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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
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/486standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2021/time-lords).

**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 484 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re going to look at the many ways screenwriters compress, twist, and otherwise manipulate time in their scripts and strategies for doing it effectively. Then we’ll discuss dialogue, both in terms of subtext and continuity. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we will discuss which moment in history or prehistory we’d most like to visit and why.

**Craig:** Exciting stuff.

**John:** It’s potentially a flashback episode.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** We could even weave in a Stuart Special.

**Craig:** We’ve actually had a little bit of a pre-discussion about this time thing with our D&D group, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out in our bonus episode for everyone else.

**John:** Yes. Little bits of news. So this sort of snuck in under the wire. This was a December 31st announcement that the DGA sent a letter to WME telling it to get rid of its conflicts. Basically the head of the DGA sent this letter to the head of WME, Ari Greenberg, and said “we believe now is the right time to communicate our strong support for DGA’s efforts to remedy the affiliated production company issue.” So, Craig, I feel torn about this in ways that, I don’t know–

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m not.

**John:** We always reach for ways, you know, of German should have a word for it. But it’s not really German. I feel like the Swedish might have the right word for this feeling of like, yes, it’s the right thing, but it’s not kind of the way you want it to happen.

**Craig:** I’m going to quote this – I don’t know if you saw this amazing interview with this Capitol Hill police officer who had been attacked by the mob.

**John:** Oh, absolutely. And the last bit of it was amazing.

**Craig:** The last bit of it was amazing. And I will go ahead and I guess this will earn us a language warning. But he said some of the people in that mob, realizing that he was in danger of being killed, finally sort of surrounded him and tried to protect him from further harm. And to those people he said, “Thank you but also fuck you for being there.” [laughs] And that’s how I feel about this. I mean, what an enormous expenditure of political capital for the DGA to just show up in the final seconds of the war to announce that they’re in support of the losing side losing. I mean, this is pointless. I don’t quite even – the only thing I think they get out of this is maybe once again earning some sort of respect from the companies for restraint?

And when I say companies I mean the agencies at this point. I don’t know what the point of this is exactly.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t know where this message actually came from, whether it was directors in the guild saying, hey, we also want this resolved, or where this came from. I want to be an optimist. And so in being an optimist I want to say that one of my great frustrations for two decades has been how little the three guilds have been willing to work together on issues of obvious multiple guild concern. And this was one of them. And the WGA did it all by itself. OK, fine.

But as we head forward into this next decade the role of the streamers and residuals and what that all looks like, we all care about that. It all has to be figured out as sort of one thing. So, maybe this is a small opening, a small glimmer of hope that we can actually coordinate some of our efforts in trying to address the challenges ahead here.

**Craig:** Over here in the pessimist’s corner I think that the DGA has always been more than happy to strategically allow the Writers Guild to be the crazy ones and the aggressive ones and the militant ones. And then pick up the spoils after the battle is over. That’s kind of how it works. They let us go into the coal mine. They don’t have to do stuff. They didn’t like some of this packaging stuff or affiliated production any more than we did, but they also didn’t have to spend anything. Not one of their members had to fire an agent. They just waited for us to take all the body blows, to go through two years or whatever long, a year and a half, or however long this was. Or continues to be. And now, you know, when it’s basically over now they can come in and try and earn some sort of, I don’t know, labor solidarity chit. That’s C-H-I-T.

I don’t see them abandoning that strategy any time soon. Honestly, you know, tip of the hat to them. It’s worked for them for decades. I don’t see them changing.

**John:** Yeah. So basically Craig Mazin maintains his WGA militancy as always. He’s always the one banging that gong, that WGA gong, over all sort of reason and order.

**Craig:** Well, I would say relative to the DGA I am militant. But, yeah, I’m doomed to be caught between the Writers Guild and the DGA. And then there’s SAG. By the way, I’m a member of all three of these unions, so I’m sure someone is going to be yelling at me soon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I don’t know, SAG doesn’t seem to – they just seem to be so inwardly focused. That’s no comment on actors in any way, shape, or form. [laughs] But it just seems so navel-gazey about things. And they have their own issues.

The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild should be allied. Just naturally they should be. The fact that they’re not is…[sighs]

**John:** Yeah. At some point we should probably schedule an episode where we really talk through that because it’s got to be so confusing to anybody who has not been immersed in this for two decades to understand why things are the way they are and how we got to this place.

