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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/creating-a-tv-comedy).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today on the show we have some clips with some bad words in them, so if you don’t want your kids to hear those words maybe listen to this one on headphones.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 508 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I could not get our schedules to sync up this week, but lucky for all of us we have a remarkable replacement in the form of Jen Statsky. She’s a writer-producer whose credits include Broad City, Parks and Rec, The Good Place, and my previous One Cool Thing Hacks, a series which she co-created. Welcome Jen.

**Jen Statsky:** Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

**John:** I’m so excited to have you here. So we’ve not really met in person I don’t think, maybe at a WGA thing?

**Jen:** Maybe at a WGA thing. But I think this might be our first in-person meeting.

**John:** It very well could be. So on Twitter I congratulated you on your show, but I think we probably retweeted the same things in the past, but that’s about as much as we’ve done together.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** Well today on the show I want to talk about how you got started and particularly how you got started in comedy because that’s a thing I know nothing about. And then I really want to dig into the form of single camera comedy, because Hacks is just great and Hacks and Broad City are both single camera comedies, but they’re very different. And I want to talk about writing those, writing towards act breaks, writing without act breaks.

**Jen:** Sure.

**John:** And we have the pages in front of us, so we have some scenes. So I really want to get very specific if we can.

**Jen:** I love it. Let’s get into it.

**John:** And you know who else has questions? Our listeners. I put out a call to the premium subscribers and they sent in 130 questions about comedy that Megana has sorted through. So, we will not 130.

**Jen:** Let’s do them. Let’s hit them all.

**John:** All of them. We’re going to knock them all out.

**Jen:** 130 questions.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for premium members I want to talk through the cat person discourse, so cat person which is that short story that everyone is talking about years ago, well now there’s an update to that, so I want to get your take on that.

**Jen:** It’s so funny that we are once again reliving cat person on Twitter. It’s all come full circle from 2017.

**John:** Yeah. I feel like there’s people who were in a coma all this time and they wake up and we’re still talking about cat person.

**Jen:** On one end of a global pandemic there’s cat person discourse, and on the other end of the global pandemic there’s cat person discourse.

**John:** It gets into those questions about like who owns a story. And we’re all sort of drawing from real life, especially writers. And I’ve run into situations where an event will happen and it’s like, oh, do I get that event, or do you get that event?

**Jen:** Exactly. I know. It’s a super nuanced conversation about art and who owns certain life things that have happened to people. So it is a really interesting conversation.

**John:** Cool. Two little bits of news and follow up to start with. First off, the WGA put out this pilot deal guide, which was kind of cool. So coming out of the agency agreement we now get all the contracts, and so we can see everybody’s contract and we can see how much people are getting paid for their deals, not just as writers but also as producers, and how much they’re getting paid to write pilots. And so they have all this information. The guild looked through 700 pilot deals from 2020 and 2021 to see what the averages were.

Jen, were there any surprises in here for you?

**Jen:** No, no real surprises. I mean, I think it’s so helpful to have this information out there. I’m just so delighted that the guild did this because you know so much of what happens is people get kept in the dark about what other people are getting paid. And in doing that it allows studios and networks to have all the power, because we’re not talking. We don’t know what our counterparts are making. And so just to have this information out there is I think wonderful.

I remember when the guild was asking for people’s contracts I had a couple of friends reach out and be like, hey, is it OK to send them this. And it’s like yeah it’s to help us, it’s not for nefarious purposes that the Writers Guild wants to look at your contracts. It’s all in the name of the information being out there and just being super helpful and give writers a stronger place to be in for negotiations.

**John:** Yeah. So if you have an agent or manager or lawyer getting your deal, great, they should have some of this information. They should have a sense of what this is. But this is a chance for a writer to say like, OK, this is above the median, this is below the median. If it’s below the median, why is it below the median? There could be a good reason. I mean, half of writers are going to get paid more. So, there could be a reason why you’re below median. But it’s helpful to understand. And if there’s a reason that you can solve about this, great.

**Jen:** Totally. Were there any surprises to you in looking at it?

**John:** I was happy to see that there were changes from 2019. So that a pilot script went up $17,500. That’s great.

**Jen:** That’s great.

**John:** And so that’s progress people are making. And the split between one hours and half hours is also good. So you deal for Hacks, was it a streamer at that point? Was it clear that it was always going to be something that was made without commercials and made for not a cable?

**Jen:** Yeah. It was always – the idea was always to go to the cable streaming places. Like we didn’t really ever entertain pitching this to networks. I and Mike Schur under overall deals at Universal Television, so it started out – we pitched to Universal and then kind of going from there we plotted out where we were going to take the show. But, yeah, in the very early iterations as Paul – my co-creators Paul Downs and Lucia Aniello and I were talking about this idea. We just always knew it had to be for streaming or cable. It’s just baked into the idea.

**John:** Great. So we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but it talks through sort of what broadcast network and streamer deals are like and you can see where things are at right now. And the good news is that it’ll keep going forward. So each year they’ll be able to put up an update to see what progress is being made, or if stuff is retrenching at all.

A bit of follow up here. Two episodes ago we talked about getting fired. Phil in LA wrote in. Megana could you tell us what Phil said?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. So Phil wrote in and said, “I listened to Episode 506 where you discussed how to handle being fired. While bad communication isn’t limited to screenwriting, it doesn’t need to be the practice. In Episode 399, Notes on Notes, instead of accepting the status quo on notes you and Craig created a program to help producers learn to give better notes and fix communication issues. The same could be done on this issue as well. And industry build on relationships and communication needs a bedrock of respect. And important moments like firing need to have established norms.”

**John:** Yeah. My daughter just applied for her first job. She’s a high schooler. And so she applied for her first job and she keeps asking like when do you think they’re going to tell me if I got the job or didn’t get the job. And I’m like they’re never going to tell you.

**Jen:** Oh, you’ll never know. I’m still waiting to find out if I got a job at Jimmy Kimmel from a packet I submitted in 2008. So, you just never know.

**John:** Well you’re in a position now to hire people, or to fire people if you need to. So, what are some things that you’re thinking about in terms of communication outward with people that are either under your employ or want to be under your employ?

**Jen:** It’s a good question. I mean, I think when it comes to hiring, and especially firing, there are just difficult conversations that you have to have. And with the privilege of getting to be a showrunner, getting to be a show creator, getting to be the boss you are also taking on the responsibility of having difficult conversations. And so I think you can’t shy away from that. I think you have to say, OK, if this person is being let go we’re not just going to do it in an unethical way where we don’t treat them like a human being. We’re going to have a conversation.

And so it’s about being a human being and just treating that person like a human being and saying, OK, this is going to be a difficult conversation and it’s probably not what I want to do with my day to day, but I at least owe this to someone to talk to them about it.

**John:** Well from a writer perspective the golden rule really applies. You know what it would feel like to be ghosted or to be fired in a bad way. We can understand what that’s like. And so even though we may not be trained as managers, which is a whole separate issue, we do have a sense of what it feels like to be the writer who is not getting the full information. And so just being honest with the person and just being thoughtful and human with the person seems to be great progress.

**Jen:** I listened to you guys talk about it and as someone who works primarily in TV, not in features, I knew this as a fact but it is so fascinating that in features it does seem like you have to get so much more used to being fired than in television. Like in television, you know, maybe you work on a show for a season and they don’t ask you back, but even that doesn’t totally feel like firing. It feels like in features it’s a much more common occurrence that people have not figured out how to handle well still.

**John:** Talk to me about not being asked back. Because that is a different thing than being fired. And it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as being dropped off of something.

**Jen:** No, not at all. You know, I have friends who have run rooms and they’ve not asked people back the next season and it’s never necessarily because, oh, that person was bad and didn’t work. Sometimes you’re just like oh you know what going forward we found that the tone of the show is way more dramatic than we thought and so we’re going to try to hire some people with more experience in drama for example. And so that really just becomes looking at every single, the makeup of your writer’s room, who do you need, what are you feeling you need more of, what direction is the story headed, and who can help you serve that?

So a lot of times I think if someone doesn’t get asked back, like yeah sure there are situations where it was just a bad fit and that person didn’t gel with the room, but it doesn’t – like you said, it doesn’t have the same stigma. It’s not quite the same as being fired and told like, OK, you’re not doing this job again on Monday basically.

**John:** It also strikes me that with so many shows being done in mini rooms are being entirely written before anything is being shot, there’s not that same expectation that you’re going to be coming back season after season on a show. Because those people will not be available necessarily. So you’re just kind of assembling a team for one heist.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And then you go off again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Like there’s so many shows now, so many opportunities. So you can’t really expect – like we have some wonderful writers who wrote on season one of Hacks, but they might get their own. They’re doing their own stuff. They might get a pilot. They might not be available for that reason. Yeah, it’s very much so one heist at a time, one season at a time.

**John:** Let’s talk about the staffing up on a show. So, this is a good transition between your role as a showrunner now versus when you were first starting up. You mentioned that you had submitted a packet to Jimmy Kimmel. What were your first jobs in the industry? What were your first attempts at writing in the industry? Because you were an intern also, correct?

**Jen:** Yeah. So long before I worked I was a kid who just was like obsessed with television. Reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite was like that’s what raised me. Because my parents kind of kicked the can down the road on that one. And so I was obsessed with television from a very young age. I didn’t really know that it was a job someone could do until maybe towards the end of high school. And then I realized like, OK, it seems like NYU has a very good film and TV program. I’m going to apply there. And I got in. And I studied film and TV there.

I went through the film and TV program which is actually more for directors, but pretty quickly learned that I did not like directing and only wanted to be a writer. And so at NYU the thing that was an incredible privilege of being at NYU was that you’re in the city during the school year so you can apply for these internships that people at other colleges can really only do during their summer breaks. So my senior year I interned at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Saturday Night Live. Kind of found myself in this insane situation where I was going to 30 Rock six out of seven days a week as a 21-year-old because I was able to do, yeah, three days at Conan, three days at SNL, which was an incredible learning experience.

It was actually 2007, so it was an incredible learning experience which was then cut short because of the writers’ strike. So I got to also see how all of that stuff was going down.

**John:** Tell me like it was an incredible learning experience because they had set it up to be, or because you were doing something that you actually – were you being entrepreneurial about your learning there?

**Jen:** Kind of a combination. They definitely were very kind people who I think wanted interns to learn from being there. But I lucked into a very specific role at Saturday Night Live which was I was a photography intern, which made no sense because I have absolutely no photography skills whatsoever. But that’s just the department I ended up in. And in being a photography intern you are tasked with going down – at least this was how it was in 2007, I don’t know if it still is now – but we were tasked with going down on the floor and taking photographs of the dress rehearsal, like on the Friday, the day before the show on Saturday. And so I had like this firsthand front row view of the sketches being worked out, the actors running through them, the writers whose sketches it were being on the floor, figuring stuff out, what works, what didn’t.

And that was just so incredibly fascinating. So it was kind of a combo. Any time you’re in an environment like that hopefully your eyes are wide open. You’re listening and you’re just trying to take in as much as you can to learn. And then I also kind of lucked out with the position I got.

**John:** That’s great. So you were there to see the tension of sort of like these are the sketches we think are going to work. These are the tweaks we’re making. Just all of the stuff that gets cut.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And you’re seeing the writers trying to save their things along the way.

**Jen:** Exactly. And just seeing firsthand what a high pressure environment it is. I mean, it’s been well documented, but that show it’s like really crazy that you are under that kind of time limit. And there’s a gun to your head and it’s like, OK, the show happens Saturday, figure it out. You’ve got to write 12 sketches or whatever it is. And they need to be done by Saturday by 11:30 and it’s Tuesday or whatever. And so that was also just kind of a good intro into realizing like, oh yeah, a lot of these TV writing jobs are super high pressure and can be really intense.

**John:** Were those writers on the show talking with you? I mean, I guess you were the photography intern at SNL, so you weren’t probably interfacing so directly with them. But something like Conan O’Brien did you have a role of actually working with them?

**Jen:** Yeah. SNL was like you said I was more in the photo department for that. But I remember at Conan there’s a long term Conan writer, I think he might be at Colbert now, this guy Brian Stack who is just the funniest, loveliest man and he would always come into the bullpen where the interns were and talk to us and say like how are you guys doing, and any questions we had we were able to ask. So like, yeah, you did mingle with the writers there a lot, which was amazing, because you’re getting to see the people doing what you hopefully – what you want to be doing. And so that was a great experience, too.

**John:** So you come out of these internships and NYU with a degree, but also hopefully some writing samples? What were you trying to do next after this experience?

**Jen:** I knew that I wanted to work in comedy. But I wasn’t quite sure what lane I wanted to pursue. And by that I mean I was taking classes at UCB. I was taking improv classes. I was taking sketch writing classes. I had some half-hour samples that I had written at NYU. But I was also doing standup. And that’s kind of an interesting thing about comedy is that there’s so many – if you are like I want to write movies, you’re like I’m writing movies. But if you’re more broadly like I know I’m interested in comedy and I want to work in comedy there are a bunch of different kind of paths you can dabble with.

And so I was doing a bunch of that and pretty quickly like the things that I was having no fun doing I realized like, OK, that’s not for me. I’m not meant to be a standup. That’s not going to happen. And so the way it happened that I got my first actual job in the industry is that when the writers’ strike happened and so SNL and Conan kind of shut down and didn’t really need interns for a bit there was a satirical newspaper called The Onion which I’m sure people are super familiar with.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Jen:** Which was like a huge touchpoint for me comedically. Like one of my first big comedic influence was The Onion. I just loved it. And I spent my last semester at NYU interning there because they at the time were doing web videos based on Onion headlines and articles. And so I worked there at The Onion and then as I graduated I just got a job in a coffee shop because had rent to pay and wasn’t sure the exact path I was going to take to make it in comedy.

But my two bosses there at the time, Will Graham and Julie Smith, they were tasked with running shows – The Onion did a show for Comedy Central and then they did a show for IFC. And these shows were happening at the exact same time, which was pretty crazy. And so they offered me a job of being their assistant and I took it. And so that was my first kind of real TV production experience.

**John:** These internships were clearly so important for you because you met the people who both inspired you but also gave you a job. So what advice do you have in sort of pursuing one of those internships and how do you land one and how do you make the most of it if you’re in one of those spots?

**Jen:** I think that’s a great question. You really just can’t underestimate what it means to be a kind, good person who seems happy to be there, which sounds like the most simple advice in the world, but I think sometimes people forget it. I think like treat those opportunities like they’re really great opportunities and work hard. And I think you will reap the benefits of it. It’s also a tricky thing because even in the ten or so, 13 years since I was doing that we’re having more conversations about what is free labor, are these internships totally ethical? So I also understand that you might find yourself in a situation where you’re like am I being taken advantage of.

But hopefully in a situation like mine was where I was being compensated in the form of school credit and I was treated with respect. I was able to I think work really hard and be available and engaged with the people I was working for and serve their needs and learn from them. And I think it led them to be like, OK, maybe she’s someone we should bring on in a more fulltime capacity.

**John:** What was the first thing you were hired to write, that you were paid to write for film or TV?

**Jen:** So the first thing I was paid to write freelance was actually Onion headlines. While being an assistant there I wanted to also be writing and so I asked if I could submit headline. And Megan Ganz actually who is a very talented writer who co-created Mythic Quest on Apple, she was an editor at The Onion at the time. And so I submitted to her and she gave me such helpful notes on why this headline works, why that one didn’t, and all this. And she kind of guided me through that.

**John:** Talk to me about an Onion headline. Because I have a sense of what it is, but it’s hard to break down specifically what it is. But is it really the order of words?

**Jen:** That can be one part of it, right? Like, oh, this needs to be more succinct. There’s too many words here. You can cut these ones out. Other times it would be like just the general premise of the idea. It’s like I kind of get the observation you’re going for here but it’s not clicking for me. Things like that. And then I eventually got hired as a freelance Onion headline writer. And so that was every week you submit Onion headlines and they send back, OK, here’s the 40 we picked and your initial would be next to yours if yours made it in. And then you don’t even know if they’re going to use them, but those are at least these the ones they’ve culled down they’ve picked that they’ve liked.

And then if they did eventually use them I think you got a $25 check in the mail. So that was my first freelance job, which again I loved because I just loved The Onion so much and I felt so grateful to be getting to write for it.

And then my first fulltime staff job was writing monologue jokes at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

**John:** So that was a job you probably went through a packet process?

**Jen:** Yes. That was a packet process. I was lucky enough to get a manager through a UCB class I took. The teacher very nicely said, “Oh I think my friend who is a manager would like your stuff, can I pass it along to her?” And he did. And to this day she’s still my manager. So through that I started submitting packets to late night shows. And, yeah, did a bunch of those that I am pretty sure I didn’t get the job for because I never worked at those shows.

**John:** In all those cases you’re submitting – you or your manager are putting this in and you just never hear back? For all you know they’re just going into a void?

**Jen:** Oh, you never, ever hear. Basically like, OK, SNL is looking for sketch packets. Conan is looking for monologue joke packets. And so you just do it and you send it out into the world and, yeah, you typically don’t hear.

I remember the monologue one for Fallon, it was like a weeklong, almost challenge or something. You would every night get sent premises and then you would have to send in your jokes either later that night or by the next morning. And you did that for like four days.

**John:** And you’re not getting paid for that.

**Jen:** No, you’re getting absolutely no money for that.

**John:** That’s why the WGA sort of stepped in there and said like, OK, you have to limit that.

**Jen:** Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it’s a good question. I’ve been out of the late night game for so long now. What is the situation with packets now?

**John:** So, here’s what happened. Both on the east, but also some on the west, we were getting these complaints about, OK, this has just become abusive. They’re asking for just tremendous amounts of just free labor to do these things. And even if that stuff is not making it into show, it’s just abusive.

**Jen:** It’s not cool.

**John:** It’s not cool at all. And so there are limits to sort of how much they can ask. And trying to get some standardization of like what packets really mean, so that you can theoretically submit a packet to more than one place, so it’s not all specific work to this. And if there’s real research involved at some point they have to pay you for like those later rounds, because some of these shows were having round after round after round you have to go through.

**Jen:** So crazy. Yeah. So unnecessary to make people jump through those hoops.

**John:** And it was clear when you talked to some of the people who were hiring it’s like they were just doing it because they were doing it. And it wasn’t actually helpful in their process.

**Jen:** Yes. That’s one of those things. And I do feel like in the late night world this happens even more than in half hour of like ways of doing things just get calcified and people go, “But it’s just because it’s the way it’s done. That’s how we do it.” Even on SNL they still stay up all night writing when I don’t know that that necessarily needs to be the process. It’s so good that the guild got involved to challenge these ideas of like, yeah, just because it’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean it’s actually cool to be doing to people.

**John:** Yeah. So it sounds like you knew in the general sense you wanted to write comedy, but you decided I’m going to try all the things and then decide from those things which things are not my things. So standup was not your thing.

**Jen:** Standup was not my thing. I am really not a performer. It is not where I shine.

**John:** So UCB was learning sketch writing.

**Jen:** Yes, UCB was sketch writing, which I liked OK, but I still wasn’t great at. And so what happened actually was around this time, I guess this was probably now 2010, before Twitter became a hell scape it was a place where people were just writing stupid jokes. And in a really cool way it kind of democratized comedy writing a little bit because anyone could just write a funny joke. And if it was funny enough a ton of people would see it and get retweeted. And a lot of people made their careers by doing that, which was cool.

And so I joined Twitter in like 2010 and started just kind of writing little one-liner jokes, which like I said there were things I wasn’t great at. I wasn’t great at standup. I wasn’t great at sketch. But I found that one-liner jokes I had a lot of fun writing those. And so I always tell people when they’re starting out in comedy like kind of follow the fun. The thing you’re having the most fun doing is probably the thing you’re best at.

So I just was doing that on Twitter and what’s funny is I had submitted – like I said I had submitted to Fallon many times. I had done that week-long challenge of sending jokes in every night, not getting any sleep, and never hearing back. But what happened was is A.D. Miles, the head writer at that time, learned of me through Twitter and then just sent me a direct message being like, “Hey, do you want to submit a packet for Fallon?” Which I was like, yes, of course, even though what I could have said is, “Yeah, I’ve done it hundreds of times. Just hire me off one of those.”

But they were actually looking for sketch writers at the time, so I had to a sketch packet. Got hired off of that. And then though quickly again since sketch is not really my strong suit I started also – even though it’s divided into up into sketch and monologue writers at that show, or at least it was when I was there, anyone is allowed to submit monologue jokes. You can just send them in.

So I started doing that and getting a decent amount on. And then it kind of became apparent, oh, this is more your skill set. We’re going to move you over to here. And then I became a permanent monologue joke writer for the rest of my time there.

**John:** What I hear you saying is that you didn’t go in saying this is exactly the kind of writer I am. You actually sort of discovered and you just tried a bunch of things. And then winnowed out the things that didn’t work. And so if people are listening to this at home who say, oh, I want to write comedy, maybe take a broad approach to what kind of comedy you’re writing and see where your natural strengths are.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Rather than assuming I’m the person who is going to write this exact show.

**Jen:** Exactly. I think that when I started, you know, growing up, even though I loved – like Mary Tyler Moore was, again, a huge influence, I also loved SNL. And I think a big part of me was like oh I’m going to be a sketch writer for Saturday Night Live. That’s what I want to do. And I think if I had just tried to like force myself into that it would have been a much tougher path because, again, I don’t think my natural skill set, I don’t think sketch writing is something that I’m great at. And so by trying a bunch of different things and allowing myself to go, right, I’m having the most fun doing this thing, let me follow that, I think that’s the thing I’m best at, it allowed me to find what my path was.

And so, yeah, I think anyone starting out, especially in comedy when there are so many different ways to approach it, I think give yourself the freedom to try a bunch of stuff, and be bad at some of it. And just because you’re bad at one part of comedy writing doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other parts. You know?

**John:** Now, what’s the segue from Fallon to writing for shows, writing for Broad City, writing for Parks and Rec? What was the step in there?

**Jen:** So I was at Fallon for about 2.5 years, which I always say felt like 20.5. Not because of the people there. They’re lovely. But because monologue joke writing is so grueling. You basically – I think every morning by 11:30 in the morning I would have to have like five pages of monologue jokes written, something like that. And let me be clear. Most of them bad. They’re not good. It’s not a good five pages. But still you’re expected to produce this volume of stuff. And it’s all based on the news. And it really – I think the people who can do it forever, like I truly tip my cap to them, because it’s really challenging and it’s really hard. And especially as the world seems to be getting darker and darker it’s hard to write topical jokes based on the news. That really, really weighed on me after a while and I was gone in 2013.

So I really appreciated the job there because – I say it was comedy writing boot camp because I just had to produce so much material every single day. But pretty like towards the end of my time there, like the last year, I realized I think I want to tell longer stories. I want to explore writing for characters and characters that have arcs and just get into that. So I knew that half hour was the place I wanted to be.

And so I made the decision to just leave. I didn’t have my next job lined up, which I remember at the time people were like why are you doing this. But sometimes I think you just have to force yourself to make the move. So I left Fallon. My then boyfriend at the time, now husband, we moved across the country. Came to LA. I wrote a spec of, wow, this is going to date me. I wrote a spec Happy Endings. Do you remember that how?

**John:** It’s a good show.

**Jen:** Yeah, I loved Happy Endings. Very funny show. So I wrote a spec for that and that was my sample, because I think even back then half hour people were looking more for specs than original pilots. And, yeah, I got hired. My first half hour job was actually the show Hello Ladies, on HBO, which was co-created by Stephen Merchant and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky. So that was my first half hour experience.

But that was a pretty short – it was like an eight-episode HBO show. One of those shows where you kind of are going to write everything in preproduction and then they’re going to go off and make it. And so towards the end of my time in that writer’s room I also came to know Mike Schur via Twitter. And he I guess, yeah, liked jokes I had written there. And then I think he read my spec, but I honestly think he also hired me based off of Twitter and just meeting me and being like, all right, she’s not a total crazy person.

**John:** So that was for Parks and Rec?

**Jen:** That was for Parks and Rec.

**John:** And again these are very joke dense shows. These are things where there’s expectation that there’s going to be a joke every 10, 15 seconds.

**Jen:** Yes. Totally. Yes.

**John:** So from there then back to New York for Broad City?

**Jen:** Yes. I did my first season of Broad City in between the last two seasons of Parks and Rec. It kind of worked out beautifully where I think the day we ended season six of Parks I got on a plane and went to New York and started the Broad City season two writer’s room. And I did that for a couple months. And then came back.

And then going forward Parks and Rec ended. I went on to a show, Lady Dynamite on Netflix. I did that in the interim. And then once The Good Place started I was always kind of – I was never again fulltime in the room in Broad City. I was always just writing a script from LA while they were in New York and giving notes on episodes and punch ups and stuff like that.

So I was very lucky in that I was able to be on The Good Place fulltime, but also be working on Broad City as well.

**John:** Great. So you’ve mentioned all the people who seemed to be involved with Hacks. So talk to me about where did the idea for Hacks come about and how did the three of you, but also Mike Schur and everyone else come together on this property?

**Jen:** So Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello, and I, we met doing comedy in New York. Lucia and I were the only two women in this sketch group that was kind of like an offshoot. It was all people who had met at UCB. And then slowly but surely the sketch group stopped emailing us to come to the meetings and we both realized, OK, I think we’ve been let go from this sketch group. Cool.

But, we instantly connected and shared a sense of humor. And I loved her and I was desperate to make her my friend. And then she was dating Paul and was also comedic partners doing sketches with Paul. And same thing. We hit it off. And I was lucky to just kind of be in their orbit for a while. If they had sketches and stuff I would pitch jokes and they went and they made their movie Rough Night. And I was on set as a punch up writer for that.

And so we just always loved writing together and knew that we wanted to make something together one day. So what happened was Paul was doing a Netflix Characters special, which I don’t know if you guys have seen, but it was basically just a bunch of sketches he was shooting. I came along just to pitch jokes for them. And we went to Maine. We were going to a monster truck rally. So the idea for Hacks was born out of a monster truck rally.

Paul has a character called Jasper Cooch, whose catchphrase is Big Trucks. And he was being allowed to just host the monster truck rally in Portland, Maine. They gave him the mic even though – like he could have absolutely said there’s a bomb in here and caused and incredible panic. But they trusted him. And so on this road trip we met up in Boston and then we drove to Portland, Maine for this monster truck rally.

And I don’t know how we got on the topic, but we started talking about comedians, particularly female comedians, and women in the arts in general and how maybe they hadn’t gotten their due the way their male counterparts had. And how it’s just such a harder path for women, like how they had to keep their heads down and pound the pavement and put up with so much bullshit frankly while, yeah, for other comedians who were maybe straight white men, they didn’t have as hard of a path.

And so we just kind of started talking about characters like that. And wanting to tell a woman like that story. And that was sort of the birthplace of Hacks.

**John:** All right. So for listeners who haven’t seen the show yet, let me give you the briefest logline so you get some sense of what we’re going to be talking about today. Hacks is a limited series, well now it’s going into its second season, so it’s a series about a legendary Vegas comedienne who hires on a disgraced, young Hollywood writer to freshen up her act. And their relationship is alternately contentious, very contentious, and maternal. And it feels like it’s mostly a two-hander.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** And yet other characters have some storytelling power. So Paul W. Downs plays an agent who can drive scenes by himself. Marcus who is her COO can also drive scenes by himself. How early in the process did you know who the characters were and sort of what the shape of the show was going to be?

**Jen:** Well, I think you’re right that it is a two-hander. That’s very much so like in the DNA of the show. That’s kind of what it was born out of. It was this idea of, OK, what if it’s this woman who has been through so much and has so much trauma from what she’s done, but also amassed this empire, making so much money doing it. And then what if there was a younger woman who didn’t fully appreciate what this woman has been through and has also maybe like so many women like this, the younger writer has the story about her wrong. Because so often we get women like this, we get their story wrong. And something gets pushed in the media and people just blindly go along with it. And only in the last few years when we look at when like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton have we started to reevaluate these stories we’ve believed about women in the public eye.

And so that was kind of the genesis of, OK, they’ll be forced to work together and they will butt heads, but actually they both really need each other. And at the heart of it it’ll be a love story. It’ll be about these two women falling in love with each other through their friendship, through their working relationship, and how does that change them and what new places does it bring them to.

But then you also are correct to bring up Marcus and Paul’s character and Kaitlin Olson who plays Jean Smart’s daughter so wonderfully. We knew we wanted to fill out Deborah’s ecosystem, right? We’re very interested in the idea of people like Deborah who are empires. Like I said they have a very carefully curated ecosystem around them. They have enough money and enough power that they get to choose all the people in their world, and there’s a lot of people in their world whose job it is to only fulfill their needs and think about them. And so someone like Marcus, played by the wonderful Carl Clemons-Hopkins, we wanted to explore the idea of well what does it mean that Marcus has devoted his entire adult life to working for Deborah and building something up for her. And also taking from her this kind of workaholic attitude and how does he reckon with but is that fulfilling him, is that fulfilling his soul.

**John:** And it’s not into late in the series that we learn that he’s actually a fan. That he got the job because he was a super fan.

**Jen:** Exactly. And we just I think never wanted any one character to feel purely like an accessory, which is a challenge to do that because even though it’s streaming you only have so much time. You only can afford to shoot so many pages in a day. So it’s definitely a balancing act of trying to give – when it’s a two-hander but also kind of also an ensemble, giving the other players in the ensemble rich storylines that feel and grounded and interesting.

So, I hope that we achieved that because that definitely was our goal going into it.

**John:** Let’s take a listen to a scene. This is a scene from the pilot in which Deborah Vance is meeting with the owner of the casino who is trying to tell her that basically she’s going to lose her theater and this job that she has is going to be ending. Let’s take a listen to it, then I want to get to what’s actually on the page.

[Clip plays]

**Marty:** You know how I’m redoing the casino’s east tower?

**Deborah:** Oh yeah.

**Marty:** So the contractor double orders everything. And what the hell am I supposed to do with two tons of fertilizer?

**Deborah:** Dumb it on Steve Wynn’s doorstep.

**Marty:** Bingo.

**Deborah:** Marty, you set me up.

**Marty:** Deb, 2,500 shows. Now, I think it’s a Vegas record.

**Deborah:** It is.

**Marty:** Well cheers.

**Deborah:** Cheers.

**Marty:** And they’re naming a street after you.

**Deborah:** I know. Deborah Vance Drive. It’ll probably be a dead end with an abortion clinic on it.

**Marty:** [laughs] Now that the big show is all planned, maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future. You know you’ll always be a part of the Palmetto’s history. But maybe it would be good if you did a few less shows a year.

**Deborah:** Good for who?

**Marty:** Yeah. I need some marquee dates for new acts. Like Pentatonix.

**Deborah:** What the hell is that?

**Marty:** They’re a beatbox forward acapella group. They do medleys. They won the Sing Off.

**Deborah:** Who gives a shit?

**Marty:** I have two buckets to fill. Families and idiots in their 20s. The families want to see singing and dancing and the college kids want to spend a grand to watch a guy in a helmet hit play on an iPod.

**Deborah:** You’re forgetting about your third bucket. People from Florida. They love me. And my numbers are strong.

**Marty:** You’ll still be doing shows, just not Friday and Saturday.

**Deborah:** Oh, just the most important nights. Un-fucking-believable.

**Marty:** Deb. Why do you even want to do 100+ shows a year? It’s not like you’re having fun. I mean, you’re on cruise control up there.

**Deborah:** I fucking wish – wish I was on cruise control. I’ve been defense my entire career thanks to assholes like you.

**Marty:** Deborah, calm down. Please.

**Deborah:** Oh, what do you care, you own the place. The service sucks. Where’s my fucking doggie bag? I’ll take his, too. And the fork! There was a cockroach in my salad.

**Marty:** Shit. Comp everybody.

**Waiter:** OK.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. Let’s take a look at the words that are actually on the page. So this is starting on page 5. This is scene 114 of the script. There’s a lot of changes at the head of the scene. So the script starts with another conversation about being wealthy. It’s about a yacht and an infrared sauna. At what point did that change?

**Jen:** So what you see here on the page we did shoot. We came into it writing the scene like first thinking OK we need to set up what is the dynamic between Marty and Deborah. And the idea being, OK, well one they connect over rich people shit. So they’re talking about their yacht and infrared sauna and that. And then also as – spoiler – but I don’t think we have to worry about that, as the series progresses you see that they have romantic history these two characters. And so there’s also a line here where Deborah says, “Oh yeah.” He says, “Remember my first 70-footer,” talking about his yacht, “Remember that one?” She says, “Oh yeah, we had some fun on that.” And it’s kind of a coy moment where they’re alluding to their sexual history.

