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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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

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

John: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Leslye: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They were just too much alike.

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

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct.

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

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

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

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Of course, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: I am, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, wow.

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

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

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

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

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

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

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

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

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

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

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

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

John: Exactly.

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

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

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

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh my God.

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

Leslye: Oh, my God.

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

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

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

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

John: I’ve never read it.

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

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

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

Leslye: I agree.

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

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslye Headland, such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes.

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

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leslye: They can’t.

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

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

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

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

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

John: Yikes.

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

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

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

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

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

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

Leslye: Phenomenal.

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

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

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

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

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

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

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

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

John: Awesome.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Today on the show, how do you approach the second season of the acclaimed TV show you created? It’s a question asked by roughly 1% of our listening audience, and yet the answer is surprisingly relevant to anyone dealing with the pressures of expectation and reality.

Craig: It’s relevant to 66% of the people right now on this podcast.

John: Which is so odd to have you both here. We will also answer listener questions about transitioning from journalism to screenwriting and what to do when you realize that someone else is making something with the same premise.

To help us do all this, we have a very special guest. Tony Gilroy is the writer and director of movies such as Michael Clayton, Duplicity, The Bourne Legacy. He also wrote The Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy, Bourne Ultimatum, Devil’s Advocate, Rogue One, and, of course, The Cutting Edge with D.B. Sweeney. Most relevant to today’s episode, Tony is also the creator and showrunner of Andor, which starts its second season on April 22nd. Welcome to Scriptnotes, Tony Gilroy.

Tony Gilroy: It is a pleasure to be here. It really is. I’ve been listening, so it’s nice to be someplace where you’ve visited.

Craig: That is startling and disturbing. Well, it’s very flattering. Tony Gilroy, for those of you who follow screenwriting, needs no introduction even though John gave him one. If you’re a casual listener, let me explain. We’ve got one of the all-time great first-ballot hall of famers here with us today.

John: Weirdly, Tony, your name has come up so much recently on the show because after our Moneyball episode with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, she mentioned running into you, which was great. Then a couple of weeks ago, Christina Hodson was on. We were talking through action sequences. We went through a great action sequence of yours from The Bourne Identity, which was so much fun to see and to see how you were doing things on the page, which is different than how Craig or I or other folks would do things on the page. It’s great to have you. You’ve been on our mind, so to have you on our show is just a delight.

Tony: I listened to that episode yesterday to prep for today. I thought she did an amazing– she just covered all of it. It was very well-played. It’s very instructive. That episode was really terrific.

John: Yes, so Craig will never listen to that episode. Craig, Christina was really smart.

Craig: I will. You don’t know that.

Tony: You have a lot to learn. There’s things to learn.

Craig: I think with this recommendation, this might go to the top of my list. Christina is fantastic, plus superb accent. It always helps.

John: It’s just the best. Love it. Love it to death. Tony, we’re here on the occasion of Andor starting its second season. Every listener needs to go back and watch Andor Season 1 immediately. Pause the podcast and go back and watch it. Maybe they’re in their car and they can’t. Could you give us the logline and set us up Andor within the universe of Star Wars for folks who aren’t familiar with what Andor is and why it’s so awesome?

Tony: I’m going to skip the awesome part. The simple setup is it’s the five-year prequel of a character, Cassian Andor, who’s in Rogue One. In Rogue One, he will sacrifice himself at the end in a very heroic, messianic way. This is the five years that leads him into the first scene of Rogue One, which is a slightly odd concept. When we meet him in Rogue One, the character in Rogue One is an all-singing, all-dancing spy warrior. There’s nothing he can’t do.

The concept of the show is to take him from a point five years earlier where he is a cynical, disinterested, self-preservationalist, the kind of guy in his town that people don’t want to see coming down the street, to take him from the lowest possible point, and have him become– In the first season, the first season is really about his stations of the cross on the way to becoming a revolutionary. It’s the revolutionary education of someone from a very outside point of view. We take him, in the first season, just to the point where he will join at the end. This second season is about the next four years as he activates that involvement.

John: Now, that’s centering it on your protagonist, the guy who’s changing, but you don’t limit the POV just to him. There’s other plot lines and things that are being set up, which leads to the bigger question of, what is the show really about? To you, what is the show? What are you actually trying to explore in the course of the show?

Tony: The show, for me, is the opportunity with the largest possible canvas and the largest possible cast and the most resources you can possibly imagine to tell the story of a revolution and to try to tell the story about what happens to a great variety of people and a great variety of social stratus and on both sides of the fence. What happens to ordinary people as revolution just explodes around them and washes over their life?

As people become absorbed into history and the pressures that that places on everyone, to my mind, it’s an all-encompassing opportunity to deal with things I’ve been thinking about my whole life and behavior I’ve been thinking about my whole life and challenges I’ve been thinking about my whole life. I have a chorus. I have a choir, 10 or 15 characters that are really identifiable that we’re carrying through. Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s character, is this messianic character surfing through the center of that. But as you suggested, it would be a disservice to say that it’s really just about this one guy. It is a broad survey of what happens to people when the shit comes down.

Craig: I’m not going to get into the absolute trap of trying to rate Star Wars stuff because I like my life to the extent that I have one, but I think that Andor does feel apart. It is completely integrated into the story of Star Wars, the history of Star Wars, that narrative, that world, that tone, but it does feel set apart because it’s so– [chuckles] I’m just going to get in trouble. I don’t care. It’s so good. It’s really just of a quality that feels different.

My question. This is really a process/psychology question because I know I’m struggling with this myself right now. You’re about to unleash Season 2 upon the world. There is a Season 3 coming. When you finished Season 1, which was so complete and accomplished, did you think to yourself, “Well, how the fuck am I going to do that again?” How do you face the blank, I don’t even call it the blank page, the blank mind, knowing there is so much work to be done to do another season, another season, another season when you’ve just run a marathon and won it?

Tony: The great crise for us was during the filming of Season 1. Our show was really salvaged as probably other shows were as well by COVID. COVID really saved our show. I started this process either out of ignorance or vainglory or just blithe indifference, whatever. I had no clue whatsoever what I was getting into. I threw together a five-day writers’ room. Things were in process. I won’t go through the whole thing, but I was in London. I was going to be directing three episodes in the spring.

I was prepping them. I was casting them. I was half-assed watching the other scripts come in and going, “Well, I got to go do some other work here.” Had we proceeded on that schedule, it would have been a trade story disaster. It really would have been an epic disaster. COVID came in and everything slowed down and stopped and reset. I reoriented my job on the show. I decided not to direct. I realized where the priorities were.

As we began to crawl back into the process and Disney was one of the first places to start that and Sanne Wohlenberg, who you know well, was so great producer from Chernobyl and we share a lot of things from Chernobyl, but she just was determined. As we started that roll-in, there was time to get our footing and for me to figure out what I needed to be doing and how to make the show potentially what I really hoped it would be. We were on the hook. We had promised that we were going to do five seasons of this show. It was going to be one season per year.

Talk about delusional. It seems so, but that’s what we committed to. We got up in Scotland. Diego and I were up there. This was post-COVID after I went through my quarantine and got back over there and up in Scotland with him. I was just looking into the next black hole as was he because he’s got to marry into Rogue One and it’s 10 years earlier. This is taking 17 years to make the first season. We really knew that we were in trouble.

I literally remember the conversation where we just sat down in the backyard in Pitlochry at this hotel with a scotch and just said, “We’re so fucked. We’re just so totally fucked. What are we going to do?” I don’t want to make this the longest answer ever.

Craig: Go for it.

Tony: The answer was mystically already in front of us. Our show was organized around blocks of three, which is this European system that we– You go for any system. You’re looking for systems that’ll help you-

Craig: Survive.

Tony: – organize things. Yes, survive really, survive really. These blocks of three, a director will do a block of three and three and three and three. We’re doing four blocks of three and that’s what we were doing for the first season. It was like, “Oh, my God. We have four years to cover. Look at this. We have four blocks.” I remember going back to the room and going, “What if I did a year per block? What could I do and would Disney go for that? Would that appeal to them? What would Kathy say? How would we do it?” That was a crucible moment where we really figured out what to do.

John: Tony, can you describe what you mean by blocks? As I watched the first season, it does really feel like this is a movie, this is an arc, and then there’s another one, and there’s another one. Is that what you’re describing?

Tony: A block is three episodes. A director can come in and do three episodes. We do treat them like films. The prep time is probably longer than most films because our demands on the show, which is something we can talk about, are so many extraordinary, extra credit things that you would never think about in any other project. The prep, the building, the editorial team, the whole project is on blocks of these three. In both seasons, it is physically possible for a director to come in and do the very first block and the last block. That would be the only way you’d be able to do the workflow.

John: That’s great. One of the things I really admired about Andor is if we reached a new environment, we’d have a sense like, “Okay, we’re going to be here for a moment.” The prison sequence of the first season is so incredible. I think because you’re doing it as a block, logistically, you’re able to build out these incredible sets and create this space, but also create story elements and create characters who are going to be so important for that sequence.

We also have a sense of, “We will move past them at the end.” It made so much sense. It seems so obvious, but what you’re describing is it wasn’t at all obvious as you were starting the process. You really probably were thinking episode by episode and it wasn’t until you got to this idea of blocks that it became feasible to tell the story the right way.

Tony: No, but Season 1 was built around that system.

John: Okay, great.

Tony: We did build around the blocks. Our very weird writers’ room thing that we did and we can talk about that if you want to. The very weird thing that we did, each writer took a block. Again, you get a chunk. You get a movie. You get these three. Season 1 almost fits that. There’s an anomalous seventh episode, which is an interesting little sidebar. It’s just we weren’t Calvinist about it in the first season. In the second season, because we are jumping a year each time, as writers, it’s a fascinating concept. The idea is we come back, it’s a year later.

Then the idea became refined as I started to sketch it. I’m like, “Oh, my God. You know what I’m going to do? I’m not going to come back and stay a month or dick around and do this thing. We’re going to come back. When we come back, we’re coming back for three days each time.” We just drop the needle on three days and then we drop a year and come back for three days. There’s this abyss of negative space that’s in between. Then my desire, my goal, what we went for is to not have any exposition whatsoever. None of the Chekhovian, “No, John, I haven’t seen you since then.”

[laughter]

Craig: “As you know…”

Tony: None of that. “As you know. As, of course, you remember, when last we spoke,” none of that. What’s the most badass drop we can do and get away with it? This second season adheres very rigorously to the four-movie concept. The show will be released that way as well. They’re going to release them three per week for a month.

Craig: Which I love. It’s amazing that we’re still coming up with new ways to do this.

Tony: I know.

Craig: I’m just thrilled that any movement towards not dumping everything at once to me is a huge victory. I’m curious. This will lead in a little bit to some consideration about your writers’ room and how that works, but showrunning, which is something that you hadn’t been doing. You had been writing movies. You had been writing and directing movies, which is like showrunning a thing.

Showrunning a television show like this, of this size, is somewhat of an elastic job. People do it differently. I myself go crazy. I wonder how you do it. I’m curious how you handle your attention. Where do you hyper-focus? Where do you delegate? How do you keep your hand on the tiller of quality control over the course of this beast because a production like this is an absolute beast?

Tony: Look, you’re absolutely right. I think people are constantly striving for a formula for how to do this. They haven’t even figured out the formula how to make people’s deals on this shit yet, right? Anybody who tells you, “Oh, well, this is how everyone’s doing it,” is lying to you. It is absolutely the Wild West.

I didn’t know what to do. My only experience had been I spent two years on House of Cards as a consultant. I really didn’t go to the room. I went there a couple of times. I was really there as a backup asshole at the end to give notes.

Really, that was my function, to be the final horrible critic of what was there.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Tony: I’d gone to the room and I’d seen it. I certainly had a lot of friends who were doing it. We evolved into– what’s the most graceful way of saying it? We evolved into a system that was a writing system. I never once, for five years straight, have ever, ever, ever stopped writing. I’d never ever, ever had a break, not a single day ever. The writing started in the conception, in the very first conversations with Lucas and Kathy and Disney and everything and tiptoeing into how this might be and what I could get away with and how far we could push it, and should I do this? All that advanced work.

Luke Hull was my next collaborator, the great production designer of Chernobyl, who Sanne Wohlenberg brought over, the great 14-year-old Mozart production designer. I began collaborating with Luke and building Ferrix and building these places and starting to design and getting some sort of handle on what we could afford and what was manageable and what would the scale of the show be.

There’s a writing process with him. I write the first three episodes. I have 100 pages of what I think might be a season. Then I brought in Beau Willimon and my brother Dan. Stephen Schiff was ill in London, so he couldn’t come, but he’d pick up an episode off the notes. Beau and Danny and I go to a room for five days in New York with Luke Hull in presence, with the production designer there who’s already been my co-writer through a whole bunch of stuff in the design sense. The producer is there.