**Craig:** Well, let’s schedule three episodes to explain why there’s a Writers Guild East and West.

**John:** That’s an easier one, but yes, that same episode or a different episode can talk about the East and the West and how luckily there’s not conflict there.

**Craig:** Anymore.

**John:** They’re doing different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Some housekeeping, sort of follow up stuff. So many of you are members of the Premium program which is awesome. Thank you for being Premium subscribers. We just added a $49 price point, so you can either go monthly, but some people asked, hey, what if there was an annual price and it would be cheaper. So, sure. So you can get 12 months for the price of 10. If you go to Scripnotes.net you can sign up for that. But thank you for all the folks who do that.

Some people are also confused about the back episodes. So the back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net. That’s through the new Premium service, so it’s not Libsyn where stuff used to be. It’s all this new thing. So we used to have Premium episodes through Libsyn. Now they’re all through this new service called Supporting Cast. We’ve been on it for a year. It’s gone really well. So thank you for everyone who has joined us over there.

But if you’re writing in with concerns about like, oh, I was looking for this thing on Libsyn, that’s why it’s not there anymore because it’s all moved over to this new service.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Yeah. And some follow up about bad IP, suggestions for – obviously we have the Rubik’s Cube Movie, the Slinky Movie. We’re always searching for a new thing. Dwayne from Edmonton, Canada wrote in to say, “Yes, I was listening in the shower, but the Showerhead Movie.” And then someone else had a suggestion for the Loofah Movie. I like Loofah Movie more than the Showerhead Movie because Showerhead actually has a function and a purpose. Loofah has some sense of like it’s tough but it’s soft. There’s a little texture to the Loofah.

**Craig:** I don’t love either one of them. Because they feel like–

**John:** I don’t love them either.

**Craig:** They have to live within the realm of possibility. That some thickheaded dingbat in the ancillary IP department of a large corporation might actually say, “You know what? We should make a movie out of this. It has to be something that is theoretically possible. Theoretically.

**John:** And really IP is intellectual property. And the thing about Lucky the Leprechaun is there is intellectual property there. There’s a copyright. There’s a protectable thing that no one else can make that movie. It’s a struggle we have, like you go in and talk to – I went in to talk to a studio a year ago and they’re like, “Oh, we really want to develop blank.” And it’s like, great, that is public IP. That’s not a protectable thing. So what is your plan for going in to do that?

Like Jack and the Beanstalk is public IP. And so anyone can make that, so would you make that? You don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it has to be something that is possess-able and ownable and exploitable. That’s the crux of the whole awful affair is that something is being exploited in the most cynical manner. So there has to be an exploitable object.

**John:** Speaking of exploitable objects, Beau Willimon, who is head of the WGA East.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** This week signed on to do the Risk movie which is based on a Hasbro property.

**Craig:** There you go. Right.

**John:** And would classically be the kind of thing that we make fun of on the show, because Risk has no characters. It has kind of a general scenario of world domination and archaic names for countries and strategies which are obvious but also crucial to understand of, you know, as a child you might start with an Australia strategy, but any adult who has played the game knows that the South American strategy is better.

**Craig:** Of course, the Venezuelan gambit. Always. Just, yeah. It is strange how the Risk board does sort of undermine what we understand to be where military and strategic value actually is located. The thing about Risk, it’s similar I guess to what they were doing with Battleship, not that it will turn out the same way. They’re just taking a game that was already based on something real and kind of echoing back to the thing it was based on. So Risk was just a board game version of a large WWI style battle for global dominance.

So my guess is that’s what the movie will – I don’t know. Actually I have no idea what the movie will be.

**John:** We’ll talk to Beau about it at some point. There was a vague plan on Twitter for us to be playing an online game of Risk to talk through it. So, who knows? Maybe that will actually happen and we’ll find some good charitable cause to play Risk online so we can celebrate this exploitation of an IP and hopefully do some good in the world.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly.

**John:** Exactly. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. So explaining sort of how the sausage is made. We are looking at a shared outline document. I put stuff on as I’m sort of helping to organize this episode. Megana put stuff on and we sort of try to group it together and have it make some sense.

Generally the topic for the week comes out of something either I was working on during the week or something I saw this week. Or Craig will suggest a topic and we’ll sort of flesh it out. In this case it was something I was writing and something I was watching. One scene that I was working on this week it was just too long. And it was clear that it needed to be cut into two scenes. Basically I needed to cut the middle out of it. And cutting the middle out of it is really common craft work that screenwriters need to do. And we haven’t talked very much about that. But basically we need to do a time compression in the middle of it.