But as we got into the edit room it just felt like this is such a lesson in storytelling you learn time and time and time again. Get to the action, get to the crisis. Also, I think once we saw obviously Jean Smart phenomenal. Chris McDonald is incredible, too. Their characters feel so lived in from the moment they appear on screen. We realized like, oh, we overwrote. We didn’t need to write stuff to establish their dynamic.

**John:** You gave them a big onramp that they did not need.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. Trust your actors. Capable actors can communicate that even without words. It’s how they’re interacting with each other. It’s how they’re laughing at each other. It’s how they’re truly sitting across the table from each other. So what happened was is that in the edit we just realized oh their dynamic is clear. This is overwritten probably. Let’s just get right to the heart of the scene which is Deborah finding out your dates are getting taken away from you.

**John:** Great. So the lines we hear in the show, are those just looped lines that you threw in? Did you shoot alternates on the day?

**Jen:** We shot alts on the day. Because it comes in about the Steve Wynn stuff. One of the benefits to having Paul, Lucia, and I are always on set. I mean, Lucia and Paul direct, so they’re of course there. But the three of us are able to pretty easily rewrite on the fly. If we feel something isn’t working there’s three brains. We can huddle up, come up with something. And so that Steve Wynn kind of leading into it that just came from us at village being like all right let’s try this. And credit to Jean and Chris, too, because they’re so nimble and quick that they can have something thrown at them like that and knock it out of the park.

**John:** Great. On page 7 I want to call out some things you do here. So there’s a great moment early on page 7. So she tells a joke, Deborah Vance Drive, and then she writes it down in her notebook, which is just such a great little detail. Is that something you’ve actually seen in real life, or just something you created for this character?

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s something that I think comes from all of our lives. Like I have on my phone Notes app of just like if a joke or if I see something going into it and writing it. And I know on Broad City they had – I think it was a doc of convos we could have. Things we could just talk about. Things that would be funny to see Abby and Ilana talk about and we’d just go into the Google Doc. So that’s something that feels very true to – I mean, I don’t know if it’s all writers. Maybe it’s more specific to comedians, but just constantly observing things and not wanting to forget them so you write them down in your notebook or on your phone.

**John:** So this lunch is set up on the pretense of just like oh let’s get together, but of course he actually has news to deliver and it’s going to lead up to this argument here. A thing you do on page 7 which works really well is Marty’s dialogue is interrupted by a scene description line that is just actually Deborah’s action here. So Mary says, “Now that the big show is all planned maybe it’s a good time to talk about the future.” Deborah puts down on her drink. “What’s this?” in quotes. He presses on.

And so the “what’s this?” is a reaction that she can give. It’s a line that she can say just with her face.

**Jen:** Yes.

**John:** It’s such a great use of breaking up the dialogue here so that we can actually see what the shift is that happened here.

**Jen:** Yeah. It’s a great way I think to show that Deborah is incredibly perceptive and very smart when it comes to business. And so when someone is gently trying to guide the conversation and maybe sneak something by her it’s like, no, no, no, you’re not getting anything by Deborah Vance. Just come out with it, man. And I think Chris does a great job then of like shifting uncomfortably in the seat because he’s a little bit scared of Deborah Vance. So yeah.

**John:** Without that line in there the delivery of his whole thing wouldn’t work. You’re going to need to have some kind of break in there so to call it out in the text is great. You also on page 7 have “Beat” just as its own line as a sentence. And listening back to it she doesn’t actually take that beat, but it’s a nice – Beat is just used as a placeholder like there’s a shift, there’s a moment, there’s a little air here.

**Jen:** A little air to show that Deborah – and again it’s not really in the version that ended up in the final cut, but yeah to show that Deborah is trying to process this tornado that’s been thrown at her of like what are you talking about, I’m losing these dates. These are the most important thing in the world to me.

**John:** Moving on to the next page, here’s an example of I bet you shot all this and people don’t realize that in the edit you have magic scissors and you can cut anything out. So what was actually probably shot was she says, “My numbers are solid and presales from the holiday are on par with last year.” That shows that she’s savvy and that she’s on it. But you probably recognized you did not need the line, so you just cut back to him and her line disappears.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. It was really like – and I had been in the edit a lot on Parks and Rec and The Good Place, always for our episodes. Mike was super like, yeah, get in the edit and do stuff. But this was, running my own show, I was the most in the edit I’d ever been before. And I was just like oh yeah you can truly do anything in the edit room. So, yeah, we shot those lines and then, again, at this point the conversation is getting heated and they’re kind of speaking on top of each other. And so we just wanted to amp up the pace and the frantic energy of it, so it just made sense to lose those lines.

**John:** Now, the decision of when she actually loses her cool, and even when she loses her cool it’s kind of a performative losing her cool. She recognizes she’s doing this in front of a crowd and that she has power because she’s doing this in the crowd. You’re going, “This hits Deborah, then she explodes.” That’s done as scene description but then there’s a parenthetical, hitting the table, getting loud, really emphasizing that this is going to color her vocal performance in this next piece.

**Jen:** Yeah. We knew that this was the moment where we wanted her to lose it because someone like Deborah Vance being told you’re on cruise control, even though it is somewhat maybe true with regard to the quality of her material or how much she’s updated it, she is a woman who like we talked about has had to fight and claw for her position. And so the idea of someone telling her, especially a man telling her, you’re on cruise control is so opposite to what she believes about herself to be true, which is that she is a shark. She just keeps moving. She’s never on cruise control. She’s always fighting, and fighting, and fighting. And so hearing this makes her really lose her top. And yeah.

**John:** So this is a dramatic moment but you’re still in a comedy, and so that’s why you have the runner of the doggie bag coming back. And so can you talk about the shape of this scene and sort of how much did this change in the writing from its initial conception. Was this the scene you kind of always envisioned it to be, or how much did it change as you approached it?

**Jen:** This one I would say of all the scenes in the pilot this one changed quite a bit. We definitely reworked this one more than we reworked some others because it’s such a pivotal scene. It’s the inciting incident for this change Deborah is going through.

**John:** The series would not happen if this scene didn’t happen.

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, it was a lot of rewriting in terms of like we talked about at the beginning, OK, how much of their dynamic do you need to set up, do you understand who Marty is. I think we got a note at one point that like someone didn’t understand his role, that he owned the casino. So I think that’s where some of the Steve Wynn stuff came in from.

So we rewrote it a decent amount. And I think the beat where she grabs the fork and stabs his steak and throws it, like that came later. She always was going to freak out, but I don’t remember that – that was a later pitch. And, again, you’re also rewriting on the day. And I got to give a shout out to Jean Smart. That “I found a cockroach in my salad” line, that was improvised. She just yelled that as she walked out and we thought it was hilarious and we kept it in.

So this scene went through a lot of rewriting. It was always, OK, he’s telling her he’s cutting back her dates. That was always what was happening. So that never changed. But a lot of the pieces around that inciting incident did change.

**John:** Now the pilot is working on basically parallel tracks. So we’re seeing what’s happening in Deborah’s life, and what’s happening in Ava’s life. And as she’s going to Las Vegas to meet with Deborah about potentially writing for her. They finally meet at the end of the show at it does not go well. It’s a long scene, so we’re going to play just a smaller clip from it, but let’s take a listen to the actual interaction between Ava and Deborah.

[Clip plays]

**Deborah:** So why are you here?

**Ava:** Oh, well, obviously it would be a huge honor to work with someone like you, who has been working so successfully for so long. I mean, you’re a legend.

**Deborah:** Wow. A legend. So you’re a fan?

**Ava:** I mean, of course. Would I be here if I wasn’t?

**Deborah:** What’s your favorite joke of mine?

**Ava:** Man. You know. That’s so hard.

**Deborah:** Well it shouldn’t be. I’ve written over 30,000. Just pick one.

**Ava:** Uh…you know what? I would have to say that your TV show is my personal favorite thing that you’ve ever done.

**Deborah:** You mean my sitcom from 1973? You’ve seen it?

**Ava:** Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen clips.

**Deborah:** Clips? Wonderful.

**Ava:** Um, yeah. Well, you know, a lot of the actors on the show that I most recently worked on were standups.

**Deborah:** You know, I’m going to stop you right there. I don’t work with writers.

**Ava:** You don’t?

**Deborah:** No. Jimmy sent you against my wishes.

**Ava:** I’m going to kill him.

**Deborah:** No, I’m going to kill him.

**Ava:** Great. Well, this sucks.

**Deborah:** Yeah. Sucks. Well at least you didn’t waste too much time researching me.

**Ava:** I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend you?

**Deborah:** Other than walk those chimney sweep boots on my silk rug? Um, no.

**Ava:** Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a shoes off situation.

**Deborah:** Well it’s shoe-dependent. Thank you for your time.

[Clip ends]

**John:** Great. So they’re finally meeting. In the actual episode they start to meet and then of course DJ the daughter interrupts and so you see all of that drama happen and then they finally get to their discussion. This scene was clearly always going to be part of this first episode, because we have to get these two women together in the room. How early on did you know who Ava was in the show? Like who her character was?

**Jen:** I think pretty early on we knew, too. But that one was certainly more – we learned it more and more as we cast. You know, we had this incredible thing where Jean signed on to do the show and you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart, and then you’re like holy shit we’ve got Jean Smart. Who is going to be play opposite her that’s like 25 and can go toe-to-toe? Oh no.

So the casting process for Ava was really, really long and intense. We saw I think maybe over 400 women for it. Watched that many tapes. And it was always this thing of what Jean has, what Jean is so incredible at is she can in equal parts do comedy and drama. She’s so skilled in both. And so we knew we were looking for someone who also could do that. Someone who could tell jokes and realistically seem like a comedy writer, so someone who is in their bones funny and you believe that, but also can play the more dramatic parts of this show. And so they had to have some real acting ability.

**John:** So what were you looking at for this? Did you write up sample scenes? Or were they scenes from this pilot?

**Jen:** They were scenes from the pilot. So everyone auditioned with the initial Ava and Jimmy scene in his office where he’s telling her he can’t help her get her job and she’s kind of laying out her situation. So they auditioned with that and then they also auditioned with the Deborah/Ava meeting scene.

**John:** OK. So a version of what we just heard?

**Jen:** A version of what we just heard, yeah.

**John:** And that didn’t burn a hole in your brains? Because I’ve always been reluctant to do that because I don’t want to hear that same scene a thousand times and then actually have to deal with it on the day.

**Jen:** Totally. Mike Schur is a big fan of doing fake audition sides because that’s I think part of it. He does not want to hear the same scene over and over and over. And it definitely at a certain point did burn a hole in our brains. I remember just being like I can’t hear this Ava/Jimmy scene one more time. It’s not working.

So, but what was interesting is that there were a lot of really wonderful, talented women who read the part, but for whatever reason a lot of the times we heard the scene Ava just came off as pretty whiny and it was not what we wanted it to be. And then when Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, auditioned it just felt different with her reading it. She was like projecting the strength and confidence of a 25-year-old who thinks they know everything, but also there was some very obvious vulnerability right below the surface that felt like she was also accessing, which made Ava not feel whiny and made her just feel like a very interesting character to us.

And so I think what was helpful was even though we had to hear these scenes over and over and over and go through the process of like oh no this isn’t working, junk all the thing in our darkest moments, once we heard it with Hannah and certainly when we heard it in the screen test with Jean and Hannah reading it it was like oh this works. This absolutely works. Which I don’t think I would have felt that if they were dummy sides that weren’t actually from the pilot.

**John:** We had that experience on Go. As we were seeing a zillion actors for Go, and I started to question like did I even write something that is even castable. And then suddenly you get the actors like, oh, that’s Sarah Polley. I get it. It all works.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** And I wasn’t imagining that there was a person who could fill that.

**Jen:** There’s a certain chemistry that happens between the writing and the actor. And when it’s the right actor you’re going to feel it in your gut in ways that you’re not if it’s maybe not the right person reading it.

**John:** So Hannah Einbinder has the vocal fry of a 25-year-old. Did you hear that voice as you were writing this? And also her tendency to kind of stop in the middle of thought. You write with a lot of ellipses in her dialogue. Was that always part of the voice for it?

**Jen:** Yeah, I think we knew that Ava felt more like kind of a drier sensibility, so that was very baked into the character. I think there are a lot of ellipses, but then I also think that Hannah’s natural – she’s also a very talented standup and if you see her perform she has a very interesting, unique cadence, which is much slower than probably your average 25-year-old up on stage. And so it kind of like naturally lined up that way. But, yeah, that was always kind of – she was written on the page the way we imagined it.

**John:** Looking at the words on the page, on page 29 there’s some cuts here and I’m just curious when the cuts came or if they all came in the editing room. So Jimmy actually sent you against my wishes/I’m going to kill him/no, I’m going to kill him, but feel free to kick the corpse. It’s a joke. Did you try it and it didn’t stick?

**Jen:** So this scene, it’s I think a 7.5 page scene or something. It’s incredibly long. And so we always knew – we knew two things. We knew, well, this show lives or dies by the chemistry between these two characters. So, hopefully the chemistry you’re interested in watching them for 7.5 pages. And if you’re not we’re in trouble anyway. But then we also knew when we get in the edit we’re going to need to trim this down, but let’s just shoot it as is and then see where we’re at.

And so, yeah, that was this “I’m going to kill him but feel free to kick the corpse” line, it totally worked. Jean delivered it perfectly. It just felt like the scene was running a little long.

**John:** It’s a little bit of a detour also. It’s pulling attention to somebody–

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Off the focus here. What happens in the rest of the scene is like we finally get to see Ava kind of monologue and actually have her voice and express her power which is ultimately what impresses Deborah. It’s so fun to actually see somebody sort of cut loose eventually, because we’ve seen Deborah be able to go off, but to actually see – it’s a strange place for an audience to be kind of rooting for both sides of the equation. Because it’s really a true two-hander we’re sort of seeing both sides of the story. And to see them go after each other was just sort of delicious. Just a nice job here at the end of this.

**Jen:** Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean that was always by design that that was how the scene was going to end. That Ava would let loose and in letting loose and kind of they would start roasting each other the way comedians do and that is their love language. Jokes are their love language. And Deborah would be impressed by Ava’s ability that way. And, yeah, I think it’s written that way and then Jean and Hannah just perform it so wonderfully together. They have such amazing chemistry that we were very happy with how it turned out.

**John:** We have a ton of listener questions, so maybe we can do some speed rounding through some listener questions.

**Jen:** Love it.

**John:** Megana Rao, if you could get us started.

**Megana:** Awesome. Joel asks, “Standup comics seem to get far more freedom to go more controversial while TV writers have to be far more careful with jokes and topics. First, do you think that perception is accurate? And if so how do you find that balance?”

**Jen:** Interesting.

**John:** So standup versus sitcom writers.

**Jen:** I think that, sure, there’s probably a little more leeway given to standups because you are just one person getting on stage one night. You might say something controversial but on the flip side when it’s in a TV show it has to go through so many layers of approval before it actually makes it to air. So I think in the case of jokes that are seen as offensive sometimes I certainly think this when I see it, I’m like how did the – so the initial writer, then the showrunner, then the entire writer’s room, then the studio, then the network, like no one gave a note on this? There are lots of rounds that that could have happened.

I think if it is true that standups are allowed more leeway that way it’s probably because it’s just one person getting up on stage saying something one random night and it’s not going through so many levels of approval. But I have to say as a TV writer it’s not something I think about. I never think like, oh, I wish I could say this controversial thing but I got to get up at the Improv to do it. I don’t really think about, oh, can I get away with saying this or not.

**John:** The incentives are also different for the standup comic. And one of the episodes sort of goes into her trying new material and the standup guy who she confronts. And the incentives are trying to get the laugh, to keep the audience laughing is so different than in a sitcom situation. When it’s just you up on that stage you’re going to say whatever you can do. You just keep saying–

**Jen:** That’s a good point. It’s almost like it’s survival. You just need them to laugh, so you’re probably – who knows what you might say to get that to happen. Whereas, yeah, TV you’re crafting characters and you need to make sure that if someone is saying something controversial it better not be punching down or something that makes this person seem like a horrible person if that’s not the intention.

**John:** Because you don’t have to go home with that standup at the end of the night, but with a sitcom character you want to come back the next week and see that character again.

**Jen:** Exactly. Totally.

**Megana:** Awesome. Nora asks, “So many of my favorite comedies get better the longer they go on. And audiences tend to say stick with it, it gets really good. Why do you think many comedies are growers and not showers?”

**Jen:** I think that is really true. I think it’s – well I think it’s for two reasons. One is, and Mike Schur, again, my mentor and the man I credit with teaching me how to make television, is fond of saying I wish I could just throw out the first episodes of a show when you make it. Because the first eight episodes is kind of this sludge pile of figuring out–

**John:** Parks and Rec, those first episodes are rough.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I think Mike – he would be happy to admit that they were figuring it out. Especially in an ensemble comedy. You are figuring out how are all these characters funny. How are they funny with each other? How does that actor mesh with that actor? And so you are really figuring it out. And so I think when comedies start out maybe not as strong as they get as they progress, it is because the writers, the actors, the crew, everyone is figuring it out a little bit. Comedy, I think there’s chemistry to it. It’s intangible. And you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle in a lot of ways. And so it takes a little bit of trial and error until you really get there.

And then I think the other reason that comedies feel they get better as they go on is like great jokes come from character. You know, yes, there are some lines on sitcoms where if you just saw them written on someone’s Instagram page you’d be like that’s a funny one-liner. But for the most part jokes are funny because they’re specific to character. Like a Ron Swanson joke can’t be put in the mouth of Leslie Knope or Andy Dwyer because they all have very different character games and world views. And it’s why you love them, because they’re specifically drawn characters.

And so I think when you watch a pilot you don’t know these characters. You don’t know their game. You’re learning them. And it’s the writer’s job to introduce you to them and that takes some time. And so I think as a show goes on you learn these characters, you love these characters, you know their games, so you say like, oh yeah, of course Monica has 11 categories for towels. That’s so her. But you don’t know these characters as well when you’re first watching a show. So I think the longer you spend with them the more you understand them and the more the things they say and do are funny to you.

**John:** You just used a term which I don’t use at all in features. Character game. So what is game?

**Jen:** So character game in comedy is basically like – and this is something that I don’t know in the streaming world if it’s as relevant, but character game is like what is their specific trait that they exhibit over and over again in behavior that is how they are funny. So for example Leslie Knope’s game, and you could say she has multiple games, but one game is she is type A crazy optimistic to a fault. She is like the craziest, hardest worker you’ve ever met in your life. And she does everything in her life 150%. And that is both endearing but also sometimes exhausting to her friends and coworkers. And so that’s the character game.

In the most simplest of terms, like sometimes the character’s game is they’re the dumb one. And that is what gets hit over and over again in their jokes and dialogue and what they do. And so it’s a term that gets used a lot in comedy and I think maybe as comedies become a little more – or at least some of them become a little more grounded, a little more real, maybe we say that less and less because the characters – at least when we were making Hacks like we want the characters to feel like real people, real grounded people.

We don’t all have character games in life. Some of us do. But it’s something that maybe we talk about a little bit less. But certainly in a more traditional comedy network sense you do talk about character game a lot.

**John:** So on the Scriptnotes podcast Craig’s umbrage is his character game?

**Jen:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** He goes off and my desire to keep things moving along to segue, like this next question.

**Megana:** Leah asks, “In a previous episode Jac Schaeffer mentioned that she received good advice about staffing people in the room. Pick writers who offer something different from what she already had. Is there a type of comedy that is your strongest? And if so, what types of writers do you look for? For example, physical humor? Adept one lines? Etc.”

**Jen:** That’s a good question. That is really good advice for staffing a room. I think to look for people who fill in the gaps for you, who are stronger in things that you are maybe weaker in. Listen, I’m really good at formatting a script. I’m really good on the keyboard. That’s definitely number one maybe. I guess, let’s see, comedy wise probably I feel stronger in terms of jokes and one liners, like just sort of naturally where I come from from the monologue writing world. I think that maybe in jokes more than I think in story.

Story is something that, you know, I think the longer you work in narrative TV you get better at it, but that certainly wasn’t my strong suit when I started out. And so for example I think I’m always, like when staffing Hacks, looking for people who are really great with story. Really great with coming up with story. Coming up with twists and stuff like that. So, yeah, that certainly is good advice. That if you are staffing you want to find people who do things that you don’t maybe do as well.

**John:** This is an obvious point, but something just occurring to me now. A difference with Hacks is you have two central characters, two women who are telling jokes and are aware that they’re telling jokes because it is their business to tell jokes all the time. So there’s two characters who are aware that they’re funny, which is really unusual actually.

**Jen:** Yeah. Exactly. Most times in comedy people are funny but they don’t know they’re making jokes. And in this show, yeah, they know they’re funny. Making jokes is their business. It’s also been an interesting thing because I think when you write about comedians or comedy writers the bar gets set pretty high I think about how funny they need to be in their every interaction. And it’s funny because as a comedy writer, like I personally – the comedy writers who are constantly making jokes in every day conversation are the worst ones to be around. They’re pretty rough.

I, you know, I’m like – I am a comedy writer, but I’ve had so many people, like my hairdresser one time who shares some clients, some friends with me, and he said, “You know, everyone says Jen is so funny, but I don’t see that side of you.” And I was like, OK, cool. I think comedy writers, you think oh this person is playing a comedy writer they better be cracking wise every line. And that’s just truthfully not – it doesn’t feel like a realistic portrayal of a comedy writer to me anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question was from Jay who asks…?

**Megana:** “What’s the correlation between being funny in person and being funny on the page? How does one get better at one or the other?”

**Jen:** Well, I mean, my hairdresser would like me more if I could learn.

**John:** It’s been my experience, too, is that like there’s people who are really, really funny, but they cannot write it down. They don’t have the ability to write in anyone else’s voice. Actually just something falls apart when they actually try to put it down on paper.

**Jen:** it’s really two different skills. And I think there are some people who are so wildly funny in person and also incredibly funny writers. That certainly exists. Someone like my co-creator Paul Downs is an incredible performer, so he’s so funny in that way, but then also a very talented writer. So it’s not like it doesn’t exist. But I think it’s hard. I think there’s no way to learn to be funny. You know, you either have it or you don’t.

So, what was the second part of the question?

**John:** How does one get better at one or the other? So like obviously people can – you went through UCB and so you learned how sketches works and you also learned some performance stuff, but it wasn’t your natural thing. And there’s going to be an upper ceiling to how good you are going to be as a performer, right?

**Jen:** Yeah. I think so. I think I could have taken a million more classes and they happily would have cashed my checks to do it, but I don’t think I ever – it is not in my wheelhouse to be a dynamic, incredible performer. It just isn’t. And that’s OK.

**John:** And we all know some really tremendous comedic actors who could not be any funnier, but they just cannot write. It’s just not natural to them.

**Jen:** Exactly. It is two very different skill sets. And sometimes you’ll find someone who has both, but it doesn’t always line up. And comedy writing is an interesting, especially TV comedy writing, is an interesting hybrid. Because when you are writing on a TV comedy you’re spending all your time in the writer’s room. And the writer’s room is just sitting around a table, breaking story together, pitching ideas, and then going through a script and pitching jokes for that script. I was shocked to find out my first narrative half hour job how little time you spend in front of a computer. When it’s your draft, you’re out on script, you’re writing the episode, but that’s pretty much it.

And so writer’s rooms are a very social place. You have to be comfortable sitting with five, six, seven, eight – back in Parks I think we had like 16 writers. A room of 15 other people and you have to get comfortable pitching your jokes out loud in front of all of them. And that was a real – again, for someone who isn’t a natural performer, and I’m not like an extrovert, that was a real challenge is to get comfortable learning like, OK, I need to just kind of be performing to pitch this joke for this character. So it is two different skill sets. But when you do work in TV comedy in writer’s rooms both come into play.

**John:** Yeah. On the feature side, if you’re pitching a comedy there’s not an expectation that you yourself are going to be hilariously funny in that pitch, but they need to believe that you actually know what funny is. And so if you’re a humorless person going into that you’re not going to get the job. That’s just how it works.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s tough. What else we got?

**Megana:** OK, a different Jay asks, “How many story arcs ahead do you and the staff have a feel for from the start?”

**Jen:** 1,012. No. There’s no set number to be honest. I think basically from the start what you’re more looking at is kind of, especially in a serialized streaming comedy, you’re looking at your tent poles for the season. You’re saying, OK, tent pole one, they meet, they clash. Then mid-season she’s going to quit, but she’s going to go on this bonding trip and learn more about her, which opens her eyes to new experiences and brings them closer. OK, another tent pole, her old LA life calls her back and she gets an opportunity that way.

You’re laying out the very big story points that you want to hit over the course of the season. And then you’re kind of filling in in between that all the little stories. And that is how it works like on our show, Hacks, which is a little more serialized. On more network TV shows, or even Broad City, those shows they were able to withstand a little more one-off episodes I think. So, I remember Parks and Rec like the beginning of every season we would have a writer’s retreat and part of your assignment for your writer’s retreat was to come up with ten episodes and you would just go to the retreat and then you pitch your ten episode ideas to Mike and we would write them all down on index cards and by the end of this retreat we would have this huge board of all the index cards of just crazy one-off episode ideas. Because a 22-episode network sitcom you have a little more leeway.

One that I pitched I remember was like Donna sends a tweet that she thinks is from her personal account but is actually the Parks Department account and it spirals. And that was just a one-off episode that we did that wasn’t tied to a larger arc. But because there are 22 episodes you had the time and space to do that.

And same on Broad City. Broad City we had much more ability to do kind of like one-off episodes that weren’t tied to a larger arc, even though we did on both Parks and Broad City you’re still telling longer arcs, but for something now like Hacks which is only 10 episodes, there’s less of a need to go, OK, we need to generate 500 episode ideas. It’s much more about these tent poles like I said of knowing where you want your character’s story to start, what’s happening in the middle, what’s happening in the end. And then filling in in between.

**John:** Well in the case Hacks in this first season you established stakes for both of the characters right at the very start. And so we know as an audience that by the end of this series we should have an answer to these fundamental questions about what’s going to happen to these two women.

**Jen:** Exactly.

**John:** Which would not really make sense for something like Parks and Rec. That really wouldn’t make sense because the idea of characters leaving, it just wouldn’t track.

**Jen:** Yeah. And we did some stuff, like Leslie is getting recalled at the beginning of the season, what’s going to happen with that? So we certainly did that. But it was less central to the way the show was built.

**John:** Let’s try one more question from a listener.

**Megana:** Jerry asks, “I’ve heard Breaking Bad and Succession both described as comedies. Atlanta has had at least two horror episodes. And Insecure has had episodes that have brought me to the edge of tears. What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the form as of late and what do you see coming over the horizon?”

**Jen:** That’s a great question. And I agree with all those assessments of those shows. Those shows have made me laugh and cry similarly, too. I think it’s really honestly exciting to me. It feels like there’s no longer these strict parameters of like it’s a comedy so it needs to sound and look like this, and it needs to be this one way, and the tone always has to be comedic.

Something with Hacks we talked about all the time is like we wanted it to feel really grounded and we wanted it to feel like real life. And real life is equal parts drama and comedy and you’re switching in between the two tones in a matter of instance sometimes. And so what I think is so exciting about all those shows, you know, the question mentioned is like those shows all play with tone in such a cool way. They can be like, yeah, Insecure can be so funny, but then it also has these real grounded heartfelt moments that do make you cry.

And to me that’s so exciting. Like I want my art that I consume to reflect the real world I live in. And it feels like these half hour shows, or all these shows, not just half hour, are getting closer to reflecting the way the real world is in that it plays with tone and it isn’t just one thing.

So I love that shows are now able to do all these different things and it doesn’t feel like there’s hard and fast rules about what they can do. And as far as what’s on the horizon, I hope that trend just continues because I think it’s really exciting. And I think what’s in, I mean, maybe I don’t know if this is on the horizon, because I don’t know what the future of network comedy is, but maybe because these shows are so successful and people love them like maybe network comedies will also get to be a little more fluid with tone and a network comedy doesn’t have to like you know be just one thing. I think that was something Mike did with The Good Place in such a great way. That is not your typical network sitcom and he was given the chance to make it. And I think people were really excited by that.

So hopefully just kind of playing with tone and the rules and letting things be more fluid is something that will spread to not just streaming or cable but also network.

**John:** A thing I noticed about Hacks and Succession both is that they’re not very classically comedies, and yet the dialogue and how the characters are sort of presented are presented with a sort of comedic voice to them. Comedic things can happen in their universe and it makes sense for them do it. And characters talk in a way that I don’t want to say they feel like they’re written by comedy writers, but it feels like they’re writing at a pitch that can feel funny.

As opposed to something that’s done as a straight drama which just would never happen. And so you can basically take the same outline for a Succession episode and write it as just a true drama and write it as this. And the same things could happen in the scenes but it’s really just how characters are expressing themselves mostly that makes it feel like kind of a comedy.

**Jen:** Which is what I love about that show so much. It’s not just a straight drama. I love the comedic moments. And the specific character, again character games, that they kind of play with. I think that’s what makes that show so rich and run to watch.

**John:** All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. I have two short One Cool Things there this week. First is an essay by Zachary Zane that ran in the New York Times a couple weeks ago called You Are Bi Enough. And it’s just a nice way of looking, as we head out of Pride month, bisexuals always kind of feel like should I even be at this party. There’s that sense of like do I even belong here. Am I sort of stealing someone else’s valor for being in the room for this conversation?

And he does a really good job sort of laying out what to do if you’re a bi person who is in a mixed gender relationship and stuff like that. It’s just a really smart essay on approaching that.

Second is much more important for me personally which is that one of the things that has been hardest about the pandemic is it’s been impossible for me to get Caffeine Free Coke Zero, which is my go-to drink.

**Jen:** That is a tough one to find. I’m a Coke Zero drinker too and I never see Caffeine Free Coke Zero.

**John:** It’s really tough. So all the canned beverages took a real hit during the pandemic because there was not enough aluminum to sort of make all of our favorite sodas. But the niche drinks, like the Caffeine Free Coke Zero just became impossible to fill. So my two placeholders have been the Caffeine Free Diet Coke, which is OK. If you can find it, that’s great. And so Megana was able to find it this week. God bless you, Megana. But the other go-to for me has been I have a SodaStream and we always just use it for fizzy water. But they actually sell the syrups to put into it.

And so I was able to track down Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup for the SodaStream. And if you use just under one ounce in a bottle it is a pretty good approximation of what Coke Zero should be like, what Caffeine Free Coke Zero should be like. So if you’re really jonesing for it – it’s not even really economically advantageous, because I worked it out and it’s $1.50 per liter which is not great.

**Jen:** Not great, no.

**John:** It’s not great. But I mean when you absolutely need it it’s there.

**Jen:** I love that you’re over here doing chemistry, too. You’re in your lab mixing.

**John:** One after another, I’m tweaking the formula to get it just right. And so I would say just under one ounce is what you need to make a perfect caffeine free diet cola.

Jen, what do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Jen:** My One Cool Thing is my favorite show that I watched over the pandemic, and honestly one of my favorite shows I’ve watched, which is a British show called I Hate Suzie. I don’t know if you guys have seen it.

**John:** I have not. Megana is nodding that she has.

**Megana:** Yeah, I love it.

**Jen:** It is co-created by Billie Piper who stars in it as well. And Lucy Prebble who is a phenomenal writer/playwright. She also writes on Succession actually. But this show is just so, so good. Billie Piper plays this actress who is like somewhat famous. She was like a pop star and now is on a zombie sci-fi show which is like seen OK. And then she’s up for this big career opportunity which is Disney is maybe going to hire her to play an “aging princess.” And so she’s very excited about that.

And right as this opportunity is about to happen her phone gets hacked and compromising photos of her leak. Her with someone who is not her husband. And it is just an eight-episode series. They’re all available on HBO Max. And it’s kind of this exploration of what it means to be a woman in the public eye. What it means to be – just modern womanhood in general. And the performances are just so wonderful. Billie Piper is amazing. It’s one of my favorite performances in a comedy of all time I think.

The woman who plays her manager and best friend, Leila Farzad, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, she’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful show that I feel like not enough people I’ve seen talking about. So, I’m doing the work.

**John:** We’ll start talking about it more.

**Jen:** I love it. Great.

**John:** Great. We’ll do it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust. You’re on Twitter?

**Jen:** Yes, I am on Twitter. I’m @jenstatsky.

**John:** And we have t-shirts. They are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can 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-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

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 Cat Person and the discourse around Cat Person.

Jen Statsky, this was amazing. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Jen:** Thank you so much for having me. This was a real career highlight as a longtime listener.

**John:** Aw, thanks.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Jen Statsky. What was your experience with Cat Person before this? So you were aware of the original short story?

