Sometimes that even that’s hard.

John: Yes. Sometimes there’s just this fundamental problems.

Craig: Yes, but I’m always honest about it, but yes, for a week. To actually do a movie– When I started out, there are movies where I’m like, It’s job. A job’s a job.

John: A job’s a job.

Craig: I got to to it. I need money. You know what, I will learn along the way.

John: I did.

Craig: I did. I will also gain fans along the way. People that hire writers. Everybody calls everybody and asks. They all have their lists. Writers move up and down the list.

John: I was on Zoom this week with an executive who I’ve known and then talked about parties and had meetings with for 30 years. I’ve never worked with him or for him, but like, “Oh it’s great to catch up with you, Michael. I’ve not seen you.” I’ve not had a chance to do it, and it would be great to be able to do this project with him.” Going and knowing like it may not happen, and it’s okay also it doesn’t happen.

Craig: Sure, yes. There are some things you can just sort of smell the curse on them.

John: Yes, and I will run away from those. I’ve also learned, it’s like, “Oh, there’s this terrible person who’s attached to this intellectual property.” I will never touch it because that person, I cannot have in my life at all.

Craig: Correct. There are things where people start talking about them, and I think, “Oh, this is– Oh. Oh.”

John: Sure, yes.

Craig: “I wonder why this hasn’t–“

John: Absolutely. I remember loving that book and like, “Oh that guy.”

Craig: “Oh, this person’s involved.” Goodbye.

John: All right, let’s get to some listener questions. What do we got first, Drew?

Drew: Vanessa writes, “I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now, and every time the intro comes around and the chime starts playing, I think I’ve heard that before. This email is asking if the chime is fully original or inspired by a movie or something like it.”

John: That is the “boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.” That is a thing I wrote originally for my short film, The Remnants. I thought I just needed a quick little intro that I sort of felt like The Office, but even quicker than that. I think it’s original, but you can actually find it in other things. Over the years, people have said like, “Oh, I found this theme from the ‘70s, which actually that has the same chord progressions.” It’s so simple that–

Craig: Yes, I know, it’s five notes. It’s five notes. Of course. It’s five notes that resolve. Yes, it will be in other things. It’s not like an identifiable jingle from any popular thing. Yes, but sure, you can find a five note progression before. There’s no new five note progression.

John: I will say, as we come up to episode 700, one of my favorite things about the show is that our incredible listeners starting with Matthew [unintelligible 00:37:03] who did so many of the incredible early intro, but just have taken those five notes and just done remarkable things with them. I’ll have a new one this week and every week. Please keep sending in your interpretations of the intro to make our outros.

Craig: Love it.

Drew: Larry writes, “”What’s the best way to watch a movie to put money back in the pockets of the people who made it? I half remember at one point that renting something out iTunes was better for y’all, but I feel like perhaps that’s out of date.”

Craig: No, that’s in date.

John: In date. We’re talking about the rental on iTunes or Amazon or wherever you rent those things. That rate is actually really good for us.

Craig: That is the best residual rate we have of anything. We got that all the way back in 2000. Yes, 2000, I’m pretty sure it was, or 2001. I think we got it mostly because the companies hadn’t really caught on yet. They were like, “What are you? Okay.” I remember the deal was that they refused to do sales. It was they were just like, “We’ll give you rentals. We’ll give you a great rate on rentals.”

John: If I’m this is a movie that I want to watch and I feel like I’m going to watch it once, I will rent it. If the movie is like, I think I may want to watch it again or if there’s something like an adaptation, I’ll buy it off of iTunes. Listen, there’s times where it’s like, “Oh, it’s got to go be streaming someplace,” and it’s like, “Sure, I’ll spend like two minutes to look see if it’s streaming someplace,” but just buy the movie or rent the movie because it’s just, I just have it.

Craig: I will say too that is very nice that he’s asking, but the truth is, the nicest way to watch anything, assuming you’re not pirating, is to watch it however you want. Rent, buy, stream, add support, doesn’t matter, just do it. Then, if you like it, tell other people to watch it too because the that’s the best residual rate we get is popularity. Spread the word, and that’s as best you can do, but you don’t need to be too concerned about the ethical viewing. [chuckles]

John: Yes, as long as you’re not pirating it, you’re making ethical choices. My movie The Nines, I think it’s it showed up on streaming every once in a while, but it’s basically always been a purchase or download, and so just like it’s cheap, it’s like $3.99 to rent the movie. Just watch the movie. It’s a good movie.

Craig: Just watch that.

John: Just watch the movie.

Craig: It’s all good.

Drew: Jeremy writes, “As a non-american, I’m horrified to watch what’s happening in your country, and my screenwriter brain was wondering how you would go about writing it in a humane, empathetic way. How do you write scripts in the era of neo-fascism that won’t dehumanize those who suffer most?”

Craig: I’m not sure I understand the question.

John: Yes, I think we may be some language barriers here, but I think I take this to mean like recognizing that your country’s is falling into fascism, how do you go approach writing movies, and does that change how we’re thinking about the stories we’re trying to tell and the choices we’re making?

Craig: if you’re writing a story that touches upon themes like that, then yes, you would want to touch on things, the part that I’m not quite getting is the, how do you be humane?

John: Humane. I think, from the context of the whole email, it’s something along the lines of like, if you’re writing about these big things, making sure that you’re thinking about the people who are affected by these big things.

Craig: Isn’t that what you would be writing about?

John: Here’s an example I can take from my own life. A project that we’ll see if I can end up getting it set up, but there’s a big military and international cooperation aspect of it, and it’s like, oh, it’s a different movie now than it would have been three or four years ago.

Craig: Sure.

John: Just because our allies are not our allies again. Europe isn’t necessarily on our side, and so those things change. You have to understand that, but in pitching it, it was actually nice to be able to say, “No, this is actually a moment where international cooperation becomes incredibly important, an outside threat unites us all together about a thing,” and that felt good and useful. In terms of, I’m not writing, I don’t have an extra appeal writing something dystopian and bleak, I think because I’m living in a bleak, dystopian moment, and I also know that I’m not going to get joy from writing that, but I also know that no one’s going to want to make that.

Craig: Right. I guess people have been writing about fascistic regimes, terroristic regimes, repressive regimes forever, whether they live in them or not. We are all, as artists, impacted by what’s going on around us. I don’t think it should be a challenge for anybody to write victims humanely.

I think sometimes there is an undertone of fear in some of the questions we get, and I don’t mean fear of fascistic regimes, although we should have that and quite a bit of it, fear that we’ll make a mistake in our writing. You use the phrase, make sure to, which is a very defensive position when you’re writing. I just want to make sure that I don’t blank, or I want to make sure I don’t blank. Make sure that you write something good, true and honest. If you do, some characters are going to be ugly, and I mean ugly on the inside, and like all of us, some victims will be imperfect. That’s part of what makes it true, interesting, and upsetting.

The weird attraction that Spielberg gave Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, that strange hypnotic power he had, made that interesting more than just, there’s the dickhead Nazi. Because he understood that the truer that person gets, the scarier he gets. Yes, I wouldn’t worry so much. I would just write what’s true.

John: Absolutely, and I also need to recognize that your movie, when it happens, will resonate with the culture of the time that it comes out. The most recent Superman movie really resonates with this moment that we’re in terms of world crisis, and yet it was two years ago, three years ago, that it got put in motion. It wasn’t actually responding to the moment that we’re in, it’s just because of when it comes out, it resonates with the world that it’s actually in.

Craig: Yes, things take on stuff. I wasn’t thinking about, Donald Trump wasn’t the president when I started working on Chernobyl. Truth wasn’t necessarily under global attack at that moment. If you write about things that are evergreen concerns for humanity, and you write them truly, without fear of making a ‘mistake,’ then I think you’re off to a good start.

John: Let’s go to this question here from John about stamina.

Drew: “I’m quite fortunately a consistently working writer who has had a handful of produced credits, and I feel like I’m firmly in the prime of my career. I’m suddenly becoming very aware that my stamina as a writer is nowhere near where it used to be. I’m starting to have more anxiety over whether this means I’m losing my love for the job, or that sometime soon I won’t be able to do it at a high level anymore. Then I stress over the actual work itself. Do you have any tips for how to keep your energy for the job up when you know that you’ll never be the version of yourself that you were 10 or 20 years ago?”

John: Oh, for sure. Yes, I nod with all of this, and I do recognize it. I think, John, you already have the insight of that you’re just never the same person you were at 20 or at 30. Because on those, I could stay up to like four in the morning writing a thing, and my life was just different. It was before I had kids. We often talk about how kids are just career killers.

Craig: Vampires.

John: Vampires sucking away at your life and your time, and yet, I’m still productive. I still get a lot done. I think if you actually look at the output of work that I’m able to do now, it hasn’t really diminished much. I have found my habits changing, and I do write in shorter sprints and get stuff done, but stuff does still happen. You can both recognize that your stamina has changed and not panic that it makes it incapable for you to write stuff.

Craig: This is one of those areas where– first of all, John, I’ve felt all of those things that you’re feeling, and I feel all of them. The other day, I had lunch with Brian Johnson the other day, and we were both talking about how like, “Are we just slowing down?” It feels like we’re slowing down, but the work keeps coming, so the problem is feels like. It feels like it sometimes.

I think part of it is because, okay, John says he’s in the prime of his career. What that tells me is he’s done enough work now at a professional level, seen enough of it go in and out of the machinery to have improved. As you improve, it becomes harder to write because you can’t write garbage the way you used to. When you start out, you’re just wee, right? I’m awesome. Because you don’t know enough to know that you’re not. You’re freer. It’s a lovely feeling. Then later, after life has beaten that a lot of you, but also after you create a little bit more of a sense of inner scrutiny, then the crucible of your own judgment becomes much hotter.

Yes, then it is a little harder, and it can feel like you’re losing stamina, but you’re not. You’re just more exacting, so you know more. You have the burden of knowledge, John. Your anxiety is normal. Just make sure to not draw any conclusions from it. You’ve made a mistake of drawing a conclusion from it. You think because you’re anxious, you are in trouble. You are not, you’re just anxious.

One of the things I’ve really tried to accept as I’m getting older now is that part of why I do what I do is because my brain is attuned to scary things. Everybody that we write about, we’re usually writing about somebody that’s afraid of something. We have very fear-attuned minds. No surprise, I’m afraid all the time. I just have to accept that is part of the package of doing what we do. What you’re feeling right now is incredibly normal. It’s actually a fantastic sign that you are a good professional writer. If you felt as free now as you did when you started, oh boy, I don’t know what to say. Something’s wrong with you.

John: If you were a professional athlete, you would have the same kind of questions, like, I don’t have the same stamina as I did earlier in your career. It’s like, well, that’s true. That’s objectively true. You can actually measure those sort of things. What we would have is experience, technique and all the other things that make it worthwhile. Unlike a professional athlete, there is no forced retirement date. You’re never going to break your back and be unable to play again.

At a certain point, you may decide you don’t want to keep doing it, which is great, but that’s not what I’m hearing in this letter. I think I agree with Craig, it’s just anxiety and fear.
Craig: Yes, you’re not at the place yet where you actually are slowing down and preparing to stop. That will be a different feeling. I don’t think I’m at that place yet.

John: A friend of mine did retire and he actually is a writer friend who worked in TV for many, many years and it’s just like, “Yeah, I’m done.” I love it for him.

Craig: Listen, in the throes of certain phases of making a large TV show, I fantasize about just pulling the old ripcord, but I know that it’s not time yet. Really what I’m reacting to there is this is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: When things are hard, there’s a little boy or girl in us that wants to quit. Then there’s our memory of our mom, dad, coach, older sibling, somebody saying, “You can want to quit, don’t yet, don’t.”

John: In the time of doing this podcast is when I started distance running. I will say that it’s been a useful metaphor for some of this stuff because it’s like, you just want to stop running. You just want to stop and just walk for a while. It’s like, no, but you actually, you really can just keep running and you just keep running.

Craig: You’ll be fine though, John. You’re in a good spot, actually, weirdly. It’s an encouraging question.

John: Let’s take two more questions, first from Kat here.

Drew: I wonder if you could settle a rumbling question for my university peers and I.

John: We can.

Craig: For my university peers and me.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m just going to correct right away. For me, object of the preposition.

John: We understand that it’s standard to render non-English languages as English on the page with the indication in parentheses that it is in Mandarin or whatever the language is, potentially mentioning whether or not it should be subtitled. Then along came Celine Song, who, as you’re aware, used Korean text on the page in past lives, setting an industry precedent by writing bilingually with all Korean translated into English.

My tutor has said that for the purposes of the degree with Celine’s industry precedent, I can use Chinese in my script. I would very much like to use this. Characters speak in their native language unless noted otherwise. Where rendered in English, the dialogue will be subtitled. Where written in Mandarin or Taiwanese is the intention not to use subtitles.
My cohort feels this would be unacceptable. to the industry. I could be getting the characters to say all sorts of nasties, unbeknownst to the producers.