There was also a sequence I was working on that I had scenes that were back to back A-B-C, but there was going to be a really significant time jump. So, you know, I was sort of changing the rules of the movie part way through where it had been sort of like scenes were very naturally flowing, like were all within one day, and then suddenly we’re jumping forward weeks. And that’s a thing we haven’t talked about.

So that’s part of why I want to talk about this, but also the movies I watched this week all dealt with time in interesting ways. So Nomadland, which was great, people should see it, has a kind of weird cyclical time thing to it. It uses time really strangely. Tenet has this weird time version. The Lego Movie seemed to take place in this continuous present. It’s just like hyperactively present. The Crown has these giant jumps forward in time between episodes. And we also watched Edge of Tomorrow which is an even better movie than I remember it being.

**Craig:** I love that movie.

**John:** Which is all about sort of looping time. So, time is just a thing that screenwriters do and it’s probably the resource that screenwriters have to control kind of most carefully. So I thought we’d just spend our main topic here just talking about time as screenwriters use it.

**Craig:** We have this craft over here, just been thinking about this because I was talking with somebody who works in plays, so she’s a playwright, and all of her work is on stage. And on stage even though there may be cheats of how time functions, it is all unfolding kind of in real time in front of you because you are actually in the room with these people. You are present in their reality, so you’re all experiencing the tick-tick of time together.

But onscreen we don’t. And in fact the entire exercise of telling a story cinematically is one that involves the manipulation of time. The very notion going all the way back to simple concept of editorial montage. I look at this, and then the camera looks over here, and we understand that there may have been time that passed. It just happens in the blink of an eye like that.

So, it’s not even something that we can sometimes choose to do or dwell on. We are always doing it in every movie no matter what. And that’s separate and apart from the theme of time. Because obviously some movies are about time itself and how it functions. And you have Looper and Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow and things like that. But in any movie, in any movie, I mean, how many times have you sat there and gone, OK, they’re in a space and this scene has concluded, but they must still be in this space again to start a new movement of the scene, meaning time has gone by. But how and why? What do I do to show that there’s been this lapse of time?

**John:** Yeah. And you think like, oh, well here’s ten tricks for doing it. Like sure, maybe there are a list of like you zoom out and you start in a close up of this thing and as you pull back out some more time has passed. Or you’re focused on this thing. There’s tricks, but it’s all hard work.

And before we even get into the jumping forward in time, we should call there are movies that try to take away that grammar. And they stick out because they are so unusual. There’s things like 12 Angry Men which is based on a play which is basically a filmed play which has sort of continuous time because it’s a play. But things like – do you remember the movie Timecode, the Mike Figgis movie that it’s quadrants and they’re all in real time.

1917 has the illusion of real time buried. Clue. Phone Booth. Dog Day Afternoon. United 93. Russian Arc. Where you’re sort of generally moving continuously through a space, and the whole gimmick, the conceit is that you’re not cutting. But those are the exceptions. And most times in cinematic storytelling you are cutting, you are jumping forward in time. And just learn as an audience to accept that as a thing that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. We know when we’re watching these things inherently that we’re going to get a compressed version of time because it’s dramatic. It’s exciting. If it weren’t we wouldn’t go. I mean, 12 Angry Men is a wonderful play and it’s a terrific film. And if it was actually presented in the way a jury deliberation would go it would be profoundly boring. Profoundly boring. With side discussions of irrelevance and people leaving to go to the bathroom and coming back. It just doesn’t work.

We are always twisting it and turning it. And so one of the things that you have to decide tonally is are you going to be naturalistic about it, meaning are you going to kind of hide the seams in between the time jumps, or are you going to have fun with it. Is it going to be something you wear on your sleeve? Like in Go, for instance, the way you move time around, you’re not hiding it, you’re making a virtue of it. But then that is a tone, right? So then the movie is sort of like an elevated heightened reality.

You have to make those decisions upfront about what you’re doing with this stuff. But what you can’t do is just ignore it. You need to be a craftswoman or man when it comes to presenting the disruptions of time to the audience.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re saying is that you may not write down your plan for how time works in your movie. It’s very unlikely you are going to have a specific time plan. But you are establishing rules very early on in your script for how time works in your movie. Both how it works inside scenes and between scenes. And so let’s talk about some of those rules and assumptions that are going to be there and what you need to think through.