**Jen:** Yes, I was aware. I remember reading it back in 2017 and I remember being very struck by it because it came out during the #MeToo movement when I certainly as a woman and I think a lot of women I knew and globally were like reevaluating their relationships with men and interactions with men and just what kind of it meant to be a woman out in the world. And certainly a woman with a sexual life. And so I was very – I thought the story was – I remember reading it and liking it. And then was also was so – I was like, wow, this is like the first viral short story. I couldn’t believe how much Twitter was discussing it and talking about it. So, yes, I was very aware of Cat Person.

**John:** I remember when it broke as well. It was a New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian and it just spread everywhere. I think because it was a short story it wasn’t a huge commitment. It wasn’t like a book where you had to read the whole thing. You could sit down and read the thing and like, oh, that was really good. And what struck me as I first read it and it was a lot of part of the discourse originally was it felt like it maybe kind of wasn’t fiction. It felt like it was actually just an essay. It felt like it was a first person thing that she was writing about her own experience. And she said like, no, I’m not, it’s fiction.

The term auto-fiction came up there. The sense of like it felt like autobiography but it was actually fully fiction.

**Jen:** Yeah. And I mean I think partly is because it’s so well-written, or so confidently written that people found it hard to believe it wasn’t someone’s actual experience.

**John:** Yes. And that’s where we get to this week. So, this past week Alexis Nowicki, another author, wrote in Slate saying like, OK, well this is actually based on my own experience, even though she’d never actually met Kristen, the original author. And so we’ll put a link to both things in the show notes. This summary of what Alexis is writing is that she read this short story and everyone was texting her saying like, “This is about you, right? This is about you and that guy?”

And she’s like, yeah, but I never met this woman. I don’t understand how this could be the situation. And she eventually reached out to Kristen Roupenian who said like, yes, I knew that same guy. And while I’m not the person, you sort of are the person who is the other character in the story.

**Jen:** Yes. That must have been such a crazy – I found the essay by, it’s Alexis–

**John:** Nowicki.

**Jen:** Nowicki. I loved the essay. I thought it was really, really well-written and interesting. And she describes coming out of a movie and having like dozens of texts being like, “Is this about you?” People sending her the story. And that must have been such a bizarre, strange experience for a person to go through. And yet it goes into a really nuanced, interesting conversation about art and who owns the details of one’s life. Is it ever OK to just point blank take facts from someone else’s life and use them as fiction? It’s really interesting.

**John:** Well so often on the podcast we do a segment for How Would This Be a Movie and Craig is always arguing you don’t need people’s life rights because facts are facts. And the facts that Roupenian was using here are kind of facts. It was basically she didn’t know this person. She looked up and she had heard about this earlier relationship this guy had had and sort of imagined what this woman was like. And Googled and found real information about where she went to school and where she used to work and was just imagining what this life was. And imagined pretty correctly sort of how a lot of this stuff worked.

But it’s the issue of like nothing was illegal here, but where the ethical boundary is between sort of pulling that stuff in.

**Jen:** Yeah. I mean, I guess what was interesting to me and this Kristen when she did, if you read the essay, you’ll see she apologizes for this eventually. She says I’m sorry I should have taken some of the details and changed them so that it wouldn’t be so directly linked to you, which I do – as a writer myself I can’t picture, yes, it’s of course you don’t need someone’s life rights necessarily. You’re always pulling from different people’s lives and experiences. But I can’t really picture writing something and using such specific details that could easily be traced to a person and not just taking the extra step of changing them slightly so that person wouldn’t think it’s about them.

**John:** Yeah. People were pointing out that it’s always dangerous to be around writers because you never know if you’re going to be sucked into this, but in this case it’s dangerous to be around people who could be around writers.

**Jen:** Yeah. Right. There’s always a writer within a few degrees of connection to you and that’s really dangerous.

**John:** So a thing that I’ve always been aware of as I’ve been around writers is like events will happen, or somebody will say something or things come up. You were saying this before about Deborah writing a joke down in her book. Like as a funny thing happens, who owns that funny thing that happens? Who owns that moment?

**Jen:** I have friends who are standups who talk about this specific issue because they’ll go on tour together. And then when you’re on tour you’re living together. You’re going out to eat. You’re on the bus. And something crazy will happen and then it’s a race to who can craft the joke about it first. Who gets to tell it on stage first? It is a really interesting thing when creative people are together. Who has ownership over it? There’s not really a hard and fast rule about it.

**John:** I also – Dana Schwartz makes this point on Twitter that whenever there’s two people it always feels like you have to declare two sides. And it’s this or it’s that. And you can’t actually say that’s an interesting conversation about this thing. She was in the right, she was in the wrong. She’s trying to claim credit for something that she didn’t actually write. And it makes it more complicated than that. I’m not on either team here. I don’t think they should have teams. I don’t think we’re playing a game.

**Jen:** Right. Twitter always rushes to be judge, jury, and executioner, right? So someone always, yes, exactly, like Dana is saying has to be in the right and someone has to be in the wrong. And what I thought was so interesting about Alexis’s essay is that she wasn’t casting herself as the victim and Kristen as the villain primarily. I thought the essay was so well done because it’s a really nuanced, holistic look of like this very strange thing happened to me. I feel angry about it in this way, but I also see that this person has a particular experience of their own.

So I found it interesting that people didn’t take the hint from the essay which is like I’m not trying to cast, oh, this action was evil and this person should be condemned. I’m just working my way through this specific personal experience that happened and kind of exploring this conversation about art and the ethics of art.

So, yeah, that was interesting. Twitter is not great for nuance.

**John:** What’s also strange about this situation is that the third person in this relationship, so Charles who is the basis of the character, is apparently dead, which is dismissed in a single line and not explained.

**Jen:** I know. My jaw dropped when I got to that part of the essay. And then I don’t know if you saw this, but a lot of people – and again we have no idea – but a lot of people on Twitter took the extra step to say, oh, he killed himself. He must have killed himself because of the negative portrayal in this work of “fiction.”

**John:** I don’t think we know that.

**Jen:** We don’t know that at all. That’s just complete conjecture from people on Twitter, which again like rushing to try to put everyone into the category of villain and good person. It’s just so fascinating. But we have no idea how this man passed away. It’s very sad. It’s a very sad part of the essay and that both of these woman are left I think grieving this person is just like a sad bookend to it.

**John:** And there is theoretically a movie version of this, so the tie in to this is so Nicholas Braun of Succession is apparently supposed to be playing this character.

**Jen:** Right.

**John:** And so it just becomes complicated as reality and fiction and meta fiction overlap.

**Jen:** I don’t know what stage – do you know if they’re–

**John:** I don’t know where they are.

**Jen:** I wonder if the current writer is scrambling now to include this newest twist into the Cat Person saga.

**John:** The next Zola saga.

**Jen:** Yeah.

**John:** Thanks Jen.

**Jen:** Thanks.

Links:

* [WGA Pilot Guide](https://www.wga.org/members/employment-resources/writers-deal-hub/pilot-deal-guide)
* [Hacks on HBO](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYIBToQrPdotpNQEAAAEa) check out the pilot script [here](https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hacks-Script-It-Starts-On-The-Page.pdf).
* [Jen Statsky](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4278387/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/jenstatsky?lang=en)
* [You Are Bi Enough](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/bisexuals-coming-out-anna-paquin.html?referringSource=articleShare) by Zachary Zane for NYT
* [Caffeine Free Diet Cola syrup by SodaStream](https://sodastream.com/products/diet-caffeine-free-cola-4-pack)
* [I Hate Suzie](https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX6MziQh41pYSwwEAAAK4) on HBO Max
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Peter Hoopes ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/508standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can now be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/screenwriting-in-color).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 494 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Movies are written in black and white but filmed in color, except for Mank which is about the writing of a screenplay for a black and white movie, so the general point still stands that screenwriters must think about color. And today on the show that is exactly what we’ll do.

We will also have a new round of the Three Page Challenge with a special focus on how opening scenes are setting up the reader for the movie that follows. And, of course, we’ll answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members Craig and I will discuss our Olympic ambitions.

**Craig:** Oh, we have those?

**John:** Or maybe you had those at one point.

**Craig:** Oh yes.

**John:** Like our sort of fantasy. If you could be good at one Olympic sport in winter and summer games which sport would it be and why?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. That’s fun.

**John:** We might also talk about sort of whether we should have the Olympics and sort of the international implications thereof.

**Craig:** I think that’s also a pretty good – that will get us in trouble. And I want trouble.

**John:** No troubles at all there. But Craig I don’t know if you heard. The WGA is on strike.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** As we record this the WGA is on strike against the ABC quiz show called The Chase.

**Craig:** Oh god. No. No!

**John:** Not your episode of The Chase. So The Chase is this quiz show that opponents in it are big Jeopardy! winners. Like Ken Jennings and folks. And so it is a show that is going into its second season of filming in theory and the WGA has not been able to reach a contract with this show. And we talk about on our podcast how the WGA covers things made for big screens and for small screens, including game shows. The WGA covers shows like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link. This is a show that should be covered by that same kind of deal.

So, the writers on that show are currently on strike.

**Craig:** Hmm. See, I’m looking at the information here. It seems like ITV America, which is the company that produces The Chase, does have an agreement with the Writers Guild of America East, which is kind of the necessary substrate for a strike. You can’t have a strike if you don’t actually have a relationship I think with the company, or if you voted for a contract, or whatever. Anyway, the point being they have a deal with the WGA-E, and they’re apparently just not abiding by it.

**John:** Well, it sounds like there are things that are in that deal that are not up to the level of what a deal needs to be. And so those writers need pension and health benefits. They need residuals. They need the basic protections and they don’t have those yet. So that’s sort of what is at issue right now.

This is being handled by the East because East handles more sort of this kind of show, even though the show actually films out here. So, we hope this is resolved by the time you are listening to this podcast, but just to know that there was a WGA strike that very few people are participating in.

**Craig:** Yeah. And a lot of people may not understand that game shows require writers, particularly these kinds of trivia shows.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** The questions are writing. And people have to do the research and write them and put them in a script and stick them on a teleprompter.

**John:** I remember a campaign at some point called Somebody Wrote That.

**Craig:** The worst campaign the guild ever did.

**John:** Billboard, “Somebody Wrote That.”

**Craig:** I’m so glad you brought that up. It was my least favorite – the best thing about that, like we’re driving around LA and there’s this huge billboard and it has a quote from a movie and then a picture of a screenwriter and then it says, “Somebody Wrote That.” And I guess the point was like, see, actors don’t come up with these lines on their own, but my point was like who is that? Can you put their name on the billboard you idiots?

So, that was the worst campaign we ever did.

**John:** Yeah. But anyway so we will see what happens with this WGA strike action.

**Craig:** Well good luck to them.

**John:** In happier, more local news, so listeners likely know that my company makes Highland which is the screenwriting app for the Mac, which I use to write everything that I write. It is a free download on the Mac App Store and will remain a free download on the Mac App Store. It’s $49 to upgrade to the full version.

But for the past 18 months we’ve also done a student version which is the full pro version but just for people who are in university writing and film programs. And so we partnered up with individual schools to do that to make sure it all works right for them. And now we’re opening it up to everybody. So, if you are a student in a college level writing or film program and would like to get the full version of Highland free for a year there’s a whole new way to do that.

So you apply, you send in a photo of your student ID, and we send you the code to unlock it free for a year. So, if you’re a listener who would like this and you are in a university writing program or film program you go to Quote-Unquote Apps and click on For Students and we will get you set up.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s lovely of you. Well done.

**John:** Yeah, we do try.

Finally, we’ve been talking a lot about scheduling of movies. And this week a whole bunch of movies came sort of smashing around like little broken up iceberg pieces in the summer season. So Black Widow and Cruella are both in theaters and on streaming. It feels like everyone is just trying to figure out how big the summer box office is going to be and when things get back to normal.

**Craig:** Yeah, this one is another whack at the piñata of the theatrical movie business. Specifically because Cruella and Black Widow, they’re big movies, right? So they’re on par with what Warner Bros recently did. And they’re also doing this premier access thing. So you pay for Disney+ and then if you want to see Cruella or Black Widow when they come out that’s another $30.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And is that $30 for the year and then you kind of get everything in that premier access? Or is $30–?

**John:** No, it’s just for that title.

**Craig:** Holy cajole.

**John:** I say that with such confidence. I cannot promise you with that confidence. But I really do believe that it’s for that title.

**Craig:** That’s my move. OK, well, I’m interested to know. But either way that is pretty huge. Because on the one hand you think, well, geez, $30 to see one thing streaming when you’re already paying for Disney+ is a lot, but I think a lot of parents remember that not too long ago, like two years ago, if you wanted to take your two kids and one of their friends to a movie it was going to be way more than $30 because of all the food and everything. So, it’s still kind of a deal.

This is one more shot at the sustainability of the theatrical business. I have no idea where this is going to go. This is nuts.

**John:** It is nuts. So two things. First off, one of the things we need to remember about parents with young kids is you are just desperate to get out of the house. So, going out of the house to see a movie with your kids is a totally viable way to burn some hours on a weekend, as opposed to watching at home. Makes sense.

But I also say like I’m not vaccinated yet but I feel like when I am vaccinated this summer I am excited to see Black Widow and Cruella on the big screen. So I’m increasingly saying what about my own possible movie-going experience in the future here.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that is in play here is the secret, not so secret, but the silent economic killer of the theatrical business which has always been marketing costs.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you and I both know that the marketing costs as they went up were also starting to, I’m going to use the word corrupt, I don’t care, corrupt the creative process of making films, because where it used to be that creative people would say here are the movies that we as a studio want to make, and then marketing people said, “OK, well, let’s figure out how to sell that.” Once you were spending more on marketing than on the movie naturally that flipped.

So the marketing people were telling the creative people what kinds of movies they should pay for. Now, with streaming you don’t have anywhere near the costs involved, because you’re not asking people to leave their house and go anywhere. In fact, every single show on Disney+ will serve as an advertisement for Black Widow or for Cruella.

Furthermore, social media has kind of taking over the job of advertising for you. People just talk about it with each other. So, if a movie like Cruella, I don’t know what Cruella cost, but it looks pretty expensive. A movie like Cruella before in the old days they probably would have spent $150 million marketing that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, if they only spend $30 million marketing that is a massive difference in how the profitability line is on that kind of movie. It’s enormous. I cannot overstate how big of a deal that would be if the big marketing buy of theatrical movies went away. That more than anything will change everything. And I have to argue probably for the better. Probably for the better.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, the big marketing spends really anchor a movie in people’s heads. And so you don’t get sort of the giant change everything franchises unless you sort of have that marketing push behind them I would argue. But, yes, when Netflix makes a movie that costs $100 million it really kind of just costs $100 million because they’re not spending a fortune on marketing that movie because it’s just they’re pushing it through their own channels. They’re putting up some billboards in the city where the actor lives but that’s it. And they’re not sort of doing the big nationwide campaign for it otherwise. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

I’m making a movie for Netflix now and it feels like the right thing to be making for that platform and that service, but it’s going to be weird not to see commercials for it and sort of a push for it.

**Craig:** I get that. I just think that if television has taught movies anything about the way streaming works it’s there is value in being unique and good. And that that is more important than kind of putting an advertisement for your movie on every carton of milk in the world because people will find it and talk about it with each other and watch it. And you do save a ton of money. And hopefully this leads to movies returning to a more adventurous mindset and not just a kind of franchise-obsessed, navel-gazing, big, big event movie for PG-13 audiences only.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Some follow up. Last week we talked about foreign levies and our own Stuart Friedel wrote in to say that foreign levies can be paid to your S-Corp but the WGA just needs a W-9 on file. So, if you are a loan-out corporation you can just register that with the WGA and they will pay it to your S-Corp rather than paying it to you as an individual person.

**Craig:** I did not know that.

**John:** Yeah, so things we learn ourselves. We have another foreign levies follow up here. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Sure. Bea asks, “Yesterday I got a WGA foreign levy for a project that was never made. It was a feature writer’s room, single day, major studio. Definitely hasn’t been made yet, if ever, but somehow the WGA is sending checks in its name. How’d that happen?”

**John:** So we won’t say what the name of this movie is, but Craig and I can both see it on the outline. I have absolutely no idea why you are getting this check for this movie that has not been made yet. Cash that check because the only reason the WGA got that check is because the studio wrote that check. And so it’s the studio’s fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not the WGA’s fault. Cash that check. I have no idea why you would be getting this check.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wonder if sometimes out of ease what happens is the countries will say like to Warner Bros, “Here’s a bunch of money that we have for your projects that are kind of…” Because remember they’re not collecting money off of the movies and shows that air. They’re collecting money off of the sale of blank tapes, disk drives, thumb drive, etc.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** So it may be that the studio kind of aggregates all of its expenses and says here’s how we will distribute that money, or here is how it should be distributed. They send a big list of information to the country. The country goes, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, let’s send out that money to the WGA for these things. That’s my guess.

**John:** That’s probably the best guess we can make for this. Basically they had a list of what writers did you employ during this year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Bea’s name was on that list and that’s what happened.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Well, cash that check. Whenever I got sort of like small checks for not a lot of money I always treated it as like Panda Express money. Ooh, I can get some eggrolls at Panda Express. That was a treat for me when I got those small checks.

**Craig:** Orange Chicken, man.

**John:** Oh, I love the Orange Chicken.

**Craig:** Everyone loves Orange Chicken. They figured something out. I remember when in the mall I noticed for the first time Panda Express had smartened up and did the double tray of the Orange Chicken. Because remember it used to be the same size tray as everything.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And then they were like, OK, fine, we give in, you people. You love sugar and fat. Here we go. Fine.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yup. It’s delicious.

**John:** Some follow up on Episode 491, the deal with deals. Danielle asks, “Following up on your conversation about writer deals, can you cover if-come deals? Specifically how they may or may not be hurting newer writers.”

Craig, have you ever had an if-come deal?

**Craig:** I was offered one many, many, many, many years ago and I said no. But I understood the general wisdom of it. I understood that.

**John:** So if-come deals are really common in TV. And so what will happen in TV is you are a writer with an idea for a series. And so you go and pitch to a studio or to a production company and they say this is fantastic, we really love that idea. We are going to make a deal with you that’s pending us getting a successful setup at a network. And so basically I’ve pitched to Sony and Sony says, yes, we love it, we’ll make you a deal. If it’s if-come on getting a network, so an ABC, or CBS, or somebody else to do it.

Super, super common in TV. And you can sort of get why they do it because that studio is going to be paying you but they’re only going to be paying you if they actually have a home for that project. And so it’s just sort of a given way of doing business in TV.

In features it’s weird and I don’t hear about it in features I think mostly because if you wrote a spec script and somebody wanted to buy it but not really buy it, or sort of have the option to buy it that’s just called an option purchase agreement where they’re paying you some money now and a promise for a lot more money down the road. That’s standard in features. What I’m guessing may be happening here in features would be let’s say, what did we decide it was, it was not the Slinky Movie, not the Uno Movie, what are we–?

**Craig:** Oh, what are we up to now? Oh, Mister Clean?

**John:** Mister Clean. So let’s say the Mister Clean Movie. So the Procter & Gamble or whoever owns Mister Clean says, OK, we love your take on the Mister Clean Movie and we want to be the producer of record on this, so we are going to make a deal for you, but it’s going to be if-come based on whether we can actually get a studio partner to actually release the thing.

I would not be excited about that deal.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because they are basically locking you up for a lot of time and they’re not paying you everything. There’s just no guaranteed money.

**Craig:** Well, even worse, what they’re doing is they’re purchasing insurance against an auction. And this is why I said no. And also I should say if-come was more common during the network dominance era, because now many streaming channels are their own studio, of course. But what they’re saying is like, OK, that’s a really cool idea. We can go and sell that to any one of 12 different places. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to lock you into what we’re going to pay you now and we’re only going to pay it to you once it lands at a place. That means is if there’s a huge competitive situation where everybody wants it the studio will benefit because the rights are going to go through the roof, the licensing fees will be massive. You won’t.

So, much better for you to be like, Nah. If I’m willing to bet on myself here I’d rather just see if a couple places want it and then they can fight over me and then I will also benefit from the competitive situation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, one of those.

**John:** It’s also important to understand that even if you have an if-come deal if they can’t find the buyer at the level that they were expecting, or the kind of situation they were expecting, they might come back to you and say like, OK, we couldn’t actually get that deal so we need to figure out a new deal that’s actually makeable for the thing we’re trying to do.

And so I’ve encountered that in my career where I got like a pretty sweet ass deal, on paper, but then we went out to the market. The one place that wanted it wasn’t going to pay the amount that would actually pay out the other places. So they were going to renegotiate your deal anyway. That also happens.

Having that quote, a good quote, could be helpful for future deals. So there’s some valid, some reason why you might want to do it. But I would say if you’re a newer writer being offered an if-come deal especially for a feature or for a TV project that feels like it already is kind of set up at one place, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

Like an if-come waiting for an actor to be attached, that makes me really nervous.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll also get if-comes a lot when you’re dealing with a producer that has an exclusivity issue. So you go to a particular company and they’re like well we have a deal with Netflix and we are exclusive to them. So we’re going to make you an if-come deal because there’s nowhere else to go. That’s it. We’re going to go there or we’re going nowhere. At that point maybe makes a little bit more sense.

**John:** Yeah. But it also may make more sense to actually just pitch to the one place that you can go and try to make a deal.

**Craig:** Well, correct. And so then you’re gambling, right? And the interesting things about those arrangements is they can be a little incestuous. So these people have a relationship already with the streamer and they can make a kind of deal where you get screwed and so do you want to lock something in earlier? It’s complicated. Your agent or lawyer will have the best advice. But Danielle that’s basically the long and short of it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, what is your favorite color?

**Craig:** Red.

**John:** My favorite color is blue. How long has red been your favorite color?

**Craig:** Since the first time someone asked me what’s your favorite color. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it’s always been red. There’s never been a question. And it’s not like, oh, I’ve got to wear red or I’ve got to paint my house red. I don’t do that. That’s stupid. I just like it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m that way with blue. It was always the first answer and I just like blue. And when I say blue I have a very specific blue. It’s like a Crayola Blue. The basic blue crayon.

**Craig:** Standard blue.

**John:** Is the kind of blue that defines my favorite color. But of course like all things as you grow up you develop maturity and you horizons expand and you come to appreciate many other colors that are wonderful out there. And so you get past the sort of like very rainbow colors of your youth.

But I want to talk about color because I’m reading this book, The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St Clair. It’s a couple years old but I’m just now reading it. Which goes through the history of how humans sort of came to be able to make the colors that we see and use. Like how dyes and pigments and sort of all these things actually came to be. Because dyes were incredibly expensive, and so it was so hard to find the things that actually got you to that color. And worth more than gold, ounce for ounce, over the annals of history. And it’s only through modern science that we sort of have the ability to reproduce all the colors that are out there.

And I’m reading this book but I’m also thinking about the script I’m writing and I feel like partly because I’m reading this book I’m just very aware of the colors of the scenes that I’m writing and sort of what is what color in what space. And even though I’m not writing those colors necessarily into scenes they’re definitely informing my choices. So I thought we might talk first about sort of how color works on screen and some of the iconic moments that we sort of think about where you couldn’t pull color out them.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. All right.

**John:** So I think of movies with amazing color palettes. Amelie. The greens of Amelie. The pink in Grand Budapest Hotel. 2001 is mostly white. And then there’s some sequences that are all red. So in the movie Knives Out Chris Evans is wearing a sweater. Craig, what color is that sweater?

**Craig:** It was an off-white.

**John:** Yeah. It was on off-white.

**Craig:** It was a bone.

**John:** American Beauty has the red flowers and she’s in the red flowers. Midsommar has a really limited color palette and it’s just the explosive colors of the flower headdresses. So color is such a part of our movies and yet we don’t think about it that much on the page. So, let’s spend some moments thinking about it on the page.

**Craig:** Well it’s hard to do because it is purely visual. Sound I think occupies maybe – well, it depends on your mind. I think everybody’s brain functions differently. For me I find the ability to hear sound from a page much easier than to visualize color so much of what’s on page is dialogue. We’ve been trained since childhood to read books where people are talking to each other and so we are trained to hear words. And therefore we can hear sound effects. And sound effects are also very onomatopoeia-able.

So, well, I made a word. I can describe with words what a smash is. Describing colors turns basically into a simile fist. So it’s tricky to do. And it’s something that I think one of the first things that happens when a director reads a script is that can start to fill in more. The director who is going to be doing the first few episodes of The Last of Us, made this movie, Kantemir Balagov made this movie called Beanpole and color is an intense part of it and so much of our conversation already has been about color and specific color choices and what it means and why they pop up.

You’re actually putting your finger on something that I think is lacking probably in my toolbox. And I don’t think of enough. And maybe I should think of more.

**John:** Yeah. Something I’m trying to be more aware of as I’m writing, but you’re also right that a lot of times our color conversation becomes part of the conversation, becomes our discussion with the director and ultimately a production designer and an art director about how things are going to look beyond what’s just happening on the page.

And so when a filmmaker is thinking about how to shoot something there’s a discussion of color palette. And color palette not just like here’s all the colors, it’s like, no, no, we are being deliberate about what colors we’re using and what colors we’re not using. And really it’s that omission of colors that becomes even the stronger statement. So, in my movie The Nines it has three different segments. The first segment is really leaning towards reds and yellows. And so that informs the color of the light, but also just the wardrobe. We really go into yellows and reds. You will not see any blue or green anywhere in that section.

When we get to section three it’s all blues and greens. And we’re outdoors in the forest and it’s wet. And the light is whiter and bluer and colder. And you will not see any reds and yellows. That is a very common set of choices that filmmakers are going to make about how they’re going to shoot a thing just to make something feel deliberate and not random.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think you’re right that a lot of times it’s the subtractive aspect of it that strikes us. It’s a subconscious thing. We don’t really know that we’re not seeing something. Just like we don’t know we’re not hearing something. But it does create a subconscious, psychological impact which is something of course everybody wants. As opposed to just, oh wow, that’s a red movie.

So, removing things is a really interesting choice. The other aspect of color that I do think about when I’m writing, it’s not specifically a color choice, but overall is a question of saturation

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So saturation is just how – I guess it’s how vivid the colors are. So when you think about, like for instance you did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Very vivid, right. Candy colors, which is no surprise.

**John:** Once we’re inside the factory. But outside the factory it’s very desaturated.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you make these choices and generally speaking we think of very saturated color as heightened reality and desaturated, particularly very desaturated as verité. So, the opening sequence in almost all of Saving Private Ryan is really desaturated to the point where you’re like, wait, is this black and white? It’s that desaturated. And it makes us feel like we are in something that’s super grounded. And there’s no right or wrong, obviously. It’s a question of tone.

So, with the stuff that I’m writing now I tend to want to write towards desaturation.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a scene I was working on this past week where I wanted that desaturated feel and I was thinking about well how am I going to get that. What is the natural way to do that? And I decided it’s two sides of a FaceTime call. And so I decided on the side I wanted desaturated. Oh, it’s going to be raining on that side and it’s going to be a guy outdoors standing under extra covering, but it’s raining. And that is sort of naturally god’s desaturation. It’s like you’re pulling the color out of things.

**Craig:** God’s desaturation.

**John:** And let’s talk about how color is created, because you can’t talk about color without talking about light. So, what color is the light? Basically what time of year is it? What time of day is it? Sort of where are you at geographically and sort of emotionally at that time?

I just watched Another Round, which I really loved, and it’s set in Denmark. And most of it takes place in sort of summery months, and so it never really fully gets dark. And so the colors are really strange. And it’s sort of always at most like a twilight. And that really affects sort of how you feel about the things you’re seeing and the choice to set those scenes at those times of day versus bright sunlight really does impact how those scenes play out.

**Craig:** Yeah. The impact of light on things, it’s a little scary for me to write it because when you start to get into how the light changes, the color of something as something moves through it, you do risk that kind of purple dialogue that we want to shy away from.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** A lot of new writers are talking about the golden hue as it turns–

**John:** The crimson sky.

**Craig:** And yada-yada-yada. And, of course, when cinematographers read that stuff they kind of roll their eyes and they’re like, OK kid, but this is not actually how light works. But there is a feeling, and I always feel that the goal is rather than to be technical – I like to just be honest, you know, the way the light hits you it makes you sad. Just say that. I think cinematographers vastly prefer that because they know how to achieve that. Just like actors are just like tell me I’m supposed to be sad. I know I can do that. So, I do think about light that way.

And then there are gags, which is our all-purpose moviemaking, television-making term for special things. So there’s a gag where a particular beam of light is coming down through a shaft and it’s combining with something else. Well that you can always call out and describe because that’s really specific.

**John:** Yeah. Well one thing you may choose to call out and describe is the colors that we’re seeing on screen, especially if they’re impacting characters. So characters are making choices about what clothes they put on, how they do their makeup, and that will have an impact. And so I’m definitely not arguing that you’re going to label the colors for every single thing a character is doing or wearing, but it’s important to highlight some things.

Like in the thing I’m working on right now it’s basically a two-hander and one of the characters has sort of a uniform that he wears every day. He just doesn’t want to think about the clothes he’s wearing. And so I’m able to describe what that is that he’s wearing. And the other character I describe as being unafraid of color and pattern. And that just tells you, like, it was a signal to the costume designer you can push this guy a little bit. This guy lives in a heightened space. And so I’m not really calling out color so much as sort of like the range of choices that should be open as we’re visualizing this character.

**Craig:** It’s such a good point. And it’s why I wish that movies would function more like television shows in the sense of how a writer interacts with key department heads, like costume. Because, you know, I’m writing a scene, or I wrote it, in an episode and there’s a crowd of people. Who they are is not important. I just want people to notice one particular woman because something is going to connect through to later. She’s not going to have a name. She doesn’t have dialogue or anything like that.

So, what I’ve done is given her a particular piece of clothing with a particular color. As I’m doing it I’m well aware that this feels very Schindler’s List. There’s the little girl in red where everyone else is in black and white. And so I don’t want to be that. But what I want to be able to say to the costume designer is this is what this means. This is what I’m just trying to achieve. Now tell me how you would go about doing it. Let’s take a look at some choices. I can always go back and revise that. But this was the intention. It is a relationship that should exist in movies and weirdly in features, for whatever reason, everyone feels the need to aggressively sequester the screenwriter from everyone else. And it just, I don’t know why other than directorial insecurity. I don’t know. It’s just bizarre.

**John:** I’m thinking back to go, my first movie, and Sarah Polley’s character, Ronna, where’s this iconic sort of red leather coat. And that’s not scripted in there, but the idea that she would have a sort of signature look, that makes total sense. What is scripted in as a color is that Adam and Zack are driving a yellow Miata. And a yellow Miata is actually just a very specific joke. And I knew it would also photograph well at night and so you could see it in these dark scenes. But them driving a yellow Miata actually does pay off. It’s a recognizable car. It also tells you something about them as characters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that becomes important. Again, we’re always arguing for specificity, but as a writer you have to be very deliberate about what things you’re putting in and what things you’re putting out. So we’re not saying to make everything a color but to be thinking about color and thinking about whether color could be helping you tell the story, especially what’s happening in the scene.

**Craig:** 100%. And if you find yourself in a specific moment wondering what you can do to get the awesomeness of your mind’s image across think about color. Because there may be a point in your script where you may want to hammer it and help people see. I think about that moment in The Last Jedi where the one spaceship goes light-speeding through another one and splitting it apart. And it’s so white. But it’s also starlight white. And I don’t know if Rian made that clear on the page, because he’s also directing and he doesn’t have to necessarily communicate it on the page the way we might have to with a different director.

But it was a moment where you go, ah, sound stops, this incredibly bright light shines, and I can see where a signature moment could really use a full attention to color on the page. So, it’s a good choice to make when you’re looking for something special as well.

**John:** And I haven’t gone back through Scott Frank’s scripts for Queen’s Gambit, but that is a series that uses color quite aggressively to establish time period. Because different time periods have different colors that are predominate. And so calling out mustard yellow appliances, that’s not just painting the walls, that’s actually anchoring you into, oh, this is what this kind of kitchen feels like because mustard yellow is a very specific time period.

And so just be aware of that. I think if you’re doing anything period it’s worth looking at sort of what the colors were that were dominant at that time because it may be worth calling those out.

**Craig:** Time and place.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because there are places that have colors. The colors of 1980’s Soviet Union, well they’re colors. I mean, you know what they are. We certainly did our research and there’s certain ones that keep popping up and they’re glorious. I mean, they’re not colors we used. I guess on one level you’d go that’s objectively an ugly color, but on another level you go it’s weirdly kind of beautiful and hypnotizing. So think about that in terms of place as well because no question that color is reflected by culture in huge ways. There’s just certain cultures just have a different point of view on color than others.