We have lines to Lucasfilm about what we can do and what we can afford. We have this absolutely knock-down, drag-out, accelerated five-day story conference where we beat out the story as crazy as we possibly can and fill in the gaps, all the gaps that I don’t have, and then divvy up who gets the assignments.

Those guys go off and they make drafts. They solve problems. They brought ideas in the room. They make drafts. They do rewrites. We do stuff. They’re always an approximation, right? It’s just such an approximation because those scripts are not going to be done. Well, because of COVID, they’re not going to be shot for 18 months.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s a lovely luxury there.

Tony: Right? There you go. They’re writing and then they go away. Then when COVID happens, all I do nonstop literally every day is write. Our system on the show, I always hear people say, “Oh, well, you have a writer on the set.” Never ever, ever, ever had a writer on the set. Our whole principle is to have the scripts be so prepped, so perfect, have so many meetings and so many design discussions and everything so completely taken care of.

I’ll do the first page turn. I’ll do the first HOD page turn. I’ll run that one. The second one, I’ll scramble. The third one, the final one, is the AD and the director taking over the show. The best version of that is I don’t ever have to say anything. I’ll have a Sunday night phone call with every director before the week’s shooting to go over anything that’s missing or any questions that we have.

Craig: That’s a great idea.

Tony: I want everything so perfect in every moment of tempo and design and everything. Everything’s been tucked away that these people can go to set every day and swing. The TV director thing, that’s a whole other podcast. As a director and as a first final-cut director and as a protective director, the idea of having me or somebody else watch over, I want them to know exactly what they’re supposed to get, what the protein is every day, what we’re going for, but I want them to swing when they go to work.

Our system was developed around that, a very scientific, “Let’s get a perfect set of drawings.” To a level, I would never take a movie. I’ve never taken a movie that far. This is hundreds of people, but so detailed. That’s what we evolved into. It’s a writing system. I wrote from the very first memos to Lucasfilm straight through. We finished November 5th to the final ADR and working with my brother, Johnny, when we’re doing all the final cuts and all the stuff because we get to finish up the show in a way. I don’t finish until the final ADR mix session. I’m writing every single day.

Craig: It sounds like you’re writing through until the point where you have finally finished the scripts. At which point, you now go, and you probably were already doing this anyway, to begin editing because you were now receiving director’s cuts in. Now, you start editing those and you start working on the visual effects. The job never ends, but it sounds like you’ve got a system where the materials that are coming in, it sounds like you’ve got a system where there aren’t too many bad surprises.

Tony: We shot 1,500 pages of script, right? We only lost one scene in the entire thing that we didn’t use for the cut. We only ever re-shot anything, which was the first sequence in the very first episode. Essentially, we re-shot it because we wanted to give the directors the balls to swing away. They were too afraid to swing. It’s like, “Dude, you got to go for it, man. I don’t need coverage. I need a movie here, man.” That’s the only time we ever did it.

Obviously, we had problem-solving complications and all kinds of workarounds because of the strike and different things like that. It is the most maximal, imaginative, immersive thing that I lived in for five years because when I say “writing,” I’m not just talking about the dialogue or the scenes. I’m not just talking about all the memos that I have to write to explain everything that I want or fight for what I need or all those things.

I’m also talking about all the dizzying, really almost hard-to-comprehend amount of design work that has to go into the show. There’s places where I will delegate. Obviously, to the directors. I delegate on the day. Every now and then, the phone would ring at 4:30 in the morning and I’d have to do something, but very, very rarely. Mostly, it’s me getting up at six o’clock in the morning and going through dailies from yesterday and being astonished at how cool these directors are blocking. “Holy shit, look what they did. How did they know how to–“ because they don’t have to worry about the script when they get to the set.

John: Now, Tony, this is your first time doing a second season of a TV show, but all three of us have done sequels. We’ve done movie sequels where we worked on one movie and then we had to come back and do the next one. We have the knowledge of like, we know what the thing is. We can make a plan for the second one. In my experience, you can have a plan for it, but that plan will go awry.

You’re dealing with a bunch of other expectations around it. Because it’s the second time through, expectations are higher and different. What were you able to take from, for example, the Bourne movies from that and bring it to this? Just like, what has been your experience of sequels overall? What are the things that you’ve learned that work well when you’re trying to do the next installment of a franchise versus that’s just not going to be relevant because you’re trying to make a new movie each time?

Tony: I think it’s easier. The first time when I went to do Supremacy, I was shocked that I didn’t have to introduce the character. I was like, “Oh, my God. All the work that you do to have people really understand this person that you’re talking about as quickly and as elegantly as possible, all that’s done.” I think it’s a huge advantage in a way. To the larger question, I think this maybe goes to what you’re saying and maybe the cherry on the top of the previous answer.

I’m no kid. I did a lot of things over the last few decades and a lot of experience of things. I found there were so many days every week where I was using absolutely everything I knew in all aspects of my life. I’m talking about all the ambassadorial things that one does as a showrunner. I’m talking about all of the, “Should I be Ho Chi Minh today or Napoleon?”

[laughter]

Is it time to write that memo? Is it everything from the most molecular scene-writing tweaks to the most maximal decisions about, “Oh, my God. We can’t afford to pay for this entire episode. What are we going to do?” and everything in between? It’s been a decompression process to come off of it, I must say.

Craig: Yes, I go through the same thing. I wonder if you’ve had this existential thought because I have, because you’ve been doing it longer. John and I have been doing it, I think, if anybody is a young person, for a long time.

Tony: I think we’re contemporary.

Craig: We’ve all been doing it for a long time. When you work in features, as you and I and John did for so long, you do get used to a little bit of the, “Well, you work on a thing and it’s maybe a year or if you’re making it two.” This show that you’re making and the show that I’m making will devour, what? A decade, a decade and a half of your life, of your rapidly dwindling life. I wonder, sometimes I turn to my first AD and I say, “When I’m not looking and when I don’t expect it, please hit me in the back of the head with a hammer as hard as you can.”

[laughter]

I don’t know how else to get off of this. Like you said, the dizzying move from molecular to macro at times is exhausting, but I love it. I do feel sometimes a little bit of an ache that there’s something– Well, whatever my Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Whenever your next Michael Clayton would be, when does that happen? Do you feel that or are you like, “Screw it. This is a beautiful thing”?

Tony: No, I spent the first year even when I was in London pre-COVID, I began to have just the worst buyer’s remorse. Epic every morning, “What have I done? I’ve fucked my life. I shouldn’t have done this.” Now, I’ve committed. All these people are here. This is horrible. When COVID came, I thought like, “You know what? Thank God. That will kill the show. Thank God.” I was very, very unhappy when the phone calls started coming. Then I was like, “Well, I’m not coming back to London to die for this show.” Then they were like, “Well, I’m not going to direct anymore.” It’s two speeds.

Number one, you have your pride of work. That never goes away. I think anybody who gets onto this podcast is probably in that category of obsessive human being. You’re just going to do the best you can all the time, but it was with horrible, horrible doubt. It really wasn’t until we started shooting and stuff started coming in and it started to pull together. My brother Johnny really came in and was really seeing stuff. I was like, “Well, this is going to be good.” My feelings changed as we did the first season. I’m only doing two, though, Craig. It’s five and a half years for me. I did do Rogue, but that was in the past.

Craig: You’re not only doing two. I don’t believe that.

Tony: I’m only doing two. We’re done. No, it’s a closed circle.

Craig: This is it? It’s over?

Tony: Yes, no, it’s a novel. Yes, because we’re taking him to the final scene that walks him into Rogue One.

Craig: In Season 2, yes.

Tony: Yes, literally, we’re walking him and I will say that is–

Craig: You found a way to get out.

[laughter]

Tony: Not only that, I think it let us stay sane. It let Diego and I stay sane and the people involved. It let Disney stay sane because there’s no secret there. The streaming model and economics changed right in the middle of our show, which could have been cataclysmic.

Craig: You’re in a victory lap now then.

Tony: Yes, but knowing the ending, always knowing the ending, made everything much more. It’s a freeing thing. It’s a liberating thing to know where the end of the road is.

Craig: Well, I know where the end of my road is. It’s just way the fuck down.

[laughter]

Tony: Well, I don’t know what to tell you.

Craig: I don’t know what to tell me either.

Tony: No, I’ve been out. I wrote another script over the summer, so I’m trying to get out.

Craig: Screw you, Gilroy. [laughs]

Tony: No, I’m out.

Craig: All right. Well, that’s a good answer and that’s encouraging. I like how happy you look right now. We’re looking at each other on Zoom. You look delighted. Just check in with me about five years from now. I hopefully will have that same, “I did it,” look on my face.

John: Yes, we’re an audio podcast. If we ever released a video episode, you could see Craig, the realization. They’re like, “Oh, Tony Gilroy’s done? That’s a choice I could have made?” You can see it recalculating everything he did.

Tony: I know. He’s shrinking there.

Craig: That was just my rage building up. That’s what that looks like. [laughter]

I love working on the show, but my God, the marathon aspect of it, at times, it’s incredible. Congratulations for making it to the end of the finish line.

John: Is there a way that we could manufacture a COVID?

Craig: Oh God, Jon, what are you saying?

Tony: Dude, I think they did that. They tried that.

John: Craig’s show actually has it built in. Is there a way that we can build in those times and the stuff because that was so crucial for you to be able to make it the first season?

Craig: Yes, I’m curious because you had the benefit of that forced break in Season 1. Now, in Season 2, as you were working on it, there was a forced break, but you couldn’t work during it because it was the Writers Guild strike.

Tony: Yes, but that was a different–

Craig: You were in a different spot.

Tony: The irony of that was that if you had asked me at any point during that year, “What’s going to be the most epic moment of your year,” I would have said, “Without any labor issues on the horizon whatsoever, I could have told you in September.” Oh, my God. Around March or April, I’m going to finish the final rewrite on the final script. That’s my timeline. I’m ahead of the production. I don’t want to minimize the work that Danny and Beau and Tom Bissell and Stephen– they make the rough-housing that we can cast and build and budget and everything.

My work to finish it and to get there and to tweak it all out and to get it off this desk, I was looking, “Oh, my God. Around March, the way I’m going, that’s where I’m going to finish.” I literally finished the final page turn about six days before the strike. It rhymed with that just by accident. The problems with the strike were production problems and it’s a whole different shit. It didn’t help me out.

Craig: It didn’t really help anyone out, I think, other than-

Tony: No, it didn’t help me out.

Craig: -the membership as a whole, which I guess was the point.

Tony: I’ll tell you one thing it did and this is interesting. What it did do is I was not allowed to see the show for six months.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Tony: They kept going. I had only seen one cut of one rough cut of the episode. In September, when the strike was over, my brother John came to New York and brought me all 12 episodes in extremely rough form, but all 12.

John: That’s amazing.

Tony: With temp crap and all the IOUs and temp music and sloppy shitty all over the place but 12. I was extremely nervous. I spent two days and I watched them. I had the experience that one always speaks about in an editing room. On every movie I’ve ever been on, there comes a moment where you go, “God, I’d pay $50,000 if I could see my movie for the first time.”

Craig: Right.

Tony: I got to watch all 12 episodes on a run with the freshest eyes and smart fresh eyes that you could possibly ever have. I generated, I don’t know, 100 pages of notes, but they were notes that were like I had developed a new way of thinking about things in a way where I’m really into the calories that the audience spends on information. I’m really sophisticatedly into that.

Craig: Describe that concept a little bit for us.

Tony: If the audience is worried about any bump in the road over here or if that’s confusing when they come in or something that she said takes my energy away and the audience is missing the protein that I have in the middle of there that I want to be there, I want to smooth that down or get rid of it. I was so much more in tune with that in a way that I never would be holistically before.

I think I generated, I don’t know, hundreds of pages of ADR and all kinds of– it was a superpower to go back to London a week later. I think we had the most exciting two weeks that I’ve almost had on the show, getting back to London after that cut and going– all four cutting rooms, all four directors, and just going like, “Okay. This is what I do here. This is this and this isn’t working. Let’s do this,” and like, man, people, it was so much.

Craig: Those are fun. Those are the fun weeks.

Tony: Yes, and so the strike in that sense maybe had a positive effect. Boy, I wouldn’t want to do it that way again.

[laughter]

Craig: Once is enough.

John: It’s like asking it to be severed. There was two Tonys and like, “No, it’s appealing,” but also, clearly, you see the damage there.

Tony: It was so much heartache for Sanne and the people in production. The work that they did was just heroic and my brother. Not to be repeated, but, again, you’re always trying to make an advantage out of something that’s a crise, right?

John: A crise is a crisis. It’s the second time you used that word.

Tony: Yes, a crisis, yes.

Craig: It’s a French crisis.

Tony: That’s the word I’m going to use. That’s the word you’re going to–

John: In your bonus segment, you’ll get more on a crise.

Craig: Yes, he’s already found the word for his word.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Craig, I’m taking from this. Calories, protein. Twice you mentioned protein, the protein of a scene. Love that. That’s so important because like everything else, lovely, makes things taste better, but the protein is the actual substance that you’re trying to make sure.