What are your thoughts on the wider industry acceptance of having small parts of the script unintelligible?

Craig: The answer is in the question. Celine, by the way, one of the best people. I like that when she did that, it became an industry precedent and therefore is now allowable at universities. That just tells me how broken the university instruction system is around screenwriting.

John: Because if there’s one movie from a filmmaker that was successful, now, I guess, sure.

Craig: What was the point of all of that dogmatic nonsense to begin with? The answer is do whatever you want. Clearly do whatever you want. She was nominated for an Oscar. Why is this person worried about what the university will think?

John: All choices you’re making have pros and cons. It’s the question of like, is it a problem that certain blocks of text in your script will not be intelligible to a person who only speaks English? It could be, but maybe it’s absolutely fine. You won’t know until you try it. Yes, if it makes sense for you, you should do it.

Craig: The whole point is to say to an English reader, you won’t understand this. Isn’t that the point?

John: Yes.

Craig: So, do it. The idea that you would be putting in stuff that so like, after the movie comes out, they’re like, oh my God, one of those characters said the Holocaust didn’t happen. That’s not a thing.

John: That’s not happening.

Craig: It’s not happening. That’s such a not worry. Who asked this question?

Drew: Kat.

Craig: Kat, listen, you write this however you want. If you are a good writer, Kat, who is going to succeed as a screenwriter, you are already beyond the concerns of this university. You have already escaped its surly bonds. If you’re not, you’re not, so it doesn’t matter. You write whatever you want.

John: Last question here from Henry.

Drew: A few big films recently are the first of a multi-part series, and while I’ve enjoyed watching them, I always leave the theater feeling that I’ve only seen half a movie. I think there’s something off with the structure here, where they’re basically making one really long film instead of discrete parts that can be watched on their own, because I don’t feel this way with, say, The Empire Strikes Back or The Fellowship of the Ring. Do John and Craig have any insight into what’s going on here?

Craig: Money.

[laughter]

I mean money’s going on. Harry Potter, the seventh book, was broken into two books, because it was very long, and I think they looked at it and they were like, okay, so on the one side, a very long movie. First of all, people don’t like to see very long movies, so we’re going to lose some people. Two, fewer showings per day on a blockbuster, we’re going to lose some money, or we split into two and we get two hit movies.

John: Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a screenwriter who was approached with the property of Wicked, and was just like, so Wicked, you could do it as one long movie.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Somebody smart would say like, no, and actually, let’s approach it from the start, saying like, what if at the act break, we actually split it into two movies? How do we make sure that the first movie is as rewarding and successful as possible, and the second movie is as rewarding and successful as possible? I think Wicked made completely the right choice.

Craig: Oh, I’m sure they did.

[laughter]

John: Now, Henry, I will say that there have been some movies recently where I did feel a little bit of that, what, because I wasn’t expecting it. That rug pull can be a thing. I felt a little bit on the last Spider-Verse movie, where it was like, oh, wow, I really thought we were going to resolve this, and we didn’t, it’s just a cliffhanger. Same thing happens in the 28 Years Later, where the movie resolves nicely, but then there’s a code that’s not a post-credit scene, that just basically sets up the whole next movie. I’m like, wait, what?

Craig: Right. Certain things have built-in dotted lines that you could see yourself folding or tearing the page. Wicked is obviously one of them. It has a huge intermission, and the last song before the intermission is Defying Gravity and as I recall, someone saying to the people there, “How in God’s name can you sit around after Defying Gravity?” Defying Gravity happens, roll credits, go home. There are certain circumstances where it makes absolute sense.

There are movies like Harry Potter, where you’re like, look, you’ve been on this ride for six movies. Let us give you a larger feast for seven and eight. Henry, I do know what you mean, and I think sometimes there’s been a little bit of indulgence. It’s that same indulgence I see in limited series sometimes, where it’s like, oh, this is a seven or eight episode limited series. It should have been a five episode limited series.

John: There’s some padding and some, oh, yes.

Craig: It’s just some sort of stretch and pull and froth, and yes, I can see that is sort of happening as movies try to accomplish some of the things that television series can accomplish. In television, we can just work with a bigger canvas, and movies want that, but I know what you mean, and I think we all smell it when it’s happening.

John: The Avengers finale, which was a split over two parts, I enjoyed the entire experience, but I really couldn’t tell you what happened in one part versus the other part. It’s just like, it was a big two-part thing.

Craig: Again, if you have successfully laid out another sequel, I don’t know how many movies we’re talking about at any given point in that one. I think it was four total, right? Then, okay, if you want the finale to be a big, big finish, sure. If you’re just starting and you’re like, hey, or if it’s part of a series, but it’s not really like, each one of the series is its own thing.

For instance, I don’t know how many James Bond movies we’re up to, but if the next James Bond movie, just being made by Denis Villeneuve, it’s going to be awesome. If the next James Bond movie did that, it wouldn’t necessarily be earned because James Bond isn’t like, okay, it’s one, two, three, done. Avengers, I got that. They want to do a big finish. [crosstalk] Yes, I’m cool with that.

John: I’m cool with that, too. It’s time for one cool things. My one cool thing is actually on the back of my phone right now, Craig, I’m going to show it to you.

Craig: Great.

John: It’s called the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand.

Craig: This is very much in my interest.

John: It is a little thing that magnetically clips to the back of your phone, and it magnetically clips down, so you can have it be a stand vertically.

Craig: I didn’t think that was going to be what it was.

John: Or horizontally.

Craig: Okay, that is cool. For what that is, what I thought I was getting shown was one of those back of the phone wallet replacers.

John: It is awesome. In that little slot, you can put two cards.

Craig: Two cards?

John: Only two cards now. If you want more than that, you’d need a different thing.

Craig: This is very slim.

John: It’s slim, and I don’t use a case on my phone.

Craig: Really?

John: I’ve never used cases on my phone.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Not for a very long time. I also use it, just I loop a finger through it and just to help hold my phone, so that I’m not bending my pinky– I’m not holding the weight of it on my pinky.

Craig: What would you call the color of that, out of curiosity?

John: I would call it–

Craig: I have a color in mind, but I don’t know if I’m right.

John: Purple is probably the closest, but I think purple is a scrappier than that.

Craig: I’m going to say mauve.

John: Mauve, okay, yes.

Craig: But is that right?

John: That was my go, Mauve. Mauve, yes.

Drew: Mauve.

John: Yes, it’s a good color, I like it.

Craig: It’s like a grayish purple.

John: Yes, I like it. If you’re looking for something to help hold onto your iPhone, the Mott Magnetic Wallet Stand, it’s like $28.

Craig: That’s fantastic. Oh, 28, that’s not bad. Just a little bit more than that, and you can get the Scriptnotes book.

John: Yes, delivered to your home.

Craig: Really, if you had a choice, I would say Scriptnotes.

John: I haven’t put it out, but as soon as I put it, it’s also available as a e-book. People are like, oh.

Craig: Of course, and that’s even cheaper, I assume.

John: People ask about the paperback, and there’s not currently plans for a paperback. We’ll see.

Craig: If it does well, there will be a paperback.

John: Probably, but there’s also increasingly some books are just never going to paperback, because-

Craig: Because the e-book sort of takes that place.

John: It does, and it’s also, our D&D books are never paperbacks, because they would rip apart. For something that you’re referring to a lot, it could be useful.

Craig: Sure. I remember my Syd Field book was paperback, and I’m sure the many Save the Cats is paperbacks.

John: Yes, are paperbacks.

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a podcast that I appeared on as a guest. I don’t know if it’s– it must be out by now. The podcast is called Total Party Skill.

John: I’m guessing it’s a D&D podcast.

Craig: You know it, a little take on Total Party Kill, and it is a Dungeons & Dragons podcast that is, I wouldn’t say hosted the podcasters, are Gabe Greenspan, Dylan McCollum, and the delightfully named George Primavera. George Primavera, by the way, sounds like a bad character name, like– [chuckles]

John: Yes. Oh, 100%.

Craig: Yes, like Gene Parmesan from– [laughs] George Primavera, and all three of these guys were absolute gentlemen and scholars, all three deeply, deeply well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons as players and DMs. They’re just fun.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We had a fun–

John: You’re not playing the game, you’re just talking through stuff?

Craig: The topics, one topic was just, “Okay, it’s been a minute since we’ve got the 2024 rules. Now that we’ve had a chance to play with them for a while, what are the things that we really love? What are some of the pain points of things we don’t love?” We had a pretty good in-depth discussion of that.
Then they did a little fun draft where we were drafting classes.

John: Right.

Craig: The question was, you’re drafting classes to survive an apocalypse. Then, I think they’re a Patreon thing. One of their Patreon subscribers wrote in to say, “Oh, here’s a name of something. What would you home brew this thing to be? Item, spell, weapon, what would it be?” It was just a joy talking with those guys talking with those guys.

John: Love it. Sounds great.

Craig: Check it out, Total Party Skill, on wherever you get your podcasts.

John: I listen to so many podcasts, and deliberately have not added any D&D podcasts, because that’s just too much. I’m sure there’s so much good content that would just eat up more of my time.

Craig: You know I don’t listen to podcasts, but I actually will listen to this podcast.

John: That’s great.

Craig: Not the one I’m on, the other ones.

John: For Craig to start listening to a podcast is a pretty big deal.

Craig: It’s got to got to be about D&D, basically.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Ciarlelli. Outro this week is by Steve Piotrowski. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this show each and every week, along with our videos and other things.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on whether we would still write screenplays if we weren’t going to sell screenplays.

[laughs]

Thank you for pre-ordering the book. Pre-order those books and send those receipts to drewaskatjohnaugust.com, and we will send you something cool. Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thank you.

[music]

John: This bonus topic came from a question. Drew, would you read us the question?

Drew: Your recent Scott Frank episode wrapped up with a bout of brutal honesty concerning the likelihood that any of us will have a career in screenwriting. I realized this was in an effort to encourage folks to be unique, advice I think I need myself, but I’d love to hear your perspectives on the idea of art for art’s sake. If, for whatever reason, nobody could ever pay you for a script again, would you still write them?

Craig: I wonder if Fraser– it feels like Fraser’s really asking this for themselves. Do I have permission to write screenplays if I’m not doing it professionally? The answer is, absolutely. I think for me, it’s a different question because I’ve written 4,000 scripts now and drafts and versions and things, and so, would I want to do it just for fun? No. I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. I would always want it to have a purpose just because I would.

If I hadn’t done so much screenwriting, I could see absolutely doing it for enjoyment.

John: I take this more as a question about the format of screenwriting as a worthwhile literary pursuit or a thing to spend your time on if it weren’t in the pursuit of actually making it into a movie or making it into a TV show. I agree with you. If I hadn’t done this job for so long, I could start writing screenplays.

I enjoy the form. I think it’s a great form, but it’s not a very shareable form. It’s not a form that other people are going to read and enjoy with you. I think having written books, and I have a graphic novel coming out next year, having written other things, I think there’s better stuff to write that for people out there in the world to read. You don’t have to write for other people to read stuff. You can just write for your own purposes and your own self.

Given what I like to do, I think I do like to write for other people to read it. I think books or stage musicals, or other things would be a better– it’s how I would spend my time.

Craig: One thing that this prompts is the idea that people pursue artistic expression for its own sake because it makes them feel good. It is part of our behavior as humans. We want to express ourselves creatively and artistically. I think it’s important that anyone give themselves permission to do so, as long as they acknowledge that they are not entitled to an audience.

If you want to write songs to make yourself happy, just don’t force your family to listen to 12 of them. You can play one maybe at Christmas, see how it goes. If you want to write a book or a poem or screenplay, great. Don’t make everyone read it. If people want to, great. I guess my point is, if you’re doing it for yourself, do it for yourself with no expectation because I think sometimes people say they’re doing it for themselves. What they really want is for everybody to tell them how great they are, and that’s a different thing.

John: It is. I feel like Fraser’s question is especially relevant in this era of increasingly powerful AIs that can generate things that look like the work that we’re doing, and just do it with seemingly effortlessly. Why even bother spending the emotional time and energy to write a thing when I can just generate a thing?

I still think there is meaning and value, and there’s discovery that happens when you’re actually trying to write a thing that is unique and wonderful. Those moments when I’ve written something, even if no one read it, I felt really good to have written it. Yes, fantastic, but I don’t necessarily need that to be a screenplay form. It could be something else.

Craig: It’s its own pleasure, right? If Fraser wants to write a screenplay because he enjoys writing screenplays and he’s able to accept that perhaps he may not write professionally, but that’s okay, he just likes writing, then that’s fantastic. There doesn’t need to be any reason to do that because there’s really no reason to do anything if we consider our mortality. What’s the point of anything? There is none. You die, so really, do you need to paint that painting? No.

We do it because it feels good. It helps us figure ourselves out and it might help us connect to one person. Beyond that, yes, just lower the requirements.

