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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/whispering-loudly).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 636 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

(Whispers:) Today on the show, what’s with all the whispering in movies? Is it a deliberate narrative choice or just a fad? We’ll discuss voice and volume. We’ll also look at what you can learn from reading early drafts, the threat of TikTok and YouTube, and answer some listener questions. Helping us out with all of this is returning guest host Pamela Ribon. Welcome back.

**Pamela Ribon:** Hi.

**John:** Woo!

**Pamela:** Yay! Hi. Thanks. Woo. I don’t normally get a woo on.

**John:** Woohoo.

**Pamela:** Oh, hello.

**John:** Woo woos are very, very nice. We had you on this summer, and you were absolutely a phenomenal guest. But since that time, I got to see your movie Nimona, which was fantastic.

**Pamela:** Aw, thanks. It’s a lot of people’s movies, but yes.

**John:** It’s a lot of people’s movies.

**Pamela:** It’s a lot of people’s movies. But yes, I’m so glad you got to see it. That is a miracle.

**John:** It’s a very long process. I do want to talk some about the history of that and how it moved around and finally got made. But I also want to talk about, you got to go to the Academy Awards with that. I thought for the Bonus Segment we would just talk about going to the Academy Awards and what it’s like to go to the Academy Awards.

**Pamela:** Totally. That’s one of my favorite things to talk about. We’ll do it.

**John:** Not only were you there, you showed up in the background of so many famous people’s shots, which I love.

**Pamela:** Yes, most unexpected.

**John:** Very nice. Before we started with that, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Foxy wrote in some follow-up about vetting in last week’s episode. She wrote, “I was so stoked about the discussion of vetting in 635, because it’s something I’ve been wondering ever since Me Too. You guys gave great advice, but I have more questions. With Me Too, most of the behavior being called out was not on set. It was behind closed doors. Most abuse functions that way. The abuser often wants to keep it a secret so they can keep their good reputation intact, hence whisper networks. Now, I’m a woman, but I’ve never been tapped into any whisper network in any area of my life. And I would never want to hire someone who was abusing someone behind closed doors at home. How do you vet for this? Because cutting ties and showing there’s professional, reputational consequences for this behavior is super important, but how do you find out in the first place if they’re keeping it secret?”

**John:** Foxy’s question here reminds me of this thing we really should’ve gotten into in last discussion is that we were talking about vetting as an employer, but you’re also vetting as an employee. You’re wondering, is this person I’m gonna work for, are they a good person or not a good person. That can be just as important.

Pamela, I’m curious whether you have any thoughts about this. How do you check to see whether that person you’re gonna be working with, either you’re gonna hire them or gonna be working for them, how do you start to check about a person?

**Pamela:** Often, it’s not really all that whispered, I find. So there’s that. And then you have to believe women. You have to believe what you hear, even if that’s inconvenient for you and what you’d like to do. You can check with your reps, and you can check with people that you know who’ve worked with these people or for these people before. I find usually people will start with that, because they don’t want you getting into a situation that they could help you avoid.

**John:** I had an incident just this past week where we’re talking about a person, and there was a passing comment about, “Oh yeah, there’s some sort of Me Too thing, but… “ When I heard that “Me Too but,” I’m like, “Oh my, oh my.” That was a signal to me that I do need to investigate this more, and so asking around additional people and getting some confirmation that some folks were uncomfortable with this person. That’s good information to have. It really influences what you’re trying to do.

Either way, if you’re not tapped into any official whisper networks, I think it’s good advice to check to see whether that person is working with the same people again and again, which is generally a good sign that they want people around, unless they’re working with the same people again and again because those people are helping to cover up some behavior. When you do ask about a person, there’s this line where sometimes they’re not willing to report the behavior they saw, but they’re willing to tell you in confidence that this wasn’t great.

**Pamela:** I think of that as the whisper network. I don’t know about a network either, just to help Foxy feel like… You’re in the network if you’re talking to people and they’re talking to you. That’s kind of how it is. If there’s a database, I don’t know about it. But I would also say this is a good time to bring up hiresurvivorshollywood.org.

**John:** Tell me about that. I’ve never heard of this.

**Pamela:** This is an organization that was created by Sarah Ann Masse – I don’t know, it might be Masse – who was one of the Weinstein silence breakers. It is to address the issue of career retaliation against those who have been sexually violated and those who have shared those details publicly.

One of the ways that you can help make sure that you’re not hiring an abuser is to hire a survivor who spoke out, who might be suffering some of the things that happen to you, even though they tell you won’t happen to you and can’t happen to you, and even HR says can’t happen to you if you talk about what has happened. I think it’s important that we are able to say you can come forward and you can talk, and you are not just protected, you are gonna continue to have your career, which is one of the first things they threaten you with.

**John:** It’s important to remember that in Hollywood, where you tend to go from job to job to job, having a break where you’ve not been working is a problem. If you haven’t been working for six months, it’s increasingly harder to get that next job. I could totally see someone who was speaking up and speaking out and didn’t get that next gig or that gig after that. It can be harder to keep momentum in your job, in your career.

**Pamela:** Yeah, you can get labeled as a troublemaker or someone who encourages people to talk and speak out. That’s the opposite of the whisper network, so we don’t have to whisper anymore. I do feel like that’s part of vetting is, if you’re even having to wonder is it worth it for this person, then maybe there’s another person out there who is worth it.

**John:** Let’s go from whisper networks to literal whispering in movies. This is something that came up this past week with people’s observations that in the movie Dune 2, there’s just a lot of whispering, and characters are whispering in situations where you really wonder whether they’d be whispering in real life. Let’s play a little clip here. This is Timothée Chalamet’s character and Zendaya’s character talking. It’s a little, intimate scene. Let’s play a bit of this.

[Dune 2 clip]

**Zendaya:** Your blood comes from dukes and great houses. We don’t have that here. Here, we’re equal, man and woman alike. What we do, we do for the benefit of all.

**Timothée Chalamet:** I’d very much like to be equal to you.

**Zendaya:** Paul Muad’Dib Usul. Maybe you could be Fremen. Maybe I’ll show you the way.

**John:** This is leading up to their first kiss. I actually really like this scene. I love Timothée Chalamet saying, “I’d like to be equal to you.” If you are just listening to this at home and don’t have the visual here, you might think, okay, they’re in bed someplace, there’s people around, they’re whispering for some reason. But no, they are on the top of a sand dune with no one else around at all, and yet they’re whispering.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) That’s right.

**John:** That’s right.

**Pamela:** Because that’s love, baby.

**John:** That’s love. Let’s talk about that. It is intimate, and so there is an intimacy created by the whispering. This scene didn’t bug me when I watched it in the theater. It’s only when someone pointed out it’s really weird that they’re whispering here that it stands out.

**Pamela:** I just think of Timothée Chalamet as just – he is whisper. If you could make a human out of the word whisper. He’s just whispering in doorways and leaning in and wants to be equal with you. Come on.

**John:** Come.

**Pamela:** Don’t make him volume. I’m leaning all the way in. Same with Zendaya. She’s so much beauty and talent. You’re like, just give it to me on level 2. It’s all I can take.

**John:** Full Zendaya, I couldn’t take it in this moment.

**Pamela:** No, we’d explode.

**John:** We have not read the script for Dune 2, so we don’t know whether in the scene description it’s talking about the fact that they’re whispering. I doubt it is. It was a choice made by the actors and director in staging the scene to do it this way. It’s a very deliberate choice.

But let’s talk about, as screenwriters, situations where we might want to have our characters whispering, when it would make sense, when we would actually put it in a script, and when it would just feel natural along the way. Obviously, the main reason characters whisper is so that other people around them don’t hear it. That feels really natural. When you see that in a movie, you get it. You’re whispering so people can’t hear. Sometimes that’s an aside. Sometimes that is so the guards 10 feet away are not hearing that. Other examples, Pamela, what are you thinking of?

**Pamela:** I don’t even think of this as whispering, what they’re doing, but in a movie this loud, this is considered whisper. That’s part of it too is you want to whisper so that you can have the opposite effect of what the rest of the film is going – or the rest of the scene. I think comedic tension whispers are my favorite whispers, where it’s like, “I can’t even believe,” because then you really get to hiss at each other. Comedic whispering is the best.

**John:** That’s really good. I think about not waking the baby. The parent arguments are happening so that they don’t wake the baby. There’s comedy there too, where you’re shouting and whispering at the same time. That can be a fun moment.

In the scene we just watched, it’s an intimate moment. I don’t know in real life if they really would be whispering, but it does bring us in closer to them. That’s honestly sometimes the job of a whisper is to invite us into that closeup so we’re really close in. Weirdly, because the camera does get close on people’s faces, if people are talking at full voice, it can feel a little strange. It can feel a little shouty.

**Pamela:** I’m thinking about times also in a script you might want someone to whisper to get all of the attention. You’re whispering on purpose. I suppose I’m just now thinking of my dad. It’s very parental. The angrier he got, the quieter he would get, so that you were like, “Oh, boy.”

**John:** Don’t worry about dad when he’s shouting. Worry when he’s whispering. People whisper to themselves, or sometimes they’ll whisper to a character who they know can’t hear them. Some examples. In Rear Window, he sees that the guy’s coming back and he’s whispering, “Get out of there.” He knows he can’t. He’s saying what he wishes he could say to the actual person, and there’s no way to actually say that. You also see that when people are watching something on a screen or a monitor and they’re trying to say, “Aha,” and there’s no way to communicate it. Weirdly, whispering is a thing people do in those situations.

**Pamela:** Yeah, but that’s to let us, the audience, know that he knows he can’t talk to them.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a question of would you do that in real life, or is that just a movie convention, that you’re vocalizing what you know you can’t say to the real person. Weakness, so a person who’s on their deathbed, we’re used to the whispering there. Confessions.

**Pamela:** I’m sorry, I’m still laughing that you have weakness equated with deathbed confessions. I was thinking weakness like, “It’s too heavy. I think we need to take some of the weight… ” But you were like, “It’s buried under the backyard flower bed.” You’re like, what a weak man.

**John:** What a weak man. I mean to separate weakness and confessions. Weakness, a person who’s physically frail, it makes sense that they can’t put their full voice behind things. Confessions I will say is a separate thing, like, “I see dead people.” You’re letting somebody in on a secret. Sometimes you whisper secrets, even if there’s no real reason to whisper.

**Pamela:** Particularly creepy secrets.

**John:** Whispering is creepy at times.

**Pamela:** (Whispers:) “I’m here for you.” That kind of stuff.

**John:** We were looking through some examples of famous whispers. Of course, “Rosebud.” “The horror.” Scar leans in to say, “I killed Mufasa.” And then, of course, “My precious.” That’s of course a character who is basically entirely whispers. His actual voice quality is what we would consider a whisper.

**Pamela:** I wrote one in Nimona, which is, “He’s perfect.” After all these reasons that this man’s a terrible villain, number one, everybody’s after him, and nobody will ever love him again, she’s looking at all of this news info, and she says, “He’s perfect.” I went to look at the script to see what did I say, and I had just put it in italics. Then I was like, oh, I don’t even remember how it’s done in the end. This is pretty amazing that you can just open it up in Netflix and I just hit a button and it went right to the line. I was like, no, that’s fresh in there. But she kind of growls it. Chloe kind of growls, like, “He’s perfect.”

**John:** The whisper growl is a thing too. Bane’s voice in Batman, or really Batman’s voice in Christopher Nolan’s Batman is a whisper growl. It’s like speaking softly but with a weird masculine intensity.

**Pamela:** The 30 Rock quote is the “talking like this” contest.

**John:** It’s good stuff. In the case of Nimona, you probably put that line in italics, and italics makes sense for that. It stands out. Other choice would be to put the parenthetical above that to indicate that this you say whispering, that it’s not at full voice. There’s a thing there.

But in the case, again, where characters are whispering lines that they wouldn’t necessarily need to whisper, that can be an on-the-set choice. That can be a choice the actors are making, the director’s making. And as long as everyone’s on the same page, it can work.

Kind of related is the issue of – on the podcast a lot recently we’ve been talking about word choices. And the last week we were talking about characters whose native language is not English and how you mark that in scripts and how you make choices that indicate that English is not their native language as you’re writing those characters.

Fundie baby voice came up. Our friend Chris pointed this out. It was something I’d not been aware of until you see the examples, like, “Oh, I totally get this.” This is an example of – it’s called fundie baby voice.

[Clip]

**Kelly Johnson:** I used to be a schoolteacher. I loved that, but I just felt burdened for so many people and I felt the calling to go back to school to become a Christian counselor.

**John:** This is Mike Johnson’s wife. It’s a voice. It’s a choice. It’s a very specific way of speaking. If you had a character who was speaking this way, you would need to indicate that in the script, because it really fundamentally changes our instinct about how those lines sound in our delivery. Have you experienced this in your real life or in scripts yet?

**Pamela:** I was just thinking this is such a church voice. You were like, “It’s learned. It’s a choice.” I think it might be ingrained. You may learn this growing up, of keep sweet and obey. This is the voice that you’re supposed to use to be, as you’ve got written here, childlike, sweet, submissive, and honey. But this voice to me is – I understand it’s fundamentalist, but it doesn’t take much to turn it into you’re in the South with the same voice.

**John:** As a counterexample, you look at Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos and the way she was deliberately pitching her voice lower, pulling down to a different register to give her authority that she felt like she couldn’t have in her normal voice. I just wonder if it’s just how we fundamentally police women’s voices the way we also police bodies. There’s no right way for a woman to speak.

**Pamela:** That’s true. I have done the Theranos, as we call this act, in rooms when I recognize that the sound of my regular voice giving ideas isn’t reaching ears anymore and it’s getting tuned out. Then I just start saying it like this. It definitely works. Definitely works.

**John:** Are people aware that you’re doing it?

**Pamela:** Only, yes, because I tell them. That’s who I am. I’m like, “Do you like it better when I say it like this?” They’ll be like, “I do.” I’m like, “I know you do. We’re gonna look into this.” This voice very much works. She’s not the only one who knows. It doesn’t take much. You just say it like this. When I look at videos of me in high school, as I did a bunch for My Year of Dicks, my voice is lower back then.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** Because I think I was hanging around boys all the time, and that was just where my voice hung out. It’s very Janeane Garofalo probably. It was the style at the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because obviously, whether it’s Christian fundie voice or the Theranos voice you’re doing, you’re pulling your voice examples based on the community around you and what seems to be working and how you fit in with the community around you. Mike Johnson’s wife, she’s probably doing that voice because that is the community that she’s in, and that feels like the right choice. And if she were to make a different choice, there would be consequences for her doing that within her community. That’s the choice that she’s making.

You were referencing My Year of Dicks, which is of course the incredible, originally a series and then done as a film you did and got the Oscar nomination for. As you’re watching those videos, do you remember deliberately choosing to lower your voice, or that was just at thing that happened?

**Pamela:** I don’t know that I definitely chose to lower my voice. I think I probably always – I still have a bit of a lower voice, and it’s only getting more so. I definitely know that there was an affect of – I think maybe it just happens in your teens, when you get your first official hormonal whatevers, and you just lean back in that sound of detachment that stayed that way.

I don’t know that I would ever write in a script how someone should do their voice, because isn’t that what the actor is bringing to the table? Unless it was she was masking her voice for some reason and doing an impression or something like that. I don’t know that I would say, “She’s got fundie voice,” even if I were writing a character who was a fundamentalist.

**John:** It’s interesting, because I feel like sometimes I need to be able to hear that character’s voice in my head. If I’m hearing it in a way that is not going to actually translate on the page without me calling it out, that feels important. Obviously, if some other character’s referencing it, you’re gonna need to put it there.

I don’t know, there’s a musicality to how these people are doing it that is different. Elizabeth Holmes, not only is she pushing it lower, she’s also going more monotone. The same words are gonna come across very differently, given that. You’re gonna make some different little word choices to fit that pattern and how it’s gonna fit.

**Pamela:** Word choices is true. I think I would maybe blend some words and italicize some words to get that musicality of the reader can hear what it says. But I don’t know that I would even talk about their pitch or something like that. But you’re right. If someone else is, “She’s definitely a lower talker, isn’t she?” there you go. You got it.

**John:** You’re going back to the Seinfeld reference. You say you pitched your voice lower. I’m sure there was some moment in which I internally recognized I had gay voice and changed, and so that I pitched lower, I made choices to sound less gay. But I don’t remember when that was, and I don’t have good examples of me on tape showing when my voice shifted. I’d love to see some forensics on that, but I just don’t think that material exists, to figure out was it in 5th grade or 7th grade that I did make that shift, because my register is much lower than it probably should be for my overall size and shape. At some point, that was just where I landed.

**Pamela:** It was a bunch of tiny recalculations probably, more than like, “Oh, the summer I turned this voice.”

**John:** This conversation is reminding me of a movie that I really, really loved, Lake Bell’s In a World. I want her to make many more movies. I really like this, but I was a little troubled by one thread of this. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman who wants to be the narrator announcer for film, so like, “In a world where,” blah blah blah blah, and how that business is so male-dominated. But it’s her conversations with other women that become a bit of an issue and come through at the end. So let’s take a listen to one clip here.

[In a World clip]

**Woman:** Hey! Watch it! That is so rude.

**Lake Bell (as Carol Solomon):** Oh my god. Okay. Excuse me. I’m so sorry. I just want to give you my card. I’m not a vocal coach anymore, but I would make an exception for you, because you sound like a squeaky toy. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. But I mean, like, I think you’re better than that. You know what I mean? And I think we’re all better than that. It’s good for the species. You know what I mean? But there’s also a Jamba Juice like two blocks away from here if you wanted to, because I bet you were looking for a smoothie. Maybe not. I don’t know. But if you were, you know where it is.

Over the next six weeks, Louis will be recording your voices, and we will listen to your sounds evolve right before your very ears, because women should sound like women, not baby dolls who end everything in a question. Let’s make a statement.

**Pamela:** Speaking of policing women’s voices, she just stopped her outside.

**John:** Yeah. Again, I really like the movie. This was just a thing that I think does not read so well to me now, 10 years or whatever years later. It does feel very police-y, like, people aren’t gonna take you seriously or maybe shouldn’t take you seriously because of your vocal choices.