Tony: Why are we here? Why are we here?

Craig: We talk about writing sometimes like it’s a little bit like the way magicians practice the art of deception and distraction. If they are looking at the hand you don’t want them looking at, you need to figure out how to get them to not look at the hand you don’t want them looking at. You want them over here. Those little bumps, the tiniest bump is too much of a bump. I love that you talk about that.

Tony: Really, in my later career, I’m vastly more conscious of my relationship with the audience than I ever was before. Not in a pandering way but in a communicative way.

Craig: Yes, I love that.

John: The real trick of the writing that we do is we have to simultaneously know everything that’s going to happen and divorce ourselves of all memory. We have to both be the creator and the audience simultaneously. It’s every word on the page and every frame is that split.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Let’s go to some listener questions. First one here is an audio question. Drew, help us out. You can place this question from Jason in Canada.

Jason: “Back in 2021, I wrote and directed my first short, a ridiculous sci-fi comedy titled, I’m Not a Robot, about a man who, after failing a CAPTCHA test trying to log onto a website, faces an existential crisis when he thinks he might actually be a robot. If the title and premise sound familiar, it’s because Victoria Warmerdam just won the Oscar for Best Short Film for her, I’m Not a Robot.”

“It was funny hearing from friends and colleagues joking that my film was nominated for an Oscar, but this got me thinking how interesting it is that two writers, an ocean apart, came up with and created such similar short films within a few months of each other. Maybe that’s a sign that the idea was in the zeitgeist or that the idea wasn’t that original, but either way, it is cool that another writer felt like an existential crisis triggered by the mundane task of clicking on images of bicycles to prove their humanity was a story worth sharing, and even cooler to see Victoria recognized for her incredible work.”

“As Craig has said before, and apologies for paraphrasing, but it’s less about the idea and more about the execution. Victoria certainly executed at the highest level. With that in mind, I still feel oddly validated. My first no-budget film did not win an Oscar, not even close, and I had nothing to do with Victoria’s Oscar win. At the same time, I wrote something that felt true to me and another writer felt that way too. I was curious if, as writers, you’ve ever experienced something similar where you saw one of your ideas or stories brought to life by another writer. If so, did any interesting similarities or differences stand out? Your friend in the North, Jason.”

Craig: I love our friend in the North. That’s so nice.

Tony: Painful, painful, painful, painful. Yes, many times, many times. It’s the one reason why one should avoid the idea that you’re better off isolating yourself away from entertainment news and staying on top of the industry and keeping your ear to the ground, and if you live in New York or you live in London, you live away, making sure that you have an agent that has their ear to the ground.

I’ve had several, many things shot out from under me when I’ve realized someone else was doing it or there was something that was close. It’s really painful when you go deep. It’s really painful when you go all the way through and find out that you’ve been treading the same territory. You have a remarkably generous attitude about it. I’m hopeful that you’re a complete human being and there are some other painful conversations about it.

Craig: Oh yes, I’m sure.

John: There was a journey of acceptance to get there, I hope.

Craig: Jason can feel pain.

Tony: It sounds a little valium to me.

Craig: Well, I think you’ve probably had the experience a few more times than Jason has. There is something, I think, at least nice to say, “Listen, I’m just starting out. I’m aspiring.” At least the thing that I thought would be interesting conceptually turns out to be interesting conceptually to somebody, which is– It’s funny. This was in the zeitgeist because I remember that Ron Funches, who was a fantastic standup, did a joke about this very thing where he said, “They keep on asking me if I’m a robot and they make me enter a series of numbers and letters,” which seems like the sort of thing a robot would be really good at.

[laughter]

Tony: Oh man, this hurts. This question hurts. PTSD.

Craig: All right. Well, Jason, you’ve triggered Tony Gilroy, so another feather in your cap.

John: For me, that example was this movie, Monsterpocalypse, I wrote for DreamWorks. Tim Burton was attached to direct it. I turned it in and they’re like, “Oh wow, we really love this. Oh wait, there’s a movie called Pacific Rim and it seems like it has a similar premise.” They found that Pacific Rim is like, “Oh Jesus, it’s the same movie.” It really is. It’s just way too close. It was a Dante’s Peak versus Volcano situation where it’s just like they didn’t want to be the second movie. I’m like, “I get it.”

Craig: They did those, though. They did both of those.

John: They did those and it didn’t help.

Craig: They did Bug’s Life and Antz.

John: They did, yes. Sometimes they will do both things and sometimes it works out.

Craig: Sometimes they’re like, “Screw it. Let’s just do it.”

John: They decided not to do mine and it’s like, “Okay.” I wish I were as immediately accepting as Jason was, but it’s tough.

Craig: Jason is just clearly far better balanced than the three of us.

John: Hey, Craig, I do want to hold on to this example for the next time we see a story in the news about like, “Oh, this person stole my script or stole my idea.” Come on. It’s the same title, the same idea.

Craig: You know what? Great point. I love Jason for, A, being an incredibly positive person, which is really cool, but B, not going anywhere near the whole, “They stole my thing.”

Tony, John and I are obsessed with the following concept that if there were justice or, I don’t know, some really good journalistic standards in the entertainment reporting business, you would never hear a story about somebody filing a lawsuit saying someone stole their thing. You would only hear if they won. That meant you would never hear anything because they never win. I’m not saying that people don’t occasionally infringe. I’m sure infringement occurs, but I just love that Jason didn’t go down that path.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off.

Craig: Of course, you’ve been ripped off. You’re really good.

Tony: I’ve been ripped off. I’m not going to get into it, but Danny and I really early in our career got ripped off.

Craig: Did you sue?

Tony: No, we were advised by an agent because we didn’t really have an agent. We were hip-pocketed at that point. They said, “Look, you could do this. You might get over on this and these people might put you to work even, but you guys look like you might be around for a while and this might not be the best thing to do.”

Craig: There you go. “You guys look like you might be around for a while.” I guess, listen, I got ripped off too in the beginning of my career. It happened and it hurt, but then people said to me, “This is not your last at-bat. Just eat this one. Get back out there. You’ll be fine.” It’s not fun. Anyway, I appreciate that Jason didn’t go down that road.

John: Drew, another question here.

Drew Marquardt: This next one comes from Anonymous. “Could being a film critic or film journalist affect your chances of working as a screenwriter? As someone currently looking for work and with a background in journalism, I personally really enjoy writing about film and I feel like it could be a great avenue for me as a young person starting to build a career, but I’m afraid of costing myself future opportunities by being granted a film critic. Perhaps it makes me look bad or someone doesn’t like something I said about their work. Is that a real concern?”

Craig: Stephen Schiff.

Tony: Look, a good script’s a good script. If you’re lucky enough to write one, someone’s going to pick up on it.

Craig: Could not agree more.

Tony: Everything else is a moot point. Nobody gives a shit.

Craig: You could absolutely destroy someone’s mom’s movie. If you write a good script three years later, they’ll buy it.

Tony: They’ll put their mom in it.

Craig: Stephen Schiff was the chief film critic for The Atlantic, I want to say?

Tony: Vanity Fair.

Craig: A really big film critic and then one day said, “I think I’m just going to try doing this,” and has been doing it at a very high level ever since. As much as film critics can make me nuts, I’m on record with that one, no, as long as you’re not a complete jerk. If your persona as a critic is jerk or if you go down the Armond White, “I just like disagreeing with everybody,” maybe then, maybe. I agree with Tony. Write a good script and all is forgiven.

John: I would also say that there’s a difference between being the critic who is reviewing every movie that comes out this week and trashing them or giving the thumbs up and the thumbs down and being the person who writes very smartly about movies and the overall trends in movies or things you notice about who can pull out themes among different directors and different films.

That’s the kind of thing which is elevating the art of film criticism and making us think about film. That’s a different thing than just trashing the new thing each week and saying how bad the most recent Disney adaptation is. That’s not doing you any favors. If people are googling your name to see that kind of stuff, that ain’t going to help you. If you’re writing really smartly about film like Stephen Schiff, that’s fantastic.

Tony: Then wait for your first review.

John: Nothing will help you out more there.

Craig: That’s when you-

Tony: Karma.

Craig: -fucked around and you found out [laughs] because, good Lord, that hurts.

John: I will say there have been some cases where I’ve seen a person who does film criticism who then goes off and makes a movie and it’s just terrible. It’s always fun to see like, “Oh, you know what? Criticizing a thing and actually making a thing are very different skills.”

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I love that. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Today, it’s something that I mentioned on the podcast before in passing, but I wanted to drill down a little bit into it because I use it literally every day now. It’s called Startpage. I don’t know about you, guys. I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google for a long time because the company that says don’t be evil has become evil. The problem is the other search engines just aren’t very good or they’re slow, but Google is giving me the AI slop all the time.

Startpage is a company that’s run out of the Netherlands. They aren’t their own search engine. What they do is they take your search query and they run it through Google or Bing if you prefer. They don’t save your search information and they strip away all the trackers. Google doesn’t know who you are. They don’t save any of your stuff. You get to Google without becoming a product of Google. It’s just as fast, just as good, and no annoying AI slop. The last thing you might want to google with actual Google is Startpage. Install it–

John: It’s actually just startpage.com.

Craig: There you go. Go to startpage.com and it’s been a delight.

John: Craig, I was trying it out because I saw it here in the show notes and I think it looks great. I really agree with it and I want to try to use it. One frustration I have is that in Safari and other browsers, you can set your default search engine. You can just type in the bar to get a thing. Right now, you can’t set startpage.com as the default search engine.

Craig: You can.

John: Okay, so tell me how you’re doing it.

Craig: Well, I’m using Chrome, so that may be the part of it is that I’m not using Safari. In Chrome, I think there is an extension or something that allows that to happen.

John: Okay, but it’s certainly worth considering because I really do think it’s a better way to do stuff. Tony, what do you have for us for One Cool Thing?

Tony: Can I name a podcast without getting in trouble?

Craig: Are you kidding me?

John: 100%, we love it.

Tony: It’s not a competitive one. My salvation for the last year and a half has been, I think, the greatest podcast I’ve ever heard. It’s called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by a guy named Andrew Hickey. There was an article about it in The New Yorker last year. I can’t remember who wrote it. It wasn’t Adam Gopnik. It was somebody else, but it was an appreciation of this. It said, basically, this is the equivalent of one man trying to write the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. He’s only up to 170. He just dropped 177 this morning.

I literally got a new one this morning. I don’t know if he’ll possibly survive to finish it. I cannot recommend this enough. If you’re into music, I was turned onto it. I started listening to ’60s stuff that I was really interested in and British Invasion and different things. I worked through that and then I chipped away at some other things. Finally, I was like, “I’m just going to go back to the very beginning and start at the beginning and go all the way through.” It has been a place of great safety and curiosity.

Craig: Love it.

Tony: That’s my recommend. He always says at the end, “If you like this podcast, please recommend it because word of mouth is the most important communicator.” This is my appreciation of Andrew Hickey. It’s on Patreon, but it’s on Spotify. It’s fantastic.

Craig: Awesome.

John: That’s great. Andrew Hickey did the thing, which we cautioned against, which is you’re starting your premise like, “I’m going to do 500 episodes of this thing,” and then you’ve boxed yourself in there. Maybe he’ll find some block format just to get through that.

Craig: We should have done that because we would have been done years ago, John.

Tony: I’m just going to say one thing, guys. I’m going to tell you one thing. If you ever listen to this, you’ll clearly understand that he has to put a lot more into it than you guys are doing.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s not just two people chatting on microphones.

Craig: What we did put into this, John did 99.3% of.

John: Andrew, yes, it’s that. My one cool thing is like Craig’s. It’s a utility I find super, super helpful. Basically, you’re surfing the internet. You’re buying stuff and there’s a site, an article that you want to hold on to. You want to set a bookmark for it. You could save it in your browser, but then you’re never going to actually find that again. You have to find some place to store that thing.

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been using a service called Pinboard, which is a bookmarking service. You save the link and you put a little tag on it, so if I remember if it’s how it would be a movie or a one cool thing. Pinboard is clearly near the end of its life. It has not been updated for a long time. I knew it’s going to just fall apart at some point. I have 4,000 bookmarks saved someplace.

I was considering rolling my own because I’m a masochist, but then I found a service called Raindrop, which is actually really good. It’s raindrop.io and it’s just a bookmarking service. You click a button. There’s a little browser extension and it saves it. You put a little note for it, put a tag on it. Then you can always just search it and find it, which is really good. What I like about it is it has a native app for iPad and for iPhone.

If you’re looking on your phone, you tap the little share sheet and you just save it to Raindrop and it’s there. If you’re looking for a way to hold onto your bookmarks and organize them in a way that you’ll actually find stuff again, I recommend it.

It’s good and it’s a paid service. You’re paying for this to get the premium stuff. I like paid services because then they’re going to stick around because they have an incentive to stick around. Raindrop.io if you’re looking for a bookmarker.