John: I always love the stories when they find some person who died and they find all this incredible writing or all these paintings that this person did. It’s like, oh my God, this person would have been a known artist, but they just chose not to do it or whatever circumstances, they didn’t. The work still is valuable and if they still enjoyed doing that thing, they did it for their own.

Craig: It’s not valuable for them anymore.

John: Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. They did it because it was meaningful to them.

Craig: Absolutely, it felt good. Then there’s the counterpart to that, which is the Kafka situation where while Kafka’s alive, he goes, “You know what, I hate all of this, I’m burning most of it.” No, don’t, and he did. That can happen too.

John: It can.

Craig: I think, make a good point, there are authors that are discovered posthumously, there are artists that are discovered posthumously, but it just doesn’t matter, actually. If you’ve decided it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Certainly, I would say, give yourself permission for it to not matter.
I wish I liked writing screenplays enough to just wake up and go, “You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to write some screenplay. Make myself feel good.”

John: Yes, that’s not me.

Craig: It’s not me. That’s the way I approach solving puzzles.

John: Playing D&D.

Craig: Playing D&D. Playing D&D, what’s the point of that?

John: No, it’s absolutely pointless.

Craig: Fellowship.

John: It is fellowship.

Craig: Fellowship, and it feels good. It’s fun, it’s interesting.

John: It’s problem solving.

Craig: It’s problem solving, but it’s creative. We get to–

John: Collaborative.

Craig: It’s collaborative, it’s creative. We get to express ourselves, does all these things. For its own sake, we are not critical role. Look, if we wanted to go, hey, some platformer, even if we went to the critical role people were like, hey, it’s me and John, and we’ve got Tom Morello and Dan Weiss and Chris Morgan, and all these cool da-da-da, Phil. Hey, we’re going to go ahead and just do it. Yes, they’d be like, yes, we’ll do it. You can make money off of it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: Of course, it would ruin it.

John: It would ruin it.

Craig: It would be horrible.

John: Also, the things we say around the table would get us canceled immediately.

Craig: I don’t think we would make it past a minute, but even if we could, the point is we’ve never even considered it because we don’t need it.

John: No.

Craig: Not because it’s that we don’t need money, it’s that we just don’t need to do it for a reason. It is ontological.

John: Also, we’re happily amateur D&D players.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes, and so I want to shout out to community theater because community theater is pointless, and also amazing and wonderful.

Craig: It is professionally pointless, but it fills people’s spirits and souls. And Waiting for Guffman, if that is not the most beautiful love letter to community theater, I don’t know what is.

John: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

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

Craig Mazin: Umm. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 695 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often on this program, we offer advice to young filmmakers and screenwriters on the next steps they should take in their career. Today on the show, we’re going to turn our attention instead to a young development executive or aspiring development executive and offer her our guidance. How do you become an exec, an agent, a manager, a producer?

We’ll talk about the first steps and next steps she should consider. I also want to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and how they interact to form story with a specific example of the police procedural. To help us do this, we welcome back Scott Frank, a legendary screenwriter and director whose credits include Out of Sight, Minority Report, Queen’s Gambit, and the new Department Q on Netflix. Welcome back, Scott Frank.

Scott Frank: Thank you for having me. I’m mildly happy to be here.

Craig: Well, that makes one of you.

Scott: Yes, thank you.

Craig: And so it begins.

[laughter]

John: You actually had an agenda coming in here, too, because you said you wanted to talk about how we’re educating writers. Give us a little sense of what you want to dive into.

Scott: I just noticed because I mentor quite a few writers, and I’ve been doing, as you’ve been doing, the Sundance Lab for now, I think, 30 years or something.

John: I’m only 25 years. You got me there.

Scott: Okay, good. The thing I’m noticing a lot at the labs, in particular, we get a lot of people post film school, and it’s amazing what’s not being taught. It’s amazing the kind of approach to writing that I see increasingly. The discussion about writing has become, I think, co-opted by what I would consider craft issues and good student issues and not really voice issues and intention issues and things like that. One of the great things about the lab is we always start with the conversation about intention. We arrive at craft later. I feel like there’s a lot of discussion about reverse engineering screenplays. I’ll get more into that as we talk later, but that’s become my pet issue.

Craig: This is great. I can take the week off and not talk about all those things [laughs] because I have a feeling you and I agree about quite a bit of it. If there’s anything we can do to help, I don’t know if there is, but if there’s anything we can do to help, because I do think that people, at least some of the film schools listen to this, including the professors, that maybe we can offer some guidance that might be a practical value.

John: I love it.

Scott: As an AFI dropout, and I do think AFI is probably the best of the bunch actually because it’s more of a workshop, but these film schools are so– I feel like in order to justify the cost, they create these curriculums full of classes that are writing the thriller, outlining, writing a half hour. It’s all nonsense to me. It’s really about being able to make mistakes. It’s about getting comfortable with the mess. It’s wrong until it’s right. There is no way to game writing. There is no way to get ahead of it. It’s just being comfortable with that feeling of it’s not working, it’s not working, oh, it’s working.

You can talk about outlining. You can talk about a three-act structure. You can talk about setups, payoffs, conflict, all the things people like to talk about, but it’s really irrelevant without the real conversation, which is one about intention to begin with, and then mindfulness in terms of spinning yarn, which is really what we do, and then we apply the craft later. If you start with the craft, it feels built.

I see it happening all the time where people are talking about these things that are very craft-oriented. A lot of the things that people have arrived at, whether it’s screenwriting books or podcasts, a lot of it is looking back and analyzing something, which is very different.

Craig: It sure is.

Scott: You can look at a script and say, “Oh, look at that,” but when you’re writing it, I feel like it’s trial and error, and you have to be comfortable with getting it wrong over and over and over and over again. That’s where the best stuff happens, through those happy accidents.

John: I think we can hopefully get into a bit of the syllabus of the Scott Frank film school that does not exist as we dive into it.

In our bonus segment for premium members, I would also like to talk about education in general and how we educate our kids, because the three of us had kids who went through public schools, private schools, alternative schools. Now that we’re on the other side of that, I want to talk about the lessons we’ve learned and things we would do differently where we’re just starting over now in 2025 with kids.

First, we’ve got some follow-up. Drew, we had some follow-up about movies they don’t make anymore.

Drew Marquardt: Phillip wrote in. We had talked about the decline of sex in movies. Phillip wrote, “I recently read the story from 2021 about how the action superhero genre has people with perfect bodies and no interest in sex.”

John: It has the best headline, I think, for this saying, “Everybody is beautiful and no one is horny,” which feels very true about our superhero movies. It’s a story by RS Benedict writing for Blood Knife. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. I think it’s just really true, like we have a bunch of sexless gods in our superhero movies.

Craig: Yes, I guess that’s true. The superhero movies are probably a subset of the larger PG-13-ification of the world. Even the rated R-ification of the world, they’re happy with violence, they’re happy with horror. We’ve talked about this before, but it does feel like there is a generation that’s like, “If I want sex on screen, I’ll watch any of the 14 trillion porn videos available to me. Why would I want that in this? This isn’t for that. Porn is for sex.”

They maybe have a point because sex on film has always been weird to me. The dramatized sex on film, I struggle. I’ve written two sex scenes in my life, and you can feel the camera wanting to drift towards the fireplace. [chuckles] It’s brutal. What do you do? Basically, the movie says you can be sexy up until a point, and then it’s fireplace time so you really can’t, whereas we can blow someone’s head off, and that’s interesting.

John: Scott and I have both written some sex scenes that I actually shot, and I think were good. The three-way sex scene in Go, it’s sexy and then there’s a fire burst out, so there’s a point to it. I think one of the real challenges of sex scenes is like, well, if it’s just the sex scene because of the sex scene, then it’s frustrating. If there’s character moments that’s happening, if it’s Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney in the trunk of a car and there’s a character happening there, that’s a different kind of sex scene. That’s something you don’t get in porn.

Scott: Yes, and I also think there are two things that drive me crazy vis-à-vis sex on film. One is when people are deliberately avoiding the physicality. They’re in bed having sex, and she’s wearing her bra or t-shirt or fur coat, and it’s so clearly perfunctory exercise, and now we’re having a sex scene, but we’re not really going to have a sex scene.

Then the gratuitous on the other side where it’s just as perfunctory where you cut to this other thing that feels like rote, now they’re in bed and there’s nothing learned, nothing gained, there’s nothing awkward or uncomfortable or interesting about it, there’s no conversation during it. You’re not exploring character, you’re just exploring naked people, and that’s a problem. There are movies where sex is done really well, I think.

John: Yes, I thought Anora did sex incredibly well. Obviously, it was crucial to the story, but it was interesting, it was fun. It was never gratuitous. The plot was happening as the sex scenes were happening.

Craig: We’re not going to be seeing that– we’re talking about big movies, right?

John: Yes, we’re talking about big movies.

Craig: Big movies used to have sex and then they don’t.

Scott: Yes.

John: I think I may have mentioned this last week, I watched Altered States for the first time, and like Altered States, there’s sex scenes in it, there’s nudity, there’s all this stuff. That’s not the point of it, but it’s because the characters would have been doing that stuff, and so we’re doing it.

Craig: Well, also in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people thought it was fun. They liked it. They thought it was exciting, and it was a draw.

John: It was a draw.

Scott: Take Body Heat, it’s part of the plot. It’s how she manipulates him through sex. There’s a scene where she literally leads him by the dick, and you’re going, “That is the point of why this is happening.” He’s showing you how she has completely got this guy under her physical spell.

Craig: It does feel like the audience, when people say, “Well, everyone is beautiful and no one is horny,” this is a guy named, or a woman named, RS Benedict. I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman, but this writer, RS Benedict, I’m guessing, is complaining. I do feel like when you talk to people who are younger than we are, which is 98% of the world’s population, they’re like, “I don’t know if I want to see this cringy shit on film.”

It isn’t what it was for us, and I think in part because, putting aside the artistic value that a good sex scene has, it could be as good or bad as a fist fight. It could have as much character or not character as a fist fight. When we were watching movies as 20-somethings, it was harder to see sex on film. It was harder to see nudity on film. It was special, and now it is not. It’s just not.

Scott: Yes.

John: I saw F1, and there is a sex moment in it, basically, but it just skips over. They start to, and then you come back to it at the end. Movies of a different time would have actually shown that thing, and it would have been a bigger deal, and the movie just skips right over. It was the right choice for that movie, but it is a little bit frustrating that we don’t have those moments anymore.

Craig: I got to be honest, I’m not frustrated. I’m okay. I’m with the kids. It’s tough. I do feel a little squirmy.

John: This whole conversation stemmed out of a discussion last week about genres of movies that Gen X (sic.) has just not seen at all because they haven’t made them. Sex thrillers was one of them, but spoof movies was another. There’s a whole big list of them. My point was that if people never have any exposure to a certain kind of movie, they won’t even know what to do with it. They won’t have a vocabulary for it. They might not know that they’d love it if they’ve never seen one of them.

What I propose for our listeners is write in with your suggestions for what are the genres that people should see at least one movie in that genre of? You can offer examples from that, but I’m really more curious about what are the genres that people should see at least one of? I’ve seen very few Japanese horror movies, and I feel like that’s a whole genre that I should see at least one of those. I’d love that list of what are the 15 or 20 things that everyone should at least give one of those movies a shot, because there could be something there that you probably love, you just don’t know about it yet.

Scott: Well, it’s tricky because I’m not even sure you need to break it down by genre. There are movies that you should just see that are either part of the canon, or they speak to you in some– I’ll recommend a movie specific to somebody I know in terms of their point of view, and so on. You want to talk about Japanese horror, I say, “Okay, go watch the Audition,” whatever it is.

John: Exactly, but I don’t even know what that is, and so I think I need to be told like, “Oh, Japanese horror is a thing,” because I might not even know that. Then like, “Okay, what are the examples within that to consider?”

Scott: The question is, do you need to watch it? Do you need to watch it by genre? I feel like, again, going back to this, it’s storytelling stuff, and the way different cultures tell stories and the way– It’s not just Japanese horror, there are Japanese police years, there’s all kinds of different things. Just watching Japanese cinema, getting exposed to that in general, you can go on a huge deep dive, where one part of it is horror, same with French cinema, you can go down the deep dive. There are great psychological thrillers, erotic thrillers, and then there’s great comedy in France too and all kinds of things. Whatever country you want, pick one, we could do this forever.

I feel like when I watch these movies, I’m watching them to see how they’re telling the story more than anything. You’re always on the make for filmmaking things as well, but it’s like, “Wow, this is a different sort of story,” particularly European films because American films are now conceptual and everything sort of services, the concept. You can predict what the story of F1 would be or something and occasionally in a big movie, we get surprised. I feel like a lot of these films, they’re great to watch for storytelling, period, the end.

John: In part because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.

Scott: Exactly.

John: You don’t have a set of expectations, you come into it with a thing. I guess my counterargument would be that if you had a sense of what those genres were, then you could understand what they’re doing that’s different from that. You might understand like, “Oh, this is how this fits into this framework.”