**Pamela:** That being said, I was a logger for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, so I listened to uncut footage 12 hours at a time in a graveyard shift. I don’t recommend it. I type what I hear, so that you’re logging for story editors for the writers to make this show. There was a season where there was a girl, I just prayed every week she was about to get voted off. She really was up in here, sitting in a hot tub, and she had a high wiggle in her voice. It’s not her fault, but it was a lot, and it was in my ears. I had to type everything she said, which was mostly, “That’s amazing. Oh, yeah, I love that.” I’m not policing her. I could not leave her. It was my job to listen to her until she was voted off.

**John:** I am curious whether the job that you were doing exists in the same way today, because that feels like an absolutely perfect use of AI to log that.

**Pamela:** John, that was a paid gig.

**John:** That was a paid gig.

**Pamela:** That’s how I kept on living.

**John:** I’m not saying it should go away. I’m just saying that feels like very low-hanging fruit.

**Pamela:** Stop it!

**John:** I’m sorry. I’m not advocating for those jobs to be replaced. I think it’s fantastic that you got paid. I want people to get paid.

**Pamela:** I was helping writers who also weren’t getting called writers. Where’s our union? Logging is a job that is not for the weak, but it’s definitely for people who need to be underpaid to survive living in LA for the first few years. It’s definitely probably an AI job now, except they don’t know what they’re doing when they’re not talking, and I watched a lot of non-talking footage. Then I would just make up what she was thinking, which is why I was not cut out for that job.

**John:** I would say AIs right now are pretty good at being able to describe what is literally happening on screen. Is it gonna be useful for the editor who’s assembling stuff? Maybe not. And so you may still need actual human beings there to do that.

But anyway, back to our discussion of whispering and voices and the choices people are making. I think we have ways of indicating on a script what volumes should be. We put things in uppercase when people are shouting. We will put parentheticals in there to give a sense of what that is.

When someone has an overall vocal quality, I think you’re right, sometimes you do want to call it out if it’s going to be something that other characters are going to remark upon. But you don’t want to box in your actor unnecessarily. You still need to let them make their own choices.

**Pamela:** I wonder if that In a World girl’s character is just Baby Voice Girl. Maybe she’s in it later, she had a character name. But that’s usually how it’s done, isn’t it, so that you don’t even get a choice? The character is called Annoying Voice Girl.

**John:** I would like to talk now about Nimona, because as I watched this, I kept hearing your voice all over it. My guess was that you recorded scratch for her for a lot of it. Is that true.

**Pamela:** Oh, that’s funny. No.

**John:** Really?

**Pamela:** Because we already had Chloe hired. I’m trying to remember if we did scratch, gosh, because we did it during lockdown. I’m trying to remember how that all worked. But I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Some of these things we just block out. I was making My Year of Dicks and Nimona at the same time, in this office, in this room, during lockdown, while I was also slightly teaching 1st and 2nd grade, so forgive me if I don’t remember. But we definitely read it out loud and read it in the room and did all of that stuff. So that is probably what you’re hearing too is, yes, acting it out.

**John:** She has an incredibly expressive voice. I would say next to Sarah Silverman’s character in the Wreck-It movies, it’s probably one of the biggest little girl voices I’ve seen, because she’s not always a little girl, of course. But she’s really super, super expressive. Was it fun to write that character?

**Pamela:** It was fun. Also, I was brought in at a time when it was like, we need to really dig into Nimona and get her voice out. This IP has been around, and Nate is a part of it too, so this is a voice that was already on the page and in the creator. But being able to play around in that back and forth and, “I’m not a little girl, I’m Nimona,” was just a fun place. Then also, Riz was already cast too, so you knew the dynamic you could play there.

**John:** Talk to us about when you came on board and what the brief was, what had changed. I should say this is available for anybody who wants to watch it on Netflix. You should absolutely see it. It was one of the five Oscar-nominated animated films this year, so congratulations on it. At what point were you coming on? There was obviously a graphic novel. It sounds like there was already a script, but you were still digging in on how to service the best out of her?

**Pamela:** It had been around for quite a bit before I came on board, because Patrick Osborne was working on it at Fox Animation. I know I was still working on Ralph Breaks the Internet. But a part of me feels like I might’ve still been on Moana when it started. I’m not sure. It was a long time coming. They had talked about me coming on earlier. Blue Sky is based in Connecticut. And I didn’t think that I could go move out there and work on the movie. That was why I had passed at that point. And then March came around. They were like, what if we just come to your house every day?

At that point, Nick and Troy were involved as the directors, and I met with them and we all hit it off. They had had this rewrite that had gone well in the boards that they had had, and it was starting to work. I came in at a time where they had tried so many things. That was the hard part coming into the story team so late. Even this beginning of, to talk about, “He’s perfect,” she wasn’t doing the opening narration. That was one of the first things I was pitching, because you don’t meet her for a while.

**John:** She’s the title character. It seems like she has sidekick energy, and yet she ends up becoming the central character in ways that are really unusual and feel like it’s almost a commentary on how we treat secondary characters in animated films.

**Pamela:** Even the draft I had read before these reels where I came in, it had changed a bunch. They had really tried to figure this one out in many, many ways. Even saying like, “What if you hear her before you meet… ” They’re like, “We tried it.” We had to get through a lot of “we tried its”. You have to be really careful and confident when you’re coming in in that way of like, “But with all due respect, we haven’t tried it, the we that includes me now. Let me see if I can show you a little what I mean.” And even then, that takes time. That’s a real double Dutch of, “I’ll leave that whole area alone. I know my instincts, but we’re not there yet to talk about it.”

But anyway, the studio was shut down while we were still working on it. But as we kept working together, it was getting stronger. Trying to figure out, I would say the story structure stayed the same, but we were moving around the parts of when do we know what we know and why and how, and that stuff got shifted around quite a bit.

But being able to gleefully play with Nimona, luckily, that was always encouraged. Everybody on this movie was so funny. Once she was really sparkling, there were a lot of like, “Oh, I bet she’d say this. I bet she’d say this.” But people got protective of Nimona, as they should.

I had said something about her speaking in a different language at some point. They were like, “No, she doesn’t know other languages. She’s never really been anywhere else.” You got this with Ralph Breaks the Internet too, where they were like, “He can’t wear glasses. His eyes won’t deteriorate. He’s a digital figure.” I was like, “He’s eating a churro. I don’t know what to say. I’m confused.”

**John:** The rules of your world are complicated. She seems to know animals that she probably has not seen. Has she seen a rhino in real life? Yes.

**Pamela:** You’ve worked so hard to understand this world that doesn’t exist, that when someone else comes in and points, just says something like, “Never,” you have to be like, “All right.” I will be like this too one day. I know it, where I will be like, “No, you can’t turn off surge protect,” just weird things that you get so mad about, where you’re like, “That’s fundamentally against the core of who she is.” That’s where you get, and that’s when you know you’re really in it.

**John:** Hearing about the development process, it also strikes me that it helps answer a question I had, which is that the film uses its time in unusual ways, and things that in other films would be like, “We need to figure out a way to do this. The next sequence will be about doing that,” instead the next scene really does that thing. Like, “We have to clear my name,” and then literally, in the next scene, we clear his name. I liked it, but it seems to jump past a lot of the normal sequence of describe the obstacle, attempt to overcome the obstacle, overcome the obstacle. It uses its time in an unusual way.

**Pamela:** I don’t know how to speak to that, because part of me feels like that’s family animation a lot of times, so that we’re letting everyone in the whole wide world, which is the demographic, know what’s going on. There is a lot of “how did we get here’s” and then “what are we gonna dos.”

**John:** Oh yeah, but I was saying I think that is a hallmark of family animation is that you are talking about the thing you need to do and then how you’re gonna do it, and then you do the thing. What’s unusual in Nimona is they describe, oh, we need to do a thing, and suddenly they just do the thing. Where I’d expected, like, okay, this’ll be in the next 10 minutes, it’s like, no, that was taken care of in the next minute, which was unusual. I think that may be a consequence of discovering some parts of the story as you’re going through it.

**Pamela:** Also, I think because they were new to each other, they were doing a lot of emotional processing while talking about how did that just happen. Instead of needing to do it, they really did work it through each other.

**John:** That’s fun. Everyone check that out. The next topic I’d like to dig into is about early drafts. It occurs to me because when you read the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films, it’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Of course, it’s always that way. But of course, we’re reading the very final draft. In some cases, we’re reading stuff that really reflects the final edit rather than the actual script they went into production with. I find it to be so educational to look at early drafts.

One of the things that I was able to do when I was at USC is – they had this big script library. They would have the final shooting script, but they would also have earlier drafts. It was so cool to see the stuff that had changed from the original idea to the final film. I remember reading the Point Break script and loving it, the James Cameron rewrite of it. It’s just great. But it’s different. It’s not the final film. You see what that looked like on the page, and ideas that were important at one point that then got dropped are great.

Also, during WGA arbitrations, a lot of times I’m reading seven scripts back, and you see what the initial instinct was versus what the final film was. You see how much stuff changes over the course of it. I think it’s really a good process for any screenwriter to see how much things really do change along the way.

**Pamela:** They solidify in your brain so differently too when you look back, because I did that a little, looking back here for you, for prepping, and I was blown away by what I didn’t remember. That’s just a good reminder to yourself of you have told yourself a story that you have believed. Thank you for your service on arbitration, honestly. What a job. What a hard thing to do, John, to go and read all those drafts and make these decisions.

**John:** I enjoy it, and so I will say yes most of the times when they call me about doing one of them, just because it’s important. You want to give people the credit that they deserve for the hard work they did.

One of the things you have in the notes here is about Natural Born Killers. Had you read a script for that early on? Had you read it before you saw the movie?

**Pamela:** No, not before I saw the film. That USC film script library sounds cool, but I was in a software company in Austin, Texas with the internet. The version that we had of that was trying to find people illegally uploading websites full of scripts. The early Natural Born Killers script was one I remember finding and being like, “Look at this. It’s so different than this film that I saw a billion times.” It’s very Tarantino-y. When you go in there, you’re like, it’s very Tarantino-y. They still have up the 1990 Tarantino script, which you can compare to the 1993 Oliver Stone and other writers’ draft.

But what’s also interesting is that then when you dive even further into people talking about it, because I only know internet rabbit holes about this script, but it came out of True Romance, which was also a rewrite of a script. In True Romance, Natural Born Killers is the screenplay that Clarence is writing while they’re on a road trip. That’s interesting. It’s the Facts of Life of – the spin-off series of the Tarantino universe.

**John:** I read Natural Born Killers from the USC script library. I remember reading it. This would’ve been 1992. It was the first script where I read the whole thing and then just went back and just started reading again from page 1. I was just blown away by it and how it upended the conventions of what I expected a movie to do, the fact that it moved into sitcoms and other things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the script so you can see what it was. It was just amazing and blew my mind, like, “Oh, this is a thing I could do on the page.” It was incredible. Then I ended up working for the producers of Natural Born Killers. I was their assistant and ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers. I had a full experience there.

**Pamela:** That’s cool. Did you go all the way back to this first one?

**John:** I tried to pull things that I thought were really interesting about the first one into the novelization. The novelization really does not resemble the final movie very much at all. Oprah gets killed in the novelization. A lot of very different stuff happens in it. No one should read the novelization. Just don’t. But I was happy with the draft I wrote. I was not happy with the draft that got published.

But weirdly, the novelization of Natural Born Killers became my comedy sample that helped me get my very first job writing a screenplay, which was How to Eat Fried Worms, because naturally, the person who wrote Natural Born Killers novelization should write a charming children’s film about a kid who eats worms.

**Pamela:** Take it from the writer of My Year of Dicks, you can also write Moana. What’s interesting about that first script is I remember it was smaller and I feel like it was mostly the trial of Mickey and Mallory Knox. That’s so different than what you get in Natural Born Killers and such an Oliver Stone kind of film. I think that that original indie film that Tarantino had made also, in that Reservoir Dogs world, would’ve thrived.

**John:** 100 percent. It would’ve totally blown up. It was really just terrific. The Oliver Stone movie I like. It’s just I really miss the movie that I couldn’t see, which was the 1990 script, because that would’ve been special in its own way. But you mentioned Moana earlier, and this was actually probably what got me thinking about seeing earlier drafts, because on an audio podcast, it’s hard for us to compare pages from two different versions of Natural Born Killers. But what we can do is listen to two different songs and compare them. I had not realized until this recent car trip where we started playing “I want” songs from movies, is that How Far I’ll Go, which I think is a fantastic “I want” song from Moana, was the second version of the “I want” song, and the original one was More. Let’s play a sample from More.

[More (Outtake) from Moana]

**John:** If I had not told you that this was from Moana, you probably would’ve figured it out. She’s talking about being on an island. She’s talking about wanting to get beyond this island. It is the same general broad strokes idea, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t really serve the same function as the finished song does.

**Pamela:** Yeah. Boy, that song takes me back. It’s like you just threw me in a time machine. Woo!

**John:** You were working on this movie back when this was the “I want” song?

**Pamela:** Yeah. I was like, “How did this all happen?” because before there was this song, I would write in the script fake lyrics or poems or ideas of where this song might be, before we had Lin and the music team involved. More came right towards the end of my time on Moana. I did get to work with Lin a little bit about what this song could be. We had gone back and forth in emails and in person, and more came out of that.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this. Did I ever come into the room with you when you were working on Moana? Because I came into a room for an afternoon on Moana, but you may not have been on the project at that point.

**Pamela:** I think you might’ve walked in as my door closed. It was a real all-hands moment. When you change the writer, it is easier than anything, but we are on contracts. I think I did not meet with you. I did sit with Michael Arndt. If you were around any time around Michael, that was around that time.

**John:** I literally came in one afternoon. My pencil never touched anything. I saw a bunch of artwork on the walls. They didn’t show me any clips. They just showed me all the art on the walls and talked me through the story. I’m like, “Oh boy. Oh boy. This isn’t gonna work.” I was wrong. It worked really, really well. It was only a year out from the movie. I’m like, “I don’t know what you guys are doing here.” They pulled it out. But in the process of figuring this stuff out, let’s compare. We just listened to More. Let’s listen to the “I want” song that’s actually in the movie. This is How Far I’ll Go.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** What we’ve done here is we’ve flipped the ideas around. In More, she’s complaining about how stuck she feels on this island, and wouldn’t it be great to be out there. In this version she’s saying, “My island is fantastic. I love everybody here, but I’m still pulled to go and leave.” There’s a tension there that’s very different. The brief of what we’re supposed to understand about her is so different.

**Pamela:** Gosh. Moana’s journey changed quite a bit also. At one point, her family was lost at sea, so she was gonna have to go and get them. The want had to change each time. You had at the base of a problem with Moana is her island is wonderful and her life is great. That wasn’t something that was really supposed to change. We had gone to these islands and interviewed young women of Moana’s age. They often said that they wanted to be pilots or missionaries or people who would leave their island but then have to come home, need to come home and want to come home. You couldn’t have a want that was… Also, I’ll just say the problem with wanting more is you get that at the end of Act 1, and then you did it. Here we are. Here is more. It’s interesting in How Far I’ll Go, you hear that, “Every trail I track.” There’s parts of More that do end up in How Far I’ll Go.

**John:** Let’s listen to that. Here’s a little clip of that.

[How Far I’ll Go from Moana]

**John:** That musical idea made it back through into the final song.

**Pamela:** I remember in the boards, it was like, “That part works. There she is. That’s the thing. That’s the feeling and the movement.” I’m not surprised that that got stuck and stayed throughout the next version.

**John:** Comparing these two things, it’s just a good reminder that, be it in our scripts or, in this case, the songs, you recognize that you went in with a specific idea, like, “This is how we get from this place to this place. This is who the character is.” Sometimes it’s only when you go to get through the draft, you realize that was not actually the story or that’s not actually the motivation, that’s not the best way to do this. You discover something by playing through it. All the outlines you want to make, all the thinking you can do is not as helpful as actually trying and seeing what works. That’s one of the huge advantages of animation is that you actually get to see does this work. You have these intermediate steps where you get to see a thing.

Broadway musicals are the same thing, where you have readings, you have workshops, you stage it, you’re changing it every night, and you get to see what actually works. Our live action features on television, we don’t get those opportunities. We go in, we shoot a thing once, we spend a long time in the editing room trying to make it work, but there’s no chance to make big changes to things.

**Pamela:** You’re also working on two different versions of the story at the same time, because you’d have a scene that then would just get lifted and be like, “Actually, I can turn that into a song and save you five minutes of screen time with a three-minute song.” As a writer, you’re like, “These are all just workable ideas. These are just thoughts.” The script is thoughts a lot of times, because you’re not recording what they’re gonna say for a very long time. That won’t be the same either, because as soon as you’re in front of them and they’re trying every line a few different ways and then you’re improvising – and it is a ball you’re playing with a lot of times, but it’s your ball, so it’s very hard.

**John:** That’s my ball.

**Pamela:** It’s like, “That’s my ball.” But it’s not, because you hit it over the net quite a few times. There’s a bunch of teams. I’ll keep metaphoring. I don’t care.

**John:** 100 percent. Weirdly, a lot of the animation I’ve done has been stop-motion animation, which is kind of the exception, where we get to shoot a thing once. You pre-record; you shoot a thing once. You can’t change a lot. It’s more like live action. I’ve found it frustrating to try to do traditional animation, because I would deliver a script, like, “Here’s a script. Go for it,” and then I will get these boards back, and it’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? That’s not the script at all. You’ve just chosen a completely different thing to animate that’s not actually useful for my script.” That’s John August struggling with how traditional animation is done.

**Pamela:** It’s not for the weak.

**John:** It’s not for the weak. I compared animation to Broadway musicals. I’m thinking back to when we were doing the Big Fish musical. We did our out-of-town tryout in Chicago. We had a really rough time, because we were trying to make big changes, but every night we had to put on a show that people could actually watch and make sense. We would introduce stuff in blocks and pieces so it could all still fit together every night, but we still were changing a lot. We were adding new songs. We were moving stuff. We were cutting stuff.