Craig: It’s an actual business model in tech.

John: Yes, that’s where I think it’s like when you don’t pay for a thing, it tends to break and fall apart because people abandon it.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our show this week is by Spencer Lackey. It’s an homage to The Last of Us, Craig.

Craig: Oh, I got to listen to this one.

John: Yes. 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 the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the description, but also 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 and to pay the talented folks who put it together. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on which words we wish existed in English. Tony, Craig, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations to both of you on your new seasons. I’m so excited to watch it.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

Tony: Really gassed. Really happy to be here. Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Drew, can you help us out? We have a question here from Jean-Philippe.

Drew: Jean-Philippe writes, “I’m a Québécois screenwriter and I needed to share how incredibly envious I am of screenwriters who write in English specifically because of two precious golden verbs, “to gasp” and “to scoff.” These beautifully concise words simply have no practical equivalent in French, yet they’re extremely useful in a screenplay as they’re a way to describe elements of nonverbal communication that are very common. What are the words that you find most useful for screenwriting and what thing do you wish there was an English word for? To all the screenwriters who work in English, be grateful for your great language.”

Craig: You don’t hear that from a French speaker too often, I got to go say. Thank you for that, Jean-Philippe.

John: As we’ve talked about on the show before, English does have just a huge vocabulary because of the way it accumulated words from French and then German and all this stuff and all of that smooshed together. We got duplications of things and we are very sound-rich, so it’s very easy for us to import words and make them work. The obvious example is “schadenfreude,” which is such a useful term that we just borrow the German word. We can say it in English because we can say any word in English, which is so useful.

I was at breakfast this morning and I realized, so you’re eating food at a restaurant and you’re enjoying it and then there’s a moment, a tipping point where it’s like, “Get this plate away from me. I don’t want this plate in front of me. I want it to go away.” There feels like there should be a word for that and there’s not a word for that. I want there to be a word for that term. Can you guys think of anything to describe that? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Craig: Oh sure. Sure, yes, it’s like food repulsion.

John: Yes, it’s like a disgust, but it’s a tipping from like, “This is delicious to–”

Tony: Yes, we should have a word for that. You’re absolutely right.

John: I was looking and Spanish has a verb, “empalagar,” which is to become overwhelmed and sickened by something that was enjoyable, but it’s really relating to something that’s too sweet and too-

Craig: Like cloying or–

John: -cloying. Then French has “écoulement,” which is also that disgust or aversion. It’s a little bit more than nausea, but it doesn’t really refer to that, the tipping point.

Craig: Yes, you’re talking about when something flips its polarity from love to hate.

John: Yes.

Craig: The Germans surely have a word for this.

Tony: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance.

Craig: Grossbundance. I like grossbundance.

John: Grossbundance. Yes, grossbundance, yes. It’s that fork-drop moment where it’s like you just can’t take it anymore. I want that word to exist. If our listeners have good suggestions for it, what are you guys thinking? Are there words you long for in other languages or things you feel like should be encapsulated in a word that just don’t exist in a word?

Tony: I’ve used the word because it gets it done, but I wish there was another word for “gobsmacked.” It’s a good word and it’s effective. Every time you type it, you’re like, “I wish there was something else for gobsmacked.” Total incredulity. I seem to find so many characters in my shows are-

Craig: Gobsmacked.

Tony: -massive quantities of incredulity. I wish there were more words like Eskimo words for snow for the feeling of not being able to believe exactly what’s– and not going, “What the fuck,” either. I’ve done that too.

Craig: Jaw drop?

Tony: Yes, I know.

Craig: Drop jaw. Yes, that’s a tough one.

Tony: They’re all a little mundane.

Craig: That’s absolutely true. It’s funny, the thing that I yearn for the most isn’t actually a different word. It’s a different punctuation mark. There has to be something between a period and an exclamation point because, to quote our friend Christopher McQuarrie, every time you put an exclamation point in a script, you’ve failed.

[laughter]

Craig: I know. Tony’s like, “That’s every fucking page.” We rarely want someone yelling. I’m actually curious. This is a side note because, Tony, you wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which I’m obsessed with. There are sections where Al Pacino fully yells paragraphs. I’m curious if those were exclamation-pointed or if he just took off on his own. He might have taken off on his own there. [chuckles]

Tony: Yes, I think it was a collaborative. Those were all done. They were all written for Al and rehearsed at the apartment. There were 20 other ones that we didn’t do. I think it was an era of exclamation points.

Craig: I wish there were something that said emphasis, but it wasn’t more than a period, which feels like just meh, but not quite an exclamation point.

Tony: You know what I don’t like, though? I don’t like when they take a transcript of your interview and then they add exclamation points where you never meant it to be.

John: Oh, God.

Tony: You’re like, “I’m not a–” Really? Did I sound like that?

John: You did not.

Tony: No.

Craig: No, none of us sound like exclamation-pointy people.

Tony: What? How did you decide to put that there?

Craig: Well, here’s a word that I wish I had and maybe there is a good German word for this. We always look to the Germans for these words. That is a simple thing to put in parentheses that says, basically, the thing that I’m about to say now, I believe the opposite of. Now, you could say “lying,” but lying doesn’t give you the full picture of, “Did you kill her?” “Absolutely not.” Lying is not enough. Full denial, complete lying, but then you’re giving it away. There’s no evocative nature for framing something as a particularly good lie because I love when characters lie.

John: That’s great. I think what we’re distinguishing in between is there’s the words that would be so helpful to have in scene description or in parenthetical versus seeing the words people are actually going to hear in dialogue. Those could be different things. In dialogue, through performance and through shading, we can get the meaning across. Sometimes you just really desperately want that thing that encapsulates the idea so clearly and it’s hard to find.

I was googling around to see what other words people were longing for. I found two words that got mentioned a lot. First is “toska” in Russian, which is a soul-deep ache, a vague, restless yearning that can’t be named or satisfied. Nabokov said, “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska.” I get that. You know what that’s like, but maybe you don’t really know what that’s like unless you’re Russian.

Craig: Russians really do know what that’s like. They’re born with that.

Tony: Duende is like that. Duende, the Spanish word “duende.” A lot of people wrote about duende. I think Hemingway wrote about the lack of duende. The word that you’re just describing, the words that take on a whole– because people have tried to think, they bring their own luggage with them. They bring this extra sparkle. Maybe we should leave them as they are and use them. I’ve used duende.

Craig: Why not? We took “ennui,” which is the bored version of duende. Let’s take it.

John: Yes, absolutely. We took schadenfreude. The other word that was brought up, which I thought was great, is “cafuné.” It’s a Brazilian-Portuguese word for the act of running your fingers through someone’s hair out of love. It’s not the verb. It’s the noun version of it. It’s like, “Yes, that’s really nice.” In English, we can convey that with a lot of words to actually do that. It’s not just running the fingers through someone’s hair. It’s specifically why you’re doing that and it’s a good image. It’s a powerful word.

Craig: John, you and I love it when our spouses run their hands through our hair.

John: Absolutely. Our baldpates, yes.

Craig: It’s sort of shyness.

Tony: I wasn’t going there.

Craig: You buff us a little bit. [laughs]

Tony: I was not going there.

Craig: Listen, Tony, you’ve got a lovely head of hair. We’d like to congratulate you on that.

Tony: Yes, I know. I wasn’t going there.

[laughter]

John: All right. Referencing back to Jean-Philippe’s question, I think we agree that, yes, English does have an abundance of words, but we could always use a few more. If people have good suggestions for the words that we’re lacking, email us. Let us know and we’ll put those in follow-up.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Tony, thank you for sticking around and talking through some words that we wish existed. A pleasure.

Tony: It’s a gas to be in the tribal community. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, Tony.

John: Thank you.

Links:

• Tony Gilroy
• Here’s a recap of Andor Season 1!
• Andor Season 2: Trailer 1 | Trailer 2 | Special Look
• Episode 680 – Writing Action Set Pieces with Christina Hodson
• I’m Not a Robot short by Victoria Warmerdam
• I’m Not a Robot short by Jason Speir
• Stephen Schiff
• Startpage
• A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
• Raindrop
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 653 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we discuss a giant area of television writing we’ve barely covered over the 12 years of our program, which is multi-camera sitcoms, from Seinfeld to Friends to most of the Disney channel programs. These were the shows we grew up watching, and they still account for a sizable portion of the writing happening today. We’ll also look at the WGA’s Annual Report, which, gasp, shows that writer income was down for the years, for reasons we can’t possibly imagine. So we’ll try to get to the bottom of that.

To help us through all this, let’s welcome a writer-producer-director whose credits range from My So-Called Life to My Boys to The Carmichael Show to Superstore. She’s also the secretary treasurer of the Writers Guild of America West. Welcome to the incredible Betsy Thomas.

Betsy Thomas: Oh, John. Wish you’d follow me around and just do that all the time.

John: Absolutely. I’m your hype man.

Betsy: That was fantastic.

John: The first time we met – I think it was the first time we met – you had reached out to me, emailed me or called me, to say, “Hey, can we talk about me running for the board?” We had a drink. We talked through stuff. And I’m so happy you decided to run for the board.

Betsy: I am, most of the time. But yes, that was really fun. We had a drink, and then I was like, “Oh.” Then later, I was like, “Oh, you made an exception for me.” I was like, “Oh, I feel flattered.”

John: It was a Friday afternoon, so it was, “Let’s have a martini,” but I’m not generally a “let’s have a martini-”

Betsy: I know. I learned that later.

John: You can hear that laughter off to the side. That is Megana Rao, who is joining us this week.

Megana Rao: Hi.

John: Hi. Drew and Craig are both out this week. Thank you so much for stepping in.

Megana: Of course. I’m excited to be here.

John: Very relevant, because you’ve just been reading a bunch of multi-cam scripts, right?

Megana: Yes, I have. I am working my way through all the seasons of Cheers through the scripts that I can find in pdf form online.

Betsy: Wow.

Megana: Which is not intentional, but I just started reading the pilot, and I was like, “Oh, this is fun.”

Betsy: It’s very cool that you’re doing that. I hope they survive long enough that you can work your way.

John: We’re gonna talk about multi-cams, but in our Bonus Segment I’d love to talk to you about golf, because you are a golfer, and Megana and I know nothing about golf. I’m speaking for both of us. You don’t know much about golf?

Megana: I don’t know much about golf, despite my father’s best efforts.

John: Very nice. Your father golfed, but you do not golf?

Megana: Correct.

John: Have you ever golfed?

Megana: Yes, I’ve golfed with my dad a lot.

John: Only people who subscribe to the Premium membership will actually-

Megana: Get to hear [crosstalk 02:30] stories.

John: … get to hear all about Megana golfing. Before we get to that, let’s talk about some news. Deadpool and Wolverine opened this past weekend. It made a bazillion dollars. It was really good for movies to succeed. I’m just really happy when things are working. Overall, the box office is down a little bit from last year, but we also have a lot more movies that are still in the pipe coming out. I feel pretty good about it. I see you nodding your head.

Betsy: It’s great. It’s incredibly exciting. I hope this continues. It sure seems dumb that they had that five-and-a-half-month break where people couldn’t do any promo, and they decided to delay all the releases. That seemed like a real waste of momentum.

John: Yeah, it does seem like a bit of that. Deadpool and Wolverine was a movie that famously did have to stop shooting because of the actors strike. That pulled all the people away, which was a hassle for them, because there’s a ton of cameos in that movie, and all those people having to be rescheduled. As the actors strike was going on, I just felt like how they get out of this and how does that movie specifically pull all of its cameo people back in to do those shoots, the logistical nightmare of that seems crazy.

Betsy: Yeah, that’s hats off to the line producer.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Combat pay for them. More big movies coming out. I just want to celebrate when there is good news, because so often we see, oh, numbers are down. It’s like, numbers are actually doing pretty well.

Betsy: Yeah, it’s great. I think we should celebrate all good news all the time.

John: 100 percent. That’s my goal for 2024 into 2025 is celebrate the wins. Let’s do some follow-up. We talked last week about listener who had concerns – he’s part of a writing team. He said, “Oh, the WGA said the gains for writing teams that was not really the gains for writing teams.” We were like, “No, you misread it.” But Megana, could you help us out with some more follow-up we got this week?

Megana: Yes. Chris wrote in and said, “I wanted to reach out and respond to the conversation you had in this week’s episode about the gains in the WGA made for writing teams in the 2023 MBA. In addition to now having pension and health caps applied to each writer instead of the project, which as a screenwriter on a team I think is hugely impactful, we also won that writing teams making the weekly minimum on a TV show will now each receive P and H contributions on the full weekly minimum, not just the half they each take home. My writing partner and I mainly work in features, but I have to imagine this is a substantial win for early career TV writing teams, so I figured it was worth making sure people know about it.”