**John:** So my advice for screenwriters going forward here, listening to this conversation, as you’re watching movies and TV shows be aware of color and be aware of when you think those choices of color were deliberate and sort of how early in the process those choices of color might have been made. Because I suspect you can retroactively write the scenes and decide, oh, they really called out that color quite early on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then as you’re going through the outside world just try to be more aware of the colors that you’re seeing. Because imagine yourself in a scene in a space. What would be the predominant color? And so if you’re hiking in the Grand Canyon you’re just going to be overwhelmed by that red color. And so that is going to influence any scene that is being shot there. If you’re in certain forests it’s just going to be overwhelmingly green unless you’re doing something to desaturate it. It’s going to be just super, super green.

So just be thinking about what the impact of color will be if you were to watch this on a screen.

**Craig:** Great advice.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So, this time we’re doing things a little bit differently. So let’s establish first what’s normal about the Three Page Challenge is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their movie or their script and we read through them and offer our honest feedback. We’ve been doing this since very early on in the show.

But based on our conversation last week we said like you know what’s interesting about the Three Page Challenge is we’re just reading these pages in a vacuum and we don’t have any sense of what’s happening in the rest of the story, so we don’t know whether these opening scenes are actually setting up the movie that we think they are.

So what we asked our listeners to do is to send in their three pages but also give us a log line or a description of what happens in the rest of the script so we can see whether we were right and whether we set these up right. So let’s welcome on our producer, Megana Rao, to get us set up for this.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So we sent out an email to our premium subscribers on Sunday afternoon saying like, hey, we’re going to try this thing. Send in your script and send in your log line, too. And how many responses did we get?

**Megana:** And we got 190 responses. I read all of those.

**Craig:** Oh wow. Oh man.

**Megana:** By Tuesday night my brain was absolute mush. So I had to ask Bo to help me narrow it down from like the top 10 to 15.

**Craig:** Thank you, Bo. Thanks for helping, Bo. But so you read nearly 600 pages.

**Megana:** Yes. But if I found two typos like pretty early on I was like I’m not going to keep reading this.

**Craig:** Ooh. I like it.

**John:** That was a new thing I asked Megana to put in as a check because I get frustrated when we do a Three Page Challenge and you and I spend time talking about stupid typos on the page. And so going forward if Megana sees typos they go away. We’re not going to consider them anymore. Because you just don’t send in your stuff with typos. Have someone else read this first.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you want us to care about, at the very least you have to care about it.

**John:** Yeah. And also so this episode will have an element of surprise and mystery because Megana has seen the writers’ log lines for these things, the synopses, but you and I haven’t. So we’re going to speculate what we think the script is about and then she will tell us what the writer thinks the script is about.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** All right. Let’s get us started. Megana, can you talk us through Rinky Dink by Stephen Brower. And we’ll have a PDF in the show notes, but if you could give us a quick synopsis.

**Megana:** So Elias, 28, films a promo video for his aunt, Janet Witherbaum, a bronze-level figure skater in her 40s, at a skating rink in Minnesota. Janet is raising money for her trip to the National Championships of Adult Amateur Figure Skating. Elias tries to teach Janet a TikTok dance which she doesn’t get. Through talking head interviews we learn that Elias’s parents have died and that Janet taught him to skate but doesn’t allow him to skate at her gala events.

**John:** Craig Mazin, what was your first read and instinct on Rinky Dink?

**Craig:** Well, I was enjoying. The Minnesota kookiness, like wacky Minnesotans is a well-mined area, you know, from Fargo, and the Fargo show. But I’m a sucker for a good ice skating comedy and it definitely feels like a comedy. And I liked the way it started. Janet was an interesting character. I liked the say she was described and I liked the way she performed. I could see it. I could see the whole thing.

I ran into trouble on page two. So, I was cruising along. But on page two what happens is we go from this POV of an iPhone that is recording her and then there’s a wide shot of her nephew, Elias, shooting her through the iPhone. OK, cool, I get it. We went from an iPhone POV to that. And then it just says, “Elias Talking Head.” And he starts talking and I’m like where is he? I didn’t understand until quite a bit later that what’s happening is Stephen is putting Elias in one of those like Office-style testimonials somewhere else, but that needs to be spelled out really clearly. Because I was baffled for a bit about where the hell he was.

My other issue was I couldn’t quite get a read on Elias’s age. I mean, we are told that he’s 28. And we’re told that he’s kind of sweet and very easily steamrolled, which I liked. But he was interacting with her the way teenagers interact with old people. You know? Like “Come on let me show you the latest TikTok dance or let me say randos.” He didn’t seem like somebody on the edge of 30. So I was a little confused by the character there.

But I like the setup of things. It seemed like there was an interesting concept. Elias was still fun. And I thought there was a really good line when he says, “This year I worked up the courage to ask Janet if she would mind,” you know, to perform. “And she said, ‘yes,’ she would mind.” Which I liked.

This is cold open for presumably a series. It does not end with much of a punchline. I think we talked about last week how important punchlines are, whether they’re dramatic or comic. And this one just sort of ends. So that was an issue.

**John:** Craig, I literally wrote “not quite enough punchline.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So, this feels like Modern Family. This feels like Modern Family, sort of Best in Show kind of space in that – whether or not there’s a documentary conceit like the way there is in The Office, or it’s just like for whatever reason they can talk directly to camera in these confessionals, it has that feel. And I mean that in a really good way. Like if I were to read this whole script and the whole script was to this level I’d be like, oh, this is a person who can write a Modern Family kind of show and shows real finesse with it and the ability to tell a joke and sort of get things going.

I have the same concerns you do about Elias though because I had forgotten that he was 28 so I just kept aging him down and down as I flipped through the pages.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Weirdly I know a lot about his parents dying and stuff like that. I know a lot of backstory, but I don’t get the great sense of who he is individually and specifically. And I’m asking a lot for the first three pages, and so I don’t want to sort of push it too far, but I don’t have a great sense of who he was at the end of these three pages in the way that in a Modern Family or in The Office I felt like I would have in the first three minutes. And so that’s a thing which I think can be worked on.

But let’s talk about some of the things that work really well here.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Page one, “Right now and always she means business.” Great. That scene description on the page it’s working really nicely for me here. Elias says, “Sorry, are you sure though? That’s what it’s called.” “No, I know.” “National Championships for Adult Amateur Skaters.” The just repeating it again to get the extra underline on the joke works really well and has a good sense of it.

On page two, here’s an opportunity to just trim a line but also I think works better as a parenthetical. So, Elias has his talking head. And so the “’whole social media thing, so’… He crosses his fingers. “’Her idea.’” I wouldn’t have broken out to the action line for that. I would have just kept in parentheticals crossing his fingers. It saves you a line and also keeps that thought together because it really should be one thought.

**Craig:** Right. I totally agree with that. I thought that one thing Stephen did pull through these three pages in terms of Elias is that he has got one of those indomitably happy spirits. So even when someone is kind of being insulting to him, or mean, he just keeps on smiling. You know, he’s like okie-dokie. So, he has a little bit of that weeble-wobble, you can tip him over but you can’t knock him down. And so I liked that. I liked him.

And so that’s why I kind of have a suspicion about where this is going, but you know, look, I’m not in possession of a log line.

**John:** What you’re saying about indomitably happy, like if he’d called that out on page one or page two, sort of like shortly after meeting him, that’s a fair thing to note because that colors what we’re seeing of the rest of his lines.

**Craig:** Right. It could contextualize that stuff for people a little bit better. I agree. But I thought that what was working here was that Janet feels like an interesting potential villain and Elias feels like an interesting potential hero. I like that the hero doesn’t quite get that the villain is the villain. And I think mostly other than the kind of simple clerical business like letting me know that we’re dealing with kind of Office testimonial, including where are they when they do it, you just need to kind of give us a good ending there. Because it just sort of petered out.

**John:** So this is the part of this special episode where we speculate about what the rest of this pilot is. And so I’m guessing that while they are central characters to this that there’s actually a pretty – there’s a bigger ensemble at work here. Because it feels like that kind of show. And so we’re going to see more of that family. Meemaw may still be alive there. And I think since Elias is our point of view character it’s going to be sort of centered around him. And so he will be sort of the straight man in – the “straight man” – amid all these sort of crazy, kooky people around him.

And so this first episode will go up through her event to raise money for her going off to this championship. And that things will go awry in trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly we’ll have lots more characters. I can’t shake the feeling that this is going to turn into Elias versus Janet. And Elias is going to get a chance to skate in the Adult Amateur Figure National Championships. And either Janet is going to become his coach, or Janet will – so Janet has to leave the dream behind and help her nephew achieve his dream. Or, that they actually aggressively compete against each other, which would be fascinating.

But it does seem like ultimately this is going to turn into Elias hopefully in some final showdown a la Strictly Ballroom or something.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you come back and tell us what does Stephen Brower say happens in the rest of this script.

**Megana:** All right, so this is the log line we got from Stephen for Rinky Dink. “A charmingly delusional 40-something figure skater must prove her work among apathetic has-beens, cutthroat mothers, and snotty little children.”

**Craig:** Oh, so Elias is just sort of along for the ride.

**John:** Yeah, so she’s the central character.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** That can work, also.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I mean, we’ve definitely built shows around sort of a delusional central figure before.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense, right? So it’s maybe more of an ongoing thing. But, you know, this is the fun part. You kind of guess from these three pages. It’s no surprise that you might think that, OK, the thing that the three pages sort of highlights is what you would imagine everything to be about. But that’s interesting. I hope that Elias does get a chance to perform in that show. Because he’s sweet and he deserves it.

**John:** Nice. All right. Let’s look at Twilight Run by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford. Megana, start us off.

**Megana:** Twyla, 30s, wakes up in a 1980s Camaro next to a character titled Dipshit. Dipshit tells her she needs to take the edge off and offers Twyla a pack of cigarettes that she throws out the window. We cut to Twyla, Dipshit, some henchmen, and a French scientist in the pasture outside of the car. The French scientist claims that he has a world-changing technology and will only deal directly with Twist Jackson.

Twyla tells him he’s out of luck. Suddenly, a cowboy figure rides in on horseback. This is Twist Jackson. He exchanges briefcases with the French scientist who tries to warn Twist of the Twilight Run. Twist shrugs off the warning and later opens the box to reveal a swirling green gas.

**Craig:** You know. The usual.

**John:** The things that happen. This is a heightened world. And so one of the reasons why this made the finalist list is because we could talk about tone. We can sort of talk about what universe you’re setting up. And this is a clearly heightened universe. And I think the things that worked in this were about setting up what kind of heightened universe it is.

I don’t sort of really know what the rules of this universe are, but things are a little bit goofy in sort of a Buckaroo Banzai or a Rick and Morty kind of sense. And it’s good to see that by the end of page three. I got a sense that there’s some logic behind this even though I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.

My biggest issue was Twyla who is identified as our hero. I know nothing about her by the end of this. I really have no great insight into sort of who she is and why she’s special, or what her deal is. And instead Twist Jackson is the person who is sort of occupying things. So, by the end of these three pages I wanted a better sense of what makes Twyla interesting other than sort of being kind of grouchy and spacing out. I didn’t get a great sense of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What were you seeing Craig?

**Craig:** Definitely Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, this just seems like an ode or an homage to Buckaroo Banzai. We could be totally wrong but that’s surely what it feels like at least through these three pages.

Couple of things. Tonally, there is a little bit of a mismatch because the first page feels tonally rather grounded actually. It’s just a couple of people in a car. They’re talking to each other. I was a little bit confused about, again, where we were. When I see somebody in a car in my mind they are – she’s behind the wheel. And then she looks over at – is she looking over to the right, to the passenger seat? Or is she looking out the window to a car next to her?

**John:** And I would say that the first two-thirds, “a woman’s face through a rearview mirror,” like I just didn’t really quite know what was happening there. And so even the second reading through I didn’t quite know what I was seeing, or why I was seeing it.

**Craig:** Correct. And I think that this underscores a larger issue that I want to talk to Andrew and Nick about. But the one thing I do know for sure is that the French scientist’s dialogue, “This discovery will change the world. I could have sold it to nations the world over. I made a deal with Twist Jackson. I want to deal with Twist Jackson,” even if the tone is heightened that’s just annoying. You have to kind of establish that a character lives in a world of bad dialogue to have him successfully deliver the bad dialogue. But we just met him. It’s literally the second – the first thing he says is, “Where is he?” which is, I don’t know anything, and then the second thing he says is this incredibly arch, villainy plot exposition thing.

So, again, you can get away with it if you know that that’s the world that guy lives in, but until you do harder to get away with.

Here’s the bigger issue, the biggest issue, and it ties directly to into what John is saying about how we don’t know anything about Twyla. There is no sense of perspective in these three pages. None. The perspective is I think a camera.

**John:** I felt like I was in a wide shot for the whole time.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. Because nothing is centered on somebody observing. Everything just happens and we’re observing, which is kind of no good. Especially when we’ve established a hero. The reason that we’re so confused about what the hell is going on is because you guys have this visual reveal that you just sort of toss out there. Like they’re in a flat open pasture. Well that is not where we expect a 1981 Z28 Camaro to be, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So make a reveal out of it. Acknowledge that we’re not quite sure where we are, whatever it is.

And then this conversation, give me a sense that Twyla is having reactions. When Twist Jackson does show up, essentially completely contradicting what Twyla said, what does she think? We know what the French scientist thinks, but what does she think? When he shows up and grabs this thing what is she doing? She’s gone. She literally is gone. But somebody’s perspective has to be the perspective.

And it’s one scene. And in one scene, or one connected scene basically once we reveal where we are, one character has the perspective. One. So who?

I don’t mean POV. I just mean who are we kind of anchoring to?

**John:** Yeah. Like who is our entry point character? We’re sort of standing in their shoes as the scene is happening. And we don’t have that here yet.

**Craig:** We don’t.

**John:** Let’s talk a little bit about the words on the page. “Asleep, her head resting on a plain white pillow.” Well, there’s a color, just white. White pillow. Dipshit has prelap. It’s not really a prelap because it’s not like he’s going into really future stuff.

**Craig:** I circled that also. I was like it’s not prelap.

**John:** Yeah, so that’s just off-screen, or voice over. You can do either one of them. Both of them are acceptable here. But that’s not really prelap.

But that whole first sequence I just didn’t get the point of it. I really had a hard time understanding what that was. So, if you need that, if this really becomes important for your story that you need that, great, but I feel like just that precious time and you need – we talk about sort of the first line of dialogue in a movie, the first image in a movie is so crucial, so precious. Just to be wasting it on something that we can’t understand or really see, it’s not good. So I think starting someplace else will help you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also want lines to be motivated. We’re going to see this issue come up in our next three pages as well. So in the very beginning, “TWYLA, our hero. 30s, short hair, black bomber jacket. Don’t fuck with her, she won’t fuck with you. Lounging behind the wheel, she looks over at: SOME DIPSHIT…” This is what you’ve described. I’m looking at a woman. She is sitting there. And then she turns for no reason to a guy who then says something. Like he was waiting for her to look at him for him to say what he’s saying which makes no sense. Especially when he’s saying “you keep zoning out.” Why would he say that after she’s turning to look at him?

That’s not what zoning out means. If she’s zoned out and then she hears, “(OS) You keep zoning out,” and then she turns and looks. So you see what I’m saying? And again that helps drive perspective so we understand we’re with her. That’s kind of important.

**John:** Lastly, these three pages had more colons in it than I’ve sort of ever seen in a script. Basically Andrew and Nick have made a choice that colons are going to be there dashes. And it’s fine. I’m not complaining. It’s a way of doing things. And so in places where you or I might use dashes or some other piece of punctuation they’re using colons. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Works.

**John:** Go for it. There’s a whole range of styles of work and at least it’s consistent. There were no other real problems on these pages in terms of like formatting screenwriting stuff, so go for it. If that’s your style knock yourself out.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, you know, perspective guys. Big one.

**John:** All right. So Craig we’ve got to speculate. What happens in this script?

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well you’ve got this really weird thing going on in the very first shot that’s like some sort of dreamy thing. I think it’s Buckaroo Banzai and I think that Twist Jackson is maybe an idiot and I think maybe Twyla is going to have to save the world from Twist Jackson’s arrogance as he seeks to do something with the swirling green stuff that leads to the Twilight Run.

**John:** Yeah. I think the box with the swirling green gas is a MacGuffin and there are going to be a bunch of people after it. And what this deal was and sort of the bigger stakes of it all are going to be important. And that she will be forced to make a choice about which side she’s on. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Now let’s find out how we did.

**John:** Megana, what’s the truth?

**Megana:** Wait, can I prolong the reveal and ask you guys a question?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Yes.

**Megana:** What do you think of the character description that’s “some dipshit who will get blown up by page nine?”

**Craig:** Great question. I personally have no problem with it. I think it’s a tone signifier.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So it’s the first indication that we might be dealing with a bit of a wacky heightened reality. I’m totally cool with that. That page unfortunately didn’t have anything that the movie viewer or TV viewer would detect that would indicate a heightened tone. It only had kind of a very mundane situation between two people. So it’s a little bit of a cheat. If the visuals matched that attitude I’d be totally cool.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I should mention that I was never clear who the goons were working for. Sometimes it seemed like Twyla’s goons and sometimes it seemed like the French guy’s goons. So just be aware of that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s two sets of goons.

**John:** Too many goons.

**Megana:** So here is their log line. Five years after a deep undercover operation ended in failure a former ATF agent teams up with a smart but socially awkward tech specialist to infiltrate a deadly cult and stop an arms deal that if successful could alter the very fabric of reality itself.

**Craig:** That’s plot. We don’t quite get what the character stuff is there. It’s so funny, we only think about stuff with character. But again log lines are very plotty, aren’t they?

**John:** They are very plotty. Yeah, I guess I could buy her as a former ATF agent who then discovers this sort of heightened universe world. But I feel like Twist Jackson exists as a semi supernatural character, just sort of appears out of nowhere and rides a horse. So, yeah, it’s not quite what I would guess. But teaming up to stop a thing, sure, you’re setting that up right here on page three.

**Craig:** There’s no sense of tone in that log line which I think actually might be a mistake. I think it’s good to kind of indicate – the way that he’ll get blown up in nine pages. Indicate a little bit of a sense of that heightened-ness because otherwise people are going to read this and go like “What is this?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Embrace the Buckaroo.

**John:** That could be Mission: Impossible.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** That could be a whole bunch of different set ups.

**Craig:** It could be a billion things. And it seems like what these guys are going for is Buckaroo Banzai. I mean, the dude is named Twist Jackson for god’s sakes.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** By the way, we’re doing poorly. I just want to point out. O for 2.

**Megana:** Great. So South Carthay by Alex Rennie. In the middle of the desert 11-year-old Andy watches the 1988 film Hellraiser 2 with his brother Parker, 13, and their pit bull, Jules. Parker is blind and relies on Andy to narrate the movie to him. Their mother, Maggie, 35, speaks to her agent Karen on the phone in her home office. Karen tries to set up a meeting for Maggie’s new book in Santa Monica but between doctor’s appointments for her sons Maggie doesn’t have any availability. Karen urges Maggie to move from the desert to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Craig, do you want to start us off.

**Craig:** This, I’m going to talk about a couple things. My first question and I still don’t have an answer for it is what year is this.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Because they’re watching a movie from 1988, but I’m not sure if they’re just watching it as an old movie or if this is 1988. And it will become relevant in a little bit.

But there are two instances of a problem in here that I alluded to in the prior pages and that is – I don’t know what else to call it – the movie waiting. It’s like reality waits for something to happen. So here’s what happens at the very, very beginning. We get a description of a two-story house in the center of a barren desert. It’s very, very hot.

“The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice. Hellraiser, prelap,” once again not prelap, “you solved the puzzle box. You summoned us, we came.” And my question is how does that suddenly happen? The movie is on, right? Like it’s not like somebody suddenly starts up a remote for the movie.

What you can do, Alex, if you want to just not have rando dialogue and then that line have music that we go like what is this weird music. That’s weird music for this. And then the line would go, oh, that was score from a movie. But the point is the movie can’t wait. It can’t just suddenly come in.

Because we then go to a television screen and we realize that these two kids, Parker and Andy, have been watching it. Have been watching. Not just started, right?

I liked the reveal that Parker is blind. I thought that was really well done. Because first I was a little bit like I don’t understand why he’s asking these questions that he’s asking. And then I was like, oh, that’s why. And I love that feeling, right. There’s a joy as a moviegoer or television watcher to think that you got the writer and then you realize they got you. So I like that.

The problem of the world waiting for something to happen occurs again. These guys are watching TV and at the same time I assume their mom is on the phone with her agent. And that scene begins with the agent on the phone saying, “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” What were they talking about before? So the phone rings, I answer it, and then I just wait, wait, wait, oh the camera is here. “Mags, I sent them your book yesterday.” That is not how that works.

So you need to pick them up in mid-conversation, or have the phone ring and have her answer. Either way you can’t just suddenly have this line start in. Especially because it’s good news and it just makes no sense to have her waiting.

There’s a story problem here that you’re describing, or a character problem rather, that Maggie is being – she’s a book author and she’s being told she needs to have a meeting in Santa Monica at noon tomorrow and her problem is that Andy has a doctor’s appointment, so maybe they can do Sunday. This sort of like, ah-ha, single mom raising kids trouble. But the issue is this feels old because we’ve just spent a year not having to go to Santa Monica. Like you can Zoom. So that’s why I want to know what year is this.

**John:** Craig, I was also concerned about what year it was based on page two, “Maggie sits in front of a desktop word processor, a house phone pressed to her ear.” And I’m like, wait, what universe is this? First off, what is a desktop word processor?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** A desktop PC I guess? Her desktop word processor, are they talking about that post-typewriter but before it was a real computer thing?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s a landline because that’s just what it is? Because that’s conceivable but that’s a very specific time period. And I don’t think that was really what Alex was going for here. So, again, one word choice of saying word processor rather than computer threw me and made me question what year this was happening in.

**Craig:** Or maybe it is happening in 1988 or 1989 and Alex just wants us to suss it out. And I guess what I would say is you need to give us a clearer indication than that. There just needs to be a clear sense, especially because they’re watching a scene from the 1988 horror feature. So they’re watching it on television. It’s either on video tape. The point is they’re not going to see it in theaters, so it’s not 1988. So when is it?

OK, so you’ve got to figure that out. And then finally I would say that the last bit here where Maggie is arguing with Karen about where she lives feels a little soft.

**John:** I didn’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t buy it. It just didn’t make any sense. Like it doesn’t matter that she got Road R as opposed to R Road. And she wouldn’t know that that’s where the airplane graveyard is. It doesn’t seem – and also this entire discussion feels very elementary. This is a real problem, but the way they’re discussing it and the way that Karen is responding just feels very elementary. Karen does not feel like a human. She feels like a plot machine.

**John:** So here’s where I liked about the characters, and the setup, and the world. And so I’m going to – and I guess this ties into where I think the story is actually going. I liked the brothers and one brother is blind. I liked the mom, the setup. I like them being out in the desert. I thought there was a promising space for a movie there. And I don’t think they’re actually going to stay out in the desert. I think they’re going to move to South Carthay, which is Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just my guess about why it’s titled that. So I like that in the setup. And so I dug these pages even though I thought a fair number of things weren’t working.

One thing I want to point out is just right at the top, “EXT. DESERT – DAY 1 A two-story house sits in the center of a barren desert landscape, dotted with patches of scrub brush.” You’re not giving me enough there. First off, there’s not just a desert. What desert? A California desert? Where are we? Anchor us. Because if you say desert I guess I’m thinking of the Sahara until you give me more stuff. So anchor us a little bit more.

And tell us what it feels like. You don’t have to describe every little thing, but is it just barely above a trailer park? Is it a two-story trailer home? Did it have that kind of feel to it? But I just don’t get a sense from this of what kind of space we’re living in.

When we get into her office we do get some more details about what her office is like and I liked that. I got a sense of character making choices that influenced the environment that they were in.

Craig had already pointed out the Hellraiser problems or the voice over that’s happening that becomes the Hellraiser dialogue. My way of handling this in general would be scratch that line “The scene is suddenly interrupted by a demonic voice.” You just hear character name Demonic Voice, “You solved the puzzle box. You summoned us. We came.” New action line. “A man’s voice screams in terror. Cut to…” And then you’re in. And that’s great. So we’re wondering what are we hearing rather than spoiling it by saying Hellraiser right at the start.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s a great idea.

And I want to point out that Alex does do a really good job of creating perspective because in this first scene it’s not there’s an indication in the action that we’re meant to identify with Parker and understand the scene from his perspective, but we do. It’s just written in that way. We understand we’re with him and his inquisitiveness and his confusion. And that’s good. I mean, there’s good stuff there. But I’m nervous about some of the elementary nature of the drama that’s being created.

**John:** A few other small things to look at. In American screenplays parentheticals get their own line underneath the character’s name. So on page one, that “unsure” right now is tucked into that dialogue line. We don’t do that in American screenplays. On page two, two action lines. “Andy thinks, picking at a set of stitches above his right eye.” That’s great. That can work. Later on, “Andy’s sandwich collapses as he struggles to keep it together.” Those are two completely separate actions that are just too close together. I feel like you’re just throwing too much business at this one character. And it’s distracting from the scene. So either he’s working on the stitches or he’s trying to eat this sandwich like he was falling apart.

Pick one. There’s just too much there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you imagined him picking at the stitches with the hand that was holding the sandwich because they’re itching and then it collapses, that’s fine. But you’ve got to let us know. But absolutely. You don’t want to have him pick-pick, and then line, and then a line, and then he’s doing an entirely other thing that implies some sort of sandwich disaster occurred. So it’s just like time management issues here in terms of continuity of reality.

Guesses, I guess it’s time to guess, huh?

**John:** It’s time to guess. So I was speculating that this family is going to move to the Carthay Circle part of Los Angeles which is close to where I live and that it’s going to be about them adjusting to their new life there. But I don’t have any sense of what the actual plot is of this story. These three characters are centered to it all, and perhaps there’s maybe stretching, reaching that it could be kind of a Lost Boys situation where it’s like the boys have their own adventure and the mother is sort of a secondary character. That’s my best guess at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah. It does feel like, and I don’t like this necessarily, but it does feel like mom is being setup to just be mom from E.T., like problem to be avoided.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And who is having a generic single mom problem like divorce, or balancing job and children, without more flavor to it. It does feel like this is going to be about Parker and Andy and some kind of horror thing, I hope. Because that would be fun. And, yes, moving to LA. But, you know, I have no clue from this which is not, I mean, again, 0 for 2. So let’s see how we did.

**Megana:** OK, so Alex wrote in, “When the MacLaine family inherits their dream home they quickly discover that their new neighborhood hides a sinister secret and must work together to find the truth.”

**Craig:** There we go. Well I like working together.

**John:** I like working together. I think we were closer than I would have guessed.

**Craig:** Oh definitely.

**John:** Yeah. It also has like a Fright Night quality where you move to a new house in this neighborhood. I like that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, Lost Boys, right? You literally, I mean, that’s exactly what happened. They moved to a house. It harbors a big secret. But I’m really happy to hear that it’s all of them together so that mom isn’t just mom, but mom. Good.

**John:** Yay. Well that was fun. So, as always, we want to thank everyone who submitted their pages, especially Alex, Andrew, Nick, and Stephen for sending in your stuff. Thank you to Megana and to Bo for reading through all of these. You’re remarkable.

**Craig:** Thank you so much guys.

**John:** And again this is not a competition. This is just an exhibition where we all get to take a look at some writing and figure out what’s working well and what could be working better.

If you want to send in your own pages you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. And there’s a form you fill out, including a new field for where you can put in your log line for your script. This is not a log line competition. We don’t really care about log lines. We are just curious what the thing is about. And so just for the reasons we used on the podcast today.

So, Megana, thank you very much for all your hard work and all your reading in making this happen.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana. Great job.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article by Emily VanDerWerff from this past week that was looking at the way professional critics and fans get drawn into what she calls The Loop of defending positions on a movie or TV show or piece of culture. So talking about the show Girls she writes, “I had tied my own personal opinion of the show to myself and from there it was far too easy to grow more and more defensive with every criticism the series endured because it was like the criticism was criticism of me.” And it just felt so true to a phenomenon I’ve experienced more and more and more over the last decade where I love a thing, someone hates that thing, that person is attacking me. And this weird way that we sort of claim ownership over things and form our identities based on what we like.

And just a really great article detailing her perspective as someone who gets paid doing this as a living and still gets stuck into that loop.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I’ve gone off on critics a billion times on the show. I’m not going to bore everybody by doing it again. But I will say that I do personally like Emily. I did a nice interview with her for Chernobyl. It was one of the early interviews I did and I thought this was – I read this, too. And I thought it was very thoughtful. And I just wanted to say you think you grow defensive with criticism of a show you watch, imagine criticism of a show you’ve written.

And what it kind of comes down to is what I’ve always said. I do think that these feelings we have about movies or television shows are a function of the relationship we have with them. And that means it’s not just about the show or the movie. It’s about us, and the show and the movie. Some intersection of who we are and where we are and that. And therefore it makes no sense – it literally makes no sense to explain to people why it is good or bad for them.

You can talk about why it was good for you. And you could talk about why it was bad for you. I wish that critics would just be more subjective. Like literally just say here’s how this made me feel. I don’t know if you’re going to feel the same way. But this is my thing. Instead of just declaring that movies are good, bad, stupid, etc.

But I enjoyed – the introspection here I thought was very valuable.

**John:** And a thing I think has changed over the course of our lifetime in terms of criticism is that it’s one thing to be a critic looking at a movie because that movie is finished. And so while people will come to that movie with new perspectives over time that movie is done. But what Emily was doing with Girls and a lot of other TV series is you’re critiquing something that is still ongoing where it hasn’t been finished yet and your criticism will actually change the thing. And that just becomes an impossible feedback loop as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just everyone to be mindful of the fact that the creative process is influenced by the criticism of it in not always healthy ways. And that if you are criticizing a piece of art to differentiate criticizing that piece of art from the person who made it. Because they really are not the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just the way that things are completely redeemed or vilified over time. I mean, blech.

I have a much easier One Cool Thing than that.

**John:** All right. Pitch it.

**Craig:** Cake.

**John:** I like cake.

**Craig:** Everyone likes cake. So, we over at the Mazin house have been engaging in a kind of homemade food exchange with another family in our town as we’ve been navigating the pandemic. So occasionally they would make something and bring it over and leave it on our doorstep and then we would make something and bring it over and leave it on their doorstep.

And so we owed them one and I asked what they wanted and they have three girls. And all three girls said chocolate cake. That was what they wanted. Which seems like, oh, OK, well chocolate cake. Who can’t do that? There’s a billion chocolate cake recipes.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m kind of a recipe nerd. I love the science of it. And so I went through and read all sorts of them and I landed on one, just faith, and it’s a recipe by a woman named Robin Stone. And it’s called The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever. It might be. It’s really, really good. It’s really, really good.

And you might be saying well what’s the big secret in it? I don’t think there is a big secret other than she does have you adding a cup of boiling water into the batter at the very end before you put it into the oven. It makes it much–

**John:** I’ve seen that in other recipes recently.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting.

**John:** It’s a chocolate thing.

**Craig:** Exactly. But overall whatever the balance of ingredients were it just came out beautifully. Same with the frosting. She also has a recipe for chocolate butter cream frosting that goes with it and it came out also beautifully. So if you’re looking to make a chocolate cake.

**John:** I’m looking to make a chocolate cake. Craig, my question for you is this gives a choice between milk, buttermilk, almond milk, coconut milk. What did you use?

**Craig:** In that circumstance – and one of the things that made me a little nervous is that Robin is like whatever. And I’m like, all right, I’m a little more finicky than that. I went with straight up whole milk.

**John:** Whole milk. So super rich.

**Craig:** Well, it’s one cup of it. It’s not exactly half and half or anything. But, yeah, just one cup of regular old whole milk as opposed to any of the other stuff. But if you were lactose intolerant does that still work after you bake something?

**John:** Yeah, it does.

**Craig:** Then you might want to try the almond or the coconut milk. There’s not that much in it so I can’t imagine it would make a massive difference.

**John:** You’ve got a cup of boiling hot water in it to dilute it anyway.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** All right. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Damn straight.

**John:** Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Ella Grace. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for shorter questions on Twitter I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com which is also where you’ll find the PDFs of for our Three Page Challenges. You’ll find transcripts there and be able to sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Olympics. Craig and Megana, thank you both very, very much.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. Thank you. And I just want to say a quick hello to listener Miranda, because I know she’s a big fan.