One of the things we realized is that we did not have a an “I want” song for Will that worked. The challenge I put for Andrew Lippa was like, “You need to write an ‘I want’ song for Will. Let’s talk about what’s in there. Let’s talk about what ideas there are.” I remember being in the basement of the Oriental Theater, and he played me the song which became Stranger, which was the big “I want” song for Will. It was perfect. It was wonderful. We couldn’t do anything with it. There was no way to stick it to the show. We couldn’t tell the company that this new song existed until we closed in Chicago, went back to New York, were in the workshop again, and we could introduce this new song, which transformed big parts of the show. I just remember tears out there, like, “Oh my god, we did it. We actually made the thing happen.” But there was no way to actually make that fix live until we can get back into a safe place to insert it. It was such a different experience than anything I would’ve had doing features.

**Pamela:** Even in Moana, I think it was weird to put that want song, because it can come too late, and now she’s complaining, or it’s too early, and you are like, “Why? What is she even talking about? I don’t agree.” You have to agree with their want. It has to be like, “Me too. That’s exactly what I want for you.” I had pulled up all the stuff around the time that More was written to remember the brain that we were in. We were very much like, “Okay. Look. We know there’s nine things the song has to do.” Poor Lin. There are nine things the song has to do.

At one point there’s this document that was sent to him that was like, “Here’s just possible titles. This is my favorite.” I was like, “This is amusing, as a writer.” I think it’s alchemy, people who are able to write songs if they hear music or even how they – I felt so embarrassed every time I knew someone was reading one of these fake song poems I was trying to do, like I’m in a coffee shop, on a stage.

We sent the following: “Here’s just some possible titles.” Why? But anyway. “Set Sail. I’ll Find My Way. I Know My Way. I Learn Too Well. Why Not Now? If Not Now, When? To Sail is Life. I Want to Sail. The Next Step. The Biggest Step. I Hear You. My Life’s at Sea. My Dream is to Sail. The Far Horizon. Beyond the Reef. The Endless Beyond. Beyond the Edge of Nowhere. There’s Somewhere There Past Nowhere. I Am Moana: Daughter of the Sea. My Life, My Ocean. A Different Voice. A Different Song. A Different Rhythm.” Just take that, Lin.

**John:** Some of those are terrible, but some of those actually totally make sense. You can completely imagine some of those things being that “I want” song. I saw this in France. When I saw it, it was Vaiana. She wasn’t Moana.

**Pamela:** You know why, yes?

**John:** I know why, because Moana was a porn star in Italy, I think, and then also a trademark in other places. In Europe, it’s just Vaiana. It always was Vaiana. My question is, I don’t remember, is this the second song? Because classically, the “I want” song in a musical is the second song. There’s a “welcome to the world” song that sets up the whole universe, and then this is the second song. Is it the second song in Moana?

**Pamela:** I don’t think it is, because you’ve got We Know the Way and Where You Are. Let’s see. Track listing, it’s number four, but that’s I think because of the opening sound.

**John:** That’s score stuff.

**Pamela:** Yeah, score stuff. It might be How Far I’ll Go is after Where You Are. That’s the thing. Where You Are, this is the “perfect world” song. That’s it. We Know the Way used to always open. It was the first song they wrote as a team. It was so great. We were like, “This is it.” It was considered, “This is how the movie has to open,” which then your third song would be a want song, which feels a little late.

**John:** It does feel a little bit late.

**Pamela:** She also used to sing a song before that of who Maui was. There was a whole Maui song too.

**John:** No, that’s not gonna work.

**Pamela:** It was a lot. It was a lot.

**John:** I could’ve come into the room and said, “It’s not gonna work.”

**Pamela:** It was an Act 1 break. She was singing like, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta find my way. I hope my dad doesn’t mind. I hope he’s not mad at me. I’ve gotta get this right. I think this is who I am, and I won’t know if I don’t go see it.” It was that want song. It was a little like, “I want to know if this feeling inside me is okay to have.”

**John:** Which is a good thought. That actually holds through into How Far I’ll Go, which is like, “I feel this tension, because I love everything here and yet I am completely drawn out there. I want to be a good daughter, and yet I feel like I can’t be.” Those are real things.

Let’s talk for a moment about the article by Mark Harris called How Bad Could It Get for Hollywood, really looking at the futures of YouTube and TikTok, coming down to the idea that young Americans aren’t thinking about movies and television in the same way, and so the industry that we’ve built to entertain people is in danger of being supplanted by a video that they’re watching that is not created by studios and, of course, union writers. What did you take from this?

**Pamela:** I feel like, oh, here’s this article again. I don’t know. Is that okay to say?

**John:** I would generally agree with you. You’re safe to predict doom and gloom every year.

**Pamela:** It’s TV and film. There’s another one going on, video games. It’s all the doom and gloom of all the things. It’s all supposed to be really bad. I feel like I’m always in whatever is the version – wherever they’re complaining that it’s over and it’s dead is where I’m employed. That seems to be-

**John:** Always good.

**Pamela:** Then they’re like, “You’re not getting employed. Over here, this is where the people are really employed.” I don’t really read these, because I don’t take them into… My husband is someone who will be like, “Your job’s [unintelligible 00:52:36].” Even this article that you’ve linked I kind of read with one eye squinting, because I don’t want it to get in my heart or my head.

**John:** There’s always an existential threat, which is basically that people are gonna stop watching the stuff that we’re making, and because people have a certain number of hours in the day, they’re gonna spend those hours doing things that are not movies or television.

The prediction that the actual movies will fail and that no one will go to the movie theaters anymore – is attendance down? Sure. But there’s still something kind of great about being in a public space with people all watching the same things. Even my teenage daughter does like doing that at times. She loves TikTok. She loves YouTube. But there’s something great about the event of everyone staring at the same screen, watching a thing.

There’s something appealing about television events that get everyone watching the same thing and talking about the same thing. There’s reasons why that works and will probably continue to work. And yet I think we do need to be mindful that there’s new threats pulling at people’s attention. And that attention could make it harder for some of the economics of our business to work.

**Pamela:** Yeah. You’ve really said it. We can all like a TikTok, but we can’t all go watch a TikTok and talk about it together and go on a date to TikTok. There’s still communal events. They’re still bringing us together. And if they’re the kinds of things that people are talking about, you’ve gotta go do the thing, to see the thing to be able to talk about it too.

That being said, I was at a friend’s house recently where they just had on the television two things from YouTube. One was a screensaver that they just had on. Every once in a while the neon sign in the image would blink, and they’d all be like, “Yay.” They’d also watch marble runs where it’s elaborate. I just said, “Why do we work so hard?” Someone in that house was also in the industry. No, they both are. I was like, “Why do we work so hard? You guys just sit here and watch marble runs.” They were like, “Look at it go. Yay.”

**John:** That’s so nice.

**Pamela:** Yay. There’s that element to what we make too, of can you shut off your head and have fun. I think that’s what the Eras Tour is proving, like, “Oh my gosh. We just want Barbie. Let’s go have fun.” They certainly tried to make Oppenheimer seem like a rollicking good time. “Let’s go out and have fun.” And it worked, because people were ready to do that.

**John:** We have some listener questions here that are perfect for Pamela Ribon, our guest today. Drew, start us off.

**Drew:** Lark in Virginia writes, “Recently I’ve been doing some rewrites for a series pilot, and as I’ve been going back, I’ve been considering how this show may be if it was animation instead of live action. Just how different is writing animation compared to live action? Do you still follow the formula in terms of writing on the page? How have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike? I feel like there are more eyes on both the WGA in both a good way and a bad way and more awareness towards TAG in general.”

**John:** We’ve talked a lot about, for writing animation, even in this episode, if you actually look at a script for an animated series and a live action series, they’re not different. Animated half-hours, like a Simpsons, is double spaced in ways, but otherwise it’s the same kind of formatting all throughout.

**Pamela:** I didn’t even think that this was a format question, because the formulas – you’re writing scripts for telling stories. They’re the same. Your budget is different, maybe. Maybe. They’re pretty expensive too. The character talking might be a cat, so that’s different. But no, you don’t write it differently. You ask yourself, does it need to be animated? That’s what’s different mostly.

**John:** There’s an animated series that I may be doing here soon. You’re figuring out how you’re going to do it, because when you say animation, there’s 15 different things and ways you could be doing an animated series. They have different costs and different requirements. But the actual script, the stuff that you’re writing, that’s not gonna change that much. That feels the same between live action and animation.

Rarely do you see a script that was written for live action that you can just immediately take and then just turn into animation. You’re gonna make some different choices just based on how audiences see things, how stuff fits together, how transitions work. You tend to write knowing something’s gonna be animated or non-animated. If you’re a person who can write live action, you’re a person who can write animation, and vice versa.

The differences and challenges is that writing something how you guys were writing Moana was a much more iterative process than what a writer would normally encounter. That’s something you have to deal with, and being good with – you said like, here’s a bundle of ideas that you know are gonna change. That’s a very different experience.

**Pamela:** I would say it still happens in live action too. When it is, you’re still like, “Iterative.” That’s just the word that I hear a lot now. But yes, in animation, it is kind of the point of it, and particularly if you’re coming around during development, before the thing is in actual production, which then is still in reels. You’re never really shooting a thing. You’re never shooting it. That’s it, John.

**John:** That’s the thing is you’re never shooting and you’re never really in post. It’s all one blurry thing. There’s development, which there can still be an artist in that time, but it’s before you have this expectation of like, we’re really making this thing. But even when they say they’re really making the thing, they may not be making the thing. Nimona, it sounds like they were kind of making the thing, and then they decided they weren’t making the thing, and then, luckily, someone else said, “Sure, we’ll make the thing.”

**Pamela:** I think of scenes that we made and finished in Ralph Breaks the Internet that were done in animation for the most part and then got cut. That’s that. Then you’re like, “Post-credit sequence.”

**John:** Yay.

**Pamela:** “Yay. We’ll still use it.” It’s never being shot.

**John:** We had Jennifer Lee on to talk about Frozen. They were way down the road in a lot of stuff, and they made giant changes. There are sequences that they couldn’t go back through and completely redo, that are just – they’re not quite the same movie, and yet you roll with it because you roll with it. I think it was the abominable snowman sequence. It’s like, it’s not kind of the same movie, those aren’t kind of the same characters, and yet it works, because it needs to work. They did not have the time to go back through and completely change that the way they would want to change that. You’re always making those choices. In that way, it feels more like traditional film and TV, where you shot a thing, and you gotta make it work in the editing room.

**Pamela:** Sometimes you’re just so close that you really are the only one who’s noticing. In its whole, people are like, “Yay.” But this question of how have things changed with writing for animation now in the after-days of the strike – nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Here’s what I would say is different. One of the best things about the strike for me were the days that I was at, generally, Warner Bros and would see a zillion TAG, The Animation Guild, folks out there on the picket line with us. I know you’ve pushed hard for improving conditions for writers working under TAG contracts. I think there was a sense of WGA versus TAG. That’s a ridiculous dichotomy. Really, the case is you want things to be WGA and TAG, because TAG is not just folks who are writing animation, but it’s all the other folks who are working in animation. It’s storyboard artists and other crucial people in animation. We would love to see movies and TV shows that have WGA writers who have the full protections and credits and residuals for the writing that they’re doing, and those projects have full TAG union members getting everything else done. We want union animation.

**Pamela:** Yes, we’re union parity. Putting it under TAG doesn’t mean I don’t have the same kind of protections and residuals that I would’ve had if you had made it WGA. Since TAG can’t free their writers, then that was what needs to happen within TAG. But not just writers. There are many, many members of TAG who are not being treated appropriately, which is why TAG might go on strike.

It is nice that it is less thinking that, “I thought everybody was WGA,” or, “I had no idea that most of you were being forced to work without a union at all, depending on the studio.” And I think just also an awareness of what a union does. But I think TAG still has a long way to go for people to understand and respect its union members.

**John:** Obviously, those negotiations are starting right now. TAG is part of larger IATSE, but TAG also has its own contracts it negotiates. It’s complicated. But we need to be mindful of it and just never pretend that writing animation is lesser than writing live action.

**Pamela:** That’s right. The things we were on strike for in the WGA are what does happen in TAG now.

**John:** Exactly.

**Pamela:** AI is already in TAG. It’s happening there. I’ve seen it. A lot of these protections that we were on strike about are because we know it can happen, because it does happen in animation.

**John:** Minimum staff size, for an example, we would talk to TAG animation writers, showrunners who basically could not hire any writing staff, and so were basically having to do everything themselves. That’s a danger you want to avoid in live action so that you don’t have showrunners just melting down because they don’t have the writing support they need.

**Pamela:** As a for instance.

**John:** As a for instance. As one of many for instances. Let’s do our One Cool Things. I’m so excited to see what you have for your One Cool Thing.

**Pamela:** I know you lived in Paris for some time. As an adult, you can do things that you didn’t get to do in high school, like learn French. Once I started going to the Annecy Animation Festival in France, I was like, “I want to keep coming back here, but I want to know more French every time.”

There’s this place called Coucou. Coucou French classes are based in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of writers live. Coucou has two locations in LA, I think Silver Lake and their new one is in Culver City. But they’re also online. This is a way to learn French that has a lot of… For me I’ve always done it online, although there’s one down the street. We get together. We are conversing. We are learning. They have all different fun ways to practice your French. They send out newsletters for, “Here are some French rom-coms to watch.” They have little classes in poetry, book reading, flower arrangement. It is what if learning another language was a fun community as opposed to something you did alone and got confused about.

**John:** Going beyond just talking to Duolingo every day and making that little green owl happy.

**Pamela:** See, because Duolingo is a slot machine. Duolingo is the Vegas of language learning. I think it’s pretty cool to jam it in there. The Pimsleur method has its own way. But those are lonely tasks. I invite you to the Coucou community. There’s private lessons. There’s group classes. There’s workshops and events. You can walk down to your little French location and hang out and have a baguette. It’s fun.

**John:** That’s awesome. That’s fun. My One Cool Thing is a video I saw this past week by David Friedman. He was looking at the Fox sitcom ‘Til Death, which I remember the title, but I never saw a single frame of that sitcom. The video talks through the fact that ‘Til Death made it to four seasons, not because anybody was watching it, but because Sony, who was making the show, made a deal with Fox to say, “We’ll give it to you for free.” They just wanted to hit that 100 episodes so they could hit syndication.

In that fourth season, they had a new showrunner. Because no one was watching, they could just make some really weird, wild swings. Characters became aware that they were on a sitcom. They just did some things you shouldn’t be able to do in a sitcom, that were kind of fun and interesting. I don’t need to go back and watch the sitcom, but I do enjoy Friedman’s exploration of how strange this sitcom got, because it was just allowed to get so strange.

The other thing I thought was interesting was a blog post Friedman did about how he constructed it, because this was 80 hours of video to watch. He didn’t want to watch the whole sitcom. He built a script that went through and figured out which cast members were in which things, because they kept changing out cast members, and basically built an Excel spreadsheet that showed where the changes were, so that he could just look at those moments and not have to watch the whole thing, which was just very smart and felt very much like how I would do it. I enjoyed the video and his explanation behind the scenes.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Vincent DeVito. 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 to this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find 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. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one Pamela and I are about to talk through on the Oscars and attending the Oscars and how fun the Oscars are. But that couldn’t be as much fun as having Pamela on again as a co-host here. An absolute delight getting to chat with you about these things.

**Pamela:** So much fun. I can’t wait to come back again. I hope you invite me. Thank you.

**John:** We will. Also, remind us where we can find you, because you have your other podcast as well. Talk through, how do we find you?

**Pamela:** My other podcast, like this is one of mine – I’ll take it. I cohost a podcast called Listen to Sassy, where we go through every issue of the beloved ’90s magazine, that you can find all about at Listen to Sassy – I was like, “Is it dot-com or dot-net? Hold on.” It’s dot-com. Of course it is. Listentosassy.com. I don’t go to Twitter.

**John:** I stopped Twitter too.

**Pamela:** You can find me on Instagram @pamelaribon. Listen to Sassy is a great way to hear more about what it’s like from the years when you talked like this.

**John:** Perfect.

**Pamela:** You know what else though? If you do want to watch My Year of Dicks, it’s at myyearofdicks.com.

**John:** I love it. Everyone should watch it. It’s so, so good. People will tell me, “Oh, Pamela Ribon was on the show, and I finally watched My Year of Dicks. It was really good.” I’m like, “Yes, I told you that last summer.”

**Pamela:** You guys were very early supporters. I thank you. I don’t know that we would – segue – be getting to the Oscars without you, so thank you so much.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Oscars. You were just at the Oscars. This is your second time at the Oscars, because you were nominated for My Year of Dicks. This time I saw you on Instagram in the back of other people’s photos. I’ve been to the Oscars a couple times, but only in the balcony stuff, because I’ve never had a thing nominated. Talk to us about your Oscars experience either of these two years.

**Pamela:** Who’s counting? This is the fourth film I’ve worked on that’s been nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Pamela:** But only the second time I had tickets. That’s how it goes. Last year when we were nominees, we were seated where you go. It’s kind of the mezzanine. You’re not all the way down there. Through a series of surprise events, I ended up way down there in the orchestra. Listen. I don’t think it’ll ever be more fun, unless I ever win an Oscar, to go to the Oscars. It was a most unexpected place to find myself. We could talk about the two different versions.

**John:** I want the celebrity-filled glamour version. This most recent version, paint the scene. Who was around you? You were very close to Charlize Theron and a bunch of other folks.

**Pamela:** Yes. I assumed it was like Forrest Gump really. “What’s Pam doing there?” In the past, usually my friends will go, “Are you at the Oscars?” and I’ll have to say, “That is Patricia Arquette.” This year it really threw my friends off, because they were like, “I knew you were going, but I knew you weren’t supposed to be seen, so what are you doing behind Charlize Theron?”

I asked an usher, “Where are these seats?” They said, “They’re down there.” I thought, “That’s a mistake. I’ll keep walking and figure out what that means,” because they said O means orchestra. I was like, “Okay. These letters don’t make any sense, because this says F.” Truly, someone was like, “The stage is A, and you’re at F,” slowly explained to me, which is what I needed, because at this point my eyes were exploding, because I’m like, “That’s Slash. Why is Slash here?” That’s the first thing I saw was a hat.

**John:** Are you at the right awards show? Is this the Grammys?

**Pamela:** I was like, “That’s Nicholas Cage.” Nothing made sense for a second, because, again, once you see Slash’s hat, you stop making sense. Then I saw Eugene Lee Yang, and their outfit was this Billy Porter-esque red suit-gown. I was like, “Oh, that’s the Nimona group.” Then they pointed me that way. Then I sat next to Lloyd, who’s another one of the credited writers.