Betsy: It’s not just early career. Everyone’s getting the contributions based on minimums in television, so it’s huge. My husband has been mostly in a writing team. I’m writing right now a pilot for ABC. Even though we’re not writing partners, we’re a team. We’re co-writing it. So it’s huge to get those full contributions.

John: Yeah, it does really matter. A lot of the gains in the contract this year really did, I think, focus on people who are at that pivotal breakpoint. Script fees for staff writers is a huge win, and making sure that we outsize increases for people who are at that first rung of the ladder, to make sure they can make it to the second rung of the ladder.

Betsy: Yes. The script fees, that is just so huge. It’s something that I have to say. John, you were there when we got that. It was such a thrill, because it’s something we’d fought for for so long. After a certain point, you’re like, “Is that ever gonna happen?” So it was really exciting.

John: Yeah, it really was. Another thing we’ve been talking about on the podcast is about locked pages and colored revisions. I’m curious what your take is, because you work largely in multi-cam – uses the same color cycle, uses the same things. A thing we’ve been discussing is that, particularly for one-hour dramas, like what Craig is doing, they’re not using printed scripts anymore at all, and so this whole notion of colored revisions and locked pages maybe doesn’t make sense.

We’re proposing, what if we just got rid of it and just started numbering stuff and doing it that way? We asked for feedback, and man have we gotten a lot of feedback. Megana, can you help us out with the two things we got this week?

Megana: Yes. I’ll start with Megan, who’s a script coordinator. She writes, “I work as a writer and script coordinator. I wouldn’t say I like locked pages, but once you hit production, I find them useful. One big reason is communication across departments. If a scene is seven pages and I need to talk to another department to quickly resolve an issue, being able to identify the exact page is helpful. And anecdotally, I know art department folks who also write notes in the margins. When a new script is published, being able to know it’s only this one page changing, versus figuring out where in a scene the change is, is helpful to them in transferring those notes.”

John: I get that to a degree. We’re not proposing that you throw out starred revisions. I think starred revisions should be doing that job. The hope is that you can see what’s changed on the page or has changed in the scene, because there’s a star that says this is something new, something to pay attention to. Betsy, what’s your first instinct there?

Betsy: I’ll say in multi-cam, a lot of times you’re just fixing a joke. I think in a half hour in general, if it’s just like, oh, we did a punch-up pass and so there’s eight new jokes, then releasing an entire new script doesn’t make a lot of sense, just because I think a lot of people do still use paper. I don’t. But I think some of the actors do. They just grab the – for the scene. Sometimes in those cases, I think locked pages make sense, because now you’re only delivering 4 pages, 8 pages to the stage, not an entire 32, 35 pages.

John: But in the case of a multi-cam comedy, let’s say there are four new jokes. What if that joke caused page breaks to change, and so you have A and B pages? Is that a hassle in multi-cam? It doesn’t matter?

Betsy: Not really. To me, it’s all wasted paper. I’ll go with the flow on anything. But I do think that it feels like there are more changes in multi-cam than there are in single-cam in general, because oftentimes in multi-cam, the script is changing every single night at such a significant rate that it’s a whole new script anyway. It doesn’t really matter.

John: The thing we’ve been speculating about, at a certain point paper’s just not the best way to capture what the current state of the script is, and so maybe people should just be looking at basically the iPad, where we’re all looking at one source of truth, because that’s what they do actually on late-night variety shows. There’s not a printed thing anymore. They’re all looking at one central, shared document, and that’s what they’re generating the run of the show off of. They’re using things like Scripto to do that.

Betsy: Look, I think it’d be great if we all got away from paper. I listened to that, and I agree. I think getting away from paper and just having a few small ones, I think it’s great. As I said, I don’t use paper anymore when I direct, and I certainly won’t when I’m working on staff. I would much prefer to have this.

But it is true, I think, that still the habit is – and this is true, again, back to multi-cam, because you have a table read and then a run-through and then a run-through – you’re watching the run-through and you’re making notes on the script, your joke pitches, whatever. The same thing on show night; you’re down there with your scripts, and you’re pitching on jokes the whole time through the show. That you can do electronically, obviously, but it’s far easier to just do it on the page.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up on that.

Megana: Sandrine, an AD, writes, “The main reason for keeping locked pages is because of breakdowns. ADs make stripboards that list what scenes will be shot each day, but department heads also make breakdowns of their particular elements, particularly props, art department, and costumes. As writers, directors, and actors, we care that Larry’s motivation changed, but props just wants to know whether or not he’s still throwing the pillow on Page 37. Costumes wants to know if he’s still wearing day 2 nightclothes even though it’s day 3 morning. Those breakdowns are always by scene, but depending on how people organize, can also use page numbers. If new pages don’t impact them, departments will often just keep working with their original script.

“Scene changes as colored pages is much more straightforward than starred revisions. If I get new pages at 11:00 p.m. and have to send off sides to actors, there’s no confusion when sending pink pages versus having to confirm that draft if it only has revision marks. With how quickly things move, particularly the micro-exchanges that happen throughout the production department and with the others, that we work really hard to shield for director and producers, that small detail of clarity can make all the difference.”

John: I welcome Sandrine’s points here. I think one of the things I would stress is that we can’t just stop doing it and not replace it with something that actually takes care of the issues. I think locked pages and colored revisions are a solution that was probably a very smart decision solution for when we first needed to do this. I just feel like there’s probably a better way we could do it now, and I don’t want our inertia to keep us from trying these things.

Betsy: Also, if you use one of those programs, you can download the starred revision. It goes right in your script. You see what’s starred. It lets you know it’s new. It’s not that hard.

John: Absolutely. Some of the software’s already there. Let’s get to one of our two main topics here. The Annual Report from the WGA is out. Over the years, Craig and I have looked at the Annual Report as it’s been published to see where trends are, what’s happening. But Betsy, I don’t think all the guilds do the kind of Annual Report we do. I don’t see the same thing coming out of DGA or SAG or any of the other places. We’re very transparent about the number of people working, how it’s all going, our finances. That’s always been the tradition as long as I’ve been in the field.

Betsy: Yeah, we always are. I think the others have to. I think their membership may not be as-

John: As engaged?

Betsy: Yeah. Writers like to look for the drama and the mystery and the intrigue.

John: Most years, I would say there’s not a lot of mystery and intrigue and drama. As we’ve gone through this, things are growing, because streaming’s growing, or the number of feature writer jobs is decreasing, because that’s just a thing that happened. But this year, there actually is bigger news.

The top line is that a total of 5,501 writers reported employment in all work areas in 2023, which is a 19.5 decline from 2022. The total writer earnings, reported for dues purposes, declined 31.8 percent, to 1.29 billion dollars.

We should say right from the start here, that clause “for dues purposes” is doing a lot of work there, because particularly in television, writers also get producer fees that are not included in the dues process. The total amount that writers in this industry are bringing in is a lot more than 1.2 million dollars, but the 1.29 is how much gets reported to the Guild.

Betsy: Yes, that’s true. Also, did you hear that we were on strike?

John: Yeah. Absolutely. Some of the blowback has been like, “Oh my god, can you see they were down 31.8 percent?” We were on strike for five months, which is 41 percent of the year no one was working, and then there was a SAG strike afterwards. So it’s not a huge surprise that writer income was down.

Betsy: There was already a contraction. I think a lot of people were saying, oh, people are scared because of a potential strike. No, there was a natural – the contraction that we’re feeling now had already begun. I remember I had pitches to take out, and they’re like, “We don’t want to take it out yet, because nobody’s buying.” That had already started. We saw this as a reflection, by the way, in our Strike Fund Loan applications and whatnot.

There were a lot of people that had not been working since 2022 already. My last job was in November of 2022. Then we came back, but the actors didn’t. There was a lot of concern about production and not wanting to maybe start production until after January 1st. The above-scale fees that television writers make, they weren’t getting.

John: A thing we should also notice is that every year this report gets published ,and you see these numbers, and the numbers go up the next time it’s reported, because basically money comes in late. This is only a reflection of the amount of money that came in. If you go back to the ’22 Financial Report, it showed a 6.1 percent decline in earnings, but when they actually did the recalculation, it was up .2 percent. Some of these numbers will actually improve a little bit over time, but it’s not gonna change the minus sign in front of the number. Clearly, writers brought in less money this last year.

Betsy: Yes. I did.

John: I did too. Funny, that. As did Megana. In the report – and we’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf – it breaks it down by TV and by features. TV took a bigger hit, which kind of makes sense, because those are things that are constantly ongoing. For features, there are people who were writing features before the strike happened, and they delivered once they could get back to work, so it didn’t take as big of a hit. TV employment was down negative 35 percent, and feature employment was down 22 percent.

I think where I get frustrated is when people say, “Oh, look how much money was not earned. You’ll never earn that money back,” and so that the strike was useless, because you’re never gonna get that five months of employment back. It makes me want to strangle people over a screen, because everything we have as the Guild, our health plan, our residuals, everything, was because someone was willing to go on strike and get that for future generations.

Betsy: Completely, I hate that too. I have also been told, “This cost me $500,000.” If that’s how much money you’re making, you’re in good shape to be able to ride this strike out in a way that a lot of other people weren’t. I try to be Zen about it. There are people that think about others and understand that the strikes are not just about today, they’re actually about tomorrow, and so this will affect me to some degree, but it’s gonna affect the younger generation far more, hopefully.

John: Writers who are not even in the Guild yet. Writers who are still in high school are benefiting from this. It was during the strike, not only were you part of the negotiating committee, you also had to work with the Strike Fund, the Good and Welfare loans. And I bless you for that, Betsy, because that’s such tough work.

Betsy: Thank you.

John: You were constantly being confronted by folks who were greatly struggling because of – as you said, it wasn’t just the strike. They were struggling before the strike, and the strike made their lives even worse. Can you just talk us through what those two programs are and how it worked?

Betsy: The Strike Fund committee, which is made up of the membership of finance committee and then we added a couple more people because of the workload. There basically are two pots to take loans from. One is the Strike Fund loan. You have to be a current active member. That loan is available to people who have been directly impacted. Their work was stopped because of the strike. You apply for that loan, and then there’s a repayment schedule. It can recur. The Good and Welfare loan is actually available all the time.

John: It’s a fund that’s always there.

Betsy: It’s a fund that’s always there. It’s a lifetime maximum of $14,000. Once you reach that, you’ve capped. You can’t get more. That does not require your work being interrupted by the strike. This could just be you’re showing financial hardship. Generally, people go to Motion Picture, and then we get handed people from that. But in this case, it was such an overwhelming need, and also, Motion Picture was so overwhelmed.

John: We should explain Motion Picture Television Fund. That’s an overall umbrella organization that helps people in the film and television industry suffering hardship.

Betsy: They were handling so many loans for so many different people and from so many different unions that their backlog was… We just then started handling it directly so that people could have answers and money quicker.

John: Great. Good and Welfare runs all the time. Strike Fund was just for this. But important to note, it’s not that we’ve burned through all the Strike Fund. We helped a lot of people, but it’s not like we zeroed out. It’s not like we ran out of money.

Betsy: I think in total, I think we had 20 million dollars in the Strike Fund, and I think we gave out 6. Some people are like, “Why didn’t you empty it out?” Because if you empty it out, then we don’t have anything for another strike. What it takes to build that fund up… It is one of the powers we have is knowing that we have the ability to help people. The AMPTP knows that. Our ability to be able to help people and weather the storm was a lot of our leverage.

John: For sure. In addition to writer income that’s happening in the course of the year, the report also talks through residuals. Residuals are this godsend that we have, thanks to previous strikes. For folks who are brand new to all this, residuals are like royalties that writers get in the film and television industry.

In 2023, the WGA collected 598 million dollars in residuals, which is up 3.5 percent. Feature residuals were down 14.5 percent. Basically, we talk about this all the time. Home video is in a freefall. It’s nowhere near the market that it was before. But this year, even streaming and new media residuals were also down for features. That’s the one place of hope people always had for feature residuals, and those were down a bit too. Again, those numbers are likely to drift up a little bit as more stuff gets reported, but it’s good to get an overall sense of where we’re at with residuals.

Betsy: I do want to point out one thing. The total amounts collected in residuals and interest from 2022 to 2023 almost doubled. It almost doubled in 2023. That’s extraordinary. The fact that it then came down a little bit in 2024, obviously year to date, is not as alarming. I don’t think it was ever gonna keep up with that pace of doubling. Part of that was because there were so many shows that had been grandfathered in to the old rates, but then we got those gains in streaming in 2020, and so for the new shows, those residuals finally kicked in. Think about the delay and once it finally is dropped in streaming. That was what was going to happen, hopefully, and it did.

John: The big things that the Guild does money-wise is it’s setting minimum rates, it is collecting residuals, but it’s also going after and enforcing the contract. The enforcement is real dollars here. For 2023, the Guild collected 75 million dollars in underpaid residuals, along with 2.3 million dollars in interest. Already for 2024, it’s collected 45 million dollars, and 1.7 million dollars in interest. That’s money that – no one else is gonna get that for you. The Guild has to go out there and shake people down and say, “No, you owe this money.” God bless. Some of our ability to do that, both in residuals but especially in late payment, is because we now have contracts for everybody, and we can see, “No, this person was due this. You gotta pay them.”