Scott: Of course, yes, I think that’s true too. As a corollary to that, tone is something no one talks about in terms of writing because tone is super hard, both for writing and directing for that matter. Tone and transitions are the two most neglected thing you have in conversations about storytelling, I think.

John: That’s pretty good. Craig, you’re silent, but it’s because you agree.

Craig: What can I say? I’ve been talking about transitions. I feel like I’ve said the word transitions too many times, [laughs] so this is great. We’ll get to our complaining section, when Scott and I have a complain off. It is the part that hurts me the most. I think I try and be very positive about the things that we talk about on the show. When we do our three-page challenges, we’ll zero in on this.

When I watch movies or television shows, the first thing that hurts is fumble transitions, lack of transitions, clunky transitions because it’s not just a matter of a director failing to go, “Oh, big to small, far to close,” whatever it is, it’s just a lack of attention to the fact that one scene is following another. It contrasts to another. It exists in relationship to what came before it, and it is preparing you for what comes after it. The lack of transitions is an indication that I’m not in safe hands, and this happens all the time. Yes, when we get to our complaining section, we’ll get in– We’ve done entire episodes about transitions.

Scott: Also, it should be in the script. It should be in the storytelling [crosstalk]

John: Of course, 100%.

Scott: It should be you read a novel. There are great transitions in novels.

Craig: Scott, no one’s teaching novel writers to not direct on the page. Let’s save this for when we get into our film school thing, because that is, I think, the number one crime of writing education [laughs] for the screen is this terror of the DGA coming to whisk you away in the middle of the night for writing “close on.”

Scott: Well, it’s all in how you do it, too.

Craig: Everything is, everything is.

John: Well, this is actually a very good transition into our short marquee topic, which is advice to this young film student who’s an actual real person. We’ll call her Lisa for this discussion. She came into the office. She was a classmate of my daughters in high school. She’s now halfway through undergrad film school, a good film school. She’s a really smart young woman. She had questions about the next thing she should be doing. She’d gone to film school with the intention of becoming maybe a cinematographer.

She really wanted to get in the production side of things. She realized, after two years of film school, that was probably not what she actually enjoyed. She did not like the physical production of it all. We didn’t dig into this, but I think she also might not really like film students because there are some really annoying film bros who are doing that stuff. What she actually really loved was storytelling development. She really loved the making of big movies aspect of this. As we were sitting there across from her, I was like, “Oh, I think you are exactly right, that you are a prototypical, wonderful, young development executive.”

You see her, it’s like, “Oh, I can completely envision you in that office, in the meeting, having a discussion about a script.” We talked to her about taste, about knowing what you want, what you don’t want, being able to go into an interview or a meeting and describe the kinds of movies that you love, being able to talk about– I don’t know, she says, “I like big mainstream movies.”

I kept pushing her, I’m like, “Be able to tell us why. Be able to talk about the recent films that you loved and why you love them. Be able to talk about, specifically from your perspective as a 20-year-old, what are the kinds of stories that you’re not seeing about your generation being told? What are the things that they should look to you as being a good voice on? Because those are the kinds of things that make you so valuable in those rooms.”

Scott and Craig, you’ve both been in a lot of meetings with a lot of young development executives. What are some other things that impress you when you meet one of them and say, “Oh, this kid is going places.”?

Craig: Typically, for me, it’s nothing specific that they say. It’s not the fact that they know a particular movie or that they have a single great note. It’s that I can sense that there is raw processing power. They’re smart. They have a point of view. They know how to have a conversation. They aren’t there trying to know everything, nor are they there to be a student at your feet or anyone else’s feet.

When you meet somebody with processing power, it’s exciting. Not that there aren’t a lot of people at these companies that aren’t smart. There are, but at that tier, when you’re talking about these junior executives, you’re going to meet a lot where you just think, “Probably in 15 years I’m not going to see you around.” When you meet one where you’re like, “Ooh, look at the big brain on Brad,” then, yes, it’s exciting.

Scott: I think that’s true. Let’s assume they’re all smart. I’ve met very few really dumb, especially younger executives in particular.

Craig: [chuckles] All the old ones.

Scott: Yes, but they’re not. They’re smart. The problem is the conversation that you’re having. Most often, you’re having the wrong conversation. Again, I’m going to use this word over and over, and it’s going to be annoying, but intention is never discussed. They confuse agenda with intention.

John: Pull those apart for us, tell us.

Scott: A lot of times, they’ll have an agenda in both directions. It’ll be stuff they want to do and stuff they are afraid to do or don’t want to do, and so the whole conversation that you’re having about the story is filtered through that. Whether they’re overtly saying it or trying to push it and goose it into a certain direction, you feel that way. Instead of saying to– again, this goes back to Sundance, instead of saying to the filmmaker or the storyteller, let’s call them the storyteller, what is it you’re trying to do?

What is it you want to do? In the case of Lisa, your example, the best conversations are not just why she likes the movie in particular, but also what it is about the story, and I love how they did this in the story. It’s rarely done that way. It’s comparing movies with other– you read pitches, and it’s a lot like Succession meets The Last of Us. They’re comparing all these things, it’s going to be awesome.

There’s a lot of that. Instead of starting with, “Okay, what is it you want to tell? Why do you want to tell it?” Then having a conversation in that direction, making it downhill, not challenging it so much as– The problem, I think, is because people are smart, they feel every idea becomes instantly transparent. They feel the need to see through it right away instead of, “Let’s jam for a minute and see what this is.” A bunch of musicians get together, they’re just going to play and see what happens and see what they can create together.

Even if you’re going in to pitch, even if you’re going in for a meeting, you want to find a way to engage people in a conversation that isn’t just me, “I’m here for an interview. I’m going to tell you about my CV and my background and all the things. This is what I like. I like the flavor strawberry, I like the color green and I like to be warm, not cold.” That’s okay, but when you can get people communicating through storytelling, it’s always, always a stronger, better conversation.

Then everybody’s inside it in the same way so that when you’re actually making it, shooting it, we’ve had this conversation with the actors, with everybody and going, “Well, did you change your mind because that’s really what we said we wanted to do, and we still want to do that, or we don’t in some cases.” For me, the conversation to begin with is always wrong. It’s framed most of the time wrong. When you turn in a draft, they’re talking about length. “You know what? Fuck you. It’s too long.” They’re always too long. Every episode will be too long.

Every draft will be too long until we cut it. Right now, just let me tell the fucking story, and we’ll get the story right, and then we’ll figure out how to tell it more efficiently. You’re telling me that it’s 140 pages is too long. What the fuck do I need you to tell me that for? That’s the kinds of things they’re doing. They’re drawing from these mechanical ideas a lot of the time, that’s only one example.

Craig: I do try and keep in mind that that’s what– I’m only seeing the little bit of the iceberg above the water, and below it, they are in meetings being told, “Don’t come in here with a script that’s blah, blah, blah. Also, here’s what I want and here’s what matters. By the way, this guy’s going to come in and talk about intention for an hour. I need you to get him to make this like that movie [chuckles] instead of that movie.”

I try and keep in mind they also have a whole other life and a boss, and it’s not me because I’m like you, I want to always try and get to, “Okay, here’s what I’m going for. What are you going for?” Part of it also is me, almost quietly like a person that walks by someone that might be in trouble, and I’m like, “Just blink twice if you’re in trouble, and we can just quietly talk.” I’ll cover you. I’m never going to call your boss and go, “Well, they didn’t care about the link.” I’ll cover you on that. Let’s just have a quiet conversation away from your boss.

Scott: I’m going to push back hard because I think if you–

Craig: Do you agree?

Scott: Yes.

Craig: I didn’t state what I said fervently enough.

Scott: [laughs] I really think the problem with that is if you’re trying to be tricky from the beginning and have an understanding and so on, I feel like eventually you’re postponing the inevitable. You’re going to run into those people you’re talking about. I’m well aware that they’re being told, “We’re not going to make anything, period. We’re not going to do anything that’s about this or about that and so on and so forth.”

At the same time, everybody is looking for something golden. They’re looking for something different. They were looking for something that feels, sounds, smells different than everything else. You could be telling a story that might fit with what they’re looking for, but how you have that conversation, make it not feel like you could– We’ve all been in these pitches where you sit there, and it just feels like fucking homework.

I say very little in a pitch. When I pitch something, I’m just telling the story. I’m just saying, “This is why I wanted to tell this story. This is what I love about it.” I give the once upon a time of it. Then I let them ask questions because I don’t want to sit there and have them say, “Well, when you say you’re talking about them living in Encino, does it have to be Encino? Did you mean the valley? Were you talking about California?” Because shooting in California–“ whatever it is that triggers them, and it’s everything that triggers them, so I try to find a different level to have these conversations on.

That’s really what I’m referring to because you’re right, Craig, they are being beat up from above. Also, the good executives, the ones that are going to have a career, go, “Listen, I know you’re not looking for this thing, but here’s a story about 1921, whatever, that’s really fucking good. Someone’s going to make it. Maybe you don’t want to make it, but I’m going to show you this person and this idea. If you don’t want to make this, we should at least work with this person. We should at least buy them if you’re not willing to buy this project.”

John: Before we can get Lisa in the media across from Scott Frank, where he– tell me what you think, or realistically, probably not Scott Frank, but Drew. Before we get her into those meetings where she gets to have those meetings with writers, she needs to get that first job. She needs to get that first spot, and she has two more years of film school and has decisions to make after that. My advice to Lisa was, she’s already in film school. She should probably not do grad school right away. She’s learned as much as she’s going to learn in this system for right now.

Her next priority needs to be meeting a bunch of writers. She’s in a place where she can meet a bunch of– some could be good, some are going to be terrible writers at her school. This is an opportunity for her to read those scripts and figure out how to form relationships, and also just actually help writers get to their best next draft, and that’s a process too. She has to learn how to do that. She’s going to get some shitty notes for a while and have some successes and failures, but better that she’s doing that with writers who are also learning than to try to give a note to me or Craig or to Scott and have it just tank.

Craig: If you give a note, and it tanks, it tanks, but there’s ways to– Look, obviously if somebody that I’ve known for 30 years and who should know better gives me a really stupid note, I’m going to be like, “Come on.” If it’s someone who’s starting out, and they give me a clunky note, I’m going to be kind to them because I don’t want the lesson to be writers are dicks.

I want the lesson to be, “Someone took care of me and explained to me why that isn’t helpful, but here’s something that is helpful because it doesn’t cost anything to do.” One thing that I’m keying on that you said that is absolutely true is when you begin this job as an executive and a development executive, you are mostly going to be assigned to people that are beginning as writers.

You will get a chance to grow up. Neither side of you knows what you’re doing. No one knows what they’re doing. Everybody is tripping over their own shoelaces, so laugh about it, trip over each other’s shoelaces. Nobody should feel superior to anyone else. What ends up happening is ideally both of you, the new writer and the new executive, know what you’re talking about and have value and insight. If one of you does, that one will continue on. [laughs] If neither of you do, God help us all, it’s just going to be sad. I don’t care. Nobody comes out of the shoot just hitting three pointers. That’s not a thing. You don’t know what you’re doing. How could you?

Scott: Well, you just don’t know what you’re doing for the rest of your career. Every new project, you start not knowing what you’re doing again. I’m not being glib. It’s true. Once you get into it, it’s all a new organic organism. You’ve just cut open a different body that’s got different things going on. It’s all new. I completely agree with a lot of that and all of that, really. I think that it doesn’t mean that you have to be like everybody else. If you’re like everybody else– There are two kinds of writers I found now, very distinct.

There are people who are bodies in a room who are contributing and working that way and throwing out ideas and writing drafts and doing things like that, and there are creators. Who do you want to be?

John: As a person who wants to be working in future development, who wants to make movies, those are creators. You have to be excited to be in a relationship with people who are struggling to deliver a two-hour movie that makes sense, that is so hard to do, and that the writer will trust you and push back against you, but also understand where you’re going, and that just takes practice. It takes taste also. I feel like Lisa needs to read her classmates’ work and give notes on her classmates’ work and be really excited about that, but at the same time, she needs to read really good scripts. She needs to read the screenplays for her favorite movies to understand what that actually looks like on a page.

She probably needs to read everything that makes the blacklist each year so she has an understanding of where is the market right now? Where is the taste right now and how does she react to it? What are the things that she really loves? Who are the writers that she needs to be trying to follow and trying to understand? Because when she goes in for a meeting at whatever production company, Hello Sunshine or whatever it is, to be able to talk about these are the writers who are really exciting and why.

It could be some names that are on that list, but names that are not on the list because she’s read them because they’re classmates, that’s going to be helpful and impressive in getting her that chance to be in that room with other real writers.

Scott: You’re talking about someone who wants to be an executive, not a writer, though.

John: To be clear, this is a young woman who definitely wants to– she’s not a writer. She wants to be a development executive or a producer or an agent, or a manager. She’s going to probably go through one of the agency training programs, which I think is another good way to see a bunch of stuff and understand how the business works. No, she definitely does not see herself as a writer, the person who’s writing the script.