And then Riz, who was going to sit next to me, had not been seated yet, so I didn’t know it was gonna be him. But right before I left the house, I thought, “Riz Ahmed did us a real service by making announcing My Year of Dicks a viral event,” and so I had a little thank you dick for him, because I’m classy. I have these little crystal dicks – Malala also has one – that I give out when you come near My Year of Dicks and help it out in some way. I thought, “Whatever, I’ve kept this one for Riz. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see him after the after-party or something.” Then he’s sitting next to me.

The first thing I do, because I don’t know, I’m like, “They’re certainly gonna kick me out of this seat,” because I turned to Lloyd, I’m like, “The writers don’t get to sit here. Someone’s made a mistake. I don’t know what’s going on. Thank you, Netflix, to the Academy. But regardless, we’re not gonna mess this up.” That’s all I kept saying, “We’re not gonna mess this up,” because that is Steven Spielberg sitting next to me, and I’m in front of the Poor Things team. And I don’t even know yet that Christopher Nolan is to my left. I’m too busy. Lloyd is doing the same thing. He’s like, “Pam, I see Jennifer Lawrence.” It’s so wild. I’m like, “That is Bradley Cooper.” It went Downey, Blunt, Cillian, Sir Ben Kingsley, Jon Batiste, Pam, like that makes any sense.

**John:** Do you have an explanation now of what happened?

**Pamela:** These are the seats. These are the seats that I was told to sit in. I was like, “Okay.” I would give out gum at breaks and then be like, “We’re getting rid of the gum when the commercials are over, because I am not gonna be gum girl.” I could really only see a number of memes happening, of me opening my mouth and just like, “Yeah, y’all,” just gums.

I will say I kept it together for the most part, but there was a moment when they were putting down all the lights in the aisle. They were just putting down a bunch of lights in the aisle. And I went, “The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming. The Kens are coming.” I turned to an usher. I went, “Right? I didn’t miss it?” How would I have missed it? Pam, you’ve been here the whole time. “The Kens are coming?” The guy goes, “The Kens are coming.” I was like, “Ah! It’s happening! [Unintelligible 01:13:01] Kens!” Which was such a chaotic moment that I didn’t really get to see his Ken piece, because they lift him in the air. We were under the show. I didn’t know the screen was telling people to grab flashlights and sing. I saw none of that. But it was still glorious. I highly recommend fifth row seats to the Oscars.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Pamela:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** I’ve been twice, I guess. The Oscars are fun in person. It’s different than watching them at home, because, obviously, during the commercial breaks, stuff is happening. I don’t know if during your awards they deliberately did stuff, or was it just everybody running for the bathrooms and the seat fillers coming in. But it’s fun when you’re – the off-camera moments are really delightful too.

**Pamela:** There was a lot of people getting up and walking around. I will say the year before when we were up in the mezzanine, which, wonderful seats, but when you’re a nominee for a category that has to move you, we were waiting for our category and then we didn’t know exactly when it was gonna be. Then they move you down to the seats that are for your category. There’s a camera on you that isn’t gonna be used or needed. Then you don’t win, and then the Oscars are over, really. That’s it. You’ve worked so hard, and then that moment happens, and you can go out to the lobby and have a drink and nurse your wounds. That is how I did it last year.

**John:** In this situation, Nimona could’ve won. Would you have gone up on stage if Nimona had won?

**Pamela:** We had been told by the team, “Hey, man, if we win, you guys, please, everybody come up,” which I’m pretty sure we would’ve. We would’ve been so excited. And we were a jumpable distance to the stage. But traditionally, no. Animation, they’re just like, “We can move on with this.”

It was the third category this year, so we also pretty early on were like, “That’s it. We just get to sit here and enjoy the show.” I don’t know if I had been back there with the rest of the team or even any – there were three different groups of Nimona all around in the Oscars. Probably we would’ve gone to find each other.

But we were so close that even Lloyd was like, “I think I’ll go get a drink,” and I was like, “Lloyd, look, if you leave, there’s a seat filler. Who knows what you’re gonna miss? I bet it’s Billie Eilish,” which it would’ve been. I said, “We’re just gonna sit here and be grateful for the shortest Oscars experience we’ll ever have.” It was over in a blink.

I thought watching it on my couch in my pajamas with my friends was fun. Going as a nominee but then not winning was its own kind of fun. This was fantastic. This was joyous. Miyazaki won. What are you gonna do? It wasn’t even the kind of thing where the winner is like, “Come on, that hack.”

**John:** You didn’t go into this with the expectation like, “Oh, we’re gonna beat Spider-Man and Miyazaki.”

**Pamela:** That’s pretty tough. The miracle of it existing – the studio was shut down. The miracle of it getting a nomination, which that requires your peers in the animation community to recognize the film and nominate it. There were a lot of wonderful films that year that didn’t make that final five. To win? How do you get all of the other branches to know about a movie on Netflix that didn’t have a theatrical release when you’re up against Spider-Verse and then Miyazaki? All of the short-list nominees really were contenders.

I saw Robert DeNiro. He did not have a good time at those Oscars. You could probably go and get jaded from it all, but I don’t know, for me – I love watching people win things in general, and particularly if they are young females. It’s just my favorite thing to watch is a young woman win something.

**John:** The editor of Oppenheimer, loved her.

**Pamela:** Absolutely. The girl with the short film. Any young woman clutching something she won is my favorite thing. The Oscars this year, it was a pretty – then I’m like, no, not every film was a happy, happy film, obviously, but there was an atmosphere down there of, “The show’s about to begin, and I think it’s gonna be a good time.”

**John:** It was a good time. It was a good show.

**Pamela:** Nicholas Cage was right in front of me. I couldn’t stop. Maybe you don’t know this. Why would you? When I was a little girl, my imaginary friends were all celebrities.

**John:** Wow.

**Pamela:** I moved a lot. You’d make a friend, and then you’d lose touch with her. But these celebrities always moved with me, time to time. There have been a couple of times in life when I’ve worked with someone who was my imaginary friend when I was a kid. I don’t tell all of them that, but I do wait, if there is a moment, and I let them know, because why not? But this was what it looked like when I was a little kid going to bed, and I had all my imaginary friends hanging out with me before bedtime. This is the closest to that experience.

**John:** Pam, you didn’t win an Oscar, but you’ve won the Oscars. You probably had the most fun of anyone there, and I love that.

**Pamela:** I will say then, here’s this Charlize moment. She wasn’t sitting in front of me. Jon Batiste was sitting in front of me. Then he went to go do his song, and then some seat fillers were sitting in front after that. Then at one point this beautiful woman is walking toward me. I’ve seen Charlize Theron more than once in person. Never I’ve spoken to her. But every time the same thing happens in my head, which is, “Does she live in my neighborhood? Does she have kids at my school?”

**John:** Totally.

**Pamela:** I don’t know why. Then she sat down. Lloyd’s like, “That’s Charlize Theron.” I was like, “That’s a seat filler. We know this.” He goes, “You can’t see what I can see. 100 percent, Charlize Theron is sitting directly in front of you.”

Then they started passing out these little tequila bottles, and they said, “There’s gonna be a toast.” That’s all we knew. You get used to these cameras moving around to position themselves in front of nominees or Steven Spielberg for the bit. The cameras were whipping around the front. The bit began with Jimmy, of like, “This is my wife, Charlize Theron.” As soon as he said, “My wife, Charlize Theron,” Lloyd elbows me, goes, “We’re definitely about to be on TV.” But I already had figured this out. I was just like, “You guys, act the part.” The actor in me went, “And we’re on.” Then the camera came up for her reaction shot. I was like, “You’re not gonna mess this up.” I’m just like, “My role is audience lady behind Charlize.”

**John:** Absolutely. You’re gonna be present but not necessarily in focus.

**Pamela:** You can totally see it in the clip. You can see me go, “And we’re live.” I wasn’t gonna mess it up. I wasn’t gonna be gum girl. I wasn’t gonna get kicked out of those seats. It was an honor and a privilege to be in a scene at the Academy Awards. Please ask me back. Riz and I were like, “I think every year.” We’re like, “Every year.”

**John:** Every year.

**Pamela:** He’s like, “Next year, what if we’re two rows up?” I said, “Maybe we have to make something to do that.” I said, “But I’m fine with that, as long as two years from now we’re on stage announcing best animated short film.”

**John:** Love it.

**Pamela:** These are the goals.

**John:** Pam, congratulations again. Yay. Thank you for sharing your Oscar experience.

**Pamela:** Thanks. I can’t wait to hear your next one.

**John:** Yay.

Links:

* [Pamela Ribon](https://pamie.com/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/pamelaribon/)
* [Listen to Sassy](https://listentosassy.com/)
* [My Year of Dicks](https://myyearofdicks.com/)
* [Nimona](https://www.netflix.com/title/81444554) on Netflix
* [Hire Survivors Hollywood](https://hiresurvivorshollywood.org/)
* [Dune: Part Two Clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZpGLqLoBJA)
* [‘Fundie Baby Voice’ Seems To Be Everywhere Now. Here’s What You Should Know](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fundie-baby-voice_l_65eb6b2fe4b05ec1ccd9e9b9) by Caroline Bologna for Huffpost
* [In a World – Smoothie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvficd_IxBc)
* [Natural Born Killers 1990 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/Natural_Born_Killers.PDF)
* [Natural Born Killers 1993 Draft](https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/natural-born-killers_shoot.html)
* [Lin-Manuel Miranda on ‘I Want’ Songs, Going Method for ‘Moana’ and Fearing David Bowie](https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/lin-manuel-miranda/)
* [More (Outtake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGtjl5YbPdQ) from Moana
* [How Far I’ll Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPAbx5kgCJo) from Moana
* [How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/oscars-hollywood-extinction-event.html) by Mark Harris for NYT
* [This Sitcom Got WEIRD When Nobody Watched It](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkGsk6RBSgg) by David Friedman
* [Researching An Old Sitcom With AI](https://ironicsans.beehiiv.com/p/researching-old-sitcom-ai) by David Friedman
* [Coucou French classes](https://coucoufrenchclasses.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Vincent DeVito ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont, and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/636standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/mystery-and-suspense).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

**John:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Excellent. Wonderful. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. 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. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/632standardV2.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/storytelling-and-the-strike).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 614 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This week, the WGA ratified a new contract with the studios, marking the conclusion of the 148-day strike, but that’s not the end of the story, nor does it really give a sense of how this all began. Today on the show, I will welcome the co-chair and chief orator of the WGA Negotiating Committee, Chris Keyser, to help us understand the storytelling behind the strike. Chris Keyser, welcome back to Scriptnotes.

**Chris Keyser:** It’s good to see you again, John. It’s been a couple of days since I was locked in a room with you for five months.

**John:** We were locked in rooms for a very, very long time. I know we are all kind of sick of talking about negotiations, but I promise this one is going to be different, because it’s going to be crafty. It’s going to be much more like… Greta Gerwig was sitting in your seat a few years back, and we were talking through Little Women. We were going through pages of the script, like, “Why did you make this choice? Why this word, not that word?” We’re going to do the same with you here, because we’re going to look at three of your speeches as a framework for talking about the overall narrative and storytelling that was so crucial for this whole campaign, for figuring this out.

**Chris:** A speech and two sequels.

**John:** A speech and two sequels, yes. You became not notorious but beloved, I’ll say, for long speeches. People loved your long speeches. We’ll talk through those speeches.

**Chris:** Is “long” the operative word in all that?

**John:** No. Inspiring, meaningful, scene-setting speeches. I think actually there’s a lot to learn here just in terms of how we tell stories, because in these speeches, we see that you had to establish a premise, identify themes and characters, structure a timeline, and it weirdly is a lot like what we do in our day jobs. One of the members of the Negotiating Committee said it was like being in the best writers’ room that just went on for forever.

**Chris:** It’s true. It’s true. Although we don’t start by saying it’s a story, in the end we have to tell a story to the members, and they have to believe the story and want to be a part of it.

**John:** Yes, and so we have to tell a story that feels true to them, and we have to be honest and truthful with them at every moment. Yet we’re still always trying to make sure that we’re framing it in ways that they can relate to, that they can identify with.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** We’re going to talk about all that, and in a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about debate, because you were president of the Harvard University Debate Council.

**Chris:** You remember.

**John:** I remember way back then. You’ve stayed active in debate. I just don’t know debate at all. You’ve coached debate.

**Chris:** I have. We can talk about it, yes. I’m happy to talk about that.

**John:** Also, we’ve got a clip of you as a 23-year-old.

**Chris:** I’m less happy about that.

**John:** It’s amazing. You’re killing it on the debate stage. It’s strange to see, because it’s both you sound like a 23-year-old and you sound exactly like Chris Keyser, which is a great combination. You’re going to want to be a Premium Member to hear that Bonus Segment.

Last time you were here, Chris Keyser, I think we were sitting in this room, and we were talking through the agency campaign, which was a whole thing and a challenge. Before we got into what happened in this campaign, this negotiation, could you set the table a little bit for where we were at around 2019, where the Guild was at, what we saw as the big, broad issues going into 2020 and then into 2023?

**Chris:** Sure. I might even go further back than that-

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** … if that’s okay. I remember.

**John:** Please.

**Chris:** David Goodman will remember this too, because I bring it up a lot, that he and I had a breakfast while I was president of the Guild at some point. I don’t even know what year it was. I finished my term in 2015. He said to me, “Nothing’s going to happen unless you come up with an agenda for how we’re going to move things forward.” I don’t mean it was just mine alone. But that began a conversation, and he was part of it, and obviously a central part of it, and others were too, and so was David Young and everyone on staff at the Guild.

We began to identify some issues that we were seeing on the horizon that we need to deal with over the next decade or so. They included, and you know because you were a part of this, one, dealing with how we’re paid, the idea that drafts, which were the old measure of payment, the unit of pay, were no longer sufficient either for screenwriters or for television writers, whose work was getting longer and longer. So we talked about that. We talked about our relationship with our agents and the extent to which our agents were representing us as true fiduciaries. We talked a lot about the three guilds and the need for a kind of unified bargaining strategy. Those were the among the highlights of that. The conversation began in earnest. A good first step in all of that was probably 2017 when we took on span, in addition to trying to save our health care plan.

**John:** Span, for folks who are new to this, is the idea that a certain amount of pay in television gives you a certain number of weeks of that writer’s time, but you can’t drag people out forever on that.

**Chris:** Exactly, exactly. Essentially, when you sign a contract, you need to know what the term of the contract is. It doesn’t mean very much to say, “Look how much I’m paid. I just didn’t realize it was for the next 25 years.” That was all part of a conversation that we’d been having also, because we’d talked about free rewrites for screenwriters. The Committee on the Professional Status of Writers had made the rounds amongst all the studios for years and years and years talking about all of that. It was part of the same question, which is you get you a payment, you think it’s for a period of time, and then you end up working some multiple of that, and it’s no longer a viable career. It began there in 2017.

2017 was also important, I think, because it was the beginning of us testing the relationship between leadership and the membership. Maybe testing is the wrong word, but solidifying it, beginning to use our power again. Broadly speaking – and I’m not the best expert at this, other people will do better – the strike of 2007 and 2008 came after nearly two decades of Guild fear of using its own power after the strike of 1988.

Patrick and John Bauman and all of those and David Young, who reestablished the Guild as a kind of fighting force, took on the issue of jurisdiction of the internet, at some cost, because the Guild was not unified at that point. They had to build it from scratch. That strike obviously succeeded in achieving its principal goal but also revealed some of those ongoing divisions in the Guild. In 2017 we took a strike authorization vote. It was the first time the membership had voted not to strike but to give the Negotiating Committee the power to call a strike if needed to at contract deadline.

That was an important process. We didn’t end up going on strike, but it tested the waters in some sense. That led us to begin to talk about the agency campaign. It’s the way in which the agents and minimums in the MBA are, as David Young has said, just two sides of the same coin, how we get paid. The agency campaign was maybe the most important thing the Guild has done.

**John:** It was one of the strangest things the Guild has done, because it’s not going up against our traditional adversary. It’s not going up against the studios the way you do every three years. This was attempting to forge a new relationship with the agencies, who are in theory our allies, but oftentimes were working at cross-purposes to us.

**Chris:** That’s right. That was not an easy thing to do. It was different from a strike, because writers did not lose work in the course of doing it, but it went on for a very long time, and it tested the Guild’s resolve. The Guild held together through all of that, thanks in large part to everybody who was on that Negotiating Committee. David Goodman was remarkable in that struggle.

We ended up obviously resetting the relationship between writers and their agents and limiting the extent to which they could function not as our fiduciaries but as independent parties to our contracts, who would be paid directly by the studios or, alternatively, establish their own studios. They were both our employers and our representatives at the same time.

**John:** But that campaign also, I think, established a different connection between writers and the Guild, and the sense that the writers should’ve felt like they were in charge of the Guild and they could act together as part of the Guild to make changes that they wanted to see happen.

Going into that, we had the captain system, which we built up out of the remnants of 2007, 2008. But it was the first time really in practice we had to see people following leadership but also leading and self-organizing to do things. I remember the events like Latinx writers nights to talk about staffing and how to figure out new, alternative systems for that. Just the entrepreneurial nature of our membership was so apparent that they actually could take on that role and weren’t afraid.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. The other thing that the agency campaign proved was precisely how democratic the Writers Guild was. Without going back and reliving that or identifying who was on what side of the conversation, there were some number of people, showrunners and others, who wish we hadn’t done what we were doing during the agency campaign and made that relatively clear.

Probably if that had happened two decades earlier, that might have fundamentally divided the Guild and undermined the campaign itself. But what became clear during the agency campaign is that every individual member of the Guild has one vote in the decision about what the Guild does. That became critically important. I don’t want to suggest that we had a major fracture. It was overwhelmingly supported. But there were meaningful members of the Guild, people who had-

**John:** Famously, we had people running for office during the course of the agency campaign, who were down on the agency campaign.

**Chris:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so that we could have tension within the Guild and still be resilient and still get through it was crucial.

**Chris:** Yeah. Not to say it’s like 1864, but David Goodman, like Abraham Lincoln before him, was forced to run for office in the middle of a war.