So, an obvious example is like is it continuous. Basically are we existing in real time or the illusion of real time? That you’re never jumping ahead. How big of jumps can you make? Can you jump to later that same day, or the next week? Or can you jump forward a few years. And that’s a very different kind of storytelling if you’re able to jump bigger jumps along the way.

How many clocks have you started ticking? And so I’m thinking back to your movie Identity Thief. And there is a timeline. You’re having characters say aloud that they need to get from here to there in a certain period of time. You’re setting expectations. Different kinds of movies are going to have different clocks ticking. But you’re generally going to set some kind of framework for what needs to happen by what point.

In Big Fish you don’t know when Edward Bloom is going to die, but you know he’s going to die. And so that is the ticking clock where you get the dramatic question of the movie answered before that alarm goes off.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I like outlining, to be honest with you. Because when you outline you are confronted by those disconnects of time. And you feel them and they literally help you outline. That’s how you suddenly go, OK, I think that this index card consists of these things that occur. And then it’s time for a new index card, or a new paragraph, or however you’re doing it. Because time is broken. There’s a snap. And I want to justify it. And I want to play around with it. And I also am aware that if I announce a certain kind of timeline that leads to a certain kind of pressure I need everything that follows to fall in line with it.

This is why Chernobyl is only five episodes and not six. Because as I was working on episode two it seemed that the timeline that the story had presented required a certain kind of speed. And even though the events that take place over the course of episode two went over the course of a week, into an hour, if they had gone into two hours of television it would have felt like two or three weeks, which would have felt wrong.

So you just have to have this weird internal fake chronometer that is aligned with what you think people’s experience of the time flow will be as they watch.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s drill into a little bit more on this, because we talked about Chernobyl in the sense of time to a limited degree. But each episode of Chernobyl changes its scale of time a little bit. So that first episode feels close to real time. You’re not slavishly real time. But it’s very, very present tense all the way through it.

The second episode, if everything took place in a matter of hours in the first episode, then you’re a matter of two days in the second episode, and then several weeks, and then months. It kaleidoscopes out. And that was a very deliberate choice really, I assume, from the conception?

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, you know, of note the first episode which does cover, I mean, the flow of events once you get out of the little prologue starts at 1:23 in the morning and it ends roughly at sunrise. That unfolds over about 50 minutes. It feels – so that’s the other thing – even though it feels like real time, it is absolutely not. And juggling some of that stuff and being really specific about it was important because I’m aware that there’s – it’s a funny thing. If you say to people, OK, this is happening at 1:30 in the morning, and then you show them something else happening at 4am, in their minds they’re like that’s really close together. It’s the middle of the night. Not a lot of stuff happening in the middle of the night, therefore it’s like those things are right after another.

If it’s in the middle of a day and it’s 10am and then it’s 2pm, that’s a different vibe. And suddenly you feel like a lot of time has passed. Things have happened. What went on in between those things? You just have to kind of have that weird sense of it.

**John:** Yeah. What you’re describing is time is relative. And not in any special relativity way, but in the sense of general relativity there’s an observer. And time flows according to what the observer sees, in this case what the audience sees. And it’s the audience that sees that two events that happened in the middle of the night are closer together than two events that happen in the middle of the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And often one of the things we encounter as screenwriters and as filmmakers is the big shift is like a day scene versus a night scene. A bunch happens between the two of those. And even if they’re back to back in the day scene and night scene that is a challenge.

A thing we often encounter with stories that are happening on multiple coasts is like it’s night in New York but it’s still maybe daytime in Los Angeles or in Australia. That’s confusing. That’s weird to see. And you try to avoid those situations because it just feels weird and wrong for the audience.

We know that they’re in different time zones, and yet if two characters are having a conversation they should both be in daylight or at nighttime they shouldn’t be split between the two of them.

**Craig:** Isn’t that funny? And there are times where people, it’s like spy movies and such where you have people in Washington, DC talking to an operative in Malaysia. Well, that’s about 12 hours apart. That’s like flip AM and PM. You will almost always see one of those people inside. Because you don’t want to see the light/dark thing. You don’t want to see somebody going night to – it is really confusing to us. Like the way our own circadian rhythms get biologically confused by jetlag. We just can’t handle it. It feels wrong and it takes us out of the moment, which is of course the thing we’re always trying to not do.

**John:** One of the other rules you’re establishing in whatever you’re creating is travel time. And so a show I loved deeply as I watched it is Alias. And as the series went along suddenly she could be kind of anywhere magically right away. They never showed her traveling someplace, so it’s like she’s in Los Angeles. She’s in Europe. She’s back. And somehow it’s still the same day. Travel time just sort of went away. And early seasons of Game of Thrones I felt like it just took forever to get from Winterfell down to King’s Landing. And then suddenly like, oh, you’re just there.