Craig: That’s okay.

Scott: Yes, which is great.

Craig: Somebody’s got to do it.

Scott: Craig will love this, but I just now fully understood that she didn’t want to be a writer.

Craig: Let’s go, let’s get grandpa’s pudding and– [laughs]

Scott: Give me my Jell-O and my blanket, and I’ll be fine.

Craig: At least he’ll give him pudding, but it’s too much for him.

Scott: I was off on this whole other thing, but I understand. When she’s coming in the room and talking about– it’s a whole other kind of thing, and it’s something which I probably don’t know how to help her with it. I don’t know how people [crosstalk]

John: Yes, but that’s the thing you really do because you know what it’s like to be on the other side, and you have a– I think writers have a certain amount of experience. We should have the ability to empathize and put ourselves in the places of those people who are giving us those notes, and I’ve been one kind of, and I’ve been around so many of those people. You get a sense of what their– you say what their agenda is, what their intention is. Your distinction there is really important because an agenda is like you came into this room with a list of things you had to accomplish, versus your intention is a more deeply seated, like this, “I’m trying to make these kinds of movies. I’m trying to tell these kinds of stories.”

Craig: Well, the thing that probably would help when you talk about– taste is a tough one because who knows, and it is a weird business, where 1 out of 100 people might think a script is good, and then it turns out that’s what the audience wants. It’s difficult, but I would say if you’re going to go down that path of being a studio executive, before you get that job, before you ever set foot in one of those buildings, know what you want to make.

Aside from what you think people would want you to make, aside from what you think they’re going to promote you for, or pay you more for, anything, just know, okay, here’s something pure. More than writers, we have something pure all the time. We have some story that we’re clinging to, and then we defend it to various levels of success, but they only get this one thing. This is their one life preserver, and then they are in the ocean for the rest of their careers. They better have a life preserver. It better be that touchstone that they can come back to; otherwise, they’re doomed.

Scott: What word would you use to describe knowing what you want to do?

Craig: Intention sounds pretty good, although I think I would, in this case, it’s really more–

Scott: Come on, can’t you give it to me? [laughs]

Craig: No, because this one actually is an aspiration, so this is aspirational. I feel like, okay, you’re a 19 or 20-year-old. You want to be in the movie business as an executive. Why? Because what I would love more than anything is to be there to help someone like a new Tarantino come along and make Pulp Fiction when everyone else is saying no. That’s the thing I want, that’s my aspiration. That’s what I’m praying and hoping for. Just know you’re not going to get anywhere near that for five years, but at least you have that there, so when it happens, [laughs] you’ll recognize it.

John: I’m recognizing an echo here because I do want to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I think, Scott, your split between agenda and intention is that. In intention, it feels like an inner thing that’s pushing you towards a thing, like this is a thing that’s driving you. Intrinsic motivation is the thing that is taking a character and making them go on that quest and make them feel like this is a thing I have to do, and I have to achieve, versus extrinsic motivation, which is they are being called upon, forced to do a thing in order to meet the plot requirements of the story. That agenda feels like an extrinsic motivation, like it’s being forced upon the character rather than something that’s coming from inside.

I actually want to circle this back to your show, Department Q, because one of the things that really struck me about the pilot that I really loved, and we’re not going to spoil some stuff that happens in the show. As we meet the Carl Mørck character who is at the center of this, extrinsic motivation is pushing him through a lot of it. He’s basically forced into taking over this cold case department that doesn’t really want to do.
It doesn’t match his intrinsic motivation, which is to solve the mystery of who shot him and get some closure on that and move forward, and he’s not being allowed to. What’s so interesting, in a feature, that tension would be tougher to manage, but in a series, that’s actually a nice engine to help tell stories. Was that a thing that was always present as you came upon this book and started on this project?

Scott: Wow.

John: Do you even identify that as being an engine of your story?

Scott: What I was thinking as you were speaking, and it’s what I’ve always thought is, “Man, John is really smart.”

[laughter]

Scott: All I think about is, and this also goes back to what Craig was just talking about, it’s I don’t think about any of that ahead of time, or even during. I am just trying to make people talk to one another. If I can’t make them talk to one another, it means I don’t know them. If I really know them, the plot is going to come from that. At some point, I may look back at it and analyze it this way or that way, say it’s too long, or we’re away from this too much, or we’ve lost this character, whatever it is.

There are certain craft things that I apply much later. For the beginning, I just want to get lost and confused and play in the sandbox and see what happens. I don’t think that way. Things like that may occur to me as I’m writing during the process, not before. I don’t even know what a theme is before. I only know, unless I’m adapting something specific, I might have a theme that I can extract from the book to help me adapt it, but with these books, there was some great ideas, but beyond that–

John: What is the central idea of the book? Because I don’t know what the original source material at all, and how similar is it to how the show sets itself up?

Scott: Very different because the show is about going from, again, looking back at it, isolation to the family you choose, which is everything I write. I always end up doing that, and how your identity comes from the people you surround yourself with, and so on, and your mental health is really defined by the quality of the relationships you have, and so on and so forth.

I just always come back to that for whatever reason. It’s not intentional, and it’s just something– When I’m writing, I’m just trying to think about once upon a time, what? I can’t do that until I know, once upon a time, who? For me, especially writing a lot of thrillers over the years and even some mysteries and things, I feel like the whodunit is nowhere near as interesting as the whydunit.

The audience is going to constantly be guessing the whodunit, and in Department Q, I give it to you right away. I pretty much tee it up, but you have no idea why. Even when you think you do know why, it’s different. For me, Chinatown is that way. Yes, you know Noah Cross is a fucking shit heel, but when you get to “she’s my sister, she’s my daughter,” you’re like, “Whoa, wait, what?” [laughs] That’s the why of it all.

I think that I appreciate everything that you’re saying in terms of identifying the two threads, and one could be an A story, and one could be a B story, is what I was thinking as you were saying, “Oh, that’s how that happened.” It was by accident. It was just by my messy process.

Craig: Well, I don’t know if it’s by accident. I’m going to say it’s not that you sit there and– okay, we’ll borrow the term intentional again. You don’t intentionally say, “Hey, I want to write about people who their inner want is this way and the world is sending them that way.” I think that there is something in your fingerprint where this does also come up quite a bit, and it’s part of the music of how your brain works. I think it’s important to say that there are things that we can– and this ties into the educational thing, that we can notice post facto that we do not notice, nor do we need to notice pre.

We just follow what feels right. It’s like Princess and the Pea. This feels good. “Oh, oh, there’s a pea down there. Something’s wrong.” How do we know that something’s wrong? Our brain is just telling us something’s wrong. We can’t get there through analysis. It is interesting that, as you said, like okay, so you’re identifying certain things that pop up, but even by your own admission, it’s not like you’re sitting down going, “And now a found family.”

[laughter]

Craig: It’s just in the DNA, and it’s also in the music of– and I will say it’s also in the audience for what you do because I consider myself a fan of your work, not because you’re a good person. You’re horrible-

Scott: Thank you.

Craig: -but the stuff is so good. It’s always struck me that way from the very first thing I saw that you did, which was Out of Sight. That means there’s something in my rhythm, too, because there are people that probably don’t like the things you do, that’s fine. Our brain’s like, “There’s a harmony going on,” and I love that. We can put a pin in this and bring it back when we talk about education, because I’m not sure there is a way to teach that at all.

Scott: No, there’s a way only to teach the process, which goes back to your development executive thing, which is it’s not really even about what made– Lindsay Doran taught both of us, I think, really, but she certainly taught me how to write. I thought I knew how to write when I was 24 and gotten my BA in film studies at UCSB. I was an AFI dropout. I know what I’m doing. I got an office on the Paramount lot, and I’m a writer. No, Lindsay taught me how to write because what she brought to bear was a process of thinking, a way of thinking, a way of thinking.

Everything about it, for me at least, just for me, I don’t preach this or think it should be this way for everybody else, it’s a way of thinking. If you’re writing a horror film, you’re mindful of certain things. If you’re writing this kind of movie, you’re mindful of certain things, but tone is a way of thinking. You can call it point of view, but I feel like for me, it’s more accurate if my brain gets into this kind of mode.

All you can do is figure out what is the primordial ooze to create that you can set up for yourself, and it’s different for everybody. Everybody has their own way of doing it. For me, I remember seeing, I guess it was Dustin Lance Black, maybe, who’s a great writer. He’s a terrific writer and done amazing things, but there was a YouTube video where he’s talking about his process, where he’s got three-by-five cards, he’s got six different colored highlighters. John, maybe you’ve seen it, I don’t know.

John: Yes, I think I did a similar one for the Academy. I would say mine was a little bit faked in portion, wasn’t quite true, so I’m curious what it shows of him doing his stuff.

Scott: Well, he was doing this whole thing that was very mechanical and for him, it works. For me, it just makes me feel like I’m a good student. I don’t feel like I’m being a writer, I’m being a good student. Outlining for me just makes me feel like I’m a good student because the truth is, I’ll outline two or three scenes at a time, but I don’t know what’s going to happen because, again, once I get them talking to one another, I want them to do things because of who they are, not because the script says so, and my big pet peeve.

How do you create a process? It’s why I think fiction workshops are more successful than film school because you’re just doing it over and over. You’re just doing it over and over, and you’re reading it out loud or people are reading it, and then they’re telling you what they like, what they don’t like. Then there’s a teacher who’s also telling you some things, and maybe you’re reading a lot of things at the same time, but you’re just doing it over and over. You’re not writing the thriller, writing a half hour, outlining, writing a treatment. It’s useless.

John: Let’s go into the syllabus because I really do want to– let’s imagine that Scott Frank course in screenwriting or filmmaking, if you want to call it that, but how do you start? What is the first class? What are the things that you’re diving into in the first class? You say intention, and intention is what is it that is making you want to tell that story? What is it? What is the spark? What is the genesis? You’re not talking about what the process is going to be at all. What do you want these students in the class to be doing? What is the discussion about?

Scott: Well, first of all, the first thing would be how to mix a cocktail and there would be an open bar and just that so that we can have our fallback, and just because we should be drinking while we’re talking about story.

Intention for me would not be something I would teach. It would be the style of conversation. It would be like, again, what happens at Sundance. We’re not saying we’re going to talk about– We don’t do that. It’s just the conversation is, so what are you trying to do?

John: Is it one-on-one or is it a salon? What do you think is the right way to–?

Scott: I think it’s both. I think you do have to write for people, and you do want to hear what people have to say. I also feel like, listen, our business, whether you like it or not or even agree, I really believe this, our business is one of apprenticeship and mentorship. The best writers come out of that. I’m not a writers’ room person. I didn’t come from writers’ room, so I don’t have any experience with that, so I can’t comment up or down on that. I know I am the beneficiary of mentorship and apprenticeship, where people gave me the time to– were telling me deliberately to slow down, as opposed to you get your first assignment, it says 10 weeks or 12 weeks in the contract.

For 40 years, I’ve been saying, I’ve never written anything in 10 or 12 weeks. I don’t even know that I can get a title page or my opening scene done in 10 or 12 weeks. If I do, I’m forced at gunpoint to write in 10 or 12 weeks. It’s going to be bad because the process for me is everything. I would say in the class, I would just start small. I would make everything bite-size. I wouldn’t say at the end of 10 weeks, you’re going to have a script, which is film school. “You need to have your project, and if you’re getting your master’s or whatever it is,” it would be just writing, talking about writing.

Let me tell you one thing about craft. I gave this speech at the Writers Guild, and so I’m just going to– I use this example, and Craig, I don’t know if you know, in Pasadena, they’re in LA, and they’re in Texas. I use the example of Mission Renaissance, which is, they’re usually in mini-malls. They teach you how to draw. The Larry Gluck method, his name is actually Larry Gluck, promises that he can teach anyone how to draw.

He’s pretty effective, it really does. If you want to learn how to draw, you’re going to learn how to draw by doing the Larry Gluck method. My kids went when they were very young, and I remember how he did it, how they did it. What you do is, you take an object or an image you’re going to copy, whatever it is, and you turn it upside down. You’re not looking at the image, you’re looking at what makes the image. Then you do that, you draw that, you copy that.

John: You figure out the light and the dark, and what the edges are.

Scott: Exactly, and then when you turn it right side up, it looks like the thing you were copying, but it is a cold, dead, fucking version of it. It is not the thing. There’s no life to it. That is how most conversations about screenwriting go, less fiction, but most conversations about screenwriting are, “Let’s look at it upside down and see what’s going on and what’s happening and the shape of it and the this.” If you don’t have that thing, that voice, that point of view, you don’t have that way of thinking, when you turn it over, it’s going to look like a script. It’s going to be the right number of pages, and things will happen when they’re supposed to, but it’s going to be a fucking cold, dead thing.

Craig: Well, this gets to the fundamental problem with writing education as a concept because I think you’re 100% right that professional screenwriting tends to be a pursuit where mentorship and apprenticeship occurs and is most effective. You were my mentor. I don’t know if I was your apprentice as much as your whipping boy.