**John:** Now, actually in the middle of the agency campaign, we had 2020, which was supposed to be a negotiation. Streaming was going to be one of the central issues on that. I was on the Negotiating Committee for that. This felt like the time where we’re going to actually really deal with streaming. We went in there with a plan. We had member meetings. Then we had a pandemic, and all the leverage we possibly would have just disappeared, because we couldn’t mount a strike threat in the middle of the pandemic. It was so strange. Everything was strange about 2020. But to go into this and have the air just go out of the balloon was really frustrating.

**Chris:** Yeah. It’s weird how history is defined by climate and disease so often. The pandemic marginally helped the agency campaign and undermined the MBA negotiations. I don’t want to say it exactly that way. Actually, the committee did a very good job. Not only did we use our leverage the way we could at that point, but we won some things we didn’t think we were going to win. You were centrally part of paid family leave, which was a meaningful achievement. A huge, meaningful achievement. And to do that in the middle of a period when no one was in a position to exercise the leverage we normally do was pretty remarkable.

But we had known, I would say we knew in 2017, looking forward, that there were issues that we hadn’t dealt or were just beginning to see on the horizon that at some point would come to a head. And the question was, would 2020 be the moment in which that happened, when the Guild suddenly had to deal with the changes that were being brought about by the shift to the streaming model. Not being able to do it in 2020 delayed for an additional three years the ability to face all of that stuff. That’s really difficult in an MBA perspective, because one of the things that we talk about a lot with the members is the AMPTP tends to see things as solidified inside the contract.

If you wait too long to make a change, they say, “We have a mature contract on that provision, and you’ve been okay with it for a number of cycles. We’re not really inclined to do anything about that.” That’s what we faced in 2023, a long list of things, and longer than I think we knew in 2020, or at least problems that had become exacerbated in the intervening three years that had to be addressed.

**John:** Let’s talk about that list-making, because the process for figuring out what we’re going to negotiate in this MBA, obviously there were conversations ahead of time, but it started with a member survey. We surveyed the entire membership to see where they’re at, what are the things they’re facing. There’s quantity of information on that, but there’s also just a lot of anecdotal data and a lot of just people’s stories. It became clear, I think from that, that there was a big list of things.

I guess the question I want to get to is, how early on did you have a sense this was going to be a kitchen sink negotiation, where it felt like there was a whole bunch of stuff that all had to be addressed in this one thing, where there wasn’t a thing we could point to that’s like, let’s save the health plan, let’s save pensions, let’s deal with that. When was it clear to you that like, oh crap, it’s a big list here?

**Chris:** I think it was pretty early. I don’t know for you, but we were paying enough attention in the three years intervening, although I didn’t have any sense that I was going to be playing the role I had, because I had been tracking it somewhat and was in touch with Guild leadership and all the way through. I knew that list was getting longer and complicated.

I’ll tell you one thing that relates to this. In 2017, the staff of the Guild, because they had also done research then – there were surveys done then – came to a meeting with the co-chairs of the Negotiating Committee and said, “Here’s what we think should be on the table in 2017.” I remember having a pretty vigorous conversation, where there was a lot of push back from me and Billy and Chip, Billy Ray and Chip Johannessen, and said, “That’s too much.” I don’t know what that story is. It might actually be worth… I’m sorry for-

**John:** Oh, go for it.

**Chris:** … being parenthetical about this. It’s important to know that when we talk about this as a story, it’s more documentary than a piece of fiction. I know it’s not fiction. The story doesn’t come first. The facts on the ground come first. You can’t make that stuff up. What the Guild fights for is what the membership says it needs. I don’t want to make it feel as if story matters more than the reality of being a writer.

It’s also true, as you suggested, that it’s very difficult to have a negotiation where there are many, many things on the table, both because that’s a more difficult, complex story to tell, but also because it’s more difficult to defend a negotiation itself, where the tendency is for the other side to say, “What do I need to give you before you get so close to that point at which the membership is no longer willing to fight for everything that you have to start dropping stuff?” We can talk about that more. But it’s a risky way of going into a negotiation. Maybe risky is not the way to put it. Ellen would tell me that’s the wrong word. But I see it that way as a non-pro.

In 2017 we said, “We have to begin to couch this in a way that we cover as much as we possibly can, we don’t ignore any of the central issues, but that people understand fundamentally what we’re fighting for.” This was, by the way, before the health care stuff came up in 2017, for those who don’t remember, because that was a rollback on the table.

**John:** That’s right. That’s right.

**Chris:** They gave us the story that we didn’t have. Yes, I think it was pretty clear well before this negotiation that there was no way to boil this down to one or two things.

**John:** Let’s talk about the first framing of all this. The first time I heard it framed was in what you call the Member Rap, which was the presentation that you give to membership, saying this is what this is going to be about. I know you had to pitch it. You gave a version to the board. You read it to the Negotiating Committee. We all had notes. I feel so bad for how many notes you got, both in the room and emailed afterwards.

**Chris:** That was the largest writers’ room I’ve ever been in. Everyone felt free to.

**John:** Of course. You’re always surrounded by the best writers who have the strongest opinions in the world, and yet you got to a really good place. I thought we might spend a few minutes looking through this rap. It’s 20 double-spaced pages. The version I see says 22.0. Is that the 22nd draft?

**Chris:** The 22nd draft, yes.

**John:** 22nd draft.

**Chris:** Yeah. I should say, John, remember also, we had a month or more of meetings before that where we began to talk about which issue should be included and also making some really important decisions that held all the way through. For example, the question of whether minimum room size should be based on episodes or on show budget was a big conversation that we had.

**John:** I do forget that there was the long list, and we were scratching things out from that early stage. It was more detailed than what the Pattern of Demands is, but it was also allowing for some flexibility. Staff would weigh in on things. There were some wild ideas that were shot down. We were also really searching for how do we unify, bring this all together, what is the story we’re telling membership out of this. You were responsible for writing out the story.

Let me hand this over to you. This is something you’ve read 20,000 times, I’m sure. I thought we might start with, this is on the bottom of Page 1, you kind of establish the premise. Would you mind reading that aloud to us, that part?

**Chris:** This feels a little bit like I’m in a courtroom. They say, “Do you want to read out loud what you said? Do you stand by that?” I said, “Driven in large part by the shift to the streaming model, writing is being devalued in every sector of the business: in features, with its insufficient streaming residuals and continued reliance on free work – in comedy variety, whose writers were being unprotected by Guild standards on streaming platforms – in episodic television, where short orders, endless production calendars, the decoupling of writing from production, and the related rise of the mini room are an existential threat to writer compensation and power.”

**John:** That feels to me like a premise. In that paragraph, you’re really talking through this is the problem that we’re facing. This is the central thing that we have to look at. It sounds obvious, but without that, I don’t know what this whole campaign is about.

**Chris:** It’s always important, I think, in these kinds of negotiations, to tie what’s happening to some meaningful kind of sea change in the business. In 2007-’08, it’s obviously the hint that the internet is going to take over and our stuff is going to migrate to that, to an online platform. Here it was what came out of the shift to the streaming model. People understand that. They realize it’s the “why now”-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … of this conversation.

**John:** In a pitch, you have to sell why do we make this movie now, why do we make this series right now, why is this important right now. This is the “why now” of this. This is the premise.

**Chris:** The other important thing that is more apparent to me now than before is that premise that we stuck with all the way through, of no writer left behind, of every single sector of the business being attended to, dovetailed really nicely with – we were talking about it – the increasing democratization of the Guild. This strike relied in large part on the energy and dynamism of younger members. If we had decided, and we were never going to, that this was going to be an agenda that mostly took care of showrunner problems, for example, that wouldn’t have flown. We wouldn’t have been able to get away with that. What we ended up with was broad, near universal solidarity for an agenda that, as we said here, within the first minute and a half of the very first member message, said this is for everybody.

**John:** Let’s talk about who this everybody are, because next up, you have a premise, but it’s not a story until there are characters. On the next page, you get to the characters. I highlighted a few of them there, if you’d mind reading those.

**Chris:** “Our survey tells a story – your story. Almost 7,000 of you responded. You wrote to us in detail, with anger and sometimes with anguish and fear. Here’s who we heard from:

“The screenwriter who’s on a one-step deal, who’s been writing for months while their delivery money is held hostage to the next free rewrite, whose residuals on streaming are capped at the movie-of-the-week rate, even with its A-list stars and theatrical budget.

“The staff writer who’s kept at the same level on short orders, year after year.

“The lower-level writer who’s going from 10-week job to 12-week job to 20-week job. Who sometimes can’t even get those jobs because mini rooms with their small staffs and uniform salaries, tend to favor higher-level writers. Who gets a script – maybe.”

**John:** In that same segment, you’re talking through comedy variety writers and mid-level writers and showrunners and making clear this is about everybody. In doing that, you are letting people say, “Oh, he mentioned me, because that’s what I am,” but also, you can imagine yourself in those other people’s position, which ended up being crucial for solidarity to make sure that we all felt like we were fighting for each other.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. The interesting thing about this is, though the membership, I’ll say first of all, understood it intuitively, because it did come from that, the full understanding of it in some ways didn’t come until people were in these meetings and then on the picket line where they began to meet each other. It was a little bit like those stories of… We’re not really like this. We’re not provincial and living in our own little wards, but it’s like you got called up to war and you met all these people from all across the country whom you had never met before. You went places you never knew existed in some ways. You learned stuff that you wouldn’t have learned had you not been drafted into a conflict.

**John:** I remember on the picket line talking with Jeopardy writers or folks who do Hallmark movies. It’s such a different structure of work than I’m used to, but it’s also covered by the same Guild and they have the same issues. Because I knew that those Jeopardy writers are under the same kind of provisions, Appendix A, as comedy variety writers, I understood what the kind of things were that they were facing, which was crucial.

**Chris:** The companies, I think, were often – I don’t know if they are anymore, maybe not – under the misconceptions that these agendas are imposed by leadership on the membership. That is not at all what happened. It comes up from the membership, and the leadership just echoes that.

Then I think the truth of this in any one of these longer struggles is that, just as in writing, you can’t make up stakes. You can put all kinds of flowery language around something, but either the stakes are there or not. The reason why this ended up actually holding people together was because they felt it deeply.

**John:** You want to move ahead?

**Chris:** Sure.

**John:** You literally state the theme. It’s Page 4 there.

**Chris:** Yes. “7,000 individual stories – your own private economies. With one repeated theme: the business is broken. Writing is broken.”

**John:** You literally state the theme. That’s a thing we came back to again and again is that the companies have broken this model that was so successful for them for so many years, and we need to fix it. We need to put in place practices that actually fix and correct the mistakes that they made, not to go back to an old system, but to make this current system workable, livable, survivable.

**Chris:** I don’t know we knew that. The thing is, you’re just guessing at… I don’t mean we’re guessing at the problem or the solutions. It’s like having a test screening, these early member meetings, to see whether it works or not, is this a four-quadrant negotiating agenda.

**John:** Let’s talk about the revisions and the rewrites, because I don’t remember clearly your first passes. What was different and what changed in that rewrite process, getting notes back from the board, from Negotiating Committee, from early people listening to the drafts of this?

**Chris:** That’s also a little distant in my memory, because there are so many drafts. First of all, it was a honing of the way we talked about the issues. I needed, and we always need, the first time through – and I remember this in every single one of these negotiations I’ve been part of – to have people hear it and say, “Am I understanding immediately what you’re talking about?”

Remember, these meetings, you’re sitting in the audience. You have some slides up of what the proposals are, but there’s a lot of information passing through your ear canal very quickly. It’s not easy to keep track of that stuff. It’s really important. It’s mostly not visual. One thing that goes on is people saying, “I’m getting this like this. It’s crystal clear.” The second thing is, to be honest, different constituencies in the board and NegComm saying, “This doesn’t entirely address what I need, and can you make sure that it does?” There was a lot of that.

Then the third thing is just there’s a lot of good language that comes out of a 40-person writers’ room. I found it, and I think that staff and anyone did, very useful to hear even the casual comments that people made in conversation. We would just jot things down and say, “That’s a beautiful way of putting that.” I remember, because I actually referred to it at one point, Mike Schur said, “The minimum size for a writers’ room in the MBA is zero.” We’re going to use that forever.

**John:** Absolutely. I do remember some NegComm meetings where someone would say something, like, “Yep, we’re pulling that in.” Let’s talk about some of the very specific and, in some cases, very strong language you’re using in that. “Cold calculation.” “Unconscionable practice.” “Systematic elimination.” “Held hostage.” “Spent money like maniacs.” You’re not afraid to paint the other side as being ruthless, which I think is important here. It’s not personifying them individually. You’re not trying to go after the CEOs. You’re saying these companies are acting in ways that are not necessarily evil, but not rational, not forgivable.

**Chris:** That’s right. First of all is you say ad hominem attacks ever, because eventually you have to negotiate with those people, also because it really is about companies at this point, not at all about CEOs, who probably have no idea exactly what’s going on at this point in the conversation.

It is an interesting thing that one of the things you deal with, with a membership that’s very attuned to obviously its own issues but also fairness – because writers really care not just to get the most of what they deserve but to make sure what they’re asking for is fair and that we’re characterizing things honestly, which I think is probably not necessarily the case in every single negotiation for every single Guild or union – but there isn’t a requirement early, particularly if you think that this could be a conflict negotiation – and we knew from the very beginning that there was certainly a possibility of that – to rev the membership up enough to have them ready to… Negotiation really isn’t a war – really, when we said that later, we meant it – but certainly a battle. To rev them up for battle, to take it out of the realm of, these are reasonable conversations with people who would deal with you reasonably, and remind them the fact is, left alone individually, they’re really being taken advantage of in the most obscene ways.

That will change over the course of the next… This is in February, March, so the next seven months, as we begin the strike and then move toward trying to settle it, the rhetoric will change, because, and David Young always used to say, first you have to make war, and then you have to make peace. Both of those things, you have to do them equivalently well.

**John:** In your recollection, did you have to tone anything down? Because I know that it is always a concern about overshooting or going too far. Do you remember softening any lines in this speech as you went along?

**Chris:** I don’t remember specifically, but I know all the way through, yes. There’s no question that sometimes you write these things, and you begin to rev yourself up, and it feels good looking at your computer. You need somebody to say, “This may be more than we need to say.” Staff was great about that. Ellen Stutzman, Rebecca Kessinger, in addition to all the members of the NegComm who read this in the leadership, and David Goodman in particular, they were all very good about it. But yes, periodically, you had to pull back on it.

**John:** Now, reading through here, I was also struck by the number of times you were heading off counterarguments, and so examples being, “You are going to hear relentless rumors of the demise of the streaming business. They will be used as a weapon against you – against all of us.” “You’re living in the past, the companies will say, This is the new business model. It’s not a business model. It’s bad faith.” “Some will say the companies want us to strike. That they want an excuse to shut down production. As if anyone’s stopping them from doing that now.” “You’ll be punished, some will say. We’re being punished now. This is what punishment looks like.” Many cases in here, you’re having to anticipate the argument and shut it down before it can be made.

**Chris:** It’s very, very deliberate, obviously, over and over again. First of all, it is sort of a debate tactic to preempt arguments. But even more important not to think of it that way, and you probably experience this with members, is one thing that we heard from them over and over again is, “Oh, you could see it coming. You told us what was going to happen, and then it happened.”

That was important for two reasons. One, obviously, it inoculates people against the shocks that necessarily will occur over the course of some number of months. A good example of one of the largest was, “The DGA is going to make a deal at some point. You need to know that. You need to know that we’re going to stay on strike, that they’re not going to solve any of our problems. We need to tell you that up front, so in that moment there’s no fracture.”

**John:** There’s no other Guild in no other hall that’s going to make our deal.

**Chris:** That’s right. Exactly, exactly. The other thing is, you begin to get a deep well of trust with a group of people who hear you saying this is what’s going to happen tomorrow, and then it happens tomorrow. We say, “Look, they’re going to make a deal. They’re going to make us an offer, and it’s going to be a bad offer. Then they’re going to tell you this about your leadership.” All of those things end up happening.

The thing is the AMPTP in some ways were undermined in this cycle, because it really did play the same playbook over and over again. They were undermined, one, because it didn’t work, because the world had changed then, but also because they were running the same offensive or defensive plays that we had seen over and over again. We knew where we could do the shift.

**John:** It’s interesting you use the word playbook, because we’ve used it a lot in the last couple of months, but it doesn’t appear in these early speeches. It’s a thing that came up later on. It’s such a useful way of describing their standard procedure, which is so ineffectual, which is crucial.

**Chris:** Here, for example, in this speech, really what we’re doing is saying, let us articulate for you what you have not been able to put together entirely, because you are still living in your own, as we say, private economy, what’s going on across the whole biz, where you fit into the way writing in general is being undermined and how we’re going to solve that. Though we talk about some of the companies’ arguments here, we don’t talk yet about negotiating very much.

**John:** We do say that we will be heading into negotiations. On Page 24, if you want to jump ahead to there, you introduce the notion of we may need to go on strike, which was I know a debate, like how much do we talk about the possibility that we’re going to head out on strike. Let’s listen to how you actually introduce it.

**Chris:** “But if the companies are unreasonable in response, it may require us to demonstrate our resolve – and we will come back to you for a strike authorization vote. We will still work to make a deal. That is always our goal. But if the companies’ answer is still no, then to get what we deserve, what we need to survive, may require a strike.”

“A strike is a brutal thing and it’s not always a fair thing. It’s okay to be afraid of it. Like a war – it takes its toll on all of us – but it also punishes some of us more than others. And yet, here is a simple truth, it is our willingness to strike, and nothing else, that gave us our health and pension funds, our minimums, and our jurisdiction over the internet.”

**John:** Here you’re just getting people ready for the notion that we may need to go on strike, especially a membership who most of them were not part of the 2007-2008 strike, so they don’t have a recollection of it.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. Two things are true about this. One, and it’s sometimes hard to remember when you’re on the Negotiating Committee, is that we’ve been talking about this amongst ourselves for months and months and months, preparing, I guess inoculating yourself against all of those things, but internalizing what might happen in the future. Members are dealing with this for the first time. They’re coming to a meeting not quite knowing particularly here what they’re going to hear.