Betsy: The Guild just did a press release about just the late pay, just the fees that they went after because they had the contracts. They were able to actually enforce something without even needing the member to do anything. It was a benefit of the agency campaign. It was something that we won when we renegotiated that contract. It’s been huge in terms of getting writers late pay. Also, this is a thing now that is in the Guild’s system to be able to constantly be policing.

John: Absolutely. The email said the Guild collected more than 1.5 million dollars in interest for late payment for more than 1,000 writers. Some examples would be $14,400 for one individual feature writer. You add all those up, that’s a huge change for somebody, like, “Oh, here’s money I didn’t know I was owed. Here’s a check for $14,000.” That’s great.

Betsy: I would like that.

John: I would like that. Everyone would like that. This is also why you have a guild, because your agency is never gonna collect that money, or your manager, because they have relationships with those studios and they don’t want to piss them off. The Guild does not care about pissing off anybody. The Guild’s not mean, but the Guild’s gonna get money for its members.

Betsy: That’s the only thing they do. Literally, the people that work in that building, this is their entire career is just worrying about writers. I think when you’re on the inside, which, John, you having been on the board and negotiating committees – you really get to know the staff, and you really see how much long, hard work goes into trying to protect writers, deal with them in the kindest and most helpful way. It’s a staggering achievement, I think, what that building does on a day-to-day basis.

John: 100 percent agree. Let’s wrap this up. The back part of the Annual Report talks about the Guild’s financial situation. You’re on the committee. You’re a person overseeing this on a regular basis. Total assets, 137 million dollars. Total liabilities of 37 million dollars. That works out to 100 million dollars left around. I looked it up in 2022. That equivalent figure was 92 million dollars. Even despite the strike and everything else, we’re doing good.

Betsy: We’re doing great. The fact that we weathered that strike and we still have this kind of financial stability is because of the assets and the investments and very, very careful… It’s why we have the Strike Fund. The finances of the Guild are really healthy. I know that was one of those great rumors that people liked to spread during the strike, like, “Oh, this is gonna bankrupt the Guild.” The whole time, I’m like, “I’m looking at the figures every single month. We’re fine. We’re good.”

John: We’re good. Let’s get to non-WGA topics. Let’s talk about multi-cam, because over the course of doing this podcast for 12 years, we’ve talked to a lot of feature writers, lot of TV writers, but they’ve mostly been TV drama writers, or they’ve been single-camera comedy writers. We’ve talked to very few people about multi-cam. Multi-cam is your bread and butter. That’s where you’ve made your –

Betsy: It’s a mix. I do both. I think it’s partly because a lot of them are dead.

John: That’s why we’re not finding so many of those writers. But we definitely grew up on them.

Betsy: For sure, and they still exist.

John: They’re still exist, and they’re still hugely popular in reruns, but the current ones are still going. Big Bang Theory is a classic multi-cam.

Betsy: But also, The Neighborhood’s been on CBS – I think this is Season 8, 7, something like that. Night Court’s been a bit hit for NBC. There’s a new one just got picked up on ABC. Tim Allen. He’s a new talent that they decided to give a shot to.

John: A rocket ship to the stars. Definitely, I could see him. Really, it comes down to him and Glen Powell. Who is the hot new face? I made Betsy laugh.

Let’s talk through development process, because we have a sense of how stuff works in one-hours now, where there’s a writers’ room that’s putting stuff together, and then you build up a bank of scripts, and then you just go forth and shoot. You try to keep on top of stuff while shooting. Classically, multi-cam has been much more week by week by week, like we’re putting a thing up on its feet and then we’re writing the next one. Is that-

Betsy: Accurate?

John: Yeah.

Betsy: I think to some degree, yes. But I think you hope that you bank a bunch of scripts before the beginning of the year. It’s done a lot of different ways. I worked on a show called Superior Donuts. The way that show worked is we all group-wrote, which I think is really how Chuck Lorre does it too. By nature, you have to have several rooms going, because you’ve got one room who’s working on a script, a future script, you got one room that’s working on the current script on the stage, and so you have that.

It necessitates, I think, a lot more collaboration, multi-cam, because the problem is – it’s not like single-cam, which is why I like single-cam, because you write your script, and it goes to the table read, you have several days or whatever you need to do that rewrite, and then you’ve got your shooting script and you’re off to the races.

But in multi-cam, you get your notes from the network or the studio and everybody. “Okay, here.” Now, you do table read. Table read, you get notes. Then you do a rewrite. You have to get it done by the morning, because it’s gotta be on the stage when the actors get there at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. That’s why sometimes you’re there late at night, because by the time –depending on when your table read is – and you get notes, and you get back to the room, and it’s 3:00. And then you gotta get Pinkberry, and so now it’s 4:30. It’s easy to be there at 11:00 or midnight. I think in many ways, multi-cam is a lot harder, in my opinion, job.

Then the next morning, you gotta be working on breaking Episode 3 or 4 or 5 before you go to run-through, which is at 2:00. Then the whole thing, you get another rewrite, another set of notes, rewrite. Same thing Wednesday, and then you get another set of notes. And then Thursday’s pre-shooting and camera blocking. So you need to have basically as much of a locked script as you can. Then you shoot on Friday. Let’s just say that’s the week.

John: Let’s talk about the difference between multi-cam versus single-cams. I think about a Modern Family as a single-camera show. In theory, they could’ve written the script well in advance and they made up a schedule. These are the sets we’re shooting. This is how we’re making this whole thing work.

When you think of multi-cams, you think of, okay, now the whole writing staff is there for tape night and where you’re actually shooting the whole thing and you can make those changes on the fly. But generally speaking, multi-cam’s all done in just one shot. You’re just doing the whole thing at once, versus splitting it out like normal production.

Betsy: Yes.

John: Those shooting nights must be really exciting but also terrifying, because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and you’re screwed.

Betsy: Yeah. There’s a famous story I’m gonna butcher, but it illustrates this. I think it was Bob Newhart. I think The Bob Newhart Show, in the episode, they had a character, and they kept calling him back. I think his name is Mr. Nakamura. I think I’m right, but I just pictured all these comedy writers going, “That’s not it!” The very first joke died. The writers were all like, “Oh, no. We have four callbacks coming.”

Sometimes it doesn’t go well, or you get a groaner or you get something and you’re like, “Uh-oh.” Then everybody furiously is getting together to try to figure out – “Let’s fix it. Let’s fix it.” In general, I think jokes are what you want to be fixing, not like, “Oh, they don’t understand. They don’t even understand this plot point.” That’s really bad. I’ve not been on a show like this, but I know friends, from what I’d heard, they would shoot the show, let the audience go, then rewrite whole scenes and reshoot them completely differently.

Megana: Wow.

Betsy: That gives me anxiety. I can’t even imagine that. I like to be prepared. Not that they weren’t prepared. I can’t work that way. It’s too chaotic for me.

John: Yeah, that sense of, this was the plan going in there, and it’s suddenly not working, and you’re just under such pressure, because you actually have your entire cast, you have the entire crew, and then in theory, a studio audience. Talk to us about studio audiences now. The shows that have laughter in the background, are most of those shot with audiences now?

Betsy: Yes. They have been. People talk about the laugh track, but the truth is, it’s not really a track. There’s mics. That’s what the studio’s done. Sometimes if you’re using something from the pre-shoot date – oftentimes you’ll pre-shoot scenes, get them in the can, and then you shoot it once in front of the audience, just to get their response and their reaction. Sometimes the audience show performance wasn’t as good or the camera had a bump on it. For some reason, you need to use the one from the – so somebody will borrow the laugh from the – even though that’s not what was under the original. It isn’t really a laugh track. It’s a falsehood. Those laughs are all from the audience itself.

John: Melissa McCarthy was talking about how on Mike and Molly, they would pre-shoot some stuff. If there was a scene where they were driving in a car, they would pre-shoot that, but then on the night of actual filming, they would just be sitting on apple boxes and doing the same scene so they could get the laughter and get the real audience reaction from that.

Betsy: That’s right. Some stuff you’ll play back, and then you’ll get the audience laughs for the thing you’ve played back – that car scene.

John: Shooting some multi-cams, because you’ve also directed, can you talk to us about how you approach shooting a multi-cam scene? Because we’re so used to the camera’s here or the camera’s here, but you’re having to watch a bunch of stuff simultaneously. You’re trying to make sure the performances make sense, but also that the cameras are capturing the performances in the right way. What are you thinking about as a director looking at a script?

Betsy: I was a theater major, so multi-cam is really natural for me, because it’s just a recorded play. That’s really all it is. You’re in this set. The way I always work – and I do this a lot of times with single-cam too – is I go to the best joke in the scene and I work backwards from that.

John: Interesting.

Betsy: Because I always feel like you want to make sure that that thing that it’s building to is landing in the best possible way. A lot of times I’ll look at that and I go, “I know I want this here. I know I want him leaning over the kitchen counter and grabbing for her at this moment.” Then I’ll try to go, “If that’s where I’m ending, where do I start, and where do I have everybody go?”

I like to have a lot of movement in scenes. There are directors that just put two people on a couch. As a writer, that’s death. I know how many scenes have died because a director… Because let’s face it – no offense to actors – with the exception honestly of Helen Hunt, who always wants business and wants to move, a lot of actors are happy just to be sitting on a couch.

John: Park and bark, yeah.

Betsy: I think if you let them do that, sometimes a scene can really die. I always try to keep a lot of life. I like it to feel like it’s natural, not like it’s artificial. I try to help the actors by giving them business that feels organic to what they should be doing and gives them purpose. That’s the other thing that I always think about when I’m directing is figuring out…

Then I also like to be flexible, so that when we get to rehearsal, I can say, “I was thinking this was my plan. What do you think of this plan?” Sometimes they love it and they’re like, “I was feeling like I didn’t want to walk on this moment. I wouldn’t want to be near him.” You’re like, “Great, then don’t do that.” Then you gotta just be flexible with the plan.

John: I want to rewind back. Let’s say this is a script you didn’t write, but this is a script you’re gonna be directing. You’re handed the script. You’re visualizing in your head, “This is the biggest joke. This is where I would see this going.” Are you then having a conversation with the writer, with the team, about putting that stuff in the scripts, putting the business in the script, or is that something you’re holding onto for yourself?

Betsy: No, I just have it, because we’re gonna rehearse, and it may or may not work. We may not like it. They’re gonna see it the next day. They’re gonna either go, “God, that scene worked great,” or…

Occasionally, if we’re deeper, it’s Wednesday night, I’ll say, “For him to get to the door in time to open the door and she’s there, I need one more line, because it’s too big a cross. He can’t get there.” That stuff I’ll say. I try to go up to the writers’ room after on multi-cams. I try to go up after our rehearsal day and go, “Everything worked great. This was beautiful. This thing is wonky. You’ll see tomorrow. But I think we’re missing some words here,” or whatever. I’ll give them a head’s up, because I liked that as a showrunner when I would get that head’s up, because it helps you start to think about and prepare as you go through the rewrite.

John: How do you as a director interact with the showrunner or other writers on rehearsal day? Basically, we recognize this thing isn’t working. Is it their responsibility to notice that and point that out? Is it your responsibility as a director to figure it out? What is the communication there?

Betsy: I would say it’s normally just like you put up the play, the thing, and then the writers are looking at it like, “How do we fix the script to make it better?” I think there are times where they’ll say, “Hey, we actually were thinking this instead of the way you staged it.” They’ll say that to the director. Then sometimes I’ll say, “I tried to make this thing work. We had it this other way. Do you want me to show you that? That didn’t feel right either.” We have a conversation.

I would say because I’m a writer – and I would even say I would identify as a writer principally. That’s where my heart is. That was my first guild. I always try to make the script work as best as I possibly can, and I’m super collaborative with the showrunner. I’m always like, “Come down to set. Come watch rehearsal. Do you want to just come down and be here for this scene? I can let you know.” I like to have them as involved as they possibly can be.

The other thing that sometimes happens with actors occasionally is, there can be some badmouthing of jokes or a little bit of eyerolling. I don’t like that. No one tried to do anything but a great job in the script, so you gotta give them what they wrote.

John: You talk about it’s basically putting up a play, but the difference is, of course, you then can go into the editing room and change the play after it was put up. Can you talk to us about the editing process as a writer, as a director? How much flexibility do you have in the editing room to improve something that was like, eh, on the day? Have you found things in multi-cam where that didn’t really work in person, but then it just killed in the edit? Is that a thing that’s possible to do?

Betsy: Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s less likely in multi-cam. I think there’s definitely more in single. Smash cuts don’t really work in multi-cam the way they do in single, but I will say there’s a couple things that do matter. I worked on a show called Outmatch. They would oftentimes be pretty long. The cut would come in long. I started saying to them, “If you think you’re gonna lift this page, you won’t be able to do that in editing, because people are making crosses.”