**John:** Oh, nice.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** Well great. And that outro felt very Winter Olympics to me. I could imagine that being under a Winter Olympics Montage. Which is a good segue to a question from a listener, Adam in Los Angeles, who writes, “If you were an Olympic level athlete what sport/event would you like to compete in?” And so we’ll look at winter and summer. Craig, of the Summer Olympic events if you could be a medal-worthy athlete is there one sport that you’d go for?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose that one way to think about this is a little bit like how fun it is to fly in a dream. Because you’re never going to fly. So one possibility is pick a thing that you would never be able to do. Like in theory I could wrestle some people. I wouldn’t be any good at it, but I could wrestle for a bit at my weight class or something. I could throw a pole.

But the thing that I cannot do, ever, in any circumstance and have never been able to do, even as a child, is run for a long distance. I was not built to run for a long distance. So I would want to be a marathon runner. I just think that would be like flying. That would be so cool.

**John:** So I can run for a long distance. I ran a half marathon. And I assumed I could never run, but now I can run. But I don’t think I would actually want to be a long distance runner for Olympic stuff. I think I would actually prefer to be like a sprinter because that to me feels like you’re The Flash where you’re just so incredibly powerful out of the gate.

But what you were saying about flying made me think like, oh, maybe I should pick pole vaulting because that’s a thing in real life I would never, ever do, but it just seems so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I don’t even understand how that happened. Why did – who figured that out? Why?

**John:** Yeah, we can pole vault. My guess is there’s a season of The Amazing Race where they were doing these – they were in these canal kind of places, flooded field canals, and you actually do use poles to get from one side to the other. So maybe that was sort of how pole vaulting became a thing. I don’t know. We could have looked it up by the time I–

**Craig:** Could have, but you know what? Nah. I’m tired of learning. I don’t want to learn anything else. I’m done. I’m done.

**John:** But I should clearly choose gymnast, because male gymnasts have the amazing skills, versatile skills. You feel like a real life Rogue. And great bodies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was waiting. It’s about the body. The male gymnast body is stupid. It’s a stupid body. Yeah, like how? Oh my god. Could you imagine?

**John:** Now the Winter Olympics. Craig, what winter sports would you want to do?

**Craig:** Ooh, I do like the Winter Olympics. They’re fun. I mean, look, like the weirdo one like the biathlete where you ski and then shoot. That’s a silly one.

**John:** That was my top choice. Biathlete.

**Craig:** It’s a pretty silly one so I kind of like sneakily want that. But I think, so the guys who do the skeleton in the luge, and the women, are moving at insane speeds. And it’s terrifying. I think maybe if I could be one of those people. Just the idea of just firing down a shoot like a bullet for like a minute just seems like it would be pretty awesome.

**John:** I said that I was so excited to be a pole vaulter, but I don’t think I would be a ski jumper because that just–

**Craig:** Ooh, god.

**John:** No. That’s just too much terror for me. I’ve bungee jumped. Great. I’m not going to ski jump. That’s, no. That’s not good at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ski jump is kind of like you go down the ramp and you catch, just perfect, boom you launch off perfectly and you’re like I’m doing it. I’m going to go further than anybody. And then when you start to go down you’re like, oh, shit.

**John:** Well, Craig, you and I both grew up with ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Of course the agony of defeat. This big intro and then it goes “the agony of defeat” and they show this guy going off the edge of the ski jump and just falling. I still feel pain just thinking about that shot.

**Craig:** Why would anyone be an athlete after that? You’re just watching a human being tumbling down a mountain, breaking I assume everything. And, yeah.

**John:** In reference to our Three Page Challenges, I think figure skating is just remarkably great, and to be able to do that stuff. But I would just get such performance anxiety to actually have to masterfully do all these things, and be artistic, and hit all those jumps. That feels like too much.

**Craig:** Yeah. The artistic part – figure skating, I don’t love it. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t love it. Not on the level of ventriloquism which is a ridiculous waste of everyone’s time. Actually, it’s the fact that figure skating is a remarkably demanding athletic pursuit, but they also have to wear these outfits.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t have to. I think they want to in a sense. But it just gets sillier and sillier. It’s like Vegas kind of. It just becomes so odd. You know what I mean?

**John:** As a young gay child I just loved my figure skating.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. I do. And maybe it’s also like the performance aspect of it is so outrageously fake. Do you know what I mean? The smiles and the…

But I can also see where, you know – look, my wife loves figure skating. I mean, loves. So I watch it when it’s on. All right.

**John:** I never looked at the contents of my mom’s DVR after she died, but I guarantee you there were at least 16 hours’ worth recorded of figure skating on that. Just to watch at any point, which is great.

**Craig:** I love it. Who was your favorite?

**John:** Growing up it was Torvill and Dean. They were an ice dancing pair.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They were remarkable. They were the Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh of their time, but on ice. And they were just remarkably talented. But then like through the Brian Boitanos, through the Kristi Yamaguchis. Katarina Witt, who I saw at a post office here in Los Angeles. Just remarkable talents.

**Craig:** Torvill and Dean, were they married?

**John:** They were married but I think they ultimately split up, yeah, which was controversial and terrible.

**Craig:** Oh, it was controversial?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah. If I remember correctly. Chris Schleicher who is a writer who I only know through Twitter, but was a competitive figure skater before he became a writer. And I always find that so fascinating as a second act, you know, get out of figure skating and then become a writer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Interesting.

**John:** So, Craig, should we go to the Olympics in China? So that’s the 2022 Winter Olympics are going to be in China. And China has not done some good things.

**Craig:** You’re asking should you and I personally go?

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

**Craig:** Or should America go?

**John:** Should America send a delegation to the Olympics in 2022?

**Craig:** I got to tell you, and this is one of those hot button things. It’s practically designed for people to argue. But I remember as a kid feeling like boycotting the Moscow Olympics wasn’t great. The point of the Olympics was let’s get closer together.

I don’t think the Olympics, going to the Olympics, is any kind of tacit approval of what a government is doing. The United States went to the Olympics in Germany when Hitler was in power and Jesse Owens got to beat everyone in front of him, which is awesome. There’s a little chance to stick it to people at the Olympics also. And the way we kind of did to the Soviets in 1980 in Lake Placid.

But it kind of bummed me out. And then of course the Russians boycotted after. I feel like once you start it’s hard to stop. Because everybody has a reason to boycott everybody. There’s no reason that – if there’s ever an Olympics in Mumbai for instance, well, should the Pakistanis just immediately boycott? Do you know what I mean? You know, over Kashmir.

Everybody has got a problem. So, let’s preserve this one place where we just come together and we do it outside of the bubble of the bad things that we are or are not doing. And hopefully it brings us together and maybe solves a problem. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder if we hadn’t had the situation where we boycotted one Olympics and they boycotted us, I wonder when we decided that Olympic athletes a chip that we would use in international trade. Because we’re not talking about like, OK, we’re going to boycott Chinese products or we’re not going to do business with China at all, because clearly we’re doing a ton of business with China.

So, it does feel weird on that level. And yet at the same time you’re dealing with a government that is doing some really bad things. So, I’m sympathetic to both sides and I’m happy to be the one who doesn’t have to make the decision.

**Craig:** Right. Turns out weirdly that they have asked me to make this decision.

**John:** Craig, as your profile grows then so does your responsibility.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how this ended up in my lap, so I’ve got to really think about this. [laughs] I’ve got to be honest with you. I’m in a whole boatload of trouble over here.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [WGA Strike](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/the-chase-strike-writers-wga-itv-1234936943/) against ABC’s The Chase.
* For current university students and professors: Learn more about the [Highland 2 Student License](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/students.php)
* [The Secret Lives of Color](https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Lives-Color-Kassia-Clair/dp/0143131141) by Kassia St Clair
* [Rinky Dink](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FRinky-Dink-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=428197df8aa5744b9773ac3f65f597c5f8419e2fd6e60923f799f6b7e82795bf) by Stephen Brower
* [The Twilight Run](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FThe-Twilight-Run-Three-Page-Challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f3e0780b9271811e28acf59ac67b2286357b3148ddf029bb4e12671a3fa558d9) by Andrew McDonald and Nick Sanford
* [South Carthay](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F03%2FSouth-Carthay-Pilot-3_21_21.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=ba275113a62a9a36a5dbf43a1c70442a3d5dd4ac8d303ec137268bbe73da2528) by Alex Rennie
* [The Loop by Emily VanDerWerff](https://emilyvdw.substack.com/p/the-loop)
* [The Best Chocolate Cake Recipe Ever](https://addapinch.com/the-best-chocolate-cake-recipe-ever/) by Robin Stone
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/494standard.mp3).

The original post of the episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/secrets-and-lies-2).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 490 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s important to stretch because today on the show we’ll talk about secrets and lies, both how they inform characters, but also how they work in a story. We’ll also answer listener questions about realism, pre-laps, and the dreaded note “why now?”

**Craig:** Oh, why now?

**John:** Throughout this episode I will be challenging Craig to solve our first ever How Would This Be a Movie mystery. The case of the fatherless child.

**Craig:** Dum-dum.

**John:** Mysteries. And in our bonus segment for premium members we will discuss post-pandemic travel and generally the idea of post-pandemia.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds like a good idea, because I think the horizon is visible.

**John:** The horizon is visible there. We can tell that we are on a round globe because of the horizon and the way that living on a sphere gives you that kind of horizon.

**Craig:** There are people – I know everyone knows this –I’m stating it because sometimes I just need to say it out loud. There are people who are currently insisting the world is flat.

**John:** Yup. They are. Because of YouTube.

**Craig:** Because of YouTube. We’ve got to take YouTube off the Internet.

**John:** And I will also say the pandemic and disbelief in the pandemic and such is related to flat-eartherism and anti-vax people. It’s all that system of belief and it’s challenging to get people past that. We’re not going to solve it on this podcast.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Instead we’re going to talk about things that screenwriters can solve, like pre-laps.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And the question of why now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why now?

**John:** One thing we were able to solve is we’ve added more scripts to Weekend Read thanks to our producer Megana Rao who has gone through and added Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, First Cow, Malcolm and Me, White Tiger, The Personal History of David Copperfield. So a good list of 20 or more of the For Your Consideration scripts are now up there in Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** They’re free to read and download. And they are digital so they will take up no space on your kitchen counter, unlike screeners. So, Craig, I want to have a little conversation about screeners because for whatever reason this year it especially bugs me that I’m getting screeners for movies that were only released on digital platforms and I’m getting a physical copy of this thing that premiered on Apple TV Plus.

**Craig:** It’s enough already. And I understand the argument which is that there are a number of older – so all these screeners are for awards and there a number of voters who are older who may not be as comfortable with streaming as they are with physical DVDs. But I don’t even believe that anymore. Like, come on, it’s easier to stream something than to play a DVD. You don’t have to change the input on your TV or anything. I don’t understand it.

And it’s the plastic. It’s the delivery of them. They send them by FedEx. Sometimes I have to sign for these stupid things. Do you know how annoying that is?

**John:** I got a UPS sticky note saying I have to sign for this thing and I’m sure it’s a screener. I’m never going to sign it.

**Craig:** Well that’s the thing, right. So you get that notice. Hey UPS was here and we had something for you and you need to sign for it. And you’re like oh my god was it something great? No.

**John:** You know what? Send me a code. If it’s really important, send me a code and I will type in the code and I’ll watch the thing. But realistically they’re all on the apps and we just don’t need them.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** Let’s stop.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s stop. I mean, what do we have to do? Listen, you’re a member of the Academy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m a member of the other academy. So between the two – although the other academy, I don’t think that there are – well, no, there are.

**John:** There are.

**Craig:** There are. They do do the TV things, yeah.

**John:** Sigh.

**Craig:** Enough of that.

**John:** Enough of that. All right, I’m eager to get you started on this mystery, and we’ll sort of revisit this mystery throughout the course of this, but this came in as a How Would This Be a Movie and I thought it could be a movie, but it could be more interesting as a thing to challenge Craig with and for us to discuss how real life articles can lead in different ways to movie adaptations.

So here is the set up. What I’m going to tell you is based on a true story. And we’ll have a link in the show notes to the actual articles. There are many articles that have been written about this thing that happened. I’m going to add some character names and details, mostly so it’s easier for us to talk about, but also so we can think about it as a potential movie.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** So this happens in Washington State, 2014. A couple, they are Roger and Annabeth Gleason. They’re both in their late 30s. They’ve been married for three years but it’s been a rocky relationship. They’ve been separated at times and Roger has been working out of state at times. They both apparently want to have a kid, though, but they’re having fertility issues on top of all of this.

With the help of IVF they have their first child, a son named Lucas. But there’s something odd. Lucas doesn’t share a blood type with either Roger or Annabeth. So, given this setup, Craig, what do you think is the next thing that happens?

**Craig:** I would imagine the next thing would be some sort of DNA test to see if the parents are the parents.

**John:** Yeah. And that is in fact what happens. Roger takes an at-home paternity test. And he learns that he is not the father.

**Craig:** Roger, you are not the father! Sorry, I had to Maury it. OK, so got it. But now the really interesting thing is, and I’m just sort of cheating because of the title of this thing, does mom take a maternity test?

**John:** Yes. So the question of sort of the paternity test and what the next step is is interesting. So I’ll set us up for our next segment by saying they end up writing into an online service called Ask a Geneticist, a blog. And he recommends that they need a more complete test. Because what’s going through their head right now is the question of like, wait, if this kid doesn’t match up, like we went through an IVF lab. Is it possible that the wrong sperm was used? That there’s something really wrong. Is there a lawsuit that we could possibly be filling?

**Craig:** And also the wrong egg.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So this expert is going to recommend they take a more extensive paternity test, a more expensive and complete genetic test, and the results of that in our next segment.

**Craig:** The game is afoot.

**John:** All right. Let’s do some follow up on previous segments. We talked about text chains on screen. Do you want to see what Sam wrote to us?

**Craig:** Yeah, Sam says, “I couldn’t help but respond to your recent discussion about empty text chains on phones as I saw this executed well for the first time just a few days ago. In Ted Lasso we see a text chain between Keely and Roy that includes previous texts and also captures their personal characteristics. For example, in the pre-thread we can see Roy who curses often and vehemently has included a bitmoji of himself cursing. Really well done and thoughtful detail on a well done and thoughtful show.”

Well, OK, so it seems like at the very least Ted Lasso is getting it right.

**John:** Yeah. So I really enjoyed Ted Lasso and I think that attention to detail is really important in the way that character is reflected it’s sort of all little choices along the way. Speaks well to Ted Lasso there.

John from Stockholm, Sweden wrote in to say that this reminds him how characters onscreen get off phone conversations much more quickly than they do in real life. And his question is, “This got me thinking about where do you, specifically you, draw the line between something being unrealistic and just being economical from a writing and filmmaking place?”

**Craig:** Yes. So very often in movies characters will call somebody and not even announce themselves either. So you’ll hear somebody say, “Hello,” and they’ll say, “Listen, we’ve got a problem.” And the person goes, “OK, what are we doing?” But they don’t say, “Hey, it’s Craig, do you got a minute?” They don’t do anything, ever, ever. And when the conversation is done one of them nods as if the other one can see and then hangs up, which in fact on the other end of the phone would just seem like a dropped connection.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We do this because a lot of that filler does in fact take up space. It’s anti-dramatic. It tends to deflate tension. And generally speaking we just kind of go along with it. I think we’ve been trained by movies to just sort of go along with it.

**John:** I think a thing we do as writers very often is we will try to come into the scene after the phone has already been picked up, or leave the scene before the call is completed. Basically you don’t want to be in a scene where someone has to pick up the phone or hang up the phone if you possibly can avoid it. And yet if there’s really no way to avoid it you try to do the shortest reasonable thing that won’t stick out to a person. So I think my internal litmus test is when I notice that something is odd because they’re not doing it, or as an audience member we’ll just roll with it because it’s just sort of the convention. And that’s the test you’re always asking when you’re trying to optimize these things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there’s room now for you to actually do these little extra handles and bits and goodbyes and hellos as long as you do them in ways that are interesting. Then people might appreciate it. Do it quickly. I think this actually becomes a directorial thing of pace. You know, if your deal is that you’re calling somebody and going, “Hey, it’s me…,” you can just as easily go, “Hey, it’s Craig, listen…” Fine. “OK? All right. Bye. Bye.” That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it.

**John:** Yeah. One of the nice things about the time we’re living in is people are tending to picking up their cellphones, so you can see who is calling you. So you can imagine like, OK, I see who is calling so I’m just going to start getting into it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you can sort of skip over that stuff. I think it’s always worth thinking about like what is the realistic way out of this conversation and what is the quickest version out of it? And do I take the quickest version or do I go even a little bit faster because of just movie logic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know, I feel like there’s a fun in wallowing in some of the things that we’ve eliminated. Just in sort of a modern way to get hyper realistic about those things. It’s kind of fun to indulge in some of those things. Like shoe leather.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because like, OK, so everybody understood, like nobody wants to watch people walking. If they’re going to go from this spot to that spot, the walking part is super boring. But if you wallow in it it could be kind of fun. So, I don’t know.

**John:** It’ll strike people as odd because you just don’t see it in on other things. Going through all of the nonsense chit chat.

**Craig:** Let’s reclaim it. Let’s reclaim shoe leather.

**John:** Evan wrote in this week writing, “You’ve been talking recently on the podcast about how you feel there’s a lack of female characters who make ethical decisions. I’ve also noticed there are no female characters with big redemption arcs, at least none that I can think of. Some of our most beloved characters are men who begin evil but are ultimately redeemed, like Darth Vader, the Hound, or Kylo Ren.

“And we have a fair number of female villains, like Cersei Lannister, or Amy Dunne from Gone Girl, but it seemed to me that evil women in fiction remain evil. I’d like to hear your thoughts on why there are no such stories or such few examples of female characters who are redeemed at the end.”

**Craig:** This is true. I was scratching my head on this one. And I don’t have great examples. I was thinking about Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max, Charlize Theron’s character, who she is a military general for the big bad villain. But she kind of makes a choice to be good really early. So I don’t think that’s a redemption story. The one that I actually thought was the closest was Helen from Bridesmaids. That’s the Rose Byrne character. Because she clearly is the villain. And then by the end she is good. She does the right thing. But not still then in the way that we think of these kind of mythological evil to good.

And I think partly it’s because a lot of male writers view women through this very binary – they used to call it the Madonna Whore complex where a woman is either a saint or a sinner. There’s no room in between, nor is there room for redemption because men are seen as morally striving and women are seen as just morally complete. They just come out good or bad. That’s it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Whereas men are on some sort of path to goodness. And that’s just not true, but I think it’s just a function of the predominance of the male voice in our culture.

**John:** I was thinking through back to fairy tales and sort of other children’s lit where you do see broadly drawn villainous characters. And so you look at Maleficent, and so in the original Sleeping Beauty she is a just a thorough villain. She is a fairy queen/witch/villain. And then her redemption really comes in sort of a complete re-imagination of who that character is. Basically it’s not the character changes. You change the frame on who that character was in order to have her be not a villain throughout the whole story.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** The same with Wicked. In the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked you see who she really is. It’s like, oh, this is all an act. She’s not inherently evil. It’s the world, it’s the system itself that is inherently evil. So, reinventions are not arcs. They’re just different characters. Different frameworks on a character behind it.

So, listeners write in. Give us some other good examples of female characters who have an arc from villain to hero or something more like a hero, because we’re having a hard time thinking of more of these. And I think it’s probably related, again, to sort of who was telling those stories and sort of what the biases they had in creating them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it illuminates a big space to fill. Anytime you can’t really think of a lot of examples of something that is an opportunity to write your own. So, I would encourage people out there. Who are scratching their heads wondering what should I write to think about this as a good prompt.

**John:** For sure. All right. Let’s get back to our mystery, Craig.

**Craig:** Ooh, great.

**John:** Where we last left off there was a desire to have a more complete genetic test. So, that genetic test happened. The couple actually ended up going to 23andMe, which is not what you would think of, but was a much better test. And the results came back and they revealed that Roger is in fact not Lucas’s father, but Roger is his uncle.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So, Craig, where is your storytelling brain going? Where is your detective brain going when I tell you that the man who thought he was this kid’s father is actually his uncle?

**Craig:** Well, I immediately wonder if Annabelle, I believe was her name, the wife.

**John:** Annabeth. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Annabeth. I wonder if Annabeth was having an affair with Roger’s brother.

**John:** That would be a very natural suspicion. Roger has no brother.

**Craig:** Well Roger thinks he has no brother. [laughs]

**John:** That’s really fascinating. So, you as the screenwriter, the person who gets the chance to invent things, what would you like to invent? Like if this was all the story that you had where would you want to take this thing and what’s your conception of who this brother that Roger doesn’t think he has – what’s the scenario there?

**Craig:** Well, it’s going to be fraternal twins separated at birth, one of whom finds out that through some reason or another he was denied the cushy life that Roger, his brother, got. And he comes back for revenge and seeks it with Roger’s wife.

**John:** I’m asking why – so why did you go to fraternal twin rather than just an older brother or younger brother? What is it about twins that is interesting to you?

**Craig:** Well, because it’s contemporary. It’s a little easier to imagine the separation not being something that Roger wouldn’t be aware of. Let’s say it’s an older kid, generally speaking if you have a child and then you have another child a few years later you don’t then boot the older one out. Although I suppose if he was a really bad seed you might want to.

Whereas twins, if they’re separated, it is conceivable that they wouldn’t know about each other. And obviously an older kid would know about a younger one. So there’s a certain plot convenience to twins.

**John:** Yeah. OK. That’s for sure. But in some ways I think it’s harder to imagine that twins got separated. I guess if Roger knew that he was always adopted. So, if Roger was adopted at the start it would make more sense. But it’s not like twins get separated and one stays with the family and one gets shipped off.

**Craig:** Generally speaking it is not an easy separation. That is correct.

**John:** I have friends who have families through adoption and it’s interesting that it’s like, oh congrats, you adopted this baby, that’s awesome. And then six months later it’s like, oh, now we have a four-year-old, too, because it turned out they had a sibling.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is great and exciting and it’s lovely to have families together under one roof, but sometimes you anticipated having one kid and suddenly you have six because it turns out there’s a whole bunch of other related kids out there.

**Craig:** That is a risk you take with adoption and also biological procreation. Because sometimes the doctor comes to you and says, wow, four heartbeats. Didn’t happen to me, but it does happen. So, yeah, life is a crapshoot.

But, yeah, so I’m just doing the genetic math here. Roger is the child’s uncle. That means it has to be either, well, hold on. There’s another possibility.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** The other possibility is that Roger and Annabeth are brother and sister. But then he would still be the father?

**John:** Yeah, he would still be the father. There’d too much overlap.

**Craig:** That would be really confusing. So, it seems like Roger has a brother. There’s a brother in the mix.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we’ve got to figure out how that brother snuck in there.

**John:** Great. That’ll be our next segment. We’ll get into what could possibly be happening here with the brother, because I’ll just whet your appetite by saying Annabeth has been faithful.

**Craig:** Wow. How?

**John:** All right, let’s get to our marquee topic which is secrets and lies. So, many episodes ago we were talking, it was like a random advice episode, and we were talking about blood donation. And you and I got into our little disagreement about whether if I had a rare blood type I should donate and it became this thing. And then in a bonus segment we talked through sort of my reasons for why lying about being gay to be allowed to donate blood I thought was problematic.

I mentioned this book by Sissela Bok that I read in college which I thought was terrific. It’s called Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life. I just finished rereading it. It’s still really, really good. It’s a book from 1975 that’s still surprisingly relevant to the things we’re facing today. But I wanted to in this topic talk about secrets and lies because I find them so interesting for writers, both in terms of plot and story, but also characters. And really be thinking about how secrets and lies relate to characters. And so I thought we could dig in a bit here and encourage our listeners to look at their own scripts from the aspect of what secrets are people keeping, what lies are they telling, and how that is driving story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we’ve talked about lies before. I don’t know that we’ve talked about secrets per se. But I have a sense memory of talking about lies. And I believe that all humans are liars. That lying – we think of lying as a sin, like theft, or whatever is going on with Roger and Annabeth. Something happened somewhere. But that it is a crime. But the truth is it’s actually – while it can be a crime, it is also an inherent fundamental part of human behavior. And we innately understand that there’s a range of lies that cover a kind of spectrum of morality.

The fact that your character is a liar is essential to making your character seem real. Nothing is weirder than characters that apparently say what they think.

**John:** Yup. They feel broken. They feel like they don’t function within a real society. So, let’s define our terms a little bit so we make sure we’re talking about the right things. Let’s define a secret as something that is being hidden. And so that could be a truth that I don’t want you to know. My secret shame. My secret history. It could be a literal thing, a secret passage. It could be a secret message. I would say a secret takes some action to maintain. You have to sort of keep a secret up. And so generally at least one person has to know the secret. If not then it’s not really a secret anymore. It’s just like lost information. So there’s a truth that’s out there that is being kept from view.

**Craig:** Sounds about right to me.

**John:** And then a lie, let’s define that as a deliberate deception. So it’s not inaccurate information. It’s deliberately not giving out the truth. There’s a truth that could be told, that could be shared, and you’re not telling it. And weirdly a lie can kind of outlive the liar. That false story can persist long after that lie has been told and long after that liar has died.

**Craig:** Oh, I mean, most of human civilization is built on lies. Religion. [laughs] Basically they’re all lies. I mean, they’re stories, but if you tell people that they really happened that way then they’re lies. Most of our actual history is like what we think of as what really happened. A lot of it is just lies told by the victors.

**John:** A famous history book I think from the ‘80s, Lies My History Teacher Told Me.

**Craig:** Right. All of it.

**John:** So, when we say these can drive both plot and character, like Big Fish is about a secret that is misperceived as being a lie. That’s fundamentally what’s driving it. It’s the question of like is Edward Bloom’s past concealing a secret or is it all a lie, and sort of the relationship between those. Chernobyl, of course, is nothing but lies and secrets all the way down.

**Craig:** Yes. And very much about the corrosive quality of that stuff.

**John:** And they’re related phenomena. So every lie fundamentally conceals a secret because there’s a truth that’s being kept out of you. So every lie is a secret. And every secret has a lot of potential for lies. Because you’re going to start telling lies to maintain that secret. It’s almost impossible to keep a secret without lying. It’s challenging to. And I think a valid thematic question for a script could be can you maintain a secret without a lie? Are all secret-keepers fundamentally liars?

**Craig:** So, not always, but often. And there is a very enjoyable, in the way that horror movies can be enjoyable, like a stimulating, exciting aspect to watching somebody spin a web of lies and attempt to keep it working and going.

**John:** Oh yeah. The plate-spinning aspect of it is great.

**Craig:** The plate-spinning aspect. I mean, that was Dexter. The entire series essentially the joy of it I think was pretty much just watching Dexter keep the plates spinning. And the more you tell, the more you tell.

**John:** Yeah. The more I dig into it it’s hard to imagine a story that doesn’t have some aspect of a secret in it. And so there’s really obvious genre examples, like spy thrillers, anything with blackmail or infidelity. A mystery. There’s a secret generally within those. There’s some truth that you’re trying to uncover. There’s some detail that the protagonist is trying to unearth or themselves hide from view. And even in a love story, I mean every love story tends to have a moment where one character loves the other character but doesn’t want to confess to it. There’s some aspect of secret in kind of every story. So it’s always worth asking what secrets is the protagonist trying to discover. What secrets is the protagonist keeping from view? And that can inform both story but also specific behavior within scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it might be helpful to organize it a little bit in this way. Secrets are the things that get revealed at the end. Lies are grenades that are going to go off at some point and the explosion leads to the end.

So, in The Hangover the lie is calling back to Tracy and saying everything is fine, we’re just here in Vegas. No problem. When they know that’s not true. The secret is the secret/mystery of where is Doug. Well that lie is going to blow up before where is Doug is discovered, or at least almost does.

So, we know when we’re watching these things that eventually it’s going to go. Even in Dexter, where it was all the plates spinning, one by one they would bring people in that the lie would fail on. And then the truth would be shared. And you just feel that sense. The tension of a lie is like a bowstring being pulled back. Eventually the truth will out.

**John:** Yeah. And you as the storyteller have to decide what is the audience’s relationship with that secret. And so we as an audience in Dexter know what he’s actually been up to, because we can see all the things he’s been up to. We have his point of view on those situations. But you could make another choice where it’s a surprise until the end. Like that secret is revealed. That’s the twist at the end. That’s the M. Night Shyamalan reveal at the end. There’s a whole different level. The filmmaker was concealing a secret truth from you. And so that’s a relationship you have to have.

And in some ways it goes back to that notion of every secret is to some degree a lie because you are deceiving your audience into believing one set of realities when in fact a very different set of realities is happening.

**Craig:** And that’s kind of what a twist is. It’s a secret that you didn’t know was in the movie. And there’s a big difference between knowing there’s a secret and waiting to find out what it is. And having no clue that there’s a secret and then discovering that there was one all along.

**John:** Yeah. Because you entered into the movie with one set of assumptions, a kind of contract that you had assumed you had signed with the storyteller. And they had made different assumptions about what that would be. Or they had relied on your misassumption in order for this thing to work properly.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Magic tricks work the same way, too. Jokes work the same way. It’s that element of I have led you to believe a certain thing and I’m going to take you to a different place than you expected.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah. But let’s talk about lies. Because as you said earlier for normal human interaction some degree of deception is absolutely required. Like just all the social niceties of how are you doing, doing just great. There’s a lie inherent to that because we’re not all doing just great. We’re all just struggling and getting by. It’s a lubrication that sort of gets us through this. This shared deception that things are a certain way.

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t necessarily have a great grasp on our own truth either, which is why we lie a lot. And it’s why characters lie a lot. I mean, so a typical way we express the notion of a white lie is I think something that might be upsetting to somebody. I don’t want to upset them. So I give them a different version, a watered down version, or a polite version that’s acceptable to them. But even the thing that I’m thinking, maybe I’m just thinking that because I know they can’t hear it.

It’s like you can scream in your car because you know that no one can hear you, but maybe that’s why you’re screaming also. Because you know that no one can hear you. It’s like a feedback loop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not necessarily true that the one thing is more true than the other. Sometimes I think that the white lie is the truth. It’s the extreme thing I’m thinking that isn’t the truth. Whoa.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Mind-blowing.

**John:** And there’s also lies we tell really for good intent. There’s the extreme versions where you lie to protect someone’s life. Basically there’s a killer at the door and they say, “Where’s Tommy?” And it’s like Tommy’s not here, when Tommy is hiding under the bed. That’s the kind of lie that even a strict moral philosopher might justify in some way. I think justification is really a fascinating word. The taking of something that you know is not right and making it seem right. That’s justification.

So there’s those extreme examples, but there’s kind of the patronizing lies, like this is for their own good. There’s a good purpose for this. It’s why we don’t tell kids the whole truth. This is why we let them believe in Santa Claus. The person is not ready for the lie so therefore it’s better for us to tell them that. And they may be agreeing to that, or they may not be agreeing to that. And those are the ethical/moral quandaries there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes I think things get retroactively turned into lies. I still don’t think that – when Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker, “Darth Vader killed your father.” I think that was real. And then later it was like, you know what, that was a lie.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, how do you want to approach that? Do you want to approach that from like what the intention was when the line was written? Or retroactively we’re saying that was metaphorical?

**Craig:** I think, yeah, so I think retroactively saying it was metaphorical. And the reason I bring it up is not because, look, I don’t know, maybe George Lucas always knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. Spoiler! But because it’s so flexible, lying or a rubber re-relationship to truth is so inherent to the way we think and speak that almost anything could be a lie. Even from people that seem saintly. You just give them a good, you know, reason for it and off you go.

**John:** Yeah. That’s why through these last four years when the New York Times would keep a list of lies that our former president said, yes it was helpful to label them as lies rather than–

**Craig:** Untruths.

**John:** Deliberate falsehoods. But there’s also fundamentally that question of like if a person doesn’t recognize that they’re lying do we hold that to the same standard? It’s tough and fraught. And I look at the Edward Bloom character in Big Fish and it’s like is he a liar or is he a bullshitter? Yeah, OK, it’s all a gradation here. And we have to make choices as writers what we’re letting our characters do and how the choices that they’re making are going to impact the characters around them.

**Craig:** And that’s the big one is what is the impact of these things. And building a good story around a single lie can be incredibly effective. Galaxy Quest is a story built around a single lie. So it’s a sin of omission. These aliens thought the show was real and the cast of the show does not disabuse them of this notion. And you know inevitably they’re going to find out. It’s inevitable. Just as in every romantic comedy where somebody is posing as something they’re not, you know inevitably they’re going to find out. And we like that.

We like watching people face the shame of lying and then recover by expressing truth, because it gives us all hope. Even if in reality typically when you’re discovered to be lying in that fashion you are rejected permanently because you hurt somebody in a way that is not – there’s just no coming back from it.