It’s really important to give them the time to process. Here we’re in – I can’t remember what the date of this is – sometime in February, but we’re going to go into negotiation in March. So we’re only two months away from a contract deadline. They need time. You can’t come back to somebody a couple of days before a contract deadline with a strike authorization vote and say, listen, we’ve never mentioned the possibility that what you could be doing could send you out on strike. That would be too much of a shock to the system. We needed to begin to put into play the possibility. Trust us, we’ll try to avoid it, but remember that this is always an option and something we might actually need to do. That I think was a place, if you remember, John, where we had lots of conversations about quite how far to go.

**John:** Of course.

**Chris:** There were people who were very nervous about that and saying, “You’re going too far. May be going too far to say a strike is a scary thing and it hurts some people.” We, broadly speaking, had the philosophy, talk about the fear. It’s like raising kids. The best thing to do is talk about everything. Don’t let anything fester inside unspoken.

**John:** Now, we’re looking at this as a printed document, but of course this was a performance. You were reading this aloud. How much did that influence both your writing process and the shape of it itself? Because it’s not meant to be a pdf that someone’s reading. It’s meant to be someone’s watching you actually say it. A related question is, stuff got applause in here, and how much did you need to anticipate where the crowd was at during the speech?

**Chris:** First, I wrote it as a speech. I wrote it according to the rhythms of how I speak. Sometimes I’d get notes, and I’d have to say to people, “Listen, I know. Just trust me. It’s not a document you’re reading. It’s a document you’re hearing, so I’ve got to do it that way.” This is the least speech-like of all of them though in some ways, because it had a very long section of proposals, which are really-

**John:** Slides, yeah.

**Chris:** … just a slide deck. But everything else is like that, and it’s written intentionally that way, with repetitive clauses and builds and things like that. You can’t know until you get there what the audience is going to do. I actually have some memory of not being flustered but thinking, “Okay, where do I need to stop? How far should I go? When do I pick up again?” All of that. I’m sure David would tell you the same thing, and Ellen as well, who sometimes when she read through the list of proposals would get a standing ovation. Certainly at the end, you get a standing ovation between every one. You learn a little bit the way the audience is going to react to it, and then you adjust. All of these things we did only a couple of times each. We didn’t go on the road with any of them and really learn.

**John:** Never see how they played in Wichita.

**Chris:** Exactly.

**John:** Let’s talk about the audiences, because the audience who is hearing this speech are all WGA members. They’re all sophisticated. They can handle complicated language. They can handle these things. They know most of the esoteric terms that you’re talking about. You may need to explain a few things, but they get the whole scope of this.

One of the things that became really clear as we got into negotiations and I would hear from people who were outside of the business or who were producers of stuff, they had never heard of this speech, and so they didn’t have the framing of all this. We talk about inoculation, but it’s also education. It’s really making sure everyone’s on the same page. Our membership was really good at being on the same page. The rest of the town didn’t have any of that information and was just perplexed by what we were doing.

**Chris:** Actually, I was going to think about something before we get to that. Remember also, we actually did a couple of other small test runs of this. We got some writers and just did it in front of them and got some notes on these things, so that the first time we did it was not in front of, I don’t know, 800 people.

**John:** First, we had the captains’ meeting.

**Chris:** That’s right.

**John:** You read it at the captains’ meeting. There was also a showrunners’ meeting. It wasn’t in front of giant hotel ballrooms. It was smaller groups first.

**Chris:** One of the things that I experienced in this, and I think David Goodman would say the same thing, is we always went into those early meetings thinking, “You don’t know how this is going to play.” Writers adopted it almost immediately and universally. You could tell me better than me, because I’m too in the middle. Was there a sense that the town truly didn’t understand this and thought there’s no way this was going to happen?

**John:** Yeah, they truly didn’t. I remember a phone call with a producer on one of the projects who said, “Oh, yeah, I know you guys might be on strike, might call for a vote, but you wouldn’t actually be on strike until September 1st.” I’m like, “I have no idea where you’re getting that information, but I guarantee you that’s not correct.” There were other just really fundamental things about what it is you’re actually going for. They clearly didn’t understand it.

**Chris:** I don’t know if you were going to bring this up or not, but very early on in the process, I think probably even in the early member meetings with this message, even though it was broadly very well received, was this repeated question: what’s the bumper sticker?

**John:** I wanted to get to that.

**Chris:** Oh, sorry.

**John:** There was no great slogan. The closest you got to it, which you did repeat three times in this, was “Put money back in writers’ pockets and power back in writers’ hands.”

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. That’s what we came up with in this one. I think some other version of it was, if somebody asks you what it’s about, it’s compensation, compensation, compensation. And yet, that didn’t really end up being the way we talked about this, although fundamentally, obviously, it is about compensation and power. No one asked us again after the first month, what’s the slogan?

**John:** We never had a bumper sticker. We never had the thing to put on a T-shirt. It wasn’t that. It was about this. Once we were on strike, we were on strike, and that was the message is that we were on strike.

But before we got out on strike, we had to have a strike authorization vote. That’s the next speech. Talking through this, this was the SAV. We had a couple of these meetings. They were mostly in hotel ballrooms. The audience for this was probably different. We obviously had a ton of captains there, because captains will come to everything. We had skeptics. We had nervous people, because the people who were fully on board, I don’t know that they necessarily needed to come to this.

**Chris:** That’s right. It’s generally true in the Guild that some percent of people who trust and are fine don’t show up to the meetings, so the meetings may encourage a broader range of points of view. I had to admit, this SAV again went very well, even in the room, as I remember, although it triggers a different kind of question, like, “Tell me you’re not going to stay on strike over this or that,” kind of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. Cleverly, you’re trying to hold off on some of those issues, and you’re trying to hold member questions back about what would a strike be like or what the logistics of a strike would be. You’re just talking about trying to balance the hope and fear going into this moment, talking about why the strike authorization vote is important for leverage in the Negotiating Committee, so we can try to get the best deal possible without a strike, and yet at the same time say, “We’re asking you to trust us that we will make the best deal possible, but if we need to go on strike, we will go on strike, even though it’s a difficult thing to do.”

**Chris:** Yeah. I don’t know whether your listeners need even more of an explanation. By the time the SAV, the strike authorization vote meetings and the strike authorization vote happen, we’ve been in negotiations for some number of weeks. They haven’t gone particularly well. The companies are not really engaging us in a meaningful way. They’re engaging us in the way they would do during a normal negotiation, which is to say, “We can give you some version of Pattern, some increasing minimums, and a few sweeteners.” The message to the membership needs to be that, but also to talk about how a strike authorization vote will put us back into the negotiating room for about two more weeks or so before the deadline, and how that member power is going to give us what we want.

It’s an interesting conversation, because in some sense, you want to say to people, “Look, a really high strike authorization vote number gives us the kind of leverage to do the work that might avoid a strike. But you can’t vote for it thinking that’s what you’re doing. You have to know that it’s real, and if we don’t get there, then a strike is what may come next.”

**John:** Going back to 2017, a lot of the messaging was maybe not intentional, but a lot of the messaging you heard is like, “Vote for the SAV because then there won’t be a strike.” That was a message that got out there. This time we were definitely trying to push back against that. Don’t just say yes because you’re trying to avoid a strike. Know that a strike is possible.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s right. It was an adjustment based on what we learned from 2017, where we probably went too far in that direction. It was effective, and it got us some of what we needed. The issues were important but not quite as existential that we describe these. I can’t say that we knew absolutely whether we were going to strike or not.

**John:** We had a rollback on the table too, and everyone wanted that rollback gone.

**Chris:** That’s right. Once that came off, of course things changed substantially. We made adjustments in that, because as I said, writers are very attuned to the truth of an argument that you’re making. It used to drive David Young crazy. He appreciated it, but it’s the only Guild that says, “I don’t deserve that, so don’t ask for that.”

**John:** Thinking back to this moment in the strike authorization vote, we did tell members that the AMPTP didn’t have crazy rollbacks. We were very honest with them. The AMPTP was polite and patronizing, but not outrageous. We worked really, really, really hard to get out giant SAV vote. Then it turned out every other unit after us could get a giant SAV vote just because, just because that was a thing that happened.

**Chris:** It drove us crazy. I went, “You can do this without being really neurotic?”

**John:** Absolutely. Without calling each individual member, it’s actually possible to get a giant number? It’s great that they did.

**Chris:** Writers are writers.

**John:** Writers are writers.

**Chris:** The other thing I was going to say is – and you know this because we’ve been in a lot of negotiations – you really don’t know until the last few days whether you’re in an actual negotiation or not. Even as we went back in with the companies, and they were being very, very difficult, there was always a possibility that at some point a week before or five days before, something would kick in, and instead of the posturing and this is all you were going to get or some stuff around the edges, we would begin to have a real negotiation. It never happened, but you don’t know that. I don’t know for you. For me, it was probably only three or four days before that I began to think, oh, they’re never coming around.

**John:** No, they’re just toying with us. I do remember you saying in the room that we have to prepare that they’re going to come to us with a deal that’s going to make it really tough for us to say yes or no, then we’ll have to debate that. That never happened. They didn’t come to us with anything even remotely close to that.

**Chris:** That’s right, because it turned out, going back to the same thing, their playbook was their playbook. You have to assume that in some ways the AMPTP was perfectly okay with us going out on strike, because they assumed that their strategy is to push us to the side right now because we were going first, get to the DGA, make a deal there, make a deal with SAG, come back to us, and say, “Now you’re alone. You’ve got this big, overreaching agenda,” as they might put it. “We’ll do a little bit here and there, and then you’ll settle pretty quickly.” That obviously did not happen, which was their fundamental mistake in all of this. I think we realized at some point, oh, this is not a real negotiation that’s going on up until then.

**John:** We did go out on strike. Not a shock there. The next speech we’ll look at is from the Shrine Auditorium. The premise in your first speech was on Page 1. The premise in this speech I think actually comes quite a bit later on. It’s on Page 9 here. Do you want to read through this section?

**Chris:** Sure. “But now as we move to close the deal with the companies, we must speak in the language of power. Power is the only thing that moves them. Our employers give up nothing in negotiations out of fairness or compassion. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no. They say yes only when they are made to understand the cost of saying no.”

**John:** Great. An example of repetition there, to make sure people actually heard the point.

**Chris:** Exactly. Pretty obvious [crosstalk 44:00].

**John:** But talking about this is going to be a power negotiation, that we basically have to show our power, so the power in the SAV but ultimately then the power in the strike, and that this wasn’t about what is right and what is fair and what is honest and what is true. This is about our power versus their power.

**Chris:** It’s important education for new people on the Negotiating Committee as well, which is to realize that for writers the story has to begin with a truthful recitation of the problems in the industry and what we need to survive. Truth doesn’t end up mattering very much in all of this. In fact, David Goodman made the joke in the later meetings that at some point one CEO said to me, “Stop with the speeches. I don’t want to hear anymore why it’s true.” That’s really the case. We had to say that to the members. We had to say to the members, “Look, at this point you and we know that we’re right in asking for these things, but that doesn’t matter anymore. We need your vote now, because all they’re going to respond to is the risk of a strike and what that means to them. That’s our power. Our power is the only thing that’s going to move them closer to their bottom line.”

**John:** Now, ultimately, we do go out on strike. I think the counterargument to that is that truth doesn’t matter to the companies, but truth matters tremendously to our membership and our transparency.

One of the great things we did, which I don’t think was all that well planned in advance, was when we went on strike we put out this two-pager that listed this is what we are asking for, this is what their counter is. That did so much work for us in terms of letting our membership know this is why we’re out on strike, these are the issues. What do you know about the two-pager? Because I perceive the two-pager as something that Sean on staff generated for our own internal purposes. When did it become an external document? What was the decision to make that a public document?

**Chris:** I think the staff had it pretty clear in their head that they were going to do that as we got to the last-

**John:** Day or two.

**Chris:** … day or two or so. Remember again, it’s a very complicated negotiation. It’s much more complex in some ways than some others. You can’t just say, “We didn’t get jurisdiction of the internet yet, so we’re still on strike.” You had to make clear exactly what we were asking for. The favor the companies did was the opposite of what you were talking about your fear would be, what happens if they get awfully close to what somebody will say is good enough. They were so far away-

**John:** Exactly.

**Chris:** … from what anyone would say was even plausible that this very clear recitation of how far they were away from any kind of reasonable deal really gave us a lot of power moving into the strike. It’s one of the most important days of the entire process from February to the middle of September is the release of that document. I don’t even remember it being a debate. It just seemed like it was a given.

**John:** The other thing I think was so powerful about the two-pager is it mirrors your initial speech in terms of we heard from the screenwriter, we heard from the middle-level writer, we heard from the lower-level writer, we heard from the showrunner, and each of those people could see themselves reflected in the things we were asking for and were not receiving and could also remember, “Oh, that’s right, that’s what the comedy variety proposal is. That’s what the issue is here.”

Of course, the issue that we… This may be a good time to talk about it. Going into this negotiation, the AI stuff was just a tiny little footnote at the end. I remember in those initial meetings with the Negotiating Committee, we have all these other things, and then there’s also AI. Like, “Really? Are we going to talk about AI?” I would explain why I thought it was important, but it didn’t seem that important. Then it became much more important really during the time we were in negotiation. Then we went out on strike, we could say to the members that they did not even want to talk to us about AI, and that that signaled that they were looking to do things with AI, and that became a real centerpiece flashpoint. It became one of the most important things we were fighting for in this.

**Chris:** It reminded me of a few things. First, let’s put AI aside for one sec. I just wanted to talk about one thing. It’s interesting. One thing that the two-page document pointed out though is exactly how complicated this negotiation is, and in some ways how even really attentive members don’t necessarily understand things intuitively, immediately.

It’s a conversation that I had with Ellen and that we had to have with members repeatedly afterward, because the two-pager included, for example, our opening proposals on minimum room size. Tell me if we did not spend the next two months explaining to our own members this was just an opening proposal, it was not the number we expected to end up at. We understood there would be a negotiation. You get caught in those things because our sense of negotiation has not been internalized by every single member. There was that. That was a little bit of a pressure that got put on us by the two-pager. It was way outweighed by the honesty of it, but we had to go back and explain all of that.

AI turned out to be a gift in some ways, because I think we were somewhat focused on it. They made us afraid of it in ways that we hadn’t been before. It required us to dive into it. I know we had a working group, or that the board had a working group. You had been working on it all the way through. But we didn’t quite know all the implications of what it would be. What it ended up doing though during the strike was it made the story even stronger, because it dovetailed with other things we were saying about the drive toward efficiency and productivity and how that would eventually undermine writer employment, how they could replace original creativity or well-distributed creativity amongst a reasonable number of writers with very few writers and a machine.

All of a sudden, all of these things we were arguing about – this may be a part of the bumper sticker – began to feel like, in ways that we didn’t really understand at the beginning, were coalescing into a single, larger argument that the membership really understood.

Look, we didn’t overhype AI. We didn’t try to turn it into more of a nightmare than it was. But the membership and the rest of the world began to fear it really intuitively. It also linked us to labor across America, because everyone’s worried about the idea that they don’t matter anymore and that they can be replaced by a machine. Maybe not everybody, although maybe everybody should. It was a fascinating moment and a huge mistake on the companies’ part.

**John:** They’ve largely acknowledged that, I think, because if they’d dealt with it early on or at least not ignored us completely, it wouldn’t become a flashpoint for the DGA even. The DGA, who didn’t seem to have an interest in it at all, suddenly had to have an interest, and then they had to get an AI proposal on there. They got really insufficient language, which angered us, angered our membership and riled us up and created even more attention on the issue. It was foolish.

**Chris:** In the months that we had to think about it, with your work and the work of the staff and everything, resulted in a much more sophisticated, I think, AI …

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Chris:** … standard proposals than we had at the very beginning.

**John:** We didn’t have anything on consent, basically that they had to tell you if they were handing you stuff generated by AI. Those were not part of our initial proposals there. Those were not any crucial gains.

**Chris:** Look, it was certainly an education for me, I think also an education for our members, thinking, for example, about training AI, to distinguish between uses of AI, those parties, Open AI, Google, Microsoft, who don’t own our copyrights and whose use of our material will be an issue both for us and for the companies who do own it. But in our relationship with the companies who do own the copyright over our material, it’s much more complex, because they have certain rights, and we have certain contractual rights, and the balance of those things is going to have to be worked out. But I didn’t understand that going in.

**John:** We are now out on strike. We have this big meeting at the Shrine Auditorium. That’s where I think we really established some individual characters in the strike, which I wouldn’t have anticipated. Obviously, Ellen became a superstar, and people just loved her sense of humor and her deadpan affect. You and David Goodman, you were familiar to people in the old history. People knew you guys. Lindsay Dougherty suddenly came out of nowhere. I’m thinking, she’s not even in our Guild, and then she became a superstar.

Then Carol Lombardini. The speech at the Shrine is the first time you mentioned Carol Lombardini by name. It’s in reference to things she said in the room, basically making sure that our membership understands that they were hearing us but also ignoring us at the same time. That was crucial. You said before we don’t do ad hominem attacks, but you do mention Carol Lombardini by name. What was your thinking about that?

**Chris:** John, I think it was around the time we began to understand what was going on here, which was that there was probably a split inside the room we had hinted at between the legacy companies and the streaming companies based on their varying business models, and that one of the factors impeding the legacy companies, for example, from coming to terms with what was happening was the way the AMPTP functioned. It became very useful to have a villain in the story.

It was good to have the villain be the AMPTP, because I think we knew – I say we knew and it all turned out this way – but in fact we had some experience and did know that this would get solved eventually when CEOs from the companies would engage in the process. It was a thing we had tried to have happen from very early on. They were resistant to it. We can talk about that if you want. It was a way of saying we’re not going to identify those people who will eventually be, I don’t want to call them the heroes, but will be our partners eventually, to spare them from that, and yet still identify, for the membership, the antagonists.

**John:** I think it’s good to stress that on our side, we did nothing to try to vilify David Zaslav, but just a series of things happened with David Zaslav, that he became a public figure for other stuff he was doing, but that wasn’t our doing.

**Chris:** It wasn’t. I don’t even think it was beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because he wasn’t the villain in this story. I don’t want to identify anybody. But we needed him to be part of the solution, and so hyper-identifying him with what was looked on as some flubs didn’t really advance our narrative particularly well.