Scott: Bitch.

Craig: [chuckles] I prefer whipping boy.

Scott: Yes, all right.

Craig: That’s what I was, and it worked. Then I was Lindsay’s student, just as you were.

Scott: Yes.

Craig: We all have people like that. Lindsay’s not a writer, so she’s a producer. We’ve had people that we’ve worked with who are directors, who are brand studios, and they recognized something and took us under their wing. Education, formalized education, and we’ll dig in a little further in our bonus segment, requires institutions to hire a lot of teachers. They need to bring in students, that is their commodity, meaning anyone can do it, is what they have to tell you, and they need to set up curricula.

That means standards with exams and targets. Before you begin, you’re fucked because that’s not how it works at all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people who are in the middle of very expensive writing programs. I didn’t even drop out of one. I just didn’t ever go. They are explaining to me what is going on in there, and I just want to light the place on fire. It’s not like it’s a large, organized RICO case scam. It’s not. Everyone’s trying. It’s just maybe this is not instructable like this.

John: I want to be a little more optimistic that there’s some better way, at least to get started, because I want Scott Frank’s Academy to succeed.

[laughter]

John: I’m wondering, a thing I would love to see, which I just don’t see it very much of, because when I’ve gone to visit film classes, what I’m often doing is I’m visiting on the day where they’re laying out the three by five cards and pitching me their story. There’s always too many cards for the first act, and it all falls apart, but at least I have some vision of what their story is. What I haven’t seen is they’re just writing scenes. Scott, I think I really appreciate about what you’re pitching is that don’t write a whole movie. Today, let’s write–

Craig: Scene work.

John: Scene work. Today, let’s write farewell scenes or let’s write [crosstalk]

Scott: Write a scene that’s four pages long called The Confrontation. Well, what’s it about, Scott? It’s about whatever the fuck you want it to be about, just write a scene called The Confrontation.

John: It doesn’t have to fit into a larger thing. It’s just about what this feels like.

Scott: Exactly.

Craig: Do you know the artistic educational system that gets this better is acting instruction.

Scott: Oh, yes, without a doubt.

Craig: Because acting classes, they say– Okay, I remember the very first assignment I ever got in my college acting class. Our teacher said, “Okay, one by one, each one of you is going to do this.” This is the very first day. “Go and sit in that chair on your own. We’ll all look at you. For one minute, act like you’re a person sitting in a chair.” Of course, everybody did something ridiculous. Then she did it, and she just sat there in a chair because that’s what you do in a chair, and we all went, “Oh.”

The point is, the building block was a moment of honesty. Honesty is the thing that we’re always looking for, and it’s what I appreciate about your work. When I watch the scenes, any scene, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a moment watching anything you’ve written where I thought, “No, somebody wouldn’t say that,” or, “I don’t believe it, or, “That’s just a false note,” no, never because honesty is so important to you. It’s so important. Well, no one’s teaching that. No one’s going, “Okay, everybody, forget the four pages. Write one half of a page and this is all that happens: Guy walks in, orders a sandwich, waitress comes back, says they’re out of it. He says, “What?” Go, you have a page, go. That’s all you need. Make it honest.”

Then, if you’ve made it honest, and it’s incredibly boring, what is she wearing? What is he wearing? Where are they? What kind of restaurant? What kind of sandwich? Do they know each other? What is he doing there today? What time is it? The million Lindsey Doran questions that suddenly bring forth life. Now, before it, it’s not an upside-down thing that’s dead. Instead, because I don’t know if there are a lot of teachers who can do that. I’m just saying it. I don’t think there are a lot of teachers who can do what we just did.

John: Here’s the question, I don’t know that you necessarily need a great teacher to do that. As long as you had an environment, you just had a curricula of the Scott Frank Academy where everyone was doing this, and we’re like, “This is the week where we are going to write scenes about this thing,” and everyone just does it, and they all share it. Then just the process of writing and sharing that scene, because the experience of writing 20 scenes will help you understand like, “Oh, this is how scenes work,” and reading other people’s shitty scenes makes you like, “Oh, that’s a shitty scene and it’s a shitty scene for these three reasons. Let me not do those thing,” is so helpful.

Going back to the Lisa example of the development executive, I worked for a year as a reader at TriStar. I read 100 mostly shitty scripts and I had to write coverage on them, which means I had to read the whole thing and write a synopsis of these things that often didn’t make sense, but it just so helped me develop my taste of like, “I don’t want to do these things. This will never work.” That’s an experience that I think people benefit from and writers benefit from, and you can’t start them with saying like, “Okay, now outline this movie you want to write.” You don’t know where to even begin.

Scott: You don’t, and I think that’s really smart what you were just saying, and I think both of you, and I think that you can’t, again, you just don’t know. Most scripts, you’re looking at scenes, and you’re going, “This scene could be in any movie.” These characters, every piece of real estate in a script, is precious. You only have a certain number of pages. If you have an elevator operator or a grocery clerk, you want them to be– they don’t have to steal everything, but where’s the specificity? Even in the scenes, in describing scenes, where’s the specificity?

Do you need to describe so much? Do you even need to stop, and there’s flow? It doesn’t flow because you’re stopping to just– you read down the page and you’re just stopping to describe someone’s fucking bedroom or whatever it is. It makes me nuts. I only need to know things when I need to know them. Don’t even get me started when you’re telling me how people are saying their dialogue, where you have the parentheticals where they’re sarcastically or reluctantly or whatever adverb they want to throw in there.

It’s like, “Isn’t the dialogue good enough that you should know? Don’t we know these people?” Again, what’s difficult about screenwriting, I think, more than anything, I think playwriting is even more difficult because in screenwriting, at least we have cut two get the fuck out of situations. In playwriting, I get them on and off. In screenwriting, the problem with it is we only have two senses, sight and sound. Anything else is cheating because the audience isn’t sitting there reading, “John, who was really traumatized as a kid, is walking into this feeling–“ They don’t get that.

How do you tell a story with just sight and sound? What’s an obstacle ultimately becomes something really interesting because you can find a tone in the script. Again, scripts should have a tone. You should read them; there should be a tone. It should be tense if it’s a thriller, it should be funny if it’s a– whatever it is, there should be a specific tone. You should have a voice, it’s not this mechanical, this happens and then this happens and then– and every scene could be, is just described in the most generic way. That’s hard. Again, one thing about the AFI is they were just making shit all the time.

John: At least when I was there.

Scott: They’re shooting–

John: The workshop aspect of it is really important.

Scott: Really good. In film school, you are making connections, and there’s plenty of things to recommend, depending on who you are. The most talented writers are both insecure and secure in what they want to do. They’re insecure in their ability because we all think we’re frauds, and we all think it’s over tomorrow, but at the same time, we know what the fuck we want to do. We know what we sound like, and that’s the thing. I know what I sound like. I know when I’m being me and when I’m trying to be somebody else, and I’m going to get killed because I’m not being true to the way I sound.

John: At the Academy, some of those first things you write will be imitations, because they have to be imitations.

Scott: Of course.

John: You’re learning what a thing is, and that’s okay.

Scott: Of course.

John: We’re writing scenes all the time, we’re reading scenes, we’re reading whole scripts and having conversations about what’s actually happening on a page, separately from watching the movie, because we need to do both.

Scott: Absolutely, and steal. I think it’s perfectly okay borrow someone’s voice to get your own sea legs. If there’s somebody you really love and you really liked– and I really recommend reading novels more than scripts to become a good writer, because then you’re going to get character. The thing we’re not talking about enough is everything comes from character. Characters are not attitudes or types or, worse, just movie stars. You plug in, it’s Tom Cruise, that’s who it is.

Craig: Because you know who loves hearing that, Tom Cruise. He’s like-

Scott: Yes, he does.

Craig: -“Oh, you named me. Okay, yes, I’ll be there.”

Scott: I’ll be there.

John: You just spoke his name.

Scott: I think that characters are everything. I think that no one is all good or all bad. Everybody lives in the gray area. We’re manipulating people in a way, but we’re not being sentimental. We’re being emotional. There’s a difference. Sentiment, bad. Emotion, good because sentimental, is sort of, I’m telling you to feel this way. Emotion is, you’re just really feeling that way, and you’re not sure why. We’ve all worked on movies and scripts that needed to be fixed at a certain point. Movies in particular, you get to the end, and they’re saying, “Our ending doesn’t work.”

People are not feeling what they’re supposed to feel at the end. You go, “Well, because you fucked up the beginning. Because you were in such a hurry, because you were so worried that it was slow or whatever it was, even though in your test screening, nobody moved, nobody got up, nobody did anything, but it was–“ If you ask people, “Was there any slow part of the movie?” They all said, “The beginning.” “Was there any slow part of the fucking book you just read?” “If I had to pick the slowest part, I’d say the beginning,” and then the editor goes, “Okay, you need to cut 20 pages out of it,” fuck me.

I think that with movies, you don’t understand the character, so when you get to the end, you want to feel it. You understand it all the time. I understand I’m supposed to feel this way, but I don’t really feel it. What the trick is, how do you make people actually feel it, that’s character. That’s pure and simple fucking really interesting character.

John: Wrapping this up, it feels like the Scott Frank Academy is-

Craig: Failure.

John: -utter failure.

Scott: Let’s call it School of Scott Frank, like Rembrandt. Let’s do it like Rembrandt.

Craig: School of Scott Frank. You’re just churning out hundreds of foul-mouthed, miserable, bent-over– [laughs]

John: Wasn’t Rembrandt’s school, though, literally, it was like people had to paint his stuff for him. That’s not probably what we’re talking about. Here’s what I’ll say is that–

Craig: I like that idea.

John: None of us grew up in the writer’s room, the TV model, but some of what we’re talking about does happen, though, where you just have to iterate a bunch of shit all the time.

Scott: Of course.

John: You’re always in conversation about the thing you’re trying to do. You’re trying to do one thing, which is not the breadth of what we’re going for here.

Craig: I think in those rooms, there are some amazing rooms where you learn from incredible people like Vince Gilligan.

John: Historically, yes.

Craig: Then there are a lot of rooms where you’re learning from not great people, and it’s really more, “Guys, we need to make the donuts, more donuts, please.”

Scott: There are legendary rooms that threw off amazing writers.

Craig: Absolutely.

Scott: Going back to the show of shows, but even Everybody Loves Raymond, all those guys ended up doing their own stuff, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Mad Men, all of it, so there are really great– and then there’s a lot of times where I have showrunner friends who’ll say, “I have 11 people in the room and only one guy can write.”

John: This is a salon situation where we’re writing a bunch of scenes, we are discussing really good movies on the page, and then probably screening them so we can talk about what has changed between them.

Scott: Reading books. As the instructor, I’m encouraging people to read novels that sort of feel like what they want to do. They don’t have to read the great novels, they have to read the novels that speak to them and make their sun tingle.

John: As we get to the point where they’ve actually written a full script, then I think, Scott, I’m guessing, we get more towards the Sundance model where you have individual meetings with smart writers who are there not to tell you what to do, but to help evoke out of you, what is it that’s not working for you, and let me help you move it to the place you wanted it to be. An extra brain for them.

Scott: Then craft comes out of that conversation because how many times at Sundance would you read a script that’s a mess? The font is weird, the format is weird, but there’s something fucking undeniable about it. You just go, “This person is an artist, but it’s a mess and it’s hard to read and I’m having– but it’s amazing.”

John: Every Sundance last project is unique. It’s very careful curation. These are very smart people who are doing very smart things, and even if the craft is just nuts, there’s good stuff there. Then, ultimately, great movies come out of this. Great writers come out of this, and it’s just a better model than I think what we’ve seen.

Scott: Because we’re not leading with craft. Craft is the easiest part of it. You apply craft last. You’re mindful
Scott: full of it. There are things that are obvious that you just know from experience. The problem is we’re always talking about all of the books, everything. It’s a lot of craft conversation.

Craig: It’s what you can write a book about. This is it. You can write a book about it. You can teach it. You can break it down into a lesson, and you can mass produce it. People do. This is the problem with the Scott Frank Academy. It requires a lot of Scott Franks, and we don’t have a lot of them, and they don’t want to teach.

John: I don’t think it does. I think I think the idea can be done without a Scott Frank. I don’t think it actually needs a genius at the helm of it. I think it just needs an intentionality of like, “This is how we’re going to do this stuff. I think you need some Scott Franks when it comes time for that. The Sundance part of it, where you’re sitting across from a very smart writer.

Craig: Sundance, correct me if I’m wrong. You guys deal with what? Eight, nine writers?

John: 12, 15 writers at top.

Craig: 12, 15 writers a year. There is a world out there that is a multi-billion-dollar higher education industry. 15 students pays for nothing.

John: Yes, I know.

Craig: It’s not–

John: Yes, I don’t think there’s a viable business model behind this. That was never my intention.

Craig: If your intention was to ruin Scott Frank.