What I hate is, unlike single, it can be very difficult to make cuts, because people jump space and because it is a play. You have to be a little more disciplined as a writer to get a little closer to time. Obviously, you want a little bit of fat. Then I always try to think, “What are some things that might go away?” and making sure that two people are not moving during that, so if you want to take that lift, it won’t be hard in the editing room.

John: It’s a thing I hadn’t really considered, but shooting multi-cam, you’re not gonna have the clean singles often that you could use to jump people around in space. They would exist naturally.

Betsy: Yeah, you don’t have as many options.

John: When you are doing multiple takes in multi-cam, let’s say you run that, like, “Oh, that’s pretty good. We’re gonna do it again.” Will you change up cameras just so you have more options in editing?

Betsy: We do. The idea is you got the four cameras. Sometimes it’ll be like, the best two shot is over here actually of these two, so we’ll do a single and a single, but even maybe we’ll do I’ll say a two. But we work with a camera coordinator, and they really helped. You say, “I know I’m gonna play this joke in a two, so let’s make sure we get that in front of the audience the first time,” because it’s the first time they’re seeing the joke, which tends to be the biggest laugh. I don’t want to start in a single. I want to start in a two shot, so I make sure I have that.

John: It does feel weird that we bring in an audience to watch this thing and they’re seeing the action in front of them, but you also want them watching the monitors.

Betsy: It is, yeah.

John: Because that’s the show.

Betsy: I think in general they do seem to watch the monitors. They’re watching the actors, but I think when you’re rolling, I think they go to that, which is good, because a lot of times you need somebody in a close-up for something to play.

John: Now, Megana, you’ve been reading through a bunch of sitcom scripts. Can you talk through about what you’ve learned? We’ll put some of these examples scripts in – put links to them in the show notes. Talk to us about what you’re seeing on the page, because they look different than what we’re used to in single-camera.

Megana: Yeah, they look different. The ones pre-2000s are all two acts with a cold open and maybe a tag, and formatted differently. The action lines are all capitalized, mostly interiors. I was very surprised, roughly six scenes in a script.

Betsy: Depends. How I Met Your Mother was one that really broke that, where they had a lot of scenes. It was a single-cam multi-cam. Yes, the old-school way to do it is to do far fewer scenes. By the way, that makes for a lot more fun show night also, because you get through it quickly. The audience is completely engaged. If you don’t have to wait for a wardrobe change, if you’re able to keep it in that, it really makes the show, I think, really sing.

Megana: Much more characters, I’ve realized, than in most of the single-cam scripts that I’m reading. In a multi-cam, obviously, you’re gonna have a bigger ensemble, typically.

Betsy: Yeah, I think that’s true. When I think about my favorite moments in multi-cam, I directed a few episodes of The Carmichael Show, and there were some scenes in their living room which were hard to stage, because it’s a lot of people in that scene. You have Tiffany and Lil Rel and Jerrod and David and Loretta. It’s not that big a set. You’re also like, “How do I keep it where not everybody’s just sitting down?” because then it gets stagnant. It was really hard to direct.

Those scenes, sometimes they were seven, eight pages long. That’s a lot for actors to get through. Old-school ones, David and Loretta, who come from theater, who come from the stage, it’s not as difficult for. But I think a younger generation, they’re not used to that, particularly if you’ve not come from stages. But those scenes just pop. The audiences love them.

Megana: You mentioned being able to do smash cut jokes in single-cam. Are there any other differences you think of between multi-cam versus single-cam comedy when you’re writing?

Betsy: I worked on a multi-cam called Abby’s that was short-lived. Mike Schur was the EP. Josh Malmuth created it.

John: Is that the one that was all in a backyard?

Betsy: Yes, with Natalie Morales. Josh had a little bit of multi-cam experience when he was much younger, but I think I was the only other person that really had… The rest of the staff was young, and they only had had single-cam experience. I found myself a few times saying, “That doesn’t really work, and the reason it doesn’t work is because you have these run-throughs.” To stage a smash cut is weird. It’s like, smash cut to the car. Where is the car? We don’t have that set. Then you’re having two actors run over to sit in a… I don’t know. It can be really awkward, which doesn’t mean that you can’t do it in the cut. But it can be awkward in terms of the run-throughs and things like that.

Megana: I didn’t realize that all of these scripts were filmed sequentially when you shoot them in front of the audience. I don’t know why I didn’t put that together.

Betsy: Yeah, they are. There are also things that they’d say, “Oh, and then he blows up the mailbox.” I’m like, “How is that gonna happen in front of an audience? It’ll look terrible, because we can’t really do… ” I think there are ways to do things in multi-cam with special effects in post that didn’t used to exist, so I think there’s a lot more flexibility now, but there’s a reason that the great multi-cams were Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers. They were people just doing their thing, walking through telling funny jokes and leaving.

John: Absolutely. I want to talk about entering and leaving, because I think that’s actually a difference, because there’s the expectation in multi-cam that people come in, people enter, and they exit. That’s a thing that actually happens, which you just don’t see as much in single-cam. People are already seated or they’re already in the middle of a thing versus walking into a thing. Entrances and exits are so important and so funny, hopefully, if it works well.

Betsy: I think it probably comes from the energy that that brings to a scene, because again, it’s just like theater. If you’re watching a theater scene of four people sitting around a table for 10 pages, it’s fine, but it’s a different energy when somebody walks in with news, somebody walks in with a complication. It has a really different energy.

John: A lot of the things we’re gonna be linking to are older things, so Cheers or Friends. But this Night Court reboot is new. It’s from 2021. A thing I do notice is underneath the scene header, in parentheses, it says which characters are in the scene. Is that a common thing?

Betsy: Yeah, always.

John: Always. Cheers and Friends don’t do it, but this one does.

Betsy: They must’ve added it later, but it is part of what the coordinator does. Obviously, it’s because it gets back to this thing of all the departments want to just see, “Who’s in this scene? What cats do I have wrangle?”

John: The decision to make dialogue double-spaced, it looks so terrible to me, but it’s convention.

Betsy: It is. It’s a lot easier for an actor to read when they’re walking through with their script, because they don’t have it memorized. All these run-throughs, they’ve got their script.

John: They’re just holding it.

Betsy: They’re walking through the scene on the run-through day, reading from their script while – “And I love you too, sweetie,” and then they… We encourage them to not try to memorize it, because we want the words. I don’t want an approximation of the words. I want to know the exact words, because then I know what I have to fix. Somebody’s saying, “I really like you too, sweetie,” that means something very different.

John: Parentheticals are part of the dialogue block itself. Things just look different in ways that just feel arbitrary.

Betsy: I know. I know.

Megana: Your scripts end up being 40 to 60 pages long.

Betsy: Hopefully not 60. That’s really long. But yes, I would say in the 38 to 42 is the sweet spot, depending on the show. Then some shows, they spread. Who knows what? They just spread, and so it’s just better to have shorter page count. Other shows can get away – I think Friends scripts were usually pretty long, because that dialogue just went so quickly.

John: Let’s say you’re a listener to the show who really loves the multi-cam format and wants to work in that. Would you recommend they write a multi-cam script, or should they write something that’s more single-camera-y but has funny jokes in it? What’s gonna be a better thing to get them noticed and read?

Betsy: A time machine.

John: That’s a good one. First, invent time travel. Then show them your Friends script.

Betsy: I don’t think it matters anymore, from what I can gather. I just had this conversation with my husband last night. He said, “I hear spec scripts are coming back.” I was like, “Really?”

John: Specs of existing shows?

Betsy: Specs meaning specs of existing shows, so you write a Night Court. My friend Corey Nickerson wrote her spec years and years ago. She did a spec Mary Tyler Moore.

John: So exciting.

Betsy: But it was R rated. It got her a lot of attention, because it just was a really cool way to reinvent that idea. For example, I think if you wrote a Modern Family spec, I think that’s gonna work for a multi-cam just great. I don’t think you have to do one or the other. I think if you wrote a Baby Reindeer spec, I’m not sure that’s gonna really translate to the Tim Allen thing.

John: Yeah, somehow, yeah, I could see that being a talent. A guy who we were on the negotiating committee with was working on the new Frasier. That’s another example of a present-day sitcom that’s out there.

I remember when my daughter was young, she was obsessed with one of the Nickelodeon shows, and so I got her onto the set of one of the Nickelodeon shows. It was very much a classic sitcom-y kind of thing, but they filmed it arbitrarily in the afternoons. There was a laugh group. It was just a bunch of people in lawn chairs who’d sit at a TV and laugh with the jokes. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.

Betsy: I’m trying to think of what the equivalent is. It feels like there’s some sort of sex worker equivalent. As a copywriter, you feel so cheap, because you’re like, “I didn’t earn that.” That’s what we had in COVID. We had the laughers in COVID, because you couldn’t have an audience. They would hire these, because then you could test them all. They could be properly COVID tested in the audience. I think it bothered all of us, and particularly actors or standups who are used to earning those laughs. It feels real dirty just to get a big guffaw. You’re like, “It wasn’t that funny. Now it feels like you’re mocking me.”

John: I just remember the producer would walk over to laughers between, like, “Can I get a bigger laugh on this joke?” I’m like, oh, no. Finger on the scale there.

Betsy: It is. It’s got real fake orgasm vibes.

John: It does. Let’s talk about some listener questions. Megana, can we start with this one from Annie?

Megana: Annie writes, “I hooked up with a director who loves one of my scripts, a feature film. He’s put a lot of work into moving the project forward and recently found a producer who’s on board. I trust the director’s taste, and we have good communication. The producer, not so much. I don’t want to be all precious. After all, a script produced is better than one on your hard drive. On the other hand, if the result is completely awful, then what? Any tips on how to navigate this process?”

John: I think we’ve all been in situations where like, “Oh, I really like your perspective, and this other person’s, I don’t, and I am stuck with both of you.” It’s a tricky place to navigate.

Betsy: My advice would be talk to the director as politically savvily as possible. Just say, “Here’s where I’m struggling. I feel like we’re very much in the same page of what this movie is. I’m not feeling like the input from the producer is rowing in the same direction. Tell me how you feel about their notes, how you’re experiencing. Maybe I’m not understanding something or I’m not seeing something,” and see if they can be – because they may be feeling the same way, and by you saying that, be like, “You know what? I actually feel the same way.” Or they may say, “Oh, I’ve worked for this person before, and take this with a grain of salt.”

John: The opposite situation is worse, when you agree with the producer, and the director has terrible notes and terrible instincts. Then you’re gonna get replaced and things are bad. It’s not gonna work out well. Ultimately, that director is responsible for executing your script. Yes, the producer’s gonna have an important function, but you’re better off seeing eye to eye with the director than with the producer.

Betsy: Yes.

John: A question here from Cayenne.

Megana: Cayenne asks, “Sometimes when writing dialogue, I find my characters being sarcastic or deadpan, saying what is phrased like a question but flatly and more as a shady statement. I like to write these with no question mark, because it feels like it makes their tone much clearer. For example, ‘Oh, really?’ versus, ‘Oh, really.’ But I’ve had a friend proofreading catch these, insisting that they’ll snag a reader out of the scene more than help. Do you have any opinions on when or when not to break grammatical norms to communicate tone?”

Betsy: I use punctuation however the hell I want. But also, you can say “flatly.” You’ve got parentheticals available to you. I usually do a combination of parentheticals and punctuation. I don’t know. I hear what the person proofing it feels, but I also think I want to know what the tone is more importantly than anything else.

John: I agree with you. I think if it’s crucial, then that parenthetical could be in there. But I do like that question marks actually kind of have a sound now. Putting a question mark on or taking a question mark, you can kind of hear it. We mentioned a couple weeks ago, someone had two question marks at the end of a sentence. I can hear what that sounds like. It felt appropriate.

This last week there was a press release that came out from Kamala Harris’s campaign, and one of the bullet points was, “Trump is old and quite weird?” with a question mark. That question mark was absolutely perfect. Choosing to put the question mark there or put a question mark on a thing that’s otherwise a statement is a total valid choice. Everything on the page matters. Don’t worry about it being grammatically perfect.

Megana: Just an example to look at, because we’ll probably link the Friends pilot in here, they set up Chandler as droll, and he doesn’t have any question marks in his sarcastic statements. It’s just a period.

John: Let’s do one more. This one from John.

Megana: John writes, “I’m writing a screenplay where, in Act 3, the protagonist is hit with a massive flashback of memories while standing in a room with other people. Like 5 to 10 pages of flashbackery. It’s important stuff and informs what happens next in the story. My question is, during the flashback, what’s happening in current time and space? Has it been presumably caused? If so, can you return right from a flashback and assume no time has passed? Is it better to return by jumping forward a bit in time, or is there a better way to handle this?”