**John:** Now, the narrative at this point is much less about… You had speeches along the way. Occasionally, a video would come. A new Chris Keyser video would drop. Everyone would stop what they’re doing and watch the Chris Keyser video. But the messaging and the narrative at this point was much less about you and what you were saying, as consistent communication from the Guild to members, from the Guild to press, just telling the story consistently and honestly and openly, and with good framing, to everyone to make sure we are all on the same page about what was happening there.

Let’s talk about message discipline. One of the things that people may not understand is that as board and Negotiating Committee members, we get some talking points, usually from Rebecca, about like, this is what we want to say about these things, and we can say those things.

If there’s a member email, we can generally say what’s in the member email, but we shouldn’t go much beyond that. We have discretion about what things we can say to individual members, but not say to groups, or certainly not to say to the media. That was so useful on our side, both for us individually as NegComm members, but I also think for members. They knew what we could talk about, what we couldn’t talk about with the negotiations. We could listen and pass that word up, but it felt like it was a good way of keeping this all together, keeping the story one story.

**Chris:** I think that’s true. It’s true, and yet there were risks inherent in making that work. The reason why it did was not something that we might have, I don’t know about predicted, but we couldn’t have counted on. There were two sides of that. The first was, I’d say it was a pretty remarkable Negotiating Committee and board and council. They were very, very good at telling the story and making it a story, not just a series of talking points. Broadly speaking, we really fanned out across the city or cities and told that story over and over again, and told it with very great discipline and some power.

Then, because I think the story we were telling was true, the members, who were much more important than had ever been true before, even in the agency campaign, as advocates and storytellers as well, also repeated that story, sometimes in ways that were very funny but always on point. You just didn’t get those people who were going off on tangents and misidentifying what our key proposals were, whatever it was. We couldn’t have known that until it happened. But it turned out that we had 11,000 members on point.

**John:** Yes, and it was really impressive to see. I’d also say that a lot of the discussions that happened in 2007-08 on the Deadline Hollywood comments section, instead, those member conversations were happening in smaller forums. We weren’t as public, which I think was really, really helpful. If there was misinformation or issues coming up that way, we could talk to those members individually. We could address those things. But there weren’t big public fights happening, which I think was great.

**Chris:** Yeah. Members really did also internalize the idea that union conversations have to be internal conversations. You can disagree, push back, ask questions, but that ought to be inside the union, because otherwise it can be very dangerous. Obviously, we had the advantage of a much more favorable press.

**John:** We really did. What theory do you have for that?

**Chris:** One thing is the journalists know what we know. They’re also members or want to be members of unions. They have seen this in their own lives, the way in which their working conditions have been degraded over time. I think there was some sense of that amongst the reporters. Not everybody. Not every reporter was that great. We still had some who seemed to take the companies’ side no matter what. By and large, again, there was a sympathy and empathy for writers that I don’t think we had before. I don’t know if you have other theories as well.

**John:** Certainly on the AI issues, because I did a lot of the AI press, they would stop recording and say, “I totally get this, because that’s exactly what’s happening in my industry.” They’re afraid of AI, because they’re just as vulnerable as we are, if not more vulnerable.

**Chris:** Right, and then probably the fact that this caught on more broadly amongst the public and other labor unions. We always tell our members very early on, the only people who need to hold together are writers themselves. Don’t worry about public opinion. Don’t worry about any of that other stuff. If we’re strong together, we can win. Turns out the truth is broad-based public support and, even more important maybe, real support amongst guilds and unions, particularly those in our own industry, were critical to the success of this. But once that builds, once that’s the story out there, I think it also engenders more support. It’s very difficult to push against that quite as hard and just take the company line.

I think there was, broadly speaking, just a general acknowledgement, except on the part of some people. The companies were just wrong about this stuff. I don’t mean wrong on every single point, but I mean broadly speaking, they had broken the business. Something had to be done. It wasn’t going to undermine their business model in order to do that. They all had to work through their problems. They can’t work through their problems by leaving their workers behind. That’s not a path forward. People got that in a way then.

Remember also, by the way, without going on, in 2007 and ’08, we’re talking about the internet. It’s a thing that hasn’t quite happened yet, and a lot of people don’t want have happen.

**John:** Exactly. The internet was our AI.

**Chris:** Right, but we were trying to control it and use it as if it were something good. Writers were thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t want to write in seven-minute segments or whatever on the internet.”

**John:** Webisodes. All webisodes. We also have to consider that the companies had their own narrative. They had to have their own internal narrative about what was going on, how long this was going to last, that the writers’ demands were unreasonable, that these things were close. And they didn’t have the message discipline to keep it together. They didn’t all have one story.

As little things would come out, it became clear they were just denying reality. It was frustrating to watch at times, because little bits would come out. I remember being in the room with the AMPTP one day, and we were getting these texts saying, “I hear there’s a deal. I hear that you’re already signed and you’re about to announce it.” We were nowhere close. This was in August when nothing was happening. It was clear that either that’s the story they were telling internally, and that it had leaked out, or they were trying to sell the story. But it never worked. They just kept tripping over themselves whenever they were trying to sell a story to the broader public.

**Chris:** That’s right, yeah. First of all, nowhere was that more apparent than in the fateful day when somebody anonymously decided to tell the press that they were trying to starve us, in fact. We took strength from all of that, because they misperceived how things would play. I’m not quite sure why they made those mistakes over and over. I think in some ways there was competitive PR going on, that different companies were trying to position themselves, and that led to mistakes being made. I don’t know whether it was ever being run through some central communications department there or not, but they seemed to do that over and over again. I have a feeling sometimes some of these companies had to tell stories to their own employees.

**John:** I think so too.

**Chris:** Yeah, that were not necessarily what was going on in the room.

**John:** No. It’s tough. Let’s think about the narrative going forward, because while we’ve just had the ratification vote, so that chapter is done, the story continues, because looking back to 2007-2008, the story of what happened in that strike kept changing and evolving. You heard a narrative like, oh, we lost things in 2007-08 or DGA won the internet in 2007-2008.

I want to think about the narrative going forward and some things we’re going to probably start hearing over the next couple months, couple years about stuff. The New York Times’ The Daily Podcast was talking about the wrap-up of the strike. And they said, oh, don’t be surprised if streamers start raising their prices, because they’ll have to pay for these writers. Price increases are your fault, Chris Keyser.

**Chris:** Yeah, exactly. One of the things that became true in the negotiations is that the CEO said to us, “This has nothing to do with our bottom line.” We made that argument to them. I know television very well. You could talk about features. But these adjustments in the writers’ budget are just internal conversations about how to reallocate inside a budget that used to much more highly favor writers and has ceased to do so. This is not going to raise their costs. Even some of the proposals, by the way, like what they call success-based residuals, are so small in comparison to what’s really going on.

We had lots of conversations with CEOs or other people in the business, who would just repeat to us, “You know, these companies have enormous problems. They have cost problems. They’ve thrown all this money out. They’ve chased the Netflix model of unlimited spending with no requirement of any kind of revenue on the other side. They’ve got too many upfront costs, and they’ve eliminated backend, and it’s all become disastrous. There’s no relationship between pay and results.”

We kept saying, “We get it. You’re going to have to take care of all of those things.” That’s what’s actually driving the changes in the business. This is not about that. This is just about the fact that when you hire us, and you only hire us when you want to spend the money, you have to pay us fairly.” This is at minimums also. This is not over scale. This is not what the highest paid screenwriter gets for a movie. This is really what the entry-level screenwriter and television writer and Appendix A writer can expect in a contract. It has nothing to do with the overall macro changes in the industry.

**John:** The price of Netflix or Disney Plus will go up. It has nothing to do with this contract or SAG-AFTRA’s contract. It’s all about how much money they think they can charge consumers for this and how much money they want to make. That’s what it’s all about.

**Chris:** That’s right. Look. They’ve got a problem in streaming obviously in particular, because they decoupled what they spent from what they got back. At some point, my guess is, and you can talk about this – I’m sure you have – that streaming is going to resemble some hybrid between broadcast and basic cable of subscribers and advertising and resale to secondary markets. That’s going to be a balance that the more successful company’s going to make work. It’ll take them some number of years to do that. But that’s going to be okay. We’re going to suffer in the meantime.

**John:** It’s going to be okay. Fewer shows will be made. Fewer writers are going to be employed. Both entirely possible.

**Chris:** I think very possible, because that peak TV era of anything goes is probably over. But people were talking about that well before. If you go back to the very first speech I made, I talk a lot about all the things the companies are saying before we go out on strike, about how the business is changing and they can’t spend the money and they’re not making money anymore. This is all over the place well before the strike happens. Decisions about what the proper number of shows is or writers being hired because of that, that’s all built in to the system.

**John:** It’s correlation versus causation. Yes, these things are happening at the same time, and they have the same underlying causes, but we didn’t cause this.

**Chris:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. Look, it’s going to be complicated. Individual writers are not going to know going forward exactly what the cause is of any given period of difficulty. I think there will be even people in our guild who will say, this happened to me because of the strike. I can’t say it’s not true for anybody. I don’t know what specific effect that will be. But broadly speaking, as with the recession of 2007-08, corresponding to that strike, unfortunately, the ups and downs of the business, the inherent uncertainties exist outside of remarkable but not business-plan-changing gains that the writers have made.

**John:** I think coming out of this strike period, we’re not going to have that intense focus and member-driven messaging about what things are. We’re not going to have that instinct to push back against, “This is the narrative that they’re trying to sell you.” Some of that stuff is just going to come up. You’re going to hear these stories and these accusations that, oh, this is going to make it harder for new writers to break in or that more production is going to go overseas. These things can be true, but they’re actually not caused by what we just did and the gains that we made.

**Chris:** Exactly right. There are some risks with that. Look, I think there are some really excellent agents who are engaging with the guilds more directly and who will take on all of the challenges, and the less good ones will repeat the message that exonerates them and the whole business from it and say, “You’re not being hired because of this and that.” We become an easy scapegoat in all of that, and we’ll have to deal with all of it.

**John:** Yeah, we will. We have two listener questions that I thought might be appropriate here. Drew, hop in here.

**Drew Marquardt:** Allen writes, “I was curious if the new WGA agreement has any impact on foreign levies payments. I saw a lot of material about an increase in foreign residuals but wasn’t sure if that included the levies as well. I’m a non-WGA writer, but I’ve received foreign levies for several years now and wasn’t sure if those amounts would increase with the new agreement or if it was a completely separate thing.”

**Chris:** I am really the wrong person to be asking this question. As I understand it, and John, you may know it better, foreign levies are based under European law. That essentially has something to do with distributing some piece of the value of selling tapes and DVDs because they might’ve been used to copy your programs. That will have nothing to do with-

**John:** It’s not part of this contract at all. Foreign levies will continue the same way that they always have. The Guild receives money on behalf of writers and other artists that get sent from Europe. The Guild is not the main collector of that. It’s not part of this contract.

**Drew:** The next one comes from An Anonymous Young Writer. They write, “With the strike over and the writers returning back to work, how is our relationship with the studios that we spent the last couple of months outside their buildings striking? I feel like there were some jabs back and forth, with us chanting, ‘Pay your writers,’ and waving our taunting signs, while they were okay with waiting months to give us a fair deal, and even Universal cutting their trees to make it harder for us to strike. How are we supposed to work together again, knowing that we just endured the last couple months fighting against them?”

**Chris:** Here’s what I hope and what I think is going to be true. I think that the creative executives with whom we work day to day understand the business, understand what we were fighting for. They may have supported us, more or less, to some degree. None of them I think should or do feel as if they were the target of this conversation. I think we tried to make that clear in our messaging all the way through, that they would be our partners again.

You can’t say never. You can’t say nobody is going to get pissed off about it. But I think broadly speaking, and John, you can speak to this as well as I can, the creative relationship between writers and their executives is going to go back to where it was before. If anything, we just miss each other and can’t wait to get back to work.

**John:** Absolutely. In the spirit of getting back to work, a thing that I keep trying to stress is that all of the energy, enthusiasm, and drive we showed on the picket lines these last five months needs to be channeled back into the thing we’re actually really, really good at, which is we are the best film and television writers in the world.

As we get back to work, what I’d love to see is, in a couple years down the road, looking back at this period, why did film and television get so good in 2024 and 2025. It’s because we had all these writers kept from doing a thing that they are so amazing at for five months, and came back with this incredible burst of passion and enthusiasm and wrote the best things that have ever been written. I think that’s going to get you past these weird feelings about the studio executives. We’re going to write these amazing things, and they’re going to pay for them, and we are going to make great TV and film.

**Chris:** I think that’s right. I also say, by the way, it’s a very writer thing to get worried about how people feel about us and think that somehow if we ask for something, we’re going to get punished for it. But the CEOs with whom we negotiated ended this on a note of respect. I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, but phone calls that said, “Listen, you guys fought hard for a thing you needed, and you got a deal, and that’s good. And we know that the thing is broken, and we should have conversations about how it broke and what needs to happen.” I don’t mean just the business itself, but I mean the system of negotiating new deals. I think all the way up to the top there is, I hope, some level of mutual respect back and forth.

**John:** That would be great. Wrapping this up, so talking about the narrative of the strike, the storytelling of the strike, what things did you learn as one of the showrunners of this crazy writers’ room?

**Chris:** Look, I think as is true with history in general, you have to do the best you can, and you have to be lucky in some ways. We got lucky.

**John:** We got very lucky.

**Chris:** We got very lucky in a lot of ways. A lot of things came together in the way we needed them to come together. It’s an odd thing to say, because we got so unlucky for the years before in the business. It’s not a lucky place to be right now. But the membership, its youth, its facility on social media, the mistakes the companies made, the extent to which they made it very clear in the way they communicated with us, the fact that the staff was so good at ascertaining exactly what was in the members’ hearts, in their 7,000-response survey, really set us up well. And I think we executed it nicely.

I do think that we learned a lot from 2007 through 2017, in the agency campaign to now. But some of it just has to break in your favor. We take good lessons from it and realize we’re just going to have to get lucky again the next time we do it.

Here’s a thing that we did know though, which is that writers are committed to each other. They are brave. They do understand. They are willing to stay together. I think the relationship between writers and their guild is different from what it was before this strike and will help us going forward. Success breeds success, and we need to use that. I guess that’s one thing I learned is you got to keep that going, keep that momentum. We’re not going to fight the next fight immediately, but we need to talk to each other constantly, all through the next two and a half years, to whatever happens. What about you?

**John:** I think it’s a good lesson in what is possible. I remember there were times throughout this campaign I would feel frustrated or just I couldn’t see what was going to happen next. I remember you saying at some point that you yourself did not know how this is going to end, that all you could know is the principles of what it is you were going for and to try to keep moving forward on those principles.

The fact that we ended up at this place where we really did get the things we needed to get was just a good lesson in being ready for hard things, embracing some of the uncertainty, and also just counting on each other. I think I felt it in the room with the Negotiating Committee, but I also felt it on the picket line. I felt it in the big rooms. Even in the most difficult member conversations, when I’d have phone calls with people who were kind of flipping out, if I could get back to the place of what it is that we’re going for here, what it is that we need to achieve, that does a lot of the work.

**Chris:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a tradition on Scriptnotes where we do a One Cool Thing, something we want to share with our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is called One Revolution Per Minute. It’s this animated short film by Erik Wernquist, which is set in a space station that has artificial gravity, because it’s revolving. It’s revolving around a central axis, so a very classic way to create artificial gravity in science fiction movies. It’s gorgeously animated. But what it’s mostly showing is that in order to create even .5g gravity, you have to be spinning really fast, and it’s actually really uncomfortable. This thing has big windows, so you can always see the thing you’re looking at. It’s like, oh, it’s too fast. It’s really uncomfortable.

**Chris:** You really feel like you’re inside of it, essentially?

**John:** Yeah, but it’s also gorgeous. Just watch it, because it’s a gorgeous video and really shows what a space station could feel like. You really wouldn’t build it this way, but it’s just very impressive. Take a look at it. It’s called One Revolution Per Minute. We’ll have a link in the show notes. What do you got for us, Chris?

**Chris:** It really shows how you’re looking forward and I’m looking backward. You’re fun, and I’m less fun. I have to admit that I’ve been so burdened by this thing, and not in a terrible way. I have a one-track mind. I re-watched yesterday one of my favorite movies, my favorite documentary, which is Barbara Kopple’s American Dream. If you haven’t seen that, you have to go watch American Dream, which is about a strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant, and it is devastating.

**John:** I know of the movie, but now I need to see it.

**Chris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all labor all the time. I’m going to stop. If you had asked me two days from now, maybe it would be something else, but that’s where we are.

**John:** I did an AI panel yesterday. It was a good panel for the FTC. I was happy to do it. But also I’m happy not to do those for a little bit. I think it’s going to be fine. I’m happy to go back to-

**Chris:** Dear FTC, not home right now. Call somebody else.

**John:** Absolutely. There’s so many talented people on the Guild who can do those panels. I don’t need to be the person doing them now.

**Chris:** It was one of the wonderful things, wasn’t it? All these people we met on the Negotiating Committee, incredible people who are going to take over and do the work.

**John:** When I look at the folks who have won on the board or won on the council, they’re so smart and they’re so great. Go, go, lead the way.

**Chris:** One of the things that happens when the Guild is successful at fulfilling writers’ needs is that people say, “I want to be a part of that. Why would I not want to be a part of that?” You get really great people, because you have to love writers after all of this.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on debate. Chris Keyser, thank you so much for coming on this show again to talk through this whole crazy thing we did.

**Chris:** You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here. This may be the last time I get to talk about it for a little while.

**John:** You won’t miss it.

**Chris:** No. I will be okay moving on.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Chris Keyser, can you talk to us about debate? To set this whole thing up, I have to play this clip that’s going to embarrass you. This is a clip from, I think it’s 1984. You were dressed in a tuxedo. You had a bow tie. Let’s listen to it.

**Chris [in old clip]:** There’s much that is lousy on both sides. The world is a lousy place. It’s also a crazy place. I’m 23 years old and no less than any one of you who has antipathy for the United States. I’m sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. Still, it seems to me that we do ourselves no good to deny what is good in a system which is not all good, to deny what is good in a system which can correct itself, and that is the United States. I think one political analyst in the United States put it best when he said, “Critics say that America is a lie because it does not reach its ideals. America is not a lie; it’s a disappointment. But it’s a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” I beg to oppose.