John: We’re on a money-losing podcast still.

Craig: It’s a joy. I thought we were breaking even.

John: We are breaking even now.

Scott: What I was going to say, too, is it’s like you guys had a really interesting conversation about setups and payoffs. Last week or the week before, I don’t remember when it was, I wanted to teach people about setups and payoffs. I go, “Okay, let’s watch a couple of clips from Kramer versus Kramer. Let’s watch the beginning when his wife has just left him, and then the kid wants French toast. He doesn’t know how to fucking make French toast. He’s mad. He’s breaking things, and the kid is going, “Mom doesn’t do it that way.” He’s getting the shells and the yolk, and the kid is watching all disillusioned, and finally, he burns himself. He says, “God damn her.”

Then later, when the wife shows up– the second scene later in the movie, when the wife, when Meryl Streep comes back because she wants to take the kid now, and now the two are in the kitchen quietly, not saying a word, working in sync, making French toast. Really, it tells you everything you need to know that they love each other, that they figured it out, and now this woman is going to fuck it up. Okay, they’re set up some payoffs. You want obstacles? Watch Butch Cassidy when they’re running away from the train, and they have the super posse chasing them. Who are those guys? There’s obstacles. It’s like a lesson in obstacles for 20 fucking minutes.

There are ways to do that and then move on. You don’t have to have a fucking three-hour conversation. It’s just like, “Here’s a tool you can use. Here’s something you can do.” Here it is, but you know what, use it, don’t use it, it’s not a requirement. Melvin and Howard has a 30-minute or 25-minute opening scene. Best screenplay, Oscar. It’s two guys in a truck. I think that it’s just those things; rules are for the uncreative. The end. That’s what they’re for.

Craig: There are no rules.

Scott: You have to be mindful of certain elements and things, but you have your own rules. When you’re filming–

Craig: You understand, no one out there believes you. I am telling you-

Scott: I know. They don’t.

Craig: -no matter how many times we say it and no matter how many writers we have on the podcast who do what so many people want to do, no matter how many times they say it, everyone out there go, “They can do it, but we can’t.” We were they.

Scott: We were they.

Craig: We were they.

Scott: Also, here’s the thing. You are competing with a lot of people. I remember Bill Goldman used to go to those– what was that thing down by the airport, that screenwriter expo where they were 1,000?

John: This is 25 years ago, but there genuinely was a thing at the airport, a huge expo.

Scott: I did a thing with him, and I can’t believe he did this. I did an interview with him, and there were 600 people in this huge room. Bill said, “Okay, maybe one of you is going to actually have a career.” They’re like, “What?” They thought he was kidding. [laughs] He goes, “No, I’m serious.” Probably none of you are going to have a career, but maybe one of you might have a career. The odds are that none of you will have a career.

Craig: I will say we say this a lot, and maybe we’re not William Goldman-esque in the crunchiness of it.

Scott: He’s very Crunchy.

Craig: We talk about the fact that there are fewer professional writers than NFL athletes.

Scott: Absolutely. Why then would you want to follow the same rules everyone else is following?

Craig: Maybe if we say it four million more times. It is so frustrating. It’s almost like the crabs in a barrel thing. Everyone is like, “Yes, but before you escape this barrel, let us pull you down and remind you that you can’t say we see in your action description.”

Scott: Oh, my God.

[laughter]

Craig: This is what happened. This is what’s going on out there.

Scott: I’m like, “Wait, what? You can’t say we see. I was saying we see for 40 years. Wait, what font am I supposed to use? Fuck.”

[laughter]

Craig: It’s the crabs in a barrel. We’ve tried so hard. We really have. We’ve tried so hard to preach a lack of orthodoxy, not a it’s just as orthodox to say, “I’m going to break all the rules.” That’s also stupid. It’s just figuring out who you are and pursuing the thing that makes you unique because I can’t do you. You can’t do them. Then are you good? Are you good?

Scott: That’s the thing. You can learn all the craft in the world. Yes, there are people who are amazing musicians, and there are people who appreciate music. They’re not the same thing. I’m not going to be the one to tell you which you are. The universe will tell you, will sort it out pretty quickly. It is the truth. If you’re leaning into craft and not into the creative side of things in terms of spinning yarn and character and how do people talk to one another and all of those things that are, by the way more fun than writing shit on three by five cards or a dry erase board or whatever it is, then there’s a reckoning that’s going to come.

Craig: One day, a real rain is going to come.

Scott: One day, a hard rain is going to fall.

John: Let us transition to our one cool things. I’ll lead us off. There’s a book I’m reading right now called Antimemetics. It’s by Nadia Asparouhova. Craig and Scott, you know what a meme is. You’re familiar with the idea of a meme. A meme is a unit of culture. It’s an idea that wants to spread. The same way that genes are selfish, they want to get out there in the world, they want to propagate. Antimemetics, or an anti-meme, is something that doesn’t want to spread or just doesn’t spread easily. This all comes out of the– there is no Antimemetics Division, which was a work of fiction, which is really cool, which is now coming out as a book.

This is a nonfiction book that she’s written that’s really digging into this concept of what does an anti-meme actually mean? What is an idea that doesn’t want to spread? Some examples would be things like the topics that everybody agrees upon, but nothing ever actually happens politically. Like extended parental leave or universal background checks on guns. Everyone agrees, like, oh, that’s a good idea, but the idea never takes hold and never gets anywhere. Topics that are taboo, like pornography, or topics that are boring, like insurance.

Craig: So boring.

John: Things that are so traumatic that you just don’t want to think about them, like global poverty. It’s a really good, smart book on this nascent concept. I’ll put a link in the show notes to where you can buy it. If you decide to buy it, the book cover is really cool, and the shape of it is really cool. I really hate the typesetting in it. If you decide to get the digital version of it, I think that’s also fine, and it’s a good way to read it. The book is Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova. It’s published by the Dark Forest Collective. The Dark Forest being that part of the internet where you hide so that no one can ever find you. That comes from the three-body problem.

Craig: Oh, I would love to go there.

John: Wouldn’t that be nice? Craig, when you’re peeking your head out of the Dark Forest, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Craig: I don’t know. You may think this is not cool, but did you read the story about the people that discovered the horrible security with the McDonald’s AI hiring bot?

John: No, but it sounds-

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: -great. Is it funny or tragic or both?

Craig: It’s in this case, I think it’s funny, but it’s funny because of the one cool thing. My one cool thing is hackers. Now, no one likes the idea of them. No one. A lot of them are malicious. No one is going to ever call up a newspaper and say, “By the way, we want to admit our security sucks. We’re going to do better. Nothing happened, but it sucks. We just wanted to tell you that while you’ve been using this, it’s been incredibly insecure. Nothing happened, but now we’re going to fix it.” No one ever does that.

We unfortunately need hackers. There are the white hat guys that are trying to protect us all. There are the bad guys who are trying to steal stuff. In the end, because people, corporations are irresponsible/stupid/lazy/cheap, these things happen. McDonald’s decided, so many people apply to work at McDonald’s that they were like, “Why don’t we just offload this process to a company that uses AI and they use a chatbot? It’s probably so regimented, it sort of makes sense like, “We are going to ask these formatted questions and we’ll get these answers. We’ll sort through some things. You’re going to eliminate 94% of people because these seven things are immediate disqualifiers.”

John: It’s just documentation, et cetera.

Craig: “You can’t be currently on parole.” I don’t even know if that’s true. This company, Paradox AI, was being looked at by these security researchers, Ian Carroll and Sam Curry, and they were doing it not for security purposes. They were just like, “We just want to know, what is this like applying to an AI chatbot?” Then they were like, “While we’re here–“

John: I’m not surprised you could break the chatbot.

Craig: “While we’re here, let’s just see if we can log in to the admin system of this entire thing.” What they tried was the username admin and the password 123456.

John: Hold on.

Craig: It worked, and just like that, they had access to 64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Furthermore, [laughs] they discovered that even if you weren’t that enterprising, even if you didn’t think, “Let’s try admin 123456,” when you applied, in the URL, it would create your application, and it would give you a number. It’s like a big, long number. You’ve seen those in URLs, where it’s like some long, shit numbers. They were like, “What if we just subtract one from that number and reload the page?” Yes, that’s the person’s application before us, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The company’s like [onomatopoeia] We say the same thing, like, “Yes, it’s not so bad, but we’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix it.” My one cool thing are hackers. Please, hackers, use your powers for good. I’m begging you. Without them, no one would ever know, and companies would do stuff like this all the time, which is unconscionable.

John: I think what you’re asking is hackers, but probing their intention. If they’re going into these sites with the intention of uncovering things for the good of humanity, fantastic. It’s when they go in there to–

Craig: Here’s the deal. It’s the only thing that keeps these companies honest. It is the only thing that makes them go, “We have to harden the wall around the stuff we give them,” is the idea that there are people out there trying to steal it.

John: It’s the stories that come out about them that scare the genius out of stuff, which helps.

Craig: Hackers.

John: Hackers.

Craig: Hackers.

John: Scott Frank, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Scott: I do. The New Yorker fiction issue has two great pieces in it, one about Elmore Leonard and one about Richard Price, two of the great dialogue writers of all time. Pursuant to what we’ve been talking about today in terms of character and in terms of efficiency and in terms of describing character and so on, and the way they work, I recommend both of the pieces in the magazine. The Elmore Leonard one, Anthony Lane wrote it. It’s really terrific. It’s full of great quotes. It’s going to lead you to also read Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules of Writing, which is this little book which begins– it’s a great list of things, one of which is–

Craig: No rules.

Scott: No, one of which is never begin a book with weather.

John: Oh, yes, sure.

Scott: It’s a great read. It’s hilarious. You’re going, “Yes.” Never use adverbs. It’s like J.K. Rowling, you read the Harry Potter. He said sneeringly, he said [unintelligible 01:12:59] never do that. It’s full of stuff.

John: Opposition to only the L-Y adverbs or all adverbs?

Scott: I think mostly the L-Y adverbs, I would say, because he’s not ruling out all adverbs.

Craig: Sneeringly.

Scott: Specifically, he said just said. Everything should just be said. It’s also full of great things. The piece that Anthony Lane wrote is terrific because it’s full of great examples of how he thought and the way he thought about story. You read it, and you just go, “Okay, that’s specificity.” The same thing with Richard Price. He’s amazing. What he does is slightly different in that they’re both big research guys, but what Richard does is he immerses himself in a culture, usually cops or city people, city government, or things like that, or a restaurant in the case of, I think, Lush Life.

He gets into this place, and the language of it and the feel of it doesn’t feel like research. It feels like character. They’re both, for us, and what we were talking about tonight it’s about really good writing. They’re not telling stories that are breaking ground. You don’t have to do that. What you have to do is just do it really well and do it in a way that feels fresh. I think both of those pieces are great examples of those two guys that I just love. Those are my two one cool things.

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Outro this week is by Nico Mansey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, just search for Scriptnotes. We have a brand new one up, which is me and Aline talking about farewells. That’s great. We talk about Big Fish, and Devil Wears Prada and Terminator 2, Casablanca, Past Lives, a really good video up there on YouTube for Scriptnotes.

We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week, at least until Scott Frank’s Academy opens up, and then we’re out of business.

Scott: Good.

John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on education and alternative schools for everything that’s not film education. Scott Frank, thank you for this film education and everyone should watch Dept. Q on Netflix. Scott, thank you so much.

Scott: Thank you for having me. It was mostly fun. [laughs]

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Scott, Craig, we have had children go all the way up through from kindergarten through college and various different schools. Craig, you and I both started in public schools, our kids were in public schools. Scott, what was your kids’ journey?

Scott: My kids, they were in private school until high school, and then they had three different tracks. They were in a very progressive school until through eighth grade. My daughter went to an all-girls school, private school in Pasadena called Westridge, uniforms, everything. She went from the super progressive school called Sequoia over there. Then my son went to LACHSA, the LA County High School for the Arts, as a jazz drummer. He went there. Then my youngest daughter went to Thatcher, which is a boarding school, and the first person in the family ever to go away for school.

John: I remember talking with you about that because we were at some Sundance thing, and you were like, “My daughter’s just suddenly at a boarding school.” It’s like, that’s not a California thing. No one does that.

Scott: It’s not remotely. She wanted to do her own thing and didn’t want to do what her siblings had done. It’s a great school. It was at the time, at least, I don’t know now, but I loved it. It was very progressive in its social thinking and more rigorous in its academics. It was a really great place for her. It’s in Ojai and it was beautiful. It wasn’t that far.

John: My daughter went through K through five at the local public school, which was great. The sixth grade year was the year that we were living in Paris. She went to an international school in Paris, which was a really good experience. International schools, by their nature, they turn over a third of their students every year. They’re just really good at onboarding kids and getting stuff going. The fact that she made friends from around the world was terrific. Then, coming back to Los Angeles, she went through a girls’ school for 7 through 12 and then went off to college. Craig, your kids both went through public school the whole way?