And, you know, in some ways that is just the collision of all the transitional scenes. Weeks could have been passing during that time. But it also just felt like they changed the rules in terms of how quickly you could move from place to place because they didn’t – it wasn’t serving them to show the travel time that would be involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that there is a boredom factor to repeating the kind of expanded time. So, it is interesting to watch a slow journey if it’s new to you. If it’s not, I’m all in favor of just like skip ahead, skip ahead. Fast forward. So I don’t have to watch the same boring journey again. No question, in the early seasons of Game of Thrones getting to The Wall took forever, which felt right. And traveling, it seemed impossible to get from Essos to Westeros. It was like a massive amount of land and ocean to cover. And as you got deeper in and closer to the end then things started going faster because you had experienced the journeys already.

And, yeah, was there some time things where you’re like on paper you have broken your own time travel rules? Yes. And you just kind of have to sometimes take those hits because when you are as deep into that world as those guys were after whatever it was, 80 episodes, it’s really hard to stay consistent and keep the story moving. It’s just hard to keep that timeline consistent.

**John:** Now so a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far has been scene-by-scene, or sequence-by-sequence, and sort of the stuff that you can look at in an outline form and figure out, OK, this is how we’re handling time. But let’s zoom in and talk about time within a scene. Because even as we’re talking to a playwright, a playwright is optimizing dialogue and moments within a scene so that things that would normally take place over four hours are happening in ten minutes. There’s an optimization that’s natural to any kind of dramatic writing where you’re sort of getting the tightest, best version of these things.

What I find to be so different as a screenwriter than other forms of writing is that we have this expectation of just how long a scene can be and how much has to be accomplished, and so often we have to be doing really delicate surgery to cut out half a page, to jump over some natural moments that might happens so we can get to that next thing. We’re always just trying to take out the stitches and see if we can just sew a little bit tighter. And that is part of it.

One of the things I’ve learned to do much better over the course of 20 years of doing this is recognizing when I can’t actually just make this – when I can’t tighten it and when I need to just actually get rid of this scene or approach it from a completely different way because there’s no short version of this scene that’s going to handle what I needed to do.

**Craig:** This is why the classes that aspiring screenwriters should be taking are not, in my opinion, screenwriting classes. Are we going to talk by the way about the crazy QAnon screen guy? Maybe next week. Because that was something else.

**John:** Oh yeah. When we have a little bit more about that we’ll do some of that.

**Craig:** We’ll get around to him next week. But I think the classes that screenwriters or aspiring screenwriters should be taking are editing classes. Because editing is where the time compression and expansion rubber meets the road. And you begin to see exactly how flexible or inflexible something is. There is a point where the material will snap. And it will not feel correct in terms of the manipulation of time. And that tensile strength, that flexibility, is different depending on tone and pace. But you’ll see it in there.

And the more you can get a rhythm of how that functions in an edit the more you will be able to anticipate that as you’re writing ahead of the edit. You will know that you can get away with certain things and you will also know you can’t get away with certain things.

I’ve spent so much time in editing rooms. So much time in editing rooms. If there’s one thing I can point to that has made me a better writer than I used to be over the years it’s the amount of time editing scenes of things I wrote.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And recognizing like, oh, I thought I needed that or basically you have to acknowledge that like it made sense why you did that on the page. And then when you actually see it with physical people in the blocking that they have, that moment just can’t last. We don’t have space for that in the movie we actually made. So therefore we need to come into that scene later or leave earlier.

So let’s talk about some of the classic techniques we do use for trimming time, which is also trimming pages. Because how we sort of measure our time is pages. Come in as late as you can. Leave as early as you can. So basically what is the latest moment you could start this scene. Can you start the scene with the person answering the question rather than the question being asked? Can you get out on a look rather than on that last line? What is the moment you can jump out of this thing? How can you not ask the question that a person would naturally ask? How can you get from A to B as cleanly as possible and still have an interesting scene?

Some of the challenges we face though is you can optimize a scene so much that it’s just not interesting. It’s quick. The story has made forward progress but there’s nothing interesting in that scene itself.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that, while the “get in as late as you can, leave as early as you can” advice is probably very good advice for early screenwriters who tend to overwrite, once you are getting better at things it’s dangerous. Because there are human moments in the beginnings and ends of things. Sometimes just the way somebody walks up to somebody else in and of itself is dramatic and sad or exciting. And it allows you to set a context for what comes next so that you don’t feel like you’re just kind of getting the choruses of the hit songs on the album, but that you’re getting something a little bit more rich.