**John:** Chris, you got huge applause there, rapturous applause. This looks like it’s off of PBS. Was this the highlight of your debating career? Talk to us about debate and your experience with debate.

**Chris:** My experience with it. Yeah, that probably was my highlight of my debating career. I wasn’t a really good debater most of the way through. I debated in high school and then in college, but not for very long in college. I used to do a kind of debate called policy debate, which is very fast speaking and like speed chess or something like that, which was great and one of the formative things of my youth. My friends, my decision to go law school, the way I thought about the world was all, I think in some ways dictated by the fact that I was part of the debate world. I loved all of that, but I ended up not caring very much about the competition in some ways. I moved into more public debating, which this is an example of it at the Oxford Union. By the way, Boris Johnson was there-

**John:** Wow.

**Chris:** … and Andrew Sullivan. I debated against William Hague. They were all in this path, I guess, not all them, the Eaton through Oxford to leading their country down the terrible path. It’s a straight line in the UK. That’s broadly speaking. I don’t mean it that way necessarily, although there are a lot of examples of it.

Anyway, that was really fun to do. It was just a way of seeing the world and talking about important things. I did a couple of these at Oxford that PBS broadcast. That was sort of fun. Then I put debate away for a really long, long time.

Debate more importantly became a part of my life again because my son started debating when he was in fifth grade, in elementary school. I guess like the dad who gets pulled into being the first base coach, because his kid says, “My dad played baseball once,” I ended up being a debate coach for about 10 years or so, but mostly for young kids, for elementary school kids and then for middle school kids, just because I really believed in the way in which debate gave kids a sense of their own selves and their own voice and ability to understand the other side of the question, to listen well. There were so many things. I can’t think of any activity outside the curriculum in a school that’s better for, broadly speaking, developing an analytical and compassionate mind than debate, so I’ve believed in it for a long time.

**John:** That’s great. I confessed to I think it was Rachel on picket line at Paramount that I get very intimidated by your ability to spontaneously speak so eloquently. She’s like, “You know he was a national debate champion.” I’m like, “I did not know he was a national debate champion.”

**Chris:** Do you know why you didn’t know that?

**John:** Because you don’t talk about it?

**Chris:** Because I wasn’t the national debate champion.

**John:** You debated on an international stage, as we just heard.

**Chris:** I did, periodically. I think it’s probably a 10,000 hours thing, whether that’s true or not. It’s just a skill you end up developing.

**John:** Here I was. You’re a professional athlete. I was saying, “Why can I not play basketball as well as Chris Keyser can?” It’s like, oh, because that’s something he does.

**Chris:** That’s like Scotty Pippen saying, “Why can’t I play basketball like Michael Jordan?” You do fine. You’re okay. I don’t mean to say I’m like Michael Jordan. That sounded obnoxious. I was trying to compliment you, not myself. Very careful of these things.

**John:** Roll back the tape here and see what you actually said. Talk to me about how you teach a fifth grader debate or a high schooler debate. What is the fundamental structure that you’re learning as you’re learning to debate? Is it about how to put together an argument and supporting arguments? Is it about the literal performance aspect of it? What are the things that are crucial for debaters to learn?

**Chris:** All of that stuff. Those topics are often announced in advance. It depends on the format of debate. There are a lot of different ones. I did policy. There’s Lincoln-Douglas. I coached in middle school parliamentary debate. The first part of it is research. It’d be a little bit like paralleling our negotiations. It’s the months we spent trying to figure out what our position was going to be and what the world suggests and understanding it from both sides, knowing what somebody else might say, and generating arguments that may work and understanding the power of arguments and how to answer them. Then it’s about being in a debate round itself and under the pressure of having to listen and take notes and understand what the other side is saying and respond immediately.

I’m just picking a few things out, because it’s too long of a conversation, but there are lessons that I think you learn in debate if you do well, one of which is don’t shy away from the places where you’re vulnerable. Lean into where you’re vulnerable. You can’t be silent on that stuff. All the stuff that we are talking about in this labor action, about preempting other arguments, understanding where our weaknesses are, trying to figure out what the other side might say, that all is well practiced in debate.

There are some kinds of debate where performance matters a lot, where eloquence matters. But there are some forms of debate where it doesn’t at all. It’s just about the very quick application of arguments and being able to cover all of them and understand all the nuances. I did different kinds of debate, and it gave me different skills. Some of them are about picking up on that stuff and generating arguments and answering arguments. Some of them are about convincing other people. I went to law school afterward. People who know me probably make fun of me about this, but I end up then thinking about writing scripts as making emotional arguments.

**John:** I want to tie that in. To what degree is screenwriting in general related to debate? How useful is that as a skill? Obviously, you’re anticipating there’s a dialogue between two people, that the people are going to come into a scene or a moment with opposing opinions, and then one person’s going to win the other one over, or at least reach an understanding. How does it apply?

**Chris:** I don’t think of it quite that way. I think running a show has something to do with organizational principles and beating out series and the structure that’s required in a screenplay or a television script are all related to that. In some sense, not to overstate it, it’s all like debate.

It’s got that element of poetry in the sense that you’ve got to be as efficient as you possibly can. Debate is all about time limitations and getting as much in as you possibly can do. You need to know in some ways the precise, right number of words and exact words to use in the moment. I don’t think of it that way. Getting to the heart of something I think is much more what I say it applies, is to think not that you have to approach it in the obvious way. You don’t want to write the scene that everyone expects. No one’s looking to me for advice on how to write right now. But I think that’s it. In debate, arguments have inherent power. They have weight. You have to know what that weight is. The same thing is true, in some ways, in writing. It’s like, where’s the weight?

**John:** I was a journalism major and essentially was advertising. It is that ruthless efficiency, like how do you get this down to an idea that people can grasp so clearly? Style and presentation, all that stuff matters a lot, but if you don’t have that central core idea, the whole thing doesn’t land. It doesn’t work. People respond to that core idea more than anything else.

**Chris:** Right. But for me, I continued to do it more because I thought for kids that the ability to think clearly and to appreciate both sides of an argument, to listen really well and to feel confident in your own point of view matters. That’s why I think I probably focus more on debaters who are entering into adolescence and right at the cusp of that, because that’s when that becomes particularly important.

**John:** How objective is the judging, scoring of debate?

**Chris:** It’s subjective.

**John:** It’s subjective.

**Chris:** Subjective. That’s, by the way, the other thing that’s really good about debate. You lose a lot. You lose sometimes for reasons that are not fair, and you have to deal with all of it. John Meany is the head of the middle school public debate program that I worked under. He always said, “Human communication is imprecise and fallible, and you have to learn to live with that.” You have to learn to live with taking your audience as you find them and convincing them of what they can understand when. By the way, it goes back again to what you and I and everyone else did in this strike, is that you can believe whatever you want, but unless the people to whom you are speaking perceive that, it doesn’t really matter.

**John:** It matters much less what you say versus what they’re hearing, what they’re actually taking in. If you’re not getting through to them, it doesn’t count.

**Chris:** Right. Academic debate is fairer than politics, where no one listens to anybody, it doesn’t really matter, and no one changes their mind from where they started. But it’s full of uncertainty.

**John:** Excellent.

**Chris:** That’s the way it is. Anyway, I love doing that, and I haven’t done it for a little while, because I got pulled back.

**John:** You’ve been busy doing things.

**Chris:** I’ve been a little bit busy. It was really great. It was a great way to do something with my son. We had lots of kids of that generation.

**John:** Chris, thank you.

Links:

* [Chris Keyser’s speech to members at the start of negotiations](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Member-Rap-22.0.pdf)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 389 – The Future of the Industry](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-future-of-the-industry)
* [One Revolution Per Minute](https://erikwernquist.com/one-revolution-per-minute) by Erik Wernquist
* [American Dream](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099028/) on IMDb
* Christopher Keyser on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Chris Keyser at The Oxford Union Society vs. The Harvard Debate Council, 1982](https://youtu.be/mS2Zi6u95pg?si=L_R7ZdlXIH_dih_3&t=2283)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/614standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/dialogue-and-character-voice).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 609 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is a clip show, but I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how we got to this clip show. So often, these clip shows come out of work we’re doing in the office on other things. This stemmed from a conversation we were having yesterday.

Chris Csont, who does our newsletter, is working on an issue about dialogue and character voice. It started a whole conversation about the difference between a writer’s character voice and what the actor brings to that voice. Drew, you had actually had some research before this, because you guys were working on chapters about this for the book.

**Drew Marquardt:** Yeah, our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, was putting together a chapter on writing dialogue, and this conversation started ringing some bells, so went back and looked through it and found some really wonderful gems to talk about character voice and writing for actors.

**John:** In any of these clip shows, we’re traveling through time. We have 10 years of Scriptnotes. Which episodes are you plucking from here?

**Drew:** We’re starting with Episode 37, which was ages ago. It’s very fun to hear you guys and how you’ve changed. We’re talking there about the four general rules of character voice. Then we’re going to go up to Episode 286, where we’re going to talk about the history of dialogue and expand on the idea of character voice. Then Episode 371, where Craig, who had started acting at that point, was talking about what makes dialogue easy to memorize. Then we move to how to make sure you’re doing right by all the characters in a scene and keeping everyone engaged.

**John:** Fantastic. For our Premium members, what kind of Bonus Segment will they get at the end?

**Drew:** We’re going to look at Episode 470 on dual dialogue, which is really fun.

**John:** That’s great. Drew, thank you so much for putting this clip show together. We look forward to coming back with hopefully a normal episode next week.

**Drew:** Definitely.

**John:** Thanks. Enjoy.

Episode 37 clip:

**John:** And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.

**Craig:** Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.

**John:** Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are some times where… There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again, I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that, you don’t really care about him.

And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error. I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. They write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.

**John:** Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem. You already hit on my next thing, which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.

**Craig:** Aha, I read your mind.

**John:** You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny, and so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome. It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.

**Craig:** Some people will say that there are highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies, you realize that he actually is crafting… Yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.

Sorkin is another one who… It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.

**John:** Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Those characters are very specific and very unique.

**Craig:** That’s a good example.

**John:** Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point, is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is, is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing?

And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.

At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.

**Craig:** No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”

Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.

I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?

**John:** No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.

**Craig:** No radio plays.

**John:** In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together, and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know, so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” I know. You don’t have to tell me. The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.

**John:** Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is one I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.

**Craig:** And a lovely woman.

**John:** And a lovely woman. During the strike, our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”

And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny, because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way. What is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations, how they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”

And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. Use that. Scenes are all, to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. Allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.

**John:** Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this, can you picture a given actor in the role, or at least preclude certain actors from the role, because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things? And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably not.

**John:** Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was appropriately-

**John:** But it’s not telling a joke funny.

**Craig:** No, it was sort of clipped and wry, which is…

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** She has a great arched brow. It’s funny, when you think about doing impressions. I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. She can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.

I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble, and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing, because it goes counter to the normal thing, which is the rambler is the weak one, and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.

But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with, because it just made those scenes more interesting to me.

And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed… I mean, language is music, and you should be musical about it, I think.

**John:** The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past like, it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors, like, oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.

Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice, because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.

It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who could ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.

Episode 286 clip:

**John:** I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously, human beings have been speaking for our entire existence. That’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case.

And so I was thinking back to what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story, and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.

But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.

And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton, where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays, so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand-year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.

**John:** Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s less of that sort of back and forth.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.

**John:** Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is, as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way, because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.

Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue, is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot, and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form.

**Craig:** It’s very strange, because the cards, they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.

**John:** Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air.

And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.

**Craig:** It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.

And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to, famously, some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.

Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well, because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue.

There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial, because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process.

Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre, where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information, so you can get it out to the audience.

**Craig:** And prior to a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free, for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television, which dominated all television, was highly bifurcated, trifurcated, quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, they had missed it, or they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. People were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.

**John:** Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.

When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.

**Craig:** That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. They always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship.

I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us, but they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.

**John:** It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next.

I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it.” I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, okay, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you. There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words, it’s For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out.

And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers, and as a screenwriter, how to be aware of those things. I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.

So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that and sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”

**Craig:** Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation.

So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about… Everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear. It is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.

So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically, I use that in the wrong sense, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.

**John:** Yep. We talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. An example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” That “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it, it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.

**Craig:** Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.

**Craig:** We’ll call it the affirmative no. Sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something. I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.

**John:** A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “Okay, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.” Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a–

**John:** But that “and” is really helpful, because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful, and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.

**Craig:** I think sometimes when educational therapists… There’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous.

But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.” And some people need to be taught these things.

**John:** Talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we, meaning humans or characters, speak, and if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.

The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I’ll just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive or informative or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies, sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated.

This we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way, when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode, which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.

**John:** There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment, and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. The moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.

**Craig:** Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap, where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation.

Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in, what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful… There’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments, because they are so remarkable. You know, Yoda is always declarative. But when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake, and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.

**John:** Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave… Oh and interesting, I just used “by the way,” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and then it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment, with how they feel. Without putting their finger on it, what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.

Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person.

And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.

**John:** Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.

That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now, not like how it functioned historically. But what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character, but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.

It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting, because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.

**Craig:** Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be… We’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.

Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment, reacting to the world around them, reacting to the feelings inside of them, and most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once, and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene.

And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.

You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional, and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible, you do want that mismatch, because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights. Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.

**John:** Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.

Episode 371 clip:

**John:** Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.

But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day, new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on, and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.

And I had an opportunity to do that. And so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.

And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered, that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end, someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate, which is when do you say it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends, because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part, you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things: the relationships between different words and what I call, what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?

**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially, we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages, and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they can reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you, and single digits, and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now. You didn’t write it down. You can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.

**John:** Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning, that would be very simple.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands.

So for instance, chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small, whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them, because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces in relationship, it’s sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.

**John:** It’s a pattern.

**Craig:** It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored, essentially.

So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal, or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word. So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?

**John:** Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything, it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.

**Craig:** Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line, but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it.

So, for instance, here’s something that, the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the … “ Every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in. You’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff, and there’s nothing anchoring it together.

The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing, so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.

**John:** Yeah. So classically, dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you to pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” okay, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says, “Take a look at this,” and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember, because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.

And similarly, as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue, there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built-in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words, but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases, but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign, because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign, and you chunk a larger bit together.

And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting. Odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just… This is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”

Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word “just” to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point, because just is kind of the anchoring word, because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. “But if it hurts it’s odd in,” all single-syllable words.

It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things, and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance, “This is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this.” Okay, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except “this is the third time” is kind of… Your brain starts to–

**John:** It’s annoying. It’s not that hard. It’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the “this” and “third” are not the same TH.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that also messes you up. I want to get back to your moving the “just.” I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way, without the “just” there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place. And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.

**Craig:** Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong, or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.

They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform, and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier, I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word “just” should be placed in that sentence, it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.

So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization, and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.

**John:** So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. That running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies, weirdly, it just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.

When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.

Make sure the words mean something to you, that you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare. She had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And you can just spout the words out, but if you don’t actually understand what they mean, the scene is not going to really work, and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words, because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.

And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking. It’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously, you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line, because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.

So it’s not just a ping-pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in the end, when you learn your part of a conversation, you have to learn their part too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least. Part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.

**John:** Yeah. Being surprised by what you said, that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So would your characters in the scene, and so will you as an actor. So, it’s okay to let the mental wheels spin a little bit, to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them, these things are always… I think they’re very helpful to consider.

And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl, he’s wordy. He’s a scientist, and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going, it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.

**John:** My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar, that are in different parts of the scene, that messes them up. If they were completely different lines, it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves, but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing, or at least in the execution, because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, okay, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.

**John:** Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.

Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service in it. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene, when they don’t have a lot to actually do.

And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because, Craig, I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there, because they have to listen to something happen. And they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen. And yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.

**John:** And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot.

So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this, that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene, because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.

So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene, even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors, because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be, because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.

So, that’s kind of the thing. When you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.

**John:** I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men, because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this, where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.

**Craig:** I can’t get over sporting championships.

**John:** Sporting championships. Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.

**Craig:** I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questron.

**John:** I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games and sporting matches.

**Craig:** You’re like, “When writing sporting championships.” Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.

**John:** But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence, and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough.

Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character. This is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now. You have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking. So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.

So, for me, what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. That’s making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene, rather than having them do individual things.

I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be, so that in cutting to them around the space, we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?

Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it, I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl, and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials, it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.

But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, okay, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s “I’m watching,” then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be “I’m watching,” because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching, actively listening.

**John:** Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there, who had to watch or witness part of it, still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.

**Craig:** Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over, and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer.

So when I write those scenes, I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go, “I have to stop this,” or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.

This is frankly, no offense to our director brothers and sisters, but this is so important for us to do as writers, because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, okay, let’s just grab reaction shots now. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene, understanding that they are not covering one narrative here, but multiple narratives.

It’s really important that we do this on the page, because if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.

**John:** Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script, if I am worried that people are going to miss it, because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy, and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.

And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore it and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting, where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep, they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial, that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.

**Craig:** Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like, given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have, that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.

**John:** Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That concludes our clip show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and featured segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonald, and Megana Rao, the whole murderers row of former Scriptnotes producers.

It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli, a classic of his. 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. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

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[Bonus Segment]

Episode 470 clip:

**John:** All right, let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue, because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it, which is not something I often do. We’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.

**Craig:** It is a little bit of a trap, because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue, it will make things look realer.

The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going, “Oh my god, I have to actually, we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically.” This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love, we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue, and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page, often that’s not how you do it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table, and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there, listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.

Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are, and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping, for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody.

But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other, with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other, and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way, I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs. If you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.

**Craig:** And when you are there, you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text from a playwright and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible, whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer, as opposed to a play.

So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized, whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read …

**John:** It’s brutal to read.

**Craig:** … I’ll say, on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue, your eyelids will get heavy.

**John:** Yeah, because you have to make the choice of, okay, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.

**Craig:** It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, you’re asking something there. When you use it, know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 37 – Let’s talk about dialogue](https://johnaugust.com/2012/dialogue)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 286 – Script Doctors, Dialogue and Hacks](https://johnaugust.com/2017/script-doctors-dialogue-and-hacks)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 371 – Writing Memorable Dialogue](https://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-memorable-dialogue)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, featuring segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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