**John:** Craig, what I think you’re speaking to is we have an expectation in our movies that there will be a cause and effect. And so therefore if this is thing is setup then the event will happen. If that car goes over the bridge it will explode in ways. We sort of have this set of reasonable expectations that these causes will lead to these effects. And I think we have an expectation that lies will eventually be exposed and there will be consequences for those lies.

And it’s disturbing when the villain gets away with the lies. And when the villain gets away with whatever actions that they’re taking. So I think that gets to, again, it’s the audience’s and the other characters’ reaction to those lies in some ways are more important than the intention behind those lies.

**Craig:** Correct. Because at the end of the movie when somebody says, “I lied, but here’s why I lied, I was afraid…” And then so that’s what she says. And the guy is like, “I love you.” And then they kiss. But then like what happens a month later? We don’t see that part. When he’s like, wait a second, you’re a liar. Like I don’t know if I believe you.

**John:** You fundamentally deceived me on all this stuff. Yeah.

**Craig:** You lied to me with a straight face, like While You Were Sleeping. Wait, hold on a second, you’re a liar. And that is kind of funky. But we don’t see what happens after the movie so we’re OK with it.

**John:** Yeah. To wrap this up, getting back to the Sissela Bok book that I’m reading, one of the things she keeps coming back to is that notion of in any situation in which you are attempted to lie ask yourself would this also be a situation in which violence might be a reasonable choice as well? So like to protect someone’s life, well, you might avoid violence but you might use violence in order to protect someone’s life. You might lie in order to protect someone’s life.

In movies, just like the same way characters will lie to each other then like forget it all, these characters have gone through sometimes these incredibly violent things and have killed people in front of each other and it’s like, oh yeah, now everything is fine and we’ll never kill anybody again. Really? Is that how it’s going to happen? You’ve broken the seal on the mortal violence.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get back to our mystery. Where we last left off we had just learned from a genetics test that Lucas is in fact the nephew of Roger. So Roger is the uncle to this kid who he assumed was his son.

**Craig:** And Annabeth, his wife, was not – she didn’t cheat on him. She was faithful. So she has not slept with anybody but Roger.

**John:** Absolutely. And as you recall this kid was conceived through IVF which may or may not be relevant. So I just want to make sure that that was still noted in there.

**Craig:** Noted. Was there any new information?

**John:** Yes. So there is some new information. We have done this genetic test. I think it was the blogger that they wrote into said like, you know what, there’s one other thing I want you to go check. And it turns out that this mystery which we believe began in 2014 actually began 30 years earlier. And the womb that we needed to look at was not the womb in which the son was born, but the womb in which the father was born.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** You had theorized – remind me your original theory of who the real father of this kid would be.

**Craig:** Oh, he ate his own twin in the womb.

**John:** He ate his own twin in the womb.

**Craig:** Wow. But the twin still had some sperm.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Whoa. [laughs] That’s awesome. That’s so crazy.

**John:** So let’s put all this together.

**Craig:** Oh, I solved it.

**John:** You did solve this. And so you solved this, and then we’ll also talk about what the story implications are behind all this. But so, yes, 30 years ago in the womb Roger was a little embryo there and he had a fraternal twin in there as well. At some point Roger’s embryo absorbed the other twin, which apparently happens. They’re realizing a lot more often than people think it happens. And so Roger is technically a chimera. He has genetic information from two different individuals. When you do more extensive genetic testing on him you’ll see there’s two completely different individuals living inside this. And some of the genetic information that he absorbed was in fact what led to sperm cells. So his sperm is actually of his brother who never existed.

**Craig:** My god. So his brother gets the ultimate revenge. Like you don’t destroy me. I destroy you!

**John:** Indeed. You will never father children and I will father children.

**Craig:** My line will live forever. Oh, babies in the womb.

**John:** Babies. So, that is the actual truth behind this and so we’ll link to some articles about this. And so I made up the characters’ names, but everything else that I described is basically what happened. So, in reaching the resolution of this mystery what are the other interesting story points for you? Because I don’t think this is necessarily a movie, but tell me what things of this spark your narrative interest.

**Craig:** Well, right away I think of it as a test of trust. Because if two people trust each other and then someone comes along and then another person comes along, and then a third person comes along, and all of them provide rock solid evidence that trust should not be there. We have entered an interesting story of faith which is trust in the absence of any reason to trust. And that is interesting.

It’s romantic, to some extent. I can certainly see that. But it also can bring up other things. So, there’s an interesting kind of story where something happens and there’s a misunderstanding. I thought that you were not faithful with me, or something. It turns out you were. But the opening, that little opening discussion has led us to discover other things.

**John:** That seed of doubt.

**Craig:** Force Majeure is a good example of this. The movie where there is an avalanche and a man instead of sort of shielding his wife and children kind of runs away. [laughs] And that leads to a long, difficult kind of explosion of a marriage. And so that’s kind of where I would imagine it going.

**John:** So, I think it also speaks to the idea of objective truth versus subjective truth and the idea of like well science says this is not genetically your offspring, and yet by all normal standards this is your offspring. No other man was involved in the creation of this child. So it is you.

But also the notion of identity. Roger assumed he was just one thing. But he actually is kind of two things. And people who have chimera syndrome or whatever you want to say, they will tend to have other manifestations of like this other twin that’s inside you to some degree. So there could be discolorations of skin. There can be aspects of that other person inside you.

So, The Dark Half, the Stephen King story, is sort of the most extreme example of that where the twin starts growing inside the other person. But that is thematically interesting. I assumed I was just one thing, but now I realize I am two things. And it’s making me question who I am.

**Craig:** I would blame all that kid’s annoying stuff on my brother. I tried to kill him. I tried to kill him in the womb, but this is his kid. You know, my brother. It’s not my fault.

**John:** Yeah. It’s fun stuff. And, of course, we’re assuming that in a time in which IVF is more common and multiple embryos can be implanted at the same time, it can just be really complicated. It’s that idea of sort of the simple half from one and half from the other. Our assumptions about sort of like the fatherhood and parenthood of a child may be really just myths.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we don’t know what we don’t know. And that’s what makes a good story.

**John:** There’s interesting stuff there. I don’t think we have a – the conclusion of this mystery is not the conclusion of a movie based on it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It could be an M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end, but it would have to be for a kind of different story that got us there.

**Craig:** The problem is it’s super convenient. It feels a little bit like evil robot twin. And in the end when you find out the reaction from the audience I would assume would be, “Ooh, OK.” [laughs] But, fine, great. Well, I guess everything is fine now. But, you know, it feels like more of a thing that might pop up in a short mystery than in a movie.

**John:** Hey, let’s imagine that instead of being a normal parenthood situation this is some sort of murder mystery or some sort of serial killer thing. Roger in some ways like he could leave evidence at a crime scene that could never be traced to him. That’s interesting.

**Craig:** Well, but it will be. Because–

**John:** It’s sort of half-traced to him.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the thing. If his sperm is the sperm of his brother that he absorbed then any sperm sample would be traced to him. So you have to be able to be like, OK, if I nick a vein you get my brother, if you nick an artery you get me. Then that would be pretty cool.

**John:** It would be pretty cool. I mean, we’re in a time now where there are those databases where they are finding serial killers through relationships to cousins and things like that. So, it becomes fascinating. The idea that there’s people who never existed who are the villain.

**Craig:** The Dragnet is tightening around your neck, my friend. We’ll get you, John. We’re going to get you.

**John:** Eventually it will all come to pass.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They’re zeroing in.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to some questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Megana Rao, our producer, if you could come on the line and talk us through some of the questions in the mailbag today.

**Megana Rao:** OK, Great. Julie Plec asks on Twitter, “What is the origin of the ‘why now?’ note? Why is it at the top of every exec checklist? What are you favorite shows and is there a why now in every single one of them? This note drives me bananas. Help me resolve this pet peeve of mine. Happy to be right or wrong. To clarify, the note in question is why is this story launching for this character now as opposed to why are we telling this story now.”

**Craig:** So, Julie Plec is the executive producer of Vampire Diaries.

**John:** And Roswell and other great shows. She’s been a guest on our podcast before. She’s a smart writer. So if Julie Plec, an incredibly successful showrunner, is getting hit by this note this note is endemic and can never be destroyed.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I don’t like it either, because I think there are plenty of stories that just happen because they happen to happen. And that’s fun. Life is a bit random in that regard. And sometimes understanding the why now makes everything feel a bit too neat. Why is it at the top of every exec checklist? Because there is peer pressure. I think people pick stuff up and then they spread it around. It’s memetic.

**John:** I also feel it’s one of those questions that they don’t have to kind of defend for themselves because you’re going to give them some answer and they’re going to be like, oh, OK. But it reveals none of their cards to ask why now. Because they could love the story and they could ask why now. They could hate the story and ask why now.

But let’s separate out the two why nows, because Julie is specifically talking about in this story that’s already established why is this particular storyline happening to this character now versus why is it time to tell – why is this the time to remake Grease, for example. And so that’s a whole separate beast and that timing stuff is complicated.

The why is this happening to this character right now, you can parse it as what is it about this storyline that is particularly interesting to this character now versus what are the existing plot mechanics that are going to generate the story now. And I think as the writer hearing this if you can hit the ball back and say like this is why this storyline right now for this character is going to be so exciting based on the other things that have happened, or this is so ripe, you’re more likely to succeed than just talking about the mechanics of the show overall.

**Craig:** I think that executives have tropes the way that writers have tropes. So, we’ve talked about clams. Writers can say, “Oh my god, it was the date from hell,” because it requires no thought. It’s just, bloop, there it is. Done. And I think sometimes there are notes like this where if you have to say something, well, you could probably get away with that one and just, bloop, there it is. Why now. And the real answer to why now is because I said so. That’s why now. Because.

**John:** Because Julie Plec is the showrunner, dammit.

**Craig:** Because you know what? I thought people would be interested. That’s why.

**John:** Now, I do know that we have quite a few development executives who listen to this show. We even did an episode where we talked to a bunch of them. So, if any of them want to write in and sort of tell us their motivations behind asking the why now question, or want to promise that they won’t ask the why now question again, we would love to hear it.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if they’re going to be able to do that. But there is probably some kind of story where it feels so unmotivated that you can’t get into it, because it just seems like, you know, for instance – I understand this. A character works at a pet shop. And they are really bored. And when our story begins they go I’m so bored I’m going to rob the pet store. Well, OK, but why didn’t you rob the pet store yesterday or the day before, or month before? You’ve been there for seven years. Did something happen? I understand that one.

**John:** That’s a reasonable question.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s reasonable. But the why now as in like, OK, but why…what’s the why now of Big Lebowski? Why is this happening to Lebowski today? Because it just did. That’s the way it goes.

**John:** Why did he meet the beautiful woman on the bus today versus yesterday? It’s like that’s not a reasonable question.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because it happened.

**Craig:** Because it happened. Bingo.

**John:** Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** All right. So Cassie in LA asks, “Before last November I rarely encountered a pre-lap in a script. Now the pre-laps are everywhere. I read a script the other day with a pre-lap scene every third scene. Am I crazy for thinking this is insane? Reading wise a pre-lap tends to take me out of the story. That’s why I don’t use them. But with all the pre-laps popping up I can’t help but wonder am I missing out? Are you guys team pre-lap or team let the editor figure that stuff out? And if you are pro pre-lap how many are too many?”

**John:** Applause for getting through as many times as you had to say pre-lap.

**Craig:** Pre-lap.

**John:** Pre-lap. Pre-lap. And you had to ask the question without even defining what the term was first, so let’s make sure that we all are talking about the same thing. A pre-lap in film or television scripts is when a character in a scene starts talking before we’ve actually made the cut. And so like if you hear my dialogue before you actually come to me in that next scene that is a pre-lap. So it’s bleeding the dialogue across into the next scene.

**Craig:** Or any sound. You know, like if it’s the sound of a lawnmower and then you cut to a guy mowing a lawn.

**John:** Exactly. And I am team pre-lap. I believe they are sometimes a useful way to convey the feeling of what it’s going to be like to be experiencing this on a screen while reading it on the page. So, I will use a pre-lap when it is useful. I think it can be overused like any technique in screenwriting. But Craig where are you on pre-lapping?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one of the transitions. We had an episode where we walked through many, many ways to transition between scenes. Transitioning between scenes is one of the things that separates the accomplished craftsperson from the not accomplished craftsperson. And having the audio begin before we get there is one of the ways we do that.

I do it all the time. I just don’t use the word pre-lap. What I’ll say is, are you ready, “We hear, yada-yada.” And then I go, Interior, blah-blah-blah, and there it is. It’s happening. So, I use it all the time. And I would say to Cassie or to anybody, look, I understand – sometimes when people say such and such takes me out of the story and whatever the such and such isn’t story material but rather format material, I get a little squirmy in my seat. Meaning you can handle it. Just do it. You’re fine.

We’re not so precious as readers that we fall apart if we see pre-lap. If it’s a good story you can deal with it. Think of it this way. If someone handed you Raiders of the Lost Ark and it said pre-lap every third scene would you throw it out? No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. You work through it. But for me, I don’t tend to use any what I would call formulistic old style mechanic instructions like pre-lap or things like that. I’ll just say, I’m more impressionistic. We hear the sound of a such-and-such rise as we find ourselves in, Interior, Bathroom.

**John:** Yeah, but if a character started speaking before the cut would you mark them as pre-lap in their parenthetical or in their character cue?

**Craig:** I must admit I almost never do that. All of my pre-laps are non-dialogue.

**John:** So as a member of team pre-lap I will use the term pre-lap I think only when the character is speaking before the cut. And I think Cassie has likely not only seen a ton of pre-laps, but has seen a ton of bad pre-laps which is why she’s noticing them. I think a pre-lap is useful if that character’s dialogue or the sound we’re hearing has an interesting contrast with the scene that is just wrapping up. And therefore starting it early actually gives us something. Gives us a little punchline to a joke. It helps do a thing to make that transition have extra weight and extra meaning.

If it’s just there as a stylistic flourish then it’s pointless and shouldn’t be there.

**Craig:** I feel like we should just record something that says, “If it’s done well it’s fine.” And we have Megana read a thousand questions in a row and we just keep hitting this button.

**John:** We press the little button.

**Craig:** Yup. If it’s done well it’s fine. If it’s done well it’s fine. Yeah.

**John:** Megana, what else you got?

**Megana:** So, JW writes, “I’ve been an appreciative listener of Scriptnotes for years. Thank you both for providing so much of your personal wisdom. That said, I have to take issue with the concept that reappears on this podcast every now and then. ‘You have it or you don’t.’ While I understand that there are well meaning reasons for repeating this phrase, I believe this line of thinking borders on elitist. I also fear that it is dangerous. Someone who has a grandiose personality but is it not self-aware enough to judge their potential lack of talent might never be dissuaded from pursuing a writing career, even if they’re told point blank that they ‘don’t have it.’

“Meanwhile many talented albeit sensitive writers could take the wrong lesson from this mantra. Such writers include myself. I quit writing for two years because I was convinced that I didn’t ‘have it’ after a vicious bout of imposter syndrome that was enhanced by the ‘you have it or you don’t’ mentality. Ultimately my inner voice told me I had to go back to writing. I’ve since sold a spec feature and went on to receive steady work in recent years.

“I love you both but I feel like I must alert you to a potentially problematic mantra that I repeatedly hear make its way back to this great podcast.”

**John:** Well, JW, thank you for writing in with that. And also congratulations on your sale. Craig, what’s your first reaction to hearing this?

**Craig:** My first reaction is that “that said” is my favorite phrase in the world. I love you, I respect you, I think you’re an amazing person. That said…oh boy.

I don’t understand. That’s my response. I don’t understand this. You do have it or you don’t. And you’re proof of it. And the fact that you were confused about it doesn’t make it true or not true. I think you’re arguing for us to just hide something that’s true because some people that don’t have it will think they do, and some people that do will think they don’t. But the phrase “you have it or you don’t” is not at the root of a lack of confidence in your own writing ability.

I have it. And I feel a lack of confidence all the time. I have it just means the potential. That’s what it means. It means you have the potential to be a successful writer. You have the materials. But now you’re going to have to do a whole lot of work. You’re going to have to pick the right thing. You’re going to have to apply yourself. You’re going to have to fix it. And you’re going to have to bust through all of the limitations of being a human being to get to something that’s good that people want to make.

I think you’re just putting way too much, I don’t know, influence. It’s a fact.

**John:** I’m trying to balance two competing instincts here. So let me sort of talk this out. On one hand we’ve discussed before that when it comes to being a professional basketball player there are objective metrics you can look at. OK, you have the skills to be a professional basketball player or you don’t. And if someone were to say like, “No, no, keep trying, keep trying. You can make it,” when it’s clear you can’t make it is doing no one any service.

And something like writing though there are not those same objective traits. And so while Craig or I or other folks could recognize like oh that person is a really good writer, we can’t necessarily recognize like oh that writing is not good yet but maybe they’ll get better over time.

And, yet, in our experience we’ve noticed common traits of writers who never make, who never flourish, and who struggle for many years and eventually decide oh you know what I’m happier not trying to be a screenwriter. And so in making that observation I think that comes to the expression of “you have it or you don’t,” or some essential skill to writing that not every person has. And I don’t know that JW would disagree with that. I don’t think that JW – my hunch is that JW doesn’t believe that pick a hundred people off the street and anyone of them could become a screenwriter if they just applied themselves enough.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Maybe JW does. But I don’t think that’s where we’re getting to.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, you have it or you don’t is a tautology. Right? It is absolutely logically from an Aristotelian point of view 100% true. It’s like something is either A or not A. That is always true. So, “you have it or you don’t” is a fact. The reason we repeat is because a lot of people promote something else, which is anyone can do this if they blankety-blank-blank-blank which are saying with the repetition of this tautology is not the case.

When you say that you believe this line of thinking borders on elitist I would push back and say it is not bordering on elitist. It is elitist. It is not elitist in the sense of snobbery, cultural snobbery. It’s elitist in the sense that there are a very small amount of people that seemingly have the ability and skill and toolkit to make it through and have a movie made, or a television show produced. It’s hard to do. Just like athletes.

I mean, we have no problem saying he’s an elite athlete. But we have a problem saying he’s an elite artist? Why?

**John:** Well, I think here’s one difference is that we talk about the skill, opportunity, and toolkit, but also is opportunity. And also is access. There’s things – there are obstacles in the way of someone becoming a successful screenwriter that have nothing to do with that person’s talent, but actually their circumstances. And I think we’ve acknowledged that repeatedly on the show and how important it is to increase access to opportunity and access to outcomes that are there.

So JW is not really talking about sort of those problems, those sort of systemic problems. JW is talking about how repeating this idea that “you have it or you don’t” dissuaded them from pursuing for a time. Yes. And I mean sometimes congratulations on having some imposter syndrome rather than this false bravado that you couldn’t do this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m really happy that things worked out for you. I’m really happy that you got past this roadblock of self-doubt. I think a thing we’ve also tried to communicate a lot over the course of this show is that successful writers have a lot of self-doubt and that it’s not just a thing that aspiring writers suddenly get over. It’s not you become successful and you suddenly have no self-doubt anymore. That’s still a part of this career.

**Craig:** Yeah. When it comes to people who are struggling through limited access or struggling through a system that has an inherent bias it’s even more important to acknowledge that some people have it. Let’s just talk about the positive part. That’s why we need to open access to everybody and make sure that there aren’t artificial barriers because there are so few people that have it that you don’t want to lose the people who do through nonsense and bad behavior.

David Zucker when people would ask him how do you – what’s the secret for making it – he would always say, “Quit now. You’ll never make it.” And if you refuse to believe that you’re halfway there. That was his sort of Zen, Koan kind of paradox.

You obviously were able to push through, JW, meaning you are proof positive that us saying “you have it or you don’t” doesn’t stop you from being a successful screenwriter. And I’m never going to stop saying it. [laughs] Ever. In fact, I’m going to say it twice as often, just because I’m cranky.

**John:** And I would also encourage JW that whatever lessons you’ve learned, whatever helped you get through that, share that. Because other people might take inspiration from your example. But also remember that you are one example of the situation. And there’s a survivorship bias that is inherent to like, well, because I made it therefore anyone else can do what I just did. And that’s not reality. That’s just not how it goes. And so when we talk about sort of like the many hundreds of people we’ve encountered through our careers and the patterns we’ve recognized, that’s what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s a great point. Great point.

**John:** All right, Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**Megana:** Thank you guys. Bye.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a game I actually texted to Craig because I thought he would enjoy it and I think he enjoyed it.

**Craig:** Loved it.

**John:** It’s called Kitty Letter and it’s by the Oatmeal, Matthew Inman, and the folks behind Exploding Kittens. It is a delightful little word puzzle where you’re trying to form as many words as possible while your opponent is trying to form words off the same tile set. It is just so specific to Matthew’s sense of humor and sort of how it all works.

I like that he coded it largely himself because it feels like a kind of thing I would do. I just really enjoyed it. It’s become a great little game to play when I have five minutes when I’m waiting for a call. So I really recommend Kitty Letter. It’s available for iOS and for Android.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. Matt did a terrific job. And it is so finger printed to him. No surprise it involved cats that explode. And also very odd-looking cartoon people with very dramatic expression and explosions of anger and joy. And it has a lovely – there’s a single-player adventure part that you can go through, like story mode, and it has a lovely ending. It was just great. I played it all straight through in like an hour. I loved it.

Well, my One Cool Thing is also a game, also for iOS, and possibly Google/Android, but I don’t care, called Inked. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s pretty well-promoted.

**John:** The trailer is beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really, so I mean I think the real value of this game is in fact the aesthetic of it. In and of itself it’s not something we haven’t seen before. It is a platform puzzler I guess you would call it where you are moving through a space and you need to manipulate certain objects in order to get through this space or move some objects where they have to go, so you have ramps and things like that.

And so the controls are very touch-based. You’re not running around or dodging or ducking or anything like that. But what makes it really run to play and look at is that the entire thing is done as ballpoint pen sketches. That kind of classic blue-lined look. And they just got it. I mean, they just nailed it. Maybe it’s fountain pen look. I don’t know. But it’s really beautiful to look at. And it is fun to play. So, check out Inked on iOS.

**John:** Fantastic. And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Daniel Green. Hey Dan.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send the longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. For short questions on Twitter you can find me @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts and they are great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can 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 the weekly-ish newsletter we make called Inneresting which has links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on where we would dream about going to vacations in our post-pandemic wonderful life.

Craig, thank you for helping solve the mystery of the Case of the Fatherless Child.

**Craig:** Case of the Devoured Twin.

**John:** If I had said the devoured twin, if that was the title it really would have spoiled it, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** It would have given it away.

**John:** It would have given it all away. Most of mystery is about finding the right title. That’s what I’ve learned today.

**Craig:** The butler did it.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right. It is time for our bonus segment. This suggestion came from our premium listener Andrea, or maybe Andrea. She’s from the UK, London. So she may pronounce it Andrea. Who knows? She asks, “After this is all over, what countries, cities, or other types of locations would you most want to travel to that you’ve never traveled to before? And why?”

Craig, what’s on your list, your bucket list for travel in a post-pandemic world?

**Craig:** Well, I’m an interesting person to ask this question of because I don’t necessarily have a lot of wanderlust. I’m very much a homebody.

But the other day I was talking about the fact that I’ve never been to Tokyo.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** And I’ve never been to Seoul. And I thought I could do like a Japan/Korea combo trip.

**John:** And as you recall that’s where I was last January. So when we brought Covid back to the US – oh shoot, I wasn’t supposed to say that.

**Craig:** Yup. It was you.

**John:** We were in Korea for Big Fish and then we were in Northern Japan skiing with a bunch of Chinese skiers.

**Craig:** I think I would probably – that sounds like fun. Now, I say that and then cut to miserable jetlag and I’ll be cursing everything. But I think that that sounds like a good plan. And I do probably my very first trip regardless no matter what is going to be London because our whole Chernobyl was intending to have a bit of a reunion around the BAFTAs. But the BAFTAs were obviously not held in person and so we did not have that opportunity. And so I’m hoping that maybe by the time it’s like Christmas/New Year’s we might be able to have that London reunion. Because I miss those folks.

**John:** Our plans for last spring break were to go back to Paris to visit all our friends in Paris, because longtime listeners of the podcast know I used to live in Paris. And it would be our first time back to visit our friends there for quite a long time. So we had actually rented the same apartment we used to live in. And we were very excited to go back and just have our Paris life back for ten days. And then of course the pandemic shut down everything there.

So, Paris is definitely the first place I need to go once the world opens up again. That’s just a high priority and I can’t wait to get back there. But I would say there have been a lot of other places that were on the list that were like oh eventually we need to get to that place. And I feel an increased urgency just because the pandemic shut this down this one time. Who knows what’s going to stand in the way of future trips.

So I definitely want to go to New Zealand. We have Paris friends who live there now so I want to go and visit them. New Zealand just seems like a wonderland that doesn’t have Covid. Iceland, always high on the priority list. But then even places that are kind of always going to be there but I just feel a new urgency to get to is like Machu Picchu and other sort of great historic sites around the world. I want to get there before the next thing happens that keeps me from going there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I never thought about the next thing.

**John:** Yeah, but even if it’s not a thing that shuts down the world, we’re of an age where bad stuff can happen. And suddenly it becomes impossible for us to travel someplace.

**Craig:** Oh right. I get what you’re saying. Like suddenly just your knee.

**John:** Just your knee. Or mortality.

**Craig:** Dark.

**John:** So this week one of the things I needed to do was – so my mom passed away December 5, and it turned out her name was already engraved on the headstone and her birthday was there but I needed to add her date of death. And so I was calling the cemetery to do this and it cost $425 if people are curious about what that is.

But a site I found which was so remarkable and how I knew what still needed to be done is somebody had gone through and photographed all of the headstones in this cemetery where my father is buried, or where my mom is going to be buried. And so I could just look up and I could actually see a photo of my dad’s tombstone, which was just awesome. There’s a service that just does all of this. Or there’s a website that keeps them on. I think it was just a volunteer who takes all the photos.

And so I was looking there and I realized my father was only 60 when he died. And in my head he was like much older than that. And it really brought a sense of – the realization of the shortness of life at times. Because he died when I was pretty young. And so I always think of him as being old when he died, but he really wasn’t that old.

**Craig:** Well, he was. It’s just so are you.

**John:** He’s not that old, because I’m not that old. That’s what I’m saying, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, when my dad died last year I definitely felt older. I mean, I think I said as much on the show. The buffer between you and the great beyond has been removed. You’re next.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** I’m the next Mazin man to die.

**John:** There’s no generation, yeah. If you were to die before your father that would be a great tragedy, but if you were to die after your father it’s like, oh, this is just what happens.

**Craig:** It’s about how it should work.

**John:** But happier topics, like imagining a post-pandemic life seems much more possible and plausible now than even a month ago. It’s surprising how quickly spring has come in a sense of this global disaster.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do feel like things – I mean, statistically the last couple of weeks have been remarkably good. It’s hard to say that when people are still dying, but relatively speaking the transmission rate and the hospitalization rate have plummeted, particularly here in LA County. Obviously plummeting from quite a steep rise that we experienced over the winter.

There is an acceleration of vaccinations. I think they said something like 50 or 60% of Americans over 65 have now been vaccinated or something. It’s like a really big number.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a crazy number.

**Craig:** And they have been saying that unfortunately because generally sucked at being good pandemic practitioners the infection rates were so high in the United States that we have started to also creep up on herd immunity just because of infections. So in LA County there is one estimate that half of all people in LA County were infected by Covid.

**John:** That seems too high to me and yet also it was just terrible here. So I could see both sides of that. I would say personally I am – and as a family – we are not sort of letting down our guard at all at this point. At some ways seeing that the end is near has strengthened our resolve to like–

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** –not get during this time.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s the short timer syndrome. The guys who were in war, they always say the most scared they are is right before their last three days. Because people do unfortunately catch it right there at the end. So, like you we are sticking to the plan and wearing the masks and social distancing and all that stuff. But, man, I cannot wait to get that jab in my arm.

**John:** I’m very excited for it.

**Craig:** I’m ready.

**John:** And it’ll be good when it happens.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I would also say we’re starting to make some summer plans. Are they plans which we could cancel if we needed to cancel? Sure. But we are actually putting down deposits on some things just because that’s what you do. And you sort of recognize that you have to not just prepare for the worst but prepare for pretty good as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that makes total sense. We are, too. I think we’re presuming that Jessie is going to be able to go to a summer program of some sort or another. Obviously last summer all the camps and things were canceled. And, you know, look, I’m preparing to produce a television show.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Obviously there are ways to mitigate production. Testing everybody constantly. But, you know, we’re hopeful that not only will we be able to get through with good testing and practice, but also that no one will get sick. And that’s really the goal.

**John:** I would say one of my biggest surprises is that so much production was able to figure out a way to happen. You and I have friends who have been in production kind of this whole time. And one just wrapped a show and managed to get through without any infections or anything shutting down. Others have been on and off and on and off because of it, but they’re still shooting, which is a great testament to the hard work and skill of a bunch of people doing it. And in some cases luck.

**Craig:** In some cases luck. But I do think that they landed on good systems. And once tests were plentiful, I mean that really was the key. That’s where we just ate it as a country. Our lack of testing capacity killed us. Literally killed us.

**John:** Yeah. I’m also kind of hopeful that – will there be another pandemic in our lifetimes? Probably? It’s just probably going to happen. Will we be much better set up for it?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. We actually recognize that it’s a real genuine threat and we can shut stuff down quickly and surgically and just be much better ready to deal with it.

**Craig:** I was actually thinking about this the other day. That the next pandemic everyone will just put on a mask, including all the people that were belly-aching about the masks during Covid. Because at this point they’ve sunk that cost in. Like they’re the bellyacher. They just can’t admit it at this point. They can’t start wearing a mask now. It’s too late for them. They’ve said too much dumb crap on Facebook. But the next one? They’ll stick a mask on.

**John:** And so, yes, it turned out that wearing a mask was much more important than washing your hands, but the next time I’m going to wash my hands, I’m going to stay at home, I’m going to put on a mask. I’m going to do all the things until they tell me I don’t have to do some of the things. I’m going to do all of the things.

**Craig:** Yup. I’ll do all the things. Because, you know, I don’t want to suffer.

**John:** Yup. I want to live.

**Craig:** I want to live.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

Links:

* [Download Weekend Read to read the ‘Awards 2021’ scripts](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life](https://www.amazon.com/Lying-Moral-Choice-Public-Private/dp/0375705287) by Sissela Bok
* [Julie Plec on Twitter](https://twitter.com/julieplec/status/1362499010594963457?s=21)
* [Kitty Letter](https://theoatmeal.com/blog/free_game) Game
* [Inked](https://inkedgame.com) Game
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Daniel Green ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/490standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/sexy-ghosts-of-chula-vista).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has one bit of swearing so just a warning if you’re in the car with your kids.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 486 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at listener’s pages and offer our honest feedback. We’ll also discuss some of the most common mistakes we find in these samples and how you can avoid them.

Plus, we’ll look at irony, which is not ironic. It’s just a topic.

**Craig:** It’s a topic.

**John:** And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss money and happiness.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Can’t wait to see what happens.

**John:** And what is the relationship between money and happiness. So, for these bonus topics you and I just sort of come up with them last minute, realistically I come up with them last minute.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so I emailed out to all of our Premium subscribers saying like, hey, what do you want us to discuss in bonus topics. And at last count Megana had gotten 165 suggestions for bonus segment topics.

**Craig:** Oh boy. So, we’re locked into this show for at least another three years is what you’re saying.

**John:** Yeah. That’s basically what we’ve come down to.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** But, Craig, there’s big breaking news because this last week Craig Mazin announced that he is no longer going to be on Twitter. Tell me about this.

**Craig:** It had been something I was thinking about for a long time. I mean, I didn’t do the big huffy cancel your account thing. I’ve just made my account private. I’ve stopped tweeting. And I turned my notification filter down to the most narrow band, so I don’t really get any. So, if for instance – the thing that’s different, like I quite Facebook many, many years ago. If you quit Facebook you can’t really see much on Facebook. With Twitter you can. So, sometimes if I’m reading an article it will link to a tweet, so I’ll be there, but my days of tweeting and responding, that’s over.

And it’s because I just kind of felt a growing list of issues that were part of the Twitter experience. Some of which I think people generally are familiar with, like the addictive nature of it. Also, I felt like Twitter was starting to change the way I was thinking about things as I learned them. So, information hits you, like news hits you, and without even trying or thinking about doing it I start to have a reaction. An opinion begins to form immediately. Twitter demands your opinions now. Now! You must have it. And that’s probably not good.