Craig: My older kid switched over to private about halfway through. Then my younger daughter went public all the way through. My older daughter has not gone to college. I don’t think has any plans to go to college. My younger daughter is currently in college, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last either.

John: She’s at Berkeley, and so she’s in a very special program.

Craig: She is, and she’s doing well. Berkeley is a vocational program, and she’s doing well enough where maybe she has a vocation, and so school becomes moot.

John: I want to talk about, we had the experience of sending kids through this, but now in 2025, if you’re a parent who’s looking at the future of education and what that is, I’m just recognizing that so much of how we set up our educational system, and Scott, you have more experience with alternatives to things, is that very classic– there’s a teacher in front of the room who’s mostly just there to keep the order and this is a set curriculum, but we’re not really assessing whether kids are getting any mastery over these things. We definitely know that kids need to understand fundamentals before they can move up to certain things, but we do also just progress them when they progress.

I was in a talented and gifted program growing up, which was useful, but I was never accelerated, and I was always bored through a lot of it. I was able to get out of high school a little bit early to do some college classes, but I came so late. We had the school of Scott Frank for future screenwriters, but for all kids, do we have a vision for what a better education would be if we could just magically do it?

Scott: Also, the other thing is we’re confronted by the double negative of right now, curriculums are smaller, everything is considered a waste now, which is a mistake. What they’re teaching, they’re not even teaching really well. What is the United States in terms of an education, number 39 or some fucking thing?

Craig: However they measure it.

Scott: Yes, however they measure it. In California, certainly pretty low in terms of the rest of the country, but I think they’re cutting the funding, they’re cutting the curriculum, and the other negative is that it was a system that was designed for people who work in factories. We’ve still got this antiquated education system, and so I think that it is the single biggest threat to our country. It was until recently, but I’ve always felt like an uneducated population is a disaster, and I think that we have an uneducated population.

Listen to how people in leadership speak. It’s amazing, the language is eroding, and this is me sounding like an old guy, but I do feel like no one knows civics. When I was shooting in Scotland, the cab driver would know who Chuck Schumer was, or the Electoral College, or the Fed, and all this stuff, and they were really well versed in sort of civics. Here, I doubt people can talk about how many people are in Congress versus how many people are in the Senate, or even tell you what the three branches of government are, and so I think education has become, I think, the weak spot for us.

John: I’ve been reading articles about alternative systems that are replacing how we’re doing, and I feel like they remind me honestly, I don’t know if your kids went through Montessori preschools, but that kind of thing where you have smaller activities where you’re just focused on– everyone’s doing their own thing, but then you are coming together for stuff. Some of the most extreme ones, basically all of the classic academic education, is individual. You’re going through the assignments on your computer, in a group room, but you’re going through all this stuff, and they do all of that just in the morning, like two hours in the morning.

The whole afternoon is group activities, putting on a play, sports, if it’s a sports school, or something like that, where it’s like the whole afternoon is for you to do all the group stuff together, because they don’t have to– instead of using teachers to do– the person in front of the room, everything is just like, you’re at your computer. It’s almost like the remote learning, but a very focused time where the person’s coaching you through that stuff, and then everything is grouped in the afternoon.

I don’t know if that’s the answer, but I just feel like how we’re doing it right now, I agree with Scott, it’s like a placeholder for 12 years, and you just don’t know that– certain kids will thrive in it, but a lot of them don’t, a lot of them learn to hate school.

Craig: Maybe this will sound weirdly optimistic relative to Scott, but on very quick psychoanalysis, more pessimistic. I don’t think it’s gotten worse; I think it’s always been horrible. I think education in the United States has always been a disaster. It’s just that we used to not insist that everybody go to college, and we used to have more vocational programs, which I think are incredibly important, and also we used to have people that knew how to do things, make things, fix things. We still need people to do these things, but what we keep telling everybody culturally is that’s not good enough, and that what you really need to do is go get yourself that college degree.

Why? I don’t know. I do not know. There are plenty of things that college degrees are wonderful for, but need? If you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or if you want to, I don’t know, something that requires that level of education, sure. If you want to be an art historian, if you want to work as a molecular biologist, sure. If you aren’t one of those people, and almost no one is, we think everybody is, very few people are, I’m not sure there’s a point to that.

Our educational system, our K through 12 educational system, which used to just be geared to, let’s just give you enough stuff so that you can go into the workforce and not be a total dummy, now is about go pass these tests. Which have no bearing on anything except to help you with your standardized application, that now goes to 800 colleges all at the same time. I just read an article where the biggest problem on college campuses right now is not only are students using AI to write things, professors are also using AI to read things. Now you just have AI talking to itself while parents are plowing hundreds of thousands of dollars into this nonsense.

Go all the way back to K through 12 and start asking some difficult questions. There are a lot of things we just take for granted. For instance, everybody needs to take algebra. No, they don’t. Very few people need to take algebra. You should take algebra if you have an interest in algebra. Once you get past arithmetic, I honestly believe math should be something you opt in on. I don’t understand why we force kids who clearly have no aptitude or interest in mathematics to learn the quadratic equation. Why? Why are we doing that?

John: I hear you, Craig. I think there’s good enough evidence that most math education is just so terribly done that the reason why kids struggle to get into algebra is because all the fundamentals weren’t. They were getting advanced beyond.

Craig: What is it that most kids, and I’m going to include us here– look, I love math. I would have opted in. I love it. Why do you need that?

John: I do wonder whether some fundamental understanding of logic is actually very difficult to do without algebra.

Craig: Okay. Logic. Let’s talk about that, because that’s actually very important, because I think Scott put his finger on civics, which is critical thinking, is the topic that is the most important thing for kids to learn in school, and no one teaches it anywhere at all. It is not a curriculum topic anywhere. It is so vastly more important than trigonometry, I can’t even express. Our civilization will not be undone by only 5% of people understanding trigonometry, because only 5% of people understand it right now. It will be undone by people who do not understand how to think critically, because they’re not taught it.

John: Thinking critically is discussion, but it’s also writing, and that is an area which I do feel like the influx of AI is incredibly dangerous, because if you don’t have the process of actually having to compose your thoughts and think on the page and express yourself, you really aren’t thinking. You don’t have the ability to analyze an issue, analyze what your opinion is of something.

Scott: Also expressing yourself, also being able to write and express yourself in writing, and being able to do that, not relying on AI or anything, but being able to make an argument on paper, to being able to just speak the language.

John: I remember proving my daughter’s papers from 7th grade through 12th grade, probably earlier than that, but really 7th through 12th grade, and you just watch how frustratingly limited she was in seventh grade and how good she got by the end of 12th grade, like, “Oh, she really is genuinely thinking. She’s expressing herself with new, unique ways.” It’s just so much hard work, and it’s so necessary to do all that work, and there’s no shortcut.

Craig: Counterpoint.

John: Please.

Craig: That’s what we value.

John: It is what we value.

Craig: I do think there is a system where you take children and you say, “I’m going to arrange a bunch of things you can look at today. Pick one. What do you want?

John: That’s preschool Montessori.

Craig: Where do you go? Because there are incredibly wonderful and pivotally important people in our society who can’t write at all, they’re terrible at it, but they’re very good at–

John: Absolutely valid. 100% I agree with you.

Craig: For instance, tax attorneys, not great writers, but God bless them. They love that. My younger daughter and I both do something that neither one of us was actually rigorously instructed in as part of a curriculum K through 12. I did not take any creative writing classes because they didn’t exist in my school at all. I did take calculus. Now, that was a waste of my time, a full waste of my time. It is a requirement to be in a pre-med track, which I would argue is a waste of time for people that would make excellent doctors. We have a system that is built around a pedagogy that is stupid. It is ancient.

Our society is changing at light speed daily. Our educational system is firmly in 1930. If we’re lucky, it’s in 1950. If we’re lucky. The government system that funds it is stupid; it is underfunded. The teacher unions have too much power. They do. The structure of the way the unions and the funding collide together– you have administration funding, you have unions, and together they go swoop. In the middle are children who are not being served well. Then they all get funneled up into the worst system of them all, the college system, which is mostly there, as far as I can tell, on a broad basis to support NCAA sports. I’m not joking.

John: I will say, the three of us on this call with kids, we all had the resources to effectuate whatever was going to work best for our individual kids. All three of Scott’s kids were different. Your two daughters were different. My daughter was exactly the right kid to go through a selective girls’ school and thrive. We need fundamental changes to the system so that parents who don’t have the resources to do all those things, the time, the money, the whatever, can have a great outcome for their kids.

Craig: Absolutely.

Scott: I think that’s true.

Craig: Since we’re waving the magic wand, we should be spending far more money on education, but it’s a little bit like your antimemetic thing, nobody can really agree on it because there is no instrument through which to spend it right now that makes any sense at all. Everybody understands that the more money you pour in, the more it will be absorbed by two entities: administration and teachers. By the way, my parents were both public school teachers. I don’t want teachers to think I– I love teachers. They’re incredibly important. I’m not a big fan of the way some of the unions function, but that’s fine.

There’s a whole tenure thing in California that makes it very hard for good teachers to be hired, and it makes it very easy for bad teachers to never go away and to soak up a lot of funds. If we could figure out a delivery system, then it would be worthwhile to pour all that money in, and our country has money.

John: My mom was originally a Spanish teacher, but then, when she went back after I was old enough to be a latchkey kid, she became an ESL teacher. As an ESL instructor, she had two or three students at a time, where she had most of the day to get them up to speed on everything. Guess what? If you have an adult working with a motivated kid who’s engaged, you can Zoom through all that stuff. I just feel like with the job losses that are probably coming in a lot of different sectors, using those to educate our next generation makes a lot of sense.

Craig: If teachers, let’s say great teachers– we understood as a society, there was a system where a great teacher could thrive and get what they needed and be rewarded for it. We came and said, “We’re going to pay you guys like they pay Goldman Sachs first years.” What a glorious–

Scott: Pay them like they were even teamsters. The guy that drives the honey wagon on the set makes more money than a teacher.

Craig: A new teamster doesn’t, an old teamster does. That actually is sort of the teacher issue. Figuring out how to make it work so that teaching is a viable profession where people have protections and pensions just like we do, all of that is doable. The system, as it currently exists, is a negotiation between two enormous entities that are so far away from individual students or teachers, it’s insane.

Scott: Even well below that, what you were saying is really the problem too, which is really teachers and what they’re paid and how they’re valued is a huge issue, and-

Craig: Of course.

Scott: -awful.

Craig: Of course.

Scott: Again, one of those anti-memes that we’d say this forever, and nothing ever happens.

Craig: Nothing ever happens.

Scott: I do think that what are the fundamentals? Okay, yes, no one needs to know calculus unless you really want to learn calculus or physics or whatever. There are basic science things people should know.

Craig: Of course.

Scott: There are basic fundamental things people should know to be a functioning human in the United States. I also think that I don’t think people should learn to write like the way we write. I think it’s just the basics of how the language works. The end. Ideally, maybe speak another language, but dare I dream?

Craig: Dare you dream.

Scott: I do think that the civics and the fundamental things that in order to be a responsible, participating, voting citizen in this country, it’s all been pulled out. The attitude toward being educated. Now, if you’re educated, the cultural elite, and the intellectual elite– I want my doctor to be smarter than me. I want people-

John: At least about medicine. [laughs]

Scott: -to be smarter than me. This whole idea that people are smart or whatever, we’re in this place where it’s weird. Now education has become also the target. I agree with you about universities. I agree with you about not everybody should go. Not everybody needs to go.

Craig: No. Which would require employers to stop requiring college degrees for jobs that do not require college degrees.

Scott: That don’t need it.

Craig: That is ruinous.

Scott: Ruinous in many ways. Financially ruinous in terms of where you spend your time, where you could be either getting your life together or traveling for a bit, and then getting– whatever it is, because people are too young to know what they want when they go to college.

Craig: Being able to afford a house because you don’t have $400,000 of loans or whatever it is. It’s the system. Every year, I get angrier about it. Every year, I get more extreme about it. It’s not going to change. I know that.

Scott: No, we have the head of– what’s her name? The head of wrestling or–

John: Oh yes, Linda McMahon.

Scott: Linda McMahon is going to fix it. We’re going to–

Craig: She’s done a great job with the WWF. Bang up job over there.

Scott: Thank you. Yes.

John: By getting rid of her dad? Anyway. Thank you both for helping us solve the education crisis in America and probably worldwide. We’ll be looking forward to seeing it rolled out shortly.

Scott: School of Scott Frank, coming.

Craig: That’s the real problem.

Scott: To a mini-mall near you.

Links:

• Dept. Q on Netflix
• Scott Frank
• Scott’s last time on Scriptnotes, Episode 476: The Other Senses
• Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny by RS Benedict for Blood Knife
• Scriptnotes 639: Intrinsic Motivation
• Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova
• Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch by Anthony Lane for The New Yorker
• Richard Price’s Street Life by Kevin Lozano for The New Yorker
• McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ by Andy Greenberg for Wired
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.