John: I definitely have felt this, where I was like, “Oh, wow, we’ve been gone a long time. Was he actually in real time experiencing all this together?” If you’re gonna be gone for more than a minute, I think you gotta return to the present tense with some sense of, okay, just tell us whether he was experiencing this too, or was this flashback for us, or was it the thing that he was experiencing at the same time.

Betsy: I agree. I would also say use it to the advantage of the scene, in other words that time didn’t just stop for everybody. But it’s like, were they boring? Was somebody in the middle of telling an incredibly emotional story and you just went into flashbacks? Then you come back and they’re like, “And then he died.” You can use it in all kinds of different ways. I would say I always try to think what is the real. Then the real is, if I’m going into a bunch of flashbacks that take three minutes of screentime, that’s three minutes the other person has been doing something, or the other people have.

John: It is weird to do the introspection of what was actually happening while I was having these thoughts. Sometimes it’s in a place where nothing else was happening. I will time travel while I’m in the shower. Nothing else was happening. But if I’m time traveling during the middle of recording this podcast, you two would notice that.

Megana: It happened a few times actually.

John: It has, where I’ve just been like, “I’m not in here anymore.” It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is this article by Mary HK Choi for New York Magazine, or The Cut. I always get confused what’s what there. The headline is What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained. I’ve seen other people talk about adult diagnosis of autism. It’s like, okay, sure. But her description of where she was at and how it made things click together was really fascinating. Then I like that she also pushed beyond to say, yes, but also I’m an immigrant and some of what you’re seeing here is also just a pretty understandable response to what my situation was. Yes, there’s probably some brain stuff, but there’s also probably some cultural stuff there, and it’s impossible to disentangle them.

I thought it was a really great article. There were so many things I wanted to highlight and underline. She’s a workaholic who’s, quote, “bad at Christmas,” which is such a great character description.

Betsy: That is great.

John: It’s so good. This is a article by Mary HK Choi. Everyone should look it up.

Megana: Awesome. My One Cool Thing is Season 2 of Unstable.

John: Tell us about Unstable. You watched the whole first season, and you should watch the second season now too?

Megana: Yes, I watched the whole first season. Everyone should watch the second season. This is the show that I had to leave my beloved Scriptnotes producing job for.

John: Absolutely. You can see Megana’s name on screen as a staff writer on Unstable Season 2.

Megana: Yes. It is a single-cam comedy on Netflix starring Rob Lowe and his real-life son John Lowe. There’s also Fred Armisen, Sian Clifford. This season has Lamorne Morris. It’s a delightful, quirky comedy. The episodes are 20 minutes long. Check it out.

John: Delightful and very exciting. Here’s the secret about Netflix, which we should just tell everybody. Start watching it and just watch the whole thing, because they really care about things being completed. Be a completionist. If you don’t have a chance to watch it all when you first sit down, maybe just let it play, so you get credit for it. Then you can go back and watch the episodes again.

Betsy: Who has time to watch an entire series in one sitting? I’m lucky to get through one.

John: I know.

Betsy: I don’t know. I guess people who don’t have kids. I don’t know.

Megana: I have a lot of time to do that.

Betsy: If you’ve had a couple glasses of wine at dinner and it’s… If it’s 9:45 and I’m not on my way to bed, something’s wrong.

John: You and me, we’re right in that zone. I could start watching something, but it’s already 9:00, so soon that means I’m gonna be tired and I’m gonna want to be upstairs.

Betsy: That’s exactly right. I feel bad, because you guys had cool things. But you could prepare. All I’ve done – this is a callback to the flashback.

John: Please.

Betsy: All I’ve done this entire time you guys were saying yours was – my brain was racing through, “Come up with a cool thing!” I barely heard either one of you. You know what I saw that I really enjoyed is a little movie called Wicked Little Letters.

John: Tell me about this.

Betsy: It’s a English movie – as John knows, we love all things English – with Jessie.

John: Jessie Buckley?

Betsy: Yep.

John: Jessie Buckley from Chernobyl.

Betsy: Yes. She’s delightful. It’s Olivia Colman.

John: Come on.

Betsy: It’s written by this fantastic writer, who’s also an actor, named Jonny Sweet.

John: Great.

Betsy: That we’re somewhat obsessed with. It’s a delight.

John: Great. Wicked Little Letters.

Betsy: It’s on streaming now.

Megana: It’s on Netflix. I’m glad you recommended it, because I saw it and I was like, “This looks really good,” but I haven’t heard people talking about it.

Betsy: It’s a delightful romp. It has some serious stuff, and it’s also loosely based on a true story.

John: Fun. You’ve not heard anybody talking about it until Betsy Thomas shows up to talk about it. Now, that broke the dam.

Betsy: Exactly. I just made Jonny Sweet a billionaire.

John: Absolutely. The little title will go to the top, what’s trending now on it, just because of your recommendation.

Betsy: Exactly.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with, this week, special help from Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. A special outro in celebration of the Olympics. It’s Scriptnotes themed in celebration of the Olympics.

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. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and other gear that’s all great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on golf. I want to hear about golf.

Betsy: That’s the least honest thing you’ve ever said.

John: Betsy, as always, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Betsy: I had a blast, you guys. Thank you so much.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: I actually am genuinely curious about golf, because there’s things that I probably never would do myself but I’m still curious about, and golf is one of those, because this is my perception of golf: It’s hot and sunny out, two things I don’t like. I’m gonna go walk around carrying a bag of things, trying to hit a ball poorly while talking with people. None of these things are clicking for me, but they do click for you. Tell me, what got you into golf?

Betsy: First of all, the birthplace of golf, it’s not hot and sunny. It’s actually the opposite.

John: It’s Scottish.

Betsy: It’s cold and windy and rainy. What is it? A lovely walk spoiled is what I think somebody called golf. Of course I can’t remember who. I’m trying to think of how to say to somebody who doesn’t play golf what’s good about golf.

Golf takes extraordinary amount of skill, practice, discipline, mental tenacity. You are always kind of just playing yourself. Even when you’re playing in a match, you’re playing competitively, the person you’re trying to beat is usually the person in your own head. That’s what I struggle the most with.

You have however many shots to get to the hole. But there are so many different versions of those shots. Tennis, you’ve got however many you have. But golf, it’s so much more complicated and more difficult. It’s a game that is very difficult to master. You can continue to play it until you’re old. It’s very social. You get four to five hours with your loved one, your friends, whoever.

John: A thing you brought up today, which I’d never really considered, is it’s less like poker and more like Solitaire, because you’re really just playing yourself. It doesn’t really matter how everyone else does. Ultimately, you’re gonna compare your scores, but you’re not playing against each other directly, the way you are in tennis or really almost any other sport.

Betsy: You are in match play. I’m playing in our club championship this weekend. Tomorrow’s my first match of match plays. It’s a bracket, and you have to win. When you are playing somebody else in a match, you are playing them directly. Hole by hole is what you’re winning.

John: How they perform really has no bearing on how you perform directly.

Betsy: No, except for if they’re on the green in two and they’re putting for birdie, and I’m in the fairway, I’m like, “Uh-oh, I have to get up and down, or I’m gonna lose this hole.”

John: Megana, you said your dad is a golfer?

Megana: He is a golfer. He’s a big-time golfer.

John: Did he golf before he came to the States, or how did that all start?

Megana: No, it’s really a hobby that he picked up, gosh, I think when I was like – it was once we moved to Ohio. Him and his friend just started golfing. Now they’re out there on all of the hot and sunny, humid days in Ohio, because there’s very limited days that you can golf there.

John: Your dad’s a doctor, so that also ties in. I think about doctors golfing.

Megana: Yeah, I guess some of his friends who are doctors also golf. My mom’s gotten into it recently.

John: Oh, interesting.

Megana: It’s a cute thing they do together.

John: My dad golfed some. I remember my mom decided, “I’m gonna take lessons so I can golf with him.” I would sit in the car at the edge of the golf practice range where she’d have her lessons. She just hated it. I really respect my mom for just stopping. She was like, “I don’t like this.” She just stopped. Learning it’s okay to quit was just such an inspiration to me.

Megana: I do feel really inspired when I see that. Betsy, when did you start golfing?

Betsy: I got clubs for my 30th birthday.

John: So not as a child then.

Betsy: So four years ago.

John: Four years, you’re already playing in the championship. That’s really great.

Betsy: Yeah, I’m the wunderkind.

John: Why did you get clubs? Did your husband golf?

Betsy: No, my friend JB Roberts, who is a manager here in LA, but we went to college together, he just decided I should be a golfer. I was an athlete. I was always an athlete. I was a tennis player. I played lacrosse growing up. I had hit the golf ball. I’d hit around a little bit. But I was not a golfer. I had no clubs, whatever. He had decided I should be a golfer. He got my friends to all pitch in and buy me clubs and lessons for my 30th birthday. That’s what began it. It was great though, because I really did enjoy it.

Then when I met my husband, Adrian, he is a very good golfer. We found that out on our first date. Then that gave us a thing to do together. We’ve been able to have that, and now our son is an excellent golfer. The three of us do golf trips all the time. We’ve been to Scotland. We get to travel.

One of the things I love about it is, A, you can drink. It’s like, oh, I’m getting my steps in and I have a vodka tonic. But here’s the terrible thing about the elitism of golf. It has some of the most beautiful land in the world – are golf courses. You get to see spectacular places wherever you travel. You get to see some of the most gorgeous landscape. As a family, we travel, and we always have this thing that we do together.

I know it sounds weird. It’s like, how is that romantic? Adrian and I are going to Ireland in October for our 25th wedding anniversary, and we’re gonna play golf. It’ll be just the two of us walking around a course together for five hours or four and a half hours. It’s actually beautiful and lovely. I know it sounds strange, but it is weirdly romantic.

John: You’ve done a really good job selling golf. I actually am much more appreciative of a thing now. The other perception I have of golf has always been people making deals over golf. How useful or not useful has it been in terms of the industry that you work in to play golf? Do you golf with industry folks? How does that tie together?

Betsy: I don’t really, but I think it’s more of sexism, because there aren’t that many women that play golf. I think that it’s a thing that guys do, because the guys all play Saturday morning together. In the club we belong, there are a lot of showbiz people. I don’t really have that, because I play with my family or I play with the ladies. We’re not normally doing that kind of thing. But I do think that is a real thing. I think there’s a lot of friendships that are formed through that.

John: Megana, was your dad golfing – do you think it was also part of, not even assimilation, but just a way to become more American? Was that a goal at all?

Megana: That’s an interesting question. I’m from the suburbs in Ohio. There is one really big golf course in the middle of our town.

Betsy: Where?

Megana: It’s Yankee Trace Golf Club in Centerville, Ohio. Are you familiar with Ohio at all?

Betsy: I am.

John: You’re saying you and Adrian are not gonna be traveling to Centerville, Ohio on your next romantic golf trip?

Betsy: I don’t think so. I’m not thinking. But there are some amazing golf courses in Ohio, actually. That’s why I was asking.

Megana: Yeah, there’s the NCR Country Club golf course, which is the National Cash Register, which is a huge part of Dayton, Ohio lore.

John: I love it.

Megana: But a lot of his friends that he golfs with are Indian, so I don’t know if it was totally an assimilation thing. He really wanted me to get into it because it is such a mental game. I don’t know. I was just such a hormonal teenager. I think he was like, “This will help,” and it did the opposite. It made me so mad.

John: It wasn’t a Venus and Serena Williams situation where suddenly-

Megana: No, absolutely not.

Betsy: I will tell you about the doctors thing that it is one of the great things. There actually are a lot of doctors who play golf, and it’s one of the great things about golf, because I turned my ankle really badly and couldn’t put weight on it, and it was like, “Oh good, there’s Dr. Dave. He’s head of orthopedics at Children’s.” I was like, “Hey.” He checks it out. Then the guy we were playing with is actually an acupuncturist and a Chinese medicine doctor. He took me into the gym, and he did a bunch of pressure point stuff on me. I said to Dave, “What should I do?” He’s like, “Ice and vodka, in any combination.” See?

John: Absolutely. The cure for most issues though really.

Betsy: That’s so true.

John: Betsy, an absolute delight having you on.

Betsy: I just had a great time.

Megana: Thank you.

Betsy: Unstable, I’m gonna watch it.

Megana: Please.

Links:

• Betsy Thomas on Wikipedia and IMDb
• Megana Rao on Twitter and IMDb
• WGA West Annual Report
• Writer Earnings Fell $600 Million Due to Strike and Industry Contraction, WGA Says by Gene Maddus for Variety
• Cheers – “Give Me a Ring Sometime” by Glen and Les Charles
• Cheers – “Father Knows Last”
• Night Court – “Pilot” by Dan Rubin
• Friends – “Pilot” by David Crane & Marta Kauffman
• What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained by Mary HK Choi for The Cut
• Unstable – Season 2 on Netflix (hooray Megana Rao!)
• Wicked Little Letters on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, X and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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You can download the episode here.