There are a lot of things that I just don’t need to have an opinion on. There are a lot of things that I don’t need people to hear from me on. And I think that there was something that happened, you know Bean Dad, right? Remember the whole Bean Dad fiasco?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So when I was reading the Bean Dad thing and I saw how that was all going down I thought to myself I think Bean Dad probably thought he was going to get love for this. I think that’s what was happening. I think Bean Dad was like people are going to applaud my story. They did not. And it does seem to me that underlying a lot of the interaction that people do on Twitter at least, maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, there’s a sense of like I think people are going to like this. And I don’t want that. I actually don’t want likeability or approvability or agreeability to be behind opinions I have or things I say.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, every day without fail a number of people would have some advice for me on The Last of Us. Who we should cast. Who we shouldn’t cast. What it should be about. What it shouldn’t be about. Who I should be working with. And I don’t do well with that. It’s not that I don’t care. I do care what people think. It’s just that there’s no way to actually do something that way. For every person that feels very strongly that it should be blue, there is somebody else who feels incredibly strongly that it should be yellow. And so you can’t make everybody happy and people are very emotional about it. And they’re very insistent. And it just starts to mess with your head. And I want to just be somewhere quiet. And make the show without feeling like I’m surfing people’s feelings, because my own feelings are so hard to surf at times.

So, all of that kind of added up to “it’s time.” But there were some good things about Twitter, I think, for me in particular. I thought Twitter made me a more empathetic person. I do.

**John:** Talk more about that. So empathetic in terms of you’re seeing different people’s experiences, you’re seeing their opinions and understanding sort of what it might feel like from their perspective?

**Craig:** Yes. But the way to get – Twitter is really good at getting under the hood of those things. Because there’s a lot of culture where people say through essay or interview this is how I feel, this is my experience, this is what’s hard. There’s a lot of fictionalized narrative and drama that does all of that. But it all feels a little bit crafted.

And on Twitter what happens is you see people in a very under-the-hood specific way talking about not only how something good makes them feel, but specifically how something bad makes them feel. Like I don’t like this and here’s why. And I think it’s normal for people who are – look, nobody wants to feel bad about themselves. Let’s just start with that. We avoid that shameful feeling if we can. So here’s something, an aspect, that you can feel shame about. If you are wealthy you can feel shame about the money that you have compared to somebody who doesn’t. If you’re white you can feel shame about the way that racial superiority has kind of shaped the world and you continues to do so. If you’re straight you can feel shame about the fact that people who are not are being limited in their freedoms or are being mocked or made miserable.

And for a lot of people I think when somebody confronts them with a possible mistake, their first instinct is to say, “No, what I just did is actually, no, you should not be upset about that because I don’t want you to be because I don’t want to feel like I made you upset.” That’s really underneath all of it. I don’t want to feel the shame of knowing that I made you feel upset.

So instead I’m going to tell you why you should be upset. And Twitter is really good at allowing the upset person to explain it. And to get out of like the cycle of people going, “I’m offended,” and other people going, “Oh, god, you people are offended by everything.” And that whole like people yelling in each other’s face it kind of still happens on Twitter, but there are times where people explain it and then you suddenly go, “I think I understand not only why you’re upset but why you’re upset that other people aren’t upset.” I’m starting to understand.

**John:** For sure. And I think the rise of threading made that more possible where you can provide additional supporting evidence behind those claims. So some things I’m hearing from you is that it was not just the consumption cycle of Twitter, and the doom-scrolling which we’re all familiar with, that was part of it. But really the need to have a reaction to things and then to feel the need to process any new piece of information in terms of like what is my take on this, what is my response to this, just become exhausting. Particularly when it’s something that you’re in the middle of creation, like The Last of Us, I can totally see why it makes sense to jump off that.

I’ve at times taken the Twitter app off my phone which sort of breaks the cycle of it. And I found that to be helpful. This feels like a nice natural step for you, too.

But I do have a question for you because one of the things I’ve appreciated about Twitter is the sense of being caught up on the popular culture and sometimes it’s stupid culture that you don’t need to be caught up on, and sometimes it’s fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So three things in the Trending Topics of today, and I’m curious whether you even know what they are. Jewish space laser.

**Craig:** I know what that is, because I built it. [laughs]

**John:** Harsh advice for writers.

**Craig:** Not familiar with that, but I can imagine what it would be.

**John:** So this was somebody had harsh advice for writers. Your writer friends are also your competition. And so people sort of jumped off of that, in reaction to that, but also made funny responses to it which is just delightful to read.

Mount Rushmore 2.

**Craig:** No. No clue.

**John:** I just made that up. But it feels like something that could be on Twitter, right?

**Craig:** I do love Jewish space laser. We are blamed for so much. I wish that we had the ability to make a space laser. She said that it caused the forest fires, where Marjorie Taylor Greene said forest fires in California were caused by a large laser in space that was possibly built by the Israelis? Is that about right? Something like that?

**John:** That’s about right.

**Craig:** That’s all I need to know.

**John:** Or there was Jewish money behind it.

**Craig:** There’s Jewish money behind it. Yeah, because the one thing I can tell you as the most Jewish person you know is that we love forest fires. Oh, boy, do Jews love forest fires. Yeah, it’s our favorite thing. What a lunatic. Good lord.

**John:** Yeah, she is.

**Craig:** She’s nuts.

**John:** Good lord. All right, some follow up from previous episodes. Back in 483 we had the episode Philosophy for Screenwriters and I had pointed out that I didn’t see a lot of examples of female characters in stories having to make ethical or moral choices. Andrew wrote in to say, “Isn’t Sophie’s Choice a classic example of a female protagonist with a moral debate?” Yes, Andrew, you are right. It’s like literally called a Sophie’s Choice. And it’s a thing we use all the time. So it’s a very good counter example in terms of just like a character having to grapple with an impossible decision. So, Sophie’s Choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a very specific decision that rarely will people have to make, but yes it is. No question.

**John:** And Airy wrote in. She said, “Regarding the female character philosophical question, in Godzilla: King of the monsters,” which I’ve seen, “Vera Farmiga’s character Emma has a bit of a villain philosophical speech where she explains why it’s a good thing to let the titans roam free and take back control of the earth.”

And I will say that it’s a really odd moment in this movie that I guess I was surprised to see a female character having that sort of villainous turn. So, yeah, that’s another counter example. There aren’t a lot of them, but I do like that people are finding some of them and I think it is still a very fertile ground for people to create female characters who are grappling with these decisions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Women can root for the destruction of all humanity, too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can be just as good as men at rooting for the destruction of humanity. I love those speeches. Those are my favorite. Isn’t there like a factory that makes that speech and they just update it?

**John:** There is. Well it’s always the eco-terrorist who really wants to turn his back to the Stone Age.

**Craig:** Look what we’ve done to this planet. Why should we be here? We’re a virus. We’re a parasite. Yup, factory just churned out another model.

**John:** Oh, it’s good stuff. J. Harris wrote in to say, “Could you discuss the use of irony within your screenplays, including situational irony, verbal irony, dramatic irony, cosmic irony, and tragic irony?” And it occurred to me that we have not really talked irony as a literary concept very often in the podcast. I think it’s because I don’t like the term. I find irony to be one of the most pedantic sort of – just the fact that you’re trying to split this into five categories of irony kind of drives me crazy.

And yet I think the use of irony is so fundamental to narrative and to dialogue and just to so many different things. I thought we might spend a few moments talking about irony as it is used in screenplays.

**Craig:** Sure. I do talk a little bit about it in the How to Write a Movie podcast, mostly I think in terms of what we’re breaking down here as possibly situational irony. That’s probably the one I think about the most when I think about writing.

**John:** Yeah. And so we’re not going to reference the Alanis Morissette song because I think that’s partly what turned me off of ever using the word irony.

**Craig:** It’s a song about non-ironic things.

**John:** Yeah. And the pedantry of sort of like well it’s a bummer but it’s not ironic. Well, ironic is maybe just not a great word for it. But it’s a phenomenon and it’s a feeling that permeates so much of what we write. So let’s talk about this umbrella feeling of irony, even if we’re not sort of going to zero in on the subcategories of it.

Irony in a very general sense is the contrast between expectation and reality. What you thought you were going to get and what you actually get. And in many ways to me it feels like the punchline to a joke, even if it’s not a funny joke. It’s the idea of you thought you were going this place, but I took you this place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think contrast between expectation and reality is an excellent way of thinking about it. And I would just add one little Philip to that and that is that the reality that you weren’t expecting is related to what you were expecting.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, if a banker is walking down the street and a piano falls on him and kills him, that was not expected. It’s also not ironic. But if a safe falls on him and kills him, he’s a banker, got killed by a safe which is a thing he uses at the bank. There is a connection between the thing that wasn’t expected and reality vaguely. And that’s where you kind of start to feel the usefulness when we’re writing because it is a fun and interesting game to figure out how to connect the surprises in some sideways interesting contrasting way with what you thought you would get.

**John:** Yup. And so I want to avoid talking about a character being ironic, because I think when we say that we really mean that a character is sarcastic and is sort of using words in a specific way. I want to talk about irony more in the sense of what it’s doing for story. So let’s look at how irony is often helping to create the conflict, the tension, the plot itself. A classic example is the audience knows something that the characters don’t.

So, the audience knows that, oh, that’s actually the characters mother rather than his sister. Or that there’s a bomb underneath the table and they keep lingering around this conversation. There’s a tension being created there because that is suspense, that is comedic. At the end of Romeo and Juliet all the trouble of the poison. We know that the poison was real, or not real, and the characters in that scene don’t. So, we feel the tension because we have information the characters don’t.

**Craig:** And typically this will be referred to as tension. I mean, while technically it is a form of irony, it’s pretty rare that people would call it ironic. It’s that feeling that you get when Clarice Starling shows up at a house and it’s supposed to be a billion miles away from where Jame Gumb is and whoops, actually he’s right there. That is the house. And she’s there and she doesn’t know he’s the guy and we do.

So, that’s tension. But technically irony, yes. Typically we don’t use it that way.

**John:** Yeah. More classically sort of ironic is in Aladdin he wants to become rich so he can impress Jasmine, but she’s repulsed by his riches. And sort of the fancier he gets the less she likes him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s irony.

**Craig:** Good old backfiring. Yup.

**John:** In The Incredibles Mr. Incredible gets sued for saving a person from suicide. There’s an irony underlying that situation. So because the suicide and saving the life are related and they’re not related in the ways you would expect them to be related. It’s helping to ignite the plot of the story as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s pretty common that you create these odd details that make you think, oh, how strange. Irony tries to make sense of the chaos of reality. So, it’s not just that some random thing happens to somebody to help them or hurt them. But it’s almost as if somebody, like God, or a writer, did it in such a way as to make a comment about that person and their life. Like, oh, you wanted – have you ever seen, I’m not a huge fan of the movie itself, but there’s a movie called Wish Master. Have you ever seen Wish Master?

**John:** I have not, but I have a sense of what may happen there. Is there a Monkey’s Paw kind of quality there?

**Craig:** There sure is. So the Wish Master is a gin, you know, that’s the root of genie. But he’s evil. And he’s released from his captivity and he grants wishes. And whatever you wish for you get. But only in the most literal sense, which ends up killing you every time. And so it’s just one situational commentary/irony moment after another. Backfiring supreme.

**John:** On the thread of like what you’re wishing for, the whole category of situational irony, like because of who you are this is ironic that it’s happening. In The Wizard of Oz everyone wishes for, everyone wants the thing that they actually already have. Scarecrow actually is quite smart, but he’s looking for a brain. That’s natural.

Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Harry Potter has to kill Voldemort, wants to kill Voldemort, but the only way he can do that is to let Voldemort kill him. So there’s a reversal of expectation there.

Classically The Twilight Zone episode, which are all sort of Monkey Paw situations. The main character wants to be left alone so he can read, but then his reading glasses break so he’s stuck there alone but can no longer read the books he wants to read.

Oedipus is searching for a murderer who is actually himself. Those are examples of sort of situational irony where a fundamental reveal in the plot, in the story itself, is character’s misassumptions about themselves or their situation.

**Craig:** And I think we like it as an audience because it does organize stuff. Irony implies intention. If someone has to die in a story you could just shake a big old bingo roller full of little balls with possible deaths on it, pull one out, and kill her. But that doesn’t feel as interesting to us as something that is intentional. Well if it’s intentional then it’s probably going to have that ironic vibe.

**John:** Yeah. We like there to feel like there’s some order and some sense to the universe. And so when we see a twist ending that works really well it’s probably because like the punchline to a joke all that setup was there, you just weren’t anticipating the setup taking you to that place. And that’s the pop. That’s the little bit of surprise you get.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But even when it’s not the whole movie, or the whole story, we use irony in smaller places to provide some texture and some detail. So, you have a married couple in counseling and they find out that their therapist has been divorced three times. There’s an irony to a divorced marriage therapist. You have a fire station burning down. You have a police car that the tires have been stolen from it. There’s an irony to that that feels – it makes the world feel just a little bit more, I don’t know, detailed, textured. It makes it feel like there’s some intention behind it.

**Craig:** Interesting. Yeah. It’s just more interesting. I mean, because you could, I mean, look the marriage counselor when they say, “Well what about you? What’s your secret?” And she says, “Oh yeah, no, I got married when I was 22 and we have the occasional fight, but mostly it’s been wonderful and we don’t really have challenges and we’re still married. It’s been 40 years. And the secret is just, you know, like all these things that I showed you on this worksheet, yeah, just do the worksheet. That’s great.” That’s super boring. It’s super boring.

And we like the idea of a failure somehow having some wisdom from their failure that they can impart that helps other people, but they’re struggling to help themselves. This is interesting. Our minds are wired to contrast. You know that vision and hearing are entirely based on contrast. So, hearing in particular, if someone plays a pure tone at a frequency and just keeps playing it you’ll stop hearing it after, I don’t know, 20 seconds. Because it’s not changing. So the little fibers that are twitching against the nerves in your ear, they activate because it’s a new. And then after a while they’re like, OK, we get it, we’ll stop. This hasn’t changed. The way that they encode videos, you know, with MPEG and all that stuff is basically by just encoding the things that change. Why encode the things that don’t?

So, this is kind of how it works for us when we’re watching stuff. We want those weird changes of things we would expect because that’s the information that makes it through our filter. Otherwise, boring.

**John:** Yeah. But we want things ideally to change in a way that matches to some degree our expectations. And so as you said earlier, if it’s just random then eventually you’re going to give up on it because you cannot follow what’s actually happening.

**Craig:** It’s just noise.

**John:** So it has to feel like, OK, there’s an intention that’s taking you to a place. And so often dialogue, irony and dialogue, is giving you that texture and giving you that bit of surprise. That little pop that keeps you coming back to it. And so sitcom writing is so full of joke after joke after joke, and it’s these little bursts of ironic surprise that sort of keep you going through it.

Generally in verbal irony it’s the difference between the literal meaning of something you’re saying versus the figurative meaning of what someone is saying. And so that’s how you get into your double entendres, your shade, your sarcasm, your passive-aggressive, “the good news is we’re all going to die.” It’s all those things that sort of have a little bit of a spark that sort of keep you engaged in a thing, keep the ball up in the air.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Irony is a useful way to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Use it.

**John:** Use it. Use it, and use it smartly. And so be thinking about it not just on a big story-wide scale, but on a smaller scale. And I would urge people to not be thinking about these little subcategories of stuff, because that’s literary criticism and papers you write when you’re a sophomore, but it’s not the kind of work that you’re doing writing a new scene in a script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Your use of irony and use of these techniques is setting a tone for what your script is doing and the way the characters talk, the way the world works. And as long as you’re consistent with it it’s going to be great. But if you try to dial that in for the first time on page 60 it’s going to bump.

I remember a script I wrote at Paramount years, and years, and years ago I had this one great line of dialogue and I was so excited about it. And my executive called it out. “That’s a great line for a completely different script. It just does not make sense here.” And I’m like, yeah, you’re right. Just it’s a great line.

**Craig:** Yeah. Irony is a fundamental ingredient. You can’t bake cookies without sugar and then sprinkle some sugar on these little flour dough balls and call it a cookie. It’s got to be in there. You just have to plan it.

**John:** All right, well let’s move to some actual writing on the page that we can look at and see if there’s any irony on display there. This is our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new to the podcast here every couple weeks we open up the mailbag and look through and see these submissions that our listeners have sent in, generally the first three pages of their script. It could be a TV script. It could be a feature script. And we look at what we see and give you our honest opinions on what we’re seeing that works and what could be a little bit better.

So we get in a zillion of these. And Megana Rao is responsible for looking through all of these. I want to invite her on because before we get started on these three specific ones she and I were looking through some of the examples and had some general guidelines and suggestions for everybody else sending stuff through. So, Megana, why don’t you come on board here?

**Craig:** Take it away, Megana.

**Megana Rao:** Hey guys.

**John:** Hey. So, how many of these samples do we get in on a given week in preparation for a given episode?

**Megana:** I usually look through about 100.

**John:** That’s a lot. And when you’re looking through them are you mostly focused on this is an interesting story idea, these are interesting problems I’m seeing, this is really good, this is really bad? What are the kind of things that bring it up to this next level for you?

**Megana:** Yeah, I think I’m looking for people who are taking risks, doing something interesting, or within three pages are quickly establishing the world and giving us some character development. And I think recently as I’ve been getting better at this, filtering through what’s just not going to work, too, issues of formatting or if I can read in the first couple of lines the writer is just trying to do too much within the description, I think it’s much easier for me to filter those out.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t want writers to ever be embarrassed. We don’t want people to feel like, you know, these people are doing this voluntarily which is great and awesome and so thank you for sending this in, but we don’t want to embarrass somebody and it does nobody any good for us to slam on somebody.

We want this to be helpful and educational for the person who sent it in, but really for everybody. And so we’re trying to find that balance of like examples that have enough things to talk about that can be improved but also have some good things to talk about as well.

Some of the pages you’ve sent through recently in this last batch, some things that I noticed, I’ve put them into kind of two buckets. One is sort of sloppiness where I just sense that this writer did not proofread carefully. And there were mistakes where like the wrong word was used. There’s extra spaces in places. It’s not even that it’s formatted wrong, they’re literally just typos. And second is unfamiliarity with the screenplay format. And it’s great that some people are sending in some of the first stuff that they’ve written, but I also feel like they have not read enough screenplays. And I think the great thing about 2021 is you can find the scripts for any movie that’s ever been produced online.

I just feel like you need to read like 30 scripts and really get a sense of what that format feels like. Because sometimes I get stuff in that’s like, oh, that’s just really don’t know what a screenplay is or does. And they just need to take in that format a little bit better.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that.

**John:** Some other sort of ongoing things I’ve noticed in a lot of these pages is confusion about punctuation. Confusion about where do commas go. You can make different choices about where to put some commas, but some of these commas are just really in the wrong place. I see semicolons sometimes. Almost never have I seen a semicolon used properly. If you’re thinking about using a semicolon you really need to stop, take a few steps back, maybe look up what the usage of semicolons is, and see if that’s really the right choice.

**Craig:** It’s not. [laughs] It’s not the right choice ever in a screenplay ever.

**John:** I mean, I can think of, having written 120 or more scripts, I’ve probably used a semicolon in a screenplay three or four times. It’s just not a common thing you’re going to use in a screenplay.

**Craig:** I literally don’t think I’ve ever done it.

**John:** Yeah. You probably want a colon. You may want two dashes. More likely you want a comma or a period. Simplicity is generally your friend there.

A thing I noticed in this last batch is people tend to not put a space before parenthesis, and so they’ll have a character’s name and then there won’t be a space for the parenthesis, the character’s age, or what the description is of that person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Put a space there. That’s great. Same with brackets. You’re doing like day or night or after something, just give us that space before then.

Lastly I would say on the title page, Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, those are all credits you’ll see. Something you’ll never see on a real screenplay is Story Edited by.

**Craig:** Story Edited by?

**John:** Or Story Editor. That’s not a thing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. That’s not a natural credit.

**Craig:** Don’t do it.

**John:** Written by, Screenplay by, Story by, nothing else is really appropriate for the stuff that you’re sending in to us.

**Craig:** The semicolon of credits.

**John:** It is.

**Megana:** And I guess the only other thing I’d add is verb tenses. I see a lot of people, just even within the three pages, flipping through a bunch of different verb tenses and that’s just something I think to be mindful of.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about that. Because screenplays are written in the present tense. And they’re never written in the past. They’re always in the present tense. And you can use the present continuous, like “Joe is putting on his shoes when he hears a noise.” “Is putting on his shoes” is great and fine. But you’re not going to use that for everything. Use that in cases where action could be interrupted. Most of the time you’re going to be using the simple present. “Joe puts on his shoes. Joe opens the door to find something.”

If you’re using present tense continuous there’s got to be a reason why you’re using that other than just the normal present tense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s just a lot of overcomplicated – all right, so John and I have a slightly different view about whether you should be going back over your stuff, but I’m such a go-backer over my stuff. And at least in this point I think even if you don’t want to creatively go back over your stuff just take a moment to go back over your stuff just for compression and concision. And just look for the bunch of words and things that maybe you just don’t need. And just concise it up a little bit if you can. It does help, right, because there’s a buildup of stuff over time.

We start to think of the things that have survived a month, or two, or three of rewrites as worthy of lasting all the way to the screen, but maybe they’re not. Maybe it’s just that you haven’t roughed them up when you could have. And these little dinky things, sometimes if you don’t do it right away you’re never going to get around to it and it’s just suddenly – there is a cumulative effect of too many words. “Too many notes,” as the emperor said.

**John:** And what Craig is saying about going back over your stuff, I think just so that everyone is clear, I try not to go over my last week’s work before I start on today’s work. I try to stay within the scenes that I’m working on. But in that scene that I’m working on I will go through that hundreds of times to keep tightening it up and to keep working on it.

And so he and I are both believers in, yeah, there’s probably your first approach to how you got through that scene, but there’s going to be a tighter version of that. There’s going to be just better choices of words and really making sure everything fits lockstep. Because screenwriting is very concise. You’re trying to use the fewest words to create the best effect possible.

So, sometimes we don’t see that in the pages that we’re getting and we’d love to see more of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And as a reminder we’re going to be talking through with some descriptions of these things, but if you’d like to actually read the pages we have PDFs. They’re attached to the show notes of this show. Or you can go to johnaugust.com. So you can read along with us as we go through these.

**Craig:** Let’s get onto it.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s talk about specifically the three pages that were sent through this week. Megana, can you give us a summary of this first one which is Echopraxia by J. Vernon Reha.

**Craig:** Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story.

**John:** Which we’ll talk about as well.

**Megana:** OK, great. 19-year-old Bianca fiddles with the radio as she drives through a quiet neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. She approaches a stop sign, but instead of slowing down she accelerates through the intersection and crashes. Time slows as we watch the fall out of the crash and ghostly images of dead squirrels in buildings flicker on screen. Bianca speaks to us in voiceover as we watch the scene of the accident from a bird’s eye view.

Police and paramedics ID Bianca’s body, but find that the car she crashed into is mysteriously empty.

**John:** Great. Craig, so you set up the first question here. So Echopraxia Or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Story. This is by J. Vernon Reha. I bumped on that subtitle.

**Craig:** Well these are more common now. I have to say. This is sort of – it’s a trend. Nobody wants to just write a thing that’s called Rebound or whatever you might want to call something like this. So, it has become common to do these funky, twisty titles like for instance Echopraxia. There’s also a trend to do funky, twisty titles where you say something like Rebound, colon, and then some sort of Charlie Kaufman-ish overly worded musey kind of Synecdoche, New Yorker-y kind of thing.

And in this case J. Vernon did both. Echopraxia or An Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story. This is essentially a promotional choice. I don’t think that J. Vernon is expecting that there’s going to be a movie with this on the marquee, or in whatever the tiles are on HBO Max or Netflix. This is really about getting people to go, “Oh, I think I’ll read that one from the pile.” That’s my guess.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a fair guess. And a couple of the other samples we got through had something kind of like that. It kind of annoys me and yet I can see why somebody does it. So, I’m not going to come out strongly against it. I can’t imagine some buyer is going to go, “Ugh.” It doesn’t feel kind of fair on the title page and yet I can see why people do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s promotional. But, you know.

**John:** Well let’s get into the pages itself. So, the first page of this is essentially the car crash and going up into the car crash. And that first line was an example of sort of the not putting a space before the parenthesis. It’s not a big deal, and yet at the same time it’s like the first word I see a problem. And that doesn’t give me a lot of faith in what’s going on.

Mostly what I wanted to see in this opening section, because I think some of the writing of the actual crash is really nice, is stuff was in the wrong order. Stuff was in the wrong place. So it says, “I/E. CAR – MORNING,” well right now the writer is starting on Bianca. But then later on it’s talking that it’s early, the sun is still rising. We keep hopping around in terms of are we talking about the day or are we talking about Bianca. Give us one thing, then give us the next thing, then give us the next thing.

So I feel like if you’re going to set up what time of day this is, or what this feels like, what the neighborhood is like, do that first. And then get us to Bianca. And then get us into the crash.

Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** There are a lot of really interesting things going on here. There are some things that are also poking out where I just think I’m not sure how this works practically. So, for instance, “She turns on the corner of Fourth and Lake.” And then you point out, “It is early – the sun is just rising.” OK, couple of things. There is practically no difference between the sun rising and the sun setting, unless we literally see a west or east sign with an arrow, like in a cartoon. We don’t know which one it is. So we’re going to need some other indication that this is morning. Any other little indication would do if that’s what you want.

Similarly, turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake, is that important? Do I need to know it’s Fourth and Lake? Do I need to know it right now? If I do, I need to be outside of the car. I don’t want to see her turning on the corner of Fourth and Lake. I want to see a car turning onto Fourth and Lake. If it’s just her, I just need to see that she’s turning. That’s all. She turns to head down a different street. It’s early. The sun is rising. Did the sun just get into her eyes? Has it shifted? You know, give me some stuff there.

This is where it gets a little trickier.

**John:** Craig–

**Craig:** Go on.

**John:** Let’s just talk through sort of how you might do that on the page. So I could envision, if the first slug line of this was “A quiet residential road in Liberty, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, one of those neighborhoods where all of the homes are eerily similar. It’s early.” And then some other description about dew on the laws. You know, newspapers on sidewalks. Whatever you want to do there. And then a car turns onto Fourth and Lake. And then we are interior the car afterwards. That’s a much more natural way to sort of – it helps us see what are the shots. It lets us visualize the movie a little bit more easily.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or stay inside the car the whole time. And then we don’t get out until the crash happens. So you have choices to make. “Bianca is pretty, but nondescript, with a face you could forget.” Well, why don’t we just start by saying, “This script is fine, but nondescript, with a story you could forget?” Why would you want to advertise? This feels like a reaction to a “hot but doesn’t know it.” But it’s not actually giving me anything. I don’t know what she looks like at all. And I definitely don’t want to be told that I need to cast an actor whose face is so generic I’ll forget them.

I want to know what her hair is like. I want to know what she’s wearing. I want to know if she has makeup on.

**John:** Are her nails painted?

**Craig:** Are they dirty?

**John:** A 19-year-old young woman could be a zillion different things, so give us some choices here.

**Craig:** “She Flicks through radio stations,” so J. Vernon capitalizes flicks, which I think is OK. At first I was like, oh, is that a mistake, but I see there’s a flick, flick, flick, flick thing going on. Flicking through radio stations is something that was far more common when you and I were learning how to drive. Because now you tap, tap, tap I think to get through radio stations at this point. But I get the point. What I was a little bit more concerned about was that this is being intercut with the following: “A child runs into the street for a ball. Flick. Squirrels chase each other up a tree. Flick. A man and his wife shout indistinctly behind an open window. Flick Flick Flick…”

How are we supposed to get to any of that? Are we just dead-cutting to a squirrel? Are we dead-cutting to a window and people maybe behind it and you can’t hear them. Are we dead-cutting to a kid in the street which you know you’re going to think is going to get run over? How do we do that? And why?

**John:** Yeah. And how does it relate to Bianca? Is she noticing this? I assume that we are in POV because of how this scene started, but this didn’t feel like POV, so–

**Craig:** Right. It doesn’t feel like POV. And the reason that I’m kind of picking on this is because I really like what happens next.

**John:** Very much.

**Craig:** And that’s what sort of matters. And so I’m wondering maybe we don’t need all this junk because really what’s important is that she does something surprising which is she intentionally crashes into another car. And I would love to know, since it’s day, I don’t know why we’re being blinded by approaching headlights? It’s morning.

**John:** I noticed that, too.

**Craig:** I’d like to see what kind of car that is. That’s actually going to be very helpful for what comes next. Is it a Prius? Is it a pickup truck? What is it? Then she crashes. The description of the crash was fascinating. I mean, obviously we’re getting into science fiction here but it was really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So this is the moment that gave me some hope because I felt like the writer was picking very specific visuals to dramatize what was actually happening here. So I love a good car crash in slow motion. And I love how it’s going to feel. I love the description of glitching. It let me know that something unusual was about to happen. And that was great. And so I loved that we got there.

So, if earlier it was just more normal and got to that moment, great. If earlier, you gave us a sense that something was odd and then we got to that, great. But I wasn’t led into this moment with any confidence. And so if I had been a little more confident going into it it would have felt even better.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then the first line comes from Bianca, who has just theoretically killed herself. And it is in voiceover, “Sometimes I wonder if I have a personality.” That’s not kind of – you want that line, whatever that line is, it needs to grab you by the face and go here we go. This is fascinating. She’s making a statement. And it doesn’t quite do that. It’s a little bit more of a thinky line than a grabby, shocking line.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s close. And I would have loved to have – there’s going to be a first line, and whatever that first line is I would have pulled it up earlier towards the crash so that we have something to anchor us to before we get to this sort of wide open street scene, or people we’ve not established before looking at the results of the car crash. I would love to hear that line somewhere in that car crash scene.

But I like the voiceover over all as a feeling. And so I was, you know, excited to see it. I don’t think the line is quite right, but I like where it was headed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tonally it seems like it’s dancing around the right thing.

**John:** So, Craig, the answer to your question, they are both gray 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Now I see.

**John:** Which feels like well that’s got to be important. I feel like that is an intentional choice. And yet I don’t know what’s important and what’s not important because there hasn’t been any signaling to me as a reader. So if that feels like the kind of thing which is so important that I might underline it or bold face it or somehow call it out or stick it on its own line. Because that’s weird.

**Craig:** I’d go further.

**John:** Why would two identical cars crash into each other?

**Craig:** That to me requires actual direction on the page. First of all, gets its own paragraph for sure. And then her car we now see is crumpled. Her 2004 gray Ford Fiesta is crumpled and smashed. We come around to see the other car on its back. Also gray. And then as we move around the back we see an upside down the word “Fiesta.” Then we go it’s the same exact model and make. Two of the same cars just smashed into each other. Because you want the audience to go Whoa, not like, Huh, those are similar.

**John:** Yeah. There must have been a sale on 2004 Ford Fiestas.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** So then we get into two detectives, one with glasses and one with a beard, talking. I want to cut most of their dialogue because it was just yada-yada. They’re basically saying that she’s alive and stable, but there’s no other body in the other car. I felt there were ways we could visually see that and get to that point and have it be the moment of discovery rather than two people talking about something that has already happened.

It would be great to see people looking in the car and there’s no body in the other car. There’s no person in the other car.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Rather than reported moments, seeing the moment feels better to me.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, you can do a thing where a detective shows up and he walks over to the other guy and he says, “OK,” and the guy is like, “Yeah, she’s…” And they’re wheeling her into – that’s Bianca Armitage, 19, no criminal history, family has been alerted. We’re running a tox screen. Looks like she’s going to make it.

OK, what about the other guy? Or what about the other car? And the cop says, “There was no one in the other car.” And that’s it. And just like, what?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s weird.

**John:** What? What?

**Craig:** We don’t need this back and forth. “It’s the strangest thing.” No one ever says that. Ever.

**John:** A real head-scratcher.

**Craig:** It’s the strangest thing. Real head-scratcher. These guys are actually diminishing the drama of the situation that you’ve created by kind of being weirdly bland about it.

**John:** Yeah. So I can envision a scenario in which the crash has basically just happened, or we’re coming in like 30 seconds later and there are neighbors who are like looking at Bianca and like, OK, she’s alive in there, and they’re looking. And then we dolly around to the other car and there’s nobody in the car. And that’s surprising. That is shocking. That’s a cool moment. And then we reveal that the license plate is blank. Like that is really creepy and interesting and goose-bumpy.

But having these detectives who aren’t going to be important characters have this dialogue isn’t doing it for us.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And then going to the reporter.

**Craig:** No. No, no.

**John:** That just has to go.

**Craig:** No, no, no.

**John:** I never believe the reporter covering this thing. You don’t cover car crashes like this.

**Craig:** No. I mean, Memphis is – maybe in some tiny, tiny Podunk town in a county where nothing ever happens. But this is Memphis, Tennessee. It’s not necessarily New York, but it’s a real city. And, no, car crashes happen all the time. They stay on somebody going, “A car crash happened.” It’s just, no. No.

**John:** So, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this on the show, but at the end of my street there are car crashes all the time, or at least there used to be car crashes all the time until we finally convinced the city to change how traffic flows and put in some one-way turns and things like that. But I would just be watching TV and I’d hear the squeal of tires, crash. And like, OK, it’s a crash. And so I’d put on my shoes, I’d get my phone, and I’d go down. And so I’ve had to deal with so many flipped over cars over the last couple of years.

**Craig:** Oh god. Jesus.

**John:** And it’s terrible. And so I know what these crashes are like and never does a news crew show up. I mean, this is Los Angeles. But even in Memphis, Tennessee a news crew is not going to show up. This is just not realistic or believable.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** Not news.

**Craig:** It’s not news.

**John:** It’s not news. Then we get to the hospital room and I’m curious what happens next. And so I will say that the good writing of the car crash and of the mystery of like, wait, where is the other person in the other car, who is Bianca, is Bianca possessed by some other spirit, I’m fascinated by all of those. So that’s what makes me curious about what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** And that is exactly how I would think about rewriting this. What would the person watching this be most curious about? And I can assure you it is not a reporter talking about a crash. It is not two detectives yapping back and forth in a bland way. I want to know, wait, was there somebody in that car? Can you convince me there was nobody in that car? What does it mean that these two cars are exactly the same? What does that mean? And where is that car now? That’s what I want to know.

So, think about what people would want. Give it to them. But in an interesting way. This is the big secret. Now you know.

**John:** Now we know. All right. Let’s move onto our next Three Page Challenge. Megana, tell us about The Little Death by Autumn Palen.

**Megana:** All right, so Brandy, a young woman in her 20s, stares blankly at the ceiling of her bedroom. Tony, male 20s, emerges from beneath the covers and asks if she “got there.” Brandy admits that she did not and that she has never “been there.” Brandy reveals that she’s been too scared to masturbate on her own. Tony asks why not and we see a series of quick cutaways of Brandy’s fears, i.e. that someone will walk in on her or that she’ll electrocute herself with a vibrator.

They banter about what Tony can try next.

**Craig:** You really can’t electrocute yourself with a vibrator. I mean, if it was plugged into a wall?

**John:** These are battery controlled. So back in the days of plug-in vibrators, which I’m sure was a thing at some point.

**Craig:** Was it?

**John:** Then you could have, but you can’t.

**Craig:** Not in my lifetime. I think there have been batteries for a long time.

**John:** It’s probably more like hair dryers in bathtubs was maybe a thing. I bet some people actually did die of that. Exposed wire.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Early on, I think like in the 20s, a man would get on some sort of bicycle contraption and then an egg beater type electric vibrator would be attached to a woman. And this was all done under the heading of curing her hysteria. But, no, not since I would imagine the ‘40s has this been.

By the way, that actually counts. I have to say, people may think we’re just being picky, but it counts. Because people need to know that the characters are living in our world and thinking somewhat logically.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, it does make me think though I’ve seen so many examples of like shows from the ‘70s where a woman was murdered because someone threw a hair dryer into the bathtub. But how was it ever a believable death? What person is using a blow dryer while in a bathtub?

**Craig:** Well, you know, people are incredibly stupid.

**John:** Yeah, I guess they smoke in bed.

**Craig:** They do. The good news is that somewhere along the line the ground fault interrupter circuit was invented so in your bathroom all those things you would plug a hair dryer into now has its own little circuit breaker. So, you probably won’t die.

**John:** All right, Craig, so The Little Death, what is your take on The Little Death?

**Craig:** Well, there’s nothing wrong with it. OK. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s just not a lot right with it. Because it is somewhat familiar. We have seen conversations a little bit like this in all sorts of sitcoms and things like that, and other movies. My biggest thing about it was it read, it flowed, the dialogue sounded perfectly fine, I just didn’t believe much of it.

So, Tony seems to have feelings. Tony is just totally cool with everything. And Brandy is in a very strange place because she’s never had an orgasm before, which is not horribly uncommon for women in their 20s. It’s a thing. OK, so I’m with it. But she neither seems to be open or closed about it. She just sort of tells it in between like let me just tell you a big secret of mine. And his reaction is like, oh, OK, let me just try a different thing. And, does that work?

It all feels a bit sort of shruggish. Like a shrug. Like I’m watching a fairly mild discussion between two perfectly nice people.

**John:** So, I enjoyed that it was overall sex positive. I enjoyed Tony’s sex positivity and that Tony was trying hard. And I really like that. I like the specific details of like “wipes his lips with a thumb and forefinger.” Great. Love that. I see the image. It’s terrific.

And while I like him being sex positive, I don’t have a sense of where are they at in their relationship. Like how long – who are they specifically individually and how long have they been kind of a couple. And I think we can get that information into this scene. Or we can get some sense of what their connection is in this scene.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some of the problems are like, Brandy, 20s. 20s is anything from 20 to 29. That’s a huge range.

**Craig:** It’s a big spread. Yeah.

**John:** So I think you got to give us a very specific age on Brandy. Like is she still in college? Or is she killing it as a consultant at a top law firm? It’s just too general here. And that’s I think my biggest problem with all of this is that it didn’t feel like it was rooted in very specific characters encountering a specific situation.

**Craig:** I mean, look, Brandy has a problem. Right? It’s not like Brandy loves this situation. She doesn’t love this situation. She’s sort of trapped by a fear. I’d love to know a little bit more. I think this fear part is the part that I believe the least, not only for the aforementioned batteries can’t kill you reason, but also because that doesn’t actually seem like why women are too scared to masturbate. It’s not a fear of physical death as much as there’s shame, culture, family issues, religion, whatever it is. It seems like it’s probably a little more complicated than that. So it seems so readily and immediately psychologically accessible to her.

Also, she seems to not – at least in these pages – she doesn’t come off as aware that this is a problem. So it’s only a problem suddenly and then it’s a problem always. Meaning, she’s letting him do this. Now, if she has a problem and she’s allowing him to do this, either she’s saying, “Here’s the deal. It’s not going to work, but you try and let’s see if you can be the one.” Which I don’t get from this. Or, she’ll fake it.

But what she’s not going to do is think, oh, for some reason this time it will be different than all the other times and I’ll just sort of mention that it actually turned out to not be different from all the other times. It just feels like there’s not backstory built in. There’s not experience built in. We’re dealing with sex, so there’s shame around it and it’s tricky and it’s psychological. And both of them just seem too simple. They just seem like incredibly simple people.

**John:** I think my biggest issue with how the pages were flowing is I didn’t get a good sense of – I think the tension of the pages is that she’s telling the guy sort of what these different encounters were, because he’s reacting to them. And I think all those cutaways back to “I just told you that story, I just told you that story,” get rid of those. I think you have a stronger story.

I think it’s more interesting if we’re, as the audience, are being led into these things and she’s not telling him those things. Because then it becomes a source of tension between the two of them. Because someone who can be too nice and too supportive and it can drive you crazy, I think that could be the source of real good comedic tension within the scene. Where she’s like I don’t want you to even try. I don’t want to deal with this right now. I don’t want to try to fix this. And then we don’t need to sort of have the escalation and the rule of three in terms of like all the things that have gone wrong.

Just the one occurrence could be great. Right now on page two, “The sound of the door slamming open snaps her from her daze. Brandy jolts up, focus fixed on the door in a panic.” And right now she says, “I didn’t know you were home.” That’s kind of generic. If she says, “Grandpa!”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s funnier.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we don’t even need to see grandpa. We just know like, oh god, I can’t even imagine how terrifying that would be.

**Craig:** Or we just see grandpa. We see him staring there dropping his little bag from Trader Joe’s on the floor in shock. No one says a full, complete sentence when they’ve been caught masturbating, I have been told.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Allegedly.

**John:** Allegedly.

**Craig:** It just seems way too, yeah, sort of rigged. By the way, I didn’t quite understand thumb and forefinger. Do you understand her to mean like wipes his lips, like wipes his mouth with the back of his hand?

**John:** No, so sort of pinching – using thumb and forefinger on each side to sort of clean off his mouth.

**Craig:** I dispute that that would be effective. [laughs] I dispute that.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems odd.

**John:** I would also, getting back to sort of the basics here, it’s such a clichéd moment of like the guy comes up from the covers and asks like “how was that/did it?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I just feel like I’ve seen that so often. I could cut those first couple lines and – or even if he just says, “No?” And you could just get rid of the question, I guess.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. Why did Tony stop? What clue did he have that it had ended? Right off the bat I was so confused. Did he set an egg timer? What happened?

**John:** We won’t know.

**Craig:** And he was like, “How was that?” And she’s like, no. And he’s like, “No? Really? You mean that you didn’t have an orgasm right when I arbitrarily stopped going down on you?”

That’s what I mean. They just seem a bit dim as people. So, make them smarter.

**John:** Yeah. We like that. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. This is Chula Vista by Kristen Delgado. Megana, talk us through it.

**Megana:** Enrique, 17, and his father, Ignacio, 34, are selling a wealthy homeowner, Mr. Lawson, 45, on their landscaping services. Mr. Lawson’s daughter, Stevie, 17, pokes out and tries to talk to Enrique who barely acknowledges her. Enrique secures the sale and as Enrique and his father are leaving Ignacio asks his son who the girl was. And Enrique pretends he doesn’t know her. As they leave the Chula Vista neighborhood Enrique tells his father that one day when he’s a doctor he’ll buy him a home there.

Then we see a tired-looking Enrique getting ready for school in the morning. He almost forgets to pack the burrito his mom packed and the dad makes a joke that Enrique is too good for it because he’s going to be a doctor.

**John:** Great. We’ll start on the title page. This includes an image. It looks like an image that’s maybe custom made for this script. You and I have talked about images in screenplays before. I felt like this set a nice tone and a picture of it. What did you feel about this image?

**Craig:** I liked it. I liked it. I thought that because the image was a bit soft and watercolor-y and defocused that it immediately said this is romance. And not just because a boy and a girl are sitting there on the ground by some lit candles at night and all the rest. Just the Chula Vista itself, the valley, the world, the sunset, the lights. Everything felt romantic.

So, even if this turns out to not be a romance, which I suspect it will turn out to be a romance, it put me in a nice place. I was happy. It felt sophisticated. You know? It was an interesting image.

**John:** Yeah. I liked it, too. One challenge with images in screenplays is that images want to be centered across the width of the page, but of course text in screenplays shift slightly to the right because historically we’ve had bindings, we’ve had three holes on the left hand side. So it bugs me a little bit that the image is off-center compared to the text. So it’s a thing you could figure out how to manipulate in whatever program you’re using. You could figure out how to do it in Highland. Being off-center bugged me more than the fact that there’s an image there. That’s me.

**Craig:** It looks on-center to the title and her name.

**John:** To me it’s on-center to the page but off-center compared to the title.

**Craig:** I printed it out, so there may be some funky printer stuff going on.

**John:** Ah, so it may look different to you.

**Craig:** But it’s a nice image. You know what? Actually, Kristen, this is by Kristen Delgado, the only thing I would think about is if you have a little Photoshop-y thing or Gimp is a free one that you can get that’s like Photoshop, to somehow just do something with the edges of this thing so it doesn’t seem like such a hard edged Internet grab. You know what I mean? Like something that’s a little softer and kind of blended somehow. Fading on the edges. That sort of.

**John:** Let’s get to the script itself. The writing of the script itself. And so I believe after these three pages that this is a story about Enrique and his probably coming of age story in 1979 Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve never seen that before. It does feel like probably about a rich girl from Chula Vista and his dad is going to be the gardener for this family. I got that off of these first three pages and I would be curious what the complications are in that relationship that go ahead. And obviously the image was helping send me to that place.

Craig, what was your overall take, your overall feeling of these three pages?

**Craig:** Nervousness. Because I think you’re right. And that is what they’re promising. And I feel like I’ve seen this. A lot. I mean, there have been a billion Romeos and Juliets, but more importantly it seems like we’re getting a little bit of a kind of already done quite a bit take on being the child of immigrants and the mixing of immigrants with people who aren’t immigrants and different races and different classes and looking down at people.

It feels like this is well trod upon territory. And I didn’t get anything different from these than I normally would. It feels like I’m getting set up for Enrique to start to turning his back on his parents and his family because he’s a little bit embarrassed about them because he kind of aspires to be more with the rich kids. And so there’s going to be conflict there. And the first page I was a little nervous because Mr. Lawson does not seem like, again, this doesn’t seem like the way people are. Someone says, “We’re doing landscaping. We noticed your grass is kind of high.” “Uh, yeah, I haven’t had a chance to get to it.”

But more importantly he goes, “How much?” “$30.” “Great. Go ahead. Do it.” That’s it? Did he not think of this before? It just seems so kind of like mild. And the other thing that was kind of odd is Ignacio in Spanish says, “What a fucking asshole.” And I’m all for the good old classic fucking asshole rich white guy, but I don’t see what Mr. Lawson did. He answered the door.

**John:** He didn’t shake his hand, but he did say yes. He got a job. So I was also thrown by that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the part that he closes the door in his face. Also, that’s – that’s not even how racists work. Like they do shake your hand. Then they close the door and then they bad mouth you. It feels like there’s a slight kind of – there’s a bit of a corniness going on to something that I think as a culture we’re getting and more honest about. I mean, there’s just more honesty.

I’m nervous that this is not going to give me something new. That said, it might. I can’t tell from three pages.

**John:** Yeah. So, Mr. Lawson, 45, dressed for racquetball at the country club.” So, I don’t really quite know what dressed for racquetball at the country club means. Unless he’s carrying his racquetball racket, I just see a guy in shorts and a headband maybe. But I immediately stop and think like you don’t actually go to the club dressed that way. You change into that kind of stuff at the club.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was a weird first image for me. I love, obviously, hair and makeup and clothing details to help us tell about the character, I just – it felt like we were trying to get to like you’re interrupting some other moment. And so figure out what that moment was.

I like the idea of Enrique, and we’re starting this story with Enrique trying to get the job to mow the lawn there. And I thought his first dialogue does make sense. But what Craig is saying is like Mr. Lawson is going to hear that and then immediately sort of know what’s going on. He’s going to check the Blakey’s home, OK, this really is a person. You know you’re not making this up. And he’s going to push a little bit more. And I just didn’t see that pushing.

And if this scene were a few lines longer there could be a little bit more back and forth in looks in terms of Stevie, the girl who is coming out, and sort of what that whole dynamic is. I just felt like it got a little rushed to get through this and I didn’t believe that he got this job.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if this is a rich guy, if that’s the point, then nice house in nice neighborhood, he either has somebody mowing his lawn, or he’s like a little kooky and doesn’t give a shit. But he’s not going to be this kind of stuffy classic country club kind of white guy and be neither of those things, just be negligent about his lawn. It just seems odd.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There must be a reason why he’s been mowing his own lawn if he has been. Also, where did Stevie come from? She just like suddenly steps out from behind her father. That’s weird. Does she just follow him around and hang out behind him and then just slide into? You know what I mean? You have to think about, OK, on the day where is she? Can she just be coming around the other side of the house? Or coming down the stairs? Or something.

**John:** Yeah. You could mention her coming around the other side of the house and she’s using the hose to spray off her feet or something that are dirty. There’s got to be a more interesting way to sort of see her than just like behind her father.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another opportunity here is while I do like the idea of getting the job for the first time, that is a lot of work to set up. If it works for the story, he could have been cutting the grass here for a time and he’s basically saying, “Oh hey, I need a check,” or “I need to get paid.” And that’s that moment. And then there’s actually money exchanging hands which could feel good and actually help set some stuff up a little bit better.

So, I think there’s just opportunities here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like Mr. So-and-so who has been doing your lawn, he’s retired, he just retired last week. We’re doing your neighbor, Mr. Blakely’s, lawn. If you like we can just pick up yours now. There’s some kind of – it just makes sense, you know.

But Stevie, yeah, like if that’s the thing, if this is the Enrique and Stevie story, this is not – this is weird. It’s like a weird dud of a moment.

**John:** Yeah. So then we get to Ignacio and Enrique in the pickup truck and this could be a really good moment. It’s not working for us right now because I don’t get what the real vibe is between father and son here. I felt like the “when I’m doctor I’ll move here,” I didn’t buy – that just felt like an author talking. It didn’t feel like an actual kid talking.

**Craig:** Corny. It just feels corny. And similarly like a dad, generally speaking, if you think that maybe like your son likes this girl and you’re like, “Oh, who’s that?” “Oh, she’s this girl from school.” You’re like, “OK, cool.” You don’t say, “That’s what I said about your mother.” Eww.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eww. That’s an eww. You just don’t do that with your boy.

**John:** Yeah. So, but I wonder what their vibe is. Is he ribbing him? What’s going on? I like the dad is drinking a beer, so there’s stuff you could do there. Also crucially, it’s in this pickup truck sequence that we’re establishing Chula Vista as a place and we’re seeing this sign. So think about, again, this is the inside/outside of the car. There’s a good argument to be made for being outside of the car, see the sign, the truck drives past, and then we’re inside the car with them.

Because if we’re inside the car with them it’s very hard to then pop out to see the sign and then be back in the car. If the sign is important, which I think it is, because I wouldn’t know that Chula Vista is necessarily a neighborhood, then tell us that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think this little spot here is one, Kristen, that I want you to think about really carefully. Because you have a point of view, you have a perspective, and you have a feeling about this place. I can tell. And I am not from there. So your job is to make me feel what you want me to feel. And in this moment you want me to feel some sort of connection and kinship to this place. But what you’ve done is you just have a guy that I just met just announcing something that frankly he wouldn’t normally announce. Because they’ve been living there a long time. So, how common is it for you to drive around the place where you’ve been living with somebody else who has been living there and then they suddenly announce, “Man, this view never gets old.” And then a fact. “You can see the whole valley.” No shit, dad. We drive here every day. I live here.

**John:** I can see, too. I have eyes.

**Craig:** So you need to figure out another way to make me feel this thing that maybe dad is upset that Enrique takes these things for granted or maybe that he doesn’t look closely enough and that he’s teaching him a lesson. But then the lesson has to be inspired by something that’s lacking that he sees in Enrique. So these are the things you’ve got to kind of figure out so that I feel what you want me to feel. Because I can tell you feel stuff. I just want it for me.

**John:** Absolutely. But if you’re trying to tell us that as the author, as the writer, then give us the wide shot and describe what it feels like and give us a sense of like this is the panorama and we get a sense of what the music is like. Oh, that’s really pretty. Rather than having the character comment on how pretty it is. Just show us how pretty it is. And that’s a thing you can do as the writer.

I felt the transition between this truck scene and then Enrique’s house, getting ready the next morning for school, was just a weird jump. And it didn’t feel like a natural handoff between this truck thing and then the next thing we’re getting ready for school. There needed to be some other moment between those two things.

**Craig:** Night.

**John:** Or maybe this wasn’t the next – night feels natural. Because as time progresses we’re used to – you know, a couple episodes back we talked about that we are time lords. And as an audience the next thing we want to see is night. We don’t want to see like the next morning getting ready for school. So, you could do the same kinds of things in the scene, but have it be a dinner thing. Like maybe he has to get all his homework off the table to set the table for dinner? Great.

**Craig:** Or maybe he’s just alone in his room thinking. You know, or he’s walking around thinking. We learn something about him or we learn something about Stevie. But if you go from day to morning you’ll just be so confused. Like, wait, why are they going to school suddenly in the afternoon. It won’t feel like morning.

**John:** It feels like a scene got dropped out in the edit and it’s just weird. Let me save you some grief in pages. The first time you have characters who are speaking in Spanish, do that “in Spanish” and then you never need to do it again. So if you’re going to use italics from that point forward you don’t ever need to do that again.

This is something I should have mentioned. The setup overall. If you have a parenthetical, that first letter inside a parenthetical is not uppercased unless it has to be uppercased. But that “in Spanish,” that should be a lowercase “in” for that parenthetical.

**Craig:** Correct. It’s just a strange convention, but that’s how it is.

**John:** Yeah. I want to thank these three writers here for sending in their pages, but also all the writers who sent in pages because it’s a tremendous amount of work for Megana to go through them but we get such a broad sampling of what our listeners are writing in with. So thank you very much for trusting us with these and for sharing your work with other people so others can learn.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** If you have three pages you want us to take a look at, don’t send them to the “ask” account. Instead, you need to go to johnaugust.com/threepage which is all spelled out, threepage. And there’s a little form there. You say who you are, that it’s OK for us to talk about on the air, and then you attach a PDF. So if you want to send in your pages that is where you send in those pages.

But thank you to everyone who submitted, especially these writers for these pages.

**Craig:** Thanks folks.

**John:** All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Nope. [laughs]

**John:** All this time you’ve completely forgotten about the conceit of the show.

**Craig:** I whiffed.

**John:** Which is absolutely fine. So I will give two One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** One of which I think you would especially enjoy. So the thing you would enjoy is GeoGuessr, which could have been a One Cool Thing many–

**Craig:** I’ve played that. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great, great game.

**Craig:** I think it’s been one before. Yeah, it’s fun.

**John:** So, tell us about GeoGuessr. That can be your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I’ll steal it. So in GeoGuessr you’re basically using the Google Earth function where you’re looking at a street view and what it does is it just generates a random street view somewhere in the world. And your job, and you can click around on the image like you an on regular Google Street View. You can move this way and that way and up and down. And your job is to figure out where it is, down to as close to the exact point as you can.

So what you’re doing is you’re looking for clues. Obviously any text on the side of a building or a truck or even license plates. You start to think, OK, am I on the left side of the road driving forward or the right side of the road? What are those trees? And then if you’re lucky enough to get a crazy phone number, you can really get close.

So, you know sometimes you do really well. Sometimes you’re like I honestly don’t know where this is. And sometimes you can get within – the best ones are when you’re within three meters of it or something, which is just a joy.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But you get points and it’s for nothing other than just your amusement. It’s just fun. It’s a fun game.

**John:** Yeah. So my family has been playing that to pass random time. And it really is a good detective sort of game and you can work really hard to get yourself within three meters and then other times it will come up with one that you’re like I think I’m in Australia but I could also be somewhere in South America. You just have no idea because it plops you down in the middle of no place. But it’s always fun to find new places.

So, GeoGuessr. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

My One Cool Thing is a newsletter that comes out every week by Noah Kalina. I know him through a podcast I also listen to with Adam Lisagor, but his newsletter is terrific. I don’t think it has a name, it’s just his newsletter. He is a photographer in Upstate New York and he just goes on these sort of weird missions that he’s inspired by things and finds all the poppy seed bagels in his neighborhood in New York and figures out the poppy seed distribution on these bagels and photographs them beautifully. And it’s fun. Every week it’s sort of a weird little adventure.

It reminds me of, folks who are fans of Reply All, it feels like Reply All, or those episodes where they go off on these weird missions to figure out stuff. It feels like that. So, there will be a link in the show notes, but check out the back episodes and maybe subscribe to Noah Kalina’s newsletter.

**Craig:** I’m just looking at it right now and he actually did like a little MythBuster’s thing to see if it’s true that if you eat a bunch of poppy seeds that you will test positive for opiates. Because obviously that’s where heroin and morphine and all those things ultimately derive from the poppy plant. Not that poppy seeds get you high.

And he ate six poppy seed bagels in a week and then he did a drug test and he came back positive for narcotics, opiates specifically.

**John:** Yeah, opiates.

**Craig:** It worked.

**John:** So, lesson learned.

**Craig:** Lesson learned.

**John:** And so the podcast I was referring to is All Consuming. And so that’s where he and Adam, they look at all the products that show up on Instagram and they buy those products and see what they actually are like in real life. And they are delightful people and I also listen to their podcast.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** That is our show for this week. I want to thank Megana Rao for reading all those submissions. Thank you very much our producer.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nora Beyer. 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 the transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can sign up to become a Premium member where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on money and happiness.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** All right, Craig, the first of our Premium subscriber questions, or suggestions comes from Lianne in Burbank. And she writes, “In your own personal experiences has becoming wealthy actually made you happier? Has there been a certain threshold of your income where you noticed diminishing happiness returns? Is being truly wealthy all it’s cracked up to be, or are there difficulties beyond the glamour that you find often aren’t discussed?”

**Craig:** That’s an interesting question.

**John:** Craig, what’s it like being rich?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. [laughs] There are levels of wealthiness, but safe to say that John and I do pretty well. So, here’s my experience, Lianne. Being wealthy has not made me happier. Being wealthy has made me less unhappy, because when problems arise, as they often do in life, sometimes they’re mundane, something is leaking. Sometimes they’re very involved. Someone is sick. Money can solve problems. Money can’t make you happier, but money can definitely make some unhappy things go away faster or more efficiently. And I don’t kind of undersell that. That actually is a big deal.

The ability for money to diminish misery is impressive. That’s not everything. But it is impressive.

What it can’t do is keep you off the psychologist’s couch. The problems that you carry with you, your shames, your fears, all that stuff that was kind of in you and fomented within you by childhood, that’s still there. And sometimes being paid a lot exacerbates those things. It makes you feel guilty, undeserving. It makes you feel like you’re an imposter. You’re a liar. You’re somehow ripping people off.

There’s all sorts of crazy things that can bang around in your head if you are somebody that deals with some core shame issues…and some of us do not. But, you know what, making bad stuff go away, hooray money.

**John:** Yeah. And I think what Craig is describing is there really is a threshold beyond which it’s like, oh, some of the things which are not annoyances or aggravations or really anxiety I guess is probably the best way to put it diminish because I’m not going to be so worried about that thing. And so I do remember going from, after having been hired to do my first project, I’ve talked about on the show how I used to have just a spreadsheet and I knew what my monthly expenses were. And I knew I can afford to live for three months, or six months. I could just sort of count down and I could watch the money run out. And that was really stressful.

And once I started making enough money that I didn’t need to worry about that so much I was happier just because I didn’t have that source of constant dread and anxiety. Not really unlike having a president I couldn’t count on. A president I was convinced was actively trying to destroy the world. When you free yourself of that you’re like, oh, you have more space to be a little bit more happy.

But it plateaus and I think you’re sense, Lianne, is that there’s a plateau, there’s a zenith at which more money doesn’t make you any happier and I think that’s very, very true. And I don’t know the specific dollar figure, but when you – I think it’s when you don’t have to worry about every expense. When you can be just like, oh, I’ll just put that on a card and I know I’ll be able to pay for it. That is a nice feeling, knowing that I don’t have to worry about certain kinds of choices that just don’t really matter.

But I think Craig and I have both described how one of the ways you can stop that anxiety from coming back in is to just not live beyond your means. And we both know people who have made a lot of money and then have lived beyond their means and are on this terrible treadmill where they have to sort of keep making money or else everything falls apart.

**Craig:** Right. So those people never get the benefit of what we’re talking about, which is a sense of security, financial security. And it is, when you don’t have it, and I’ve certainly – I was definitely, you know, on the month-to-month living plan when I first came to Los Angeles, it is exhausting. You’re expending a lot of energy in fear and concern about how that functions. And if one thing goes wrong, there’s not a lot between you and real trouble.

So living beneath your means is incredibly important. It’s also, generally speaking, it’s a value. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s a value. I think that there’s a grace to it. And also one really nice thing about making a lot of money is that you can be charitable. And some people aren’t. And OK, fine. I’m not going to yell at them. But it is rare that I feel as effective and impactful on the world as I do when I’m making some kind of significant charitable donation. More so than writing television and movies and things, which I know people see and they may or may not care about. But actually making charitable contributions to either political causes or medical help or developing nations, whatever it is that you pursue, you know, curing diseases, it feels good. It does.

And I know that John you and Mike are pretty charitable folks as well.

**John:** For sure. A thing that I think people can intuitively sense and yet they can get tripped up on is buying the next thing will not make you happier. And buying that fancy car, you may enjoy driving it for a time, but that will fade. And buying a bigger house, you know, beyond a certain point just becomes an extra source of anxiety and stress and tension.

We have friends who have multiple houses and that fills me with dread. I would constantly be thinking about that house that I’m not at and sort of something going wrong with that property.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s just a choice I made to not invite that into my life. And people, obviously there’s many ways to do things, but I think not getting caught up in the expectation to really be happy, if I had this thing I would be happy, that’s not true. Happiness comes from having enough. Having plenty and not needing to have more.

**Craig:** Sharing is generally when I feel the best about spending. Sharing. That’s a great feeling. It’s a great feeling to have friends over and cook them dinner and know that you’ve bought lots of good food and you don’t have to freak out about it and you could put a good bottle of wine out. That, to me, the kind of quiet – here’s what I’m not, for instance, I’m not a collector. And I now a lot of people who are collectors. And most people are collecting things that don’t cost a lot of money, but there are people who make a lot of money and then they just begin collecting incredibly expensive things.

I’m sure Jay Leno is a great guy. This isn’t even a criticism of him. It’s really more just a difference of opinion. I don’t understand why he has 800 cars. I just don’t understand it. I don’t. Just drive one, and then, you know, rent it or something. I just don’t understand the idea of having them all. Or I think Seinfeld has like 80 Porsches or something. That gets weird for me. It just feels like a dragon sitting on its hoard.

So I think just sharing and that sort of thing is fun. But, you know, again, look, here’s the truth. The guys like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld have so much more money than I do that they can hoard things like cars and such and then in their charity however they perform it donate vastly more money than I do. So I can’t really criticize them. It’s just a difference is how I would put it.

**John:** It’s a whole different conversation to have about that level of super wealth and sort of like what that does. When a person has the wealth of a nation, that is such an odd difference from the lives that you and I are leading. I’m still scrubbing the bathroom. We’re still doing our own laundry at our house. So it’s a different kind of life than some other people have. And that’s fine, too.

Craig, have you ever heard this explanation for why altruism exists? That sense of an evolutionary adaptation to recognize that the best place to store food is in your friends’ bellies. After a hunt there’s more meat than you can possibly eat and so you cannot store it. So, the best thing you can do with that meat is to give it to everybody else so that they will share their wealth the next time.

**Craig:** I wrote a paper about this in college. And I think the center of it was there’s a story. In the ‘80s there was a terrible plane crash. Plane went down in the Potomac. I don’t know if you remember this. Right there in DC. It was a frigid wintery day. A plane goes down. There are people alive but they’re in this icy water. And a man driving by stops and basically jumps into the water and saves some people. And the question was why. He doesn’t know them. And it’s quite clear that there is great danger connected to jumping in that frigid water. He himself might also die. So why/how evolutionarily does this make any sense at all?

And the answer, or at least an answer is this. That evolutionarily we are better off as members of a society, strength in numbers, right? So, we are selected for pro-social instincts. People who generally feel a connection to a group beyond just their own immediate family members will tend to do better overall because they stay inside of a group. But that tendency, that pro-social tendency is stupid. Meaning it can’t make choices in a moment about what would be advantageously pro-social. It just is pro-social.

And so that’s why you find people who just that instinct kicks in. And it’s the instinct of holding a society together which in its own way is a beautiful thought.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve talked about empathy on the show as well. In leaving Twitter you said it taught you empathy. And for me pulling over to the side of the road and jumping into the frigid water is like it’s because I could imagine myself as the person in the water and needing somebody to help save me. And so it’s easy to see that other side. And the folks who don’t have that are sometimes our elected president and that’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** Or run movie studios. [laughs]

**John:** True. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Irony](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-irony-different-types-of-irony-in-literature-plus-tips-on-how-to-use-irony-in-writing#what-are-the-main-types-of-irony) and [cosmic irony](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cosmic-irony-definition-and-examples/)
* Three Page Challenge: [Echopraxia or an Interdimensional Coming of Age Ghost Story](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F12%2Fechopraxia-three-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=3daf6520c3d18584e970f76e9b48965308dfbca379eb9e229603392f8b8c2ece) by J Vernon Reha
* Three Page Challenge: [The Little Death](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2021%2F01%2FTheLittleDeath_AutumnPalen.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=0abfaa550f0e35fa9e1fe7d11adc10079351101e68f0a6e46563289eb367bd82) by Autumn Palen
* Three Page Challenge: [Chula Vista](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2020%2F11%2FChula-Vista-pg-1-3-Kristen-Delgado.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=4d0c0d1249961917d27dcfa77679d4b7713ef86147a3a00e2860e4bfacd3d97e) by Kristen Delgado
* Thank you to all of our Three Page Challenge submissions! [Apply here](https://johnaugust.com/threepage) to be considered for our next round.
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