Shoe leather is the term we use in production for people that are walking.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Traveling pointlessly from one spot to another is considered the cardinal sin. There’s a moment in Chernobyl that we looked at a billion times where Jared Harris has, they’ve taken a break in the trial and he sees Shcherbina is sitting a bit a ways away on a bench and he walks over to him. And the question was how much walking do we need. I think initially in Johan’s first cut he just sort of materialized next to him and I was like, well, no. We can’t do that.

But, on the other hand, do we actually want to show him doing the full freaking walk? No. So can we show some of the walk that feels meaningful and weighty and just trust that the kind of, I don’t know, human aspect of his little travel there will be enough to kind of cover the manipulation of time? And it seemed like it was.

But there is definitely a screenwriting class version of that scene that begins with those two guys just sitting next to each other already. Like they went out there. They’re sitting next to each other. There’s a pause. And then one of them starts talking. But, you know, I like a little windup. What can I say? I’m a windup kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah. But you have to really make that decision. Does seeing one character sit down next to the next character change the dynamics of the scene?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If it does, then yes, you should write it and you should aim to shoot it that way. If it doesn’t really matter then maybe you do just have him sitting there because you don’t think about sort of the editorial work that the reader is doing. But just that sentence of like “walks over and sits down next to the person,” we’re filming that in our minds and it’s changing our perception of what is the urgency, what’s actually happening. Getting to that moment more quickly may be the right choice.

Definitely I think you and I are both urging writers to write like it’s the edit. And write the version of the movie that you’re actually seeing in your head. And you may make different decisions working with a director. You may decide to make some different decisions. But as close as you can come to this best version you can make inside your head and get that on paper the more likely you’re going to have a successful version of that scene and hopefully you’re whole movie.

**Craig:** Yup. It is one of those places where you get to show off a little bit of creative freedom. A little bit of chaos. Even shows that you might think of as very well organized temporally like say Breaking Bad is full of time tricks. Full of them. There’s that one season where multiple show openings were of a pool and a teddy bear floating in it. And you didn’t know why. And none of it made sense until the end when it was revealed to be a function of something that hadn’t even yet occurred at the first episode of that season. Because they had no problem messing with time and being creatively chaotic with it.

But it’s got to pay off. It’s got to be worth it in the end.

**John:** Yeah. You have to have confidence and you have to – that confidence has to be built out of trust in your audience and your audience trusting you. We always talk about the social contract between the writer and the reader. It’s like give me your attention and I will make it worth your while. And time and use of time well is one of those aspects of trust.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to some listener questions because some of our questions actually do tie into this topic. Here is where we bring on our producer, Megana Rao, who asks the questions that our listeners write in with. Megana, what have you got for us this week?

**Megana Rao:** All right. So first up, Don writes, “I know you’ve talked about continuous dialogue before, but I wanted to take a crack at changing your minds.”

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**Megana:** “Wouldn’t it just be easier for everyone to stop using continuous dialogue altogether? Does it really help that much? I can understand the argument that is useful at the start of a new page, but I can’t seem to find any usefulness outside of that. Even if the dialogue is broken up by action, I assume the average person doesn’t get totally lost without the use of CONT’D. Continued.”

**Craig:** I must admit, Don, I’m a little confused. Because you don’t have to change my mind at all. I don’t use CONT’D for dialogue, for continuous dialogue. I haven’t used it ten years.

**John:** Yeah. So CONT’D is a convention that I kind of feel is going away to a degree, but there’s two kinds of CONT’Ds to talk about. And it’s a thing that we encounter a lot with Highland because Highland does one kind and doesn’t do another kind. So let’s talk about what the difference is.

There’s CONT’D if a character is talking at the bottom of a page. Let’s say they have a long speech and it jumps to the next page. Software will automatically mark it CONT’D there to make it clear that it’s one block of dialogue that just got split between two different pages. That I have no problem with. I think Craig you don’t have a problem, too.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it’s referring to like it’s just the software doing a thing to make it clear that this really is all one block of dialogue.

**Craig:** If you didn’t put it there you would not know that the next bit of dialogue was meant to be part of a continuous speech.

**John:** Yeah. So that – no one really has big issues with that.

**Craig:** That’s all good.

**John:** What we’re talking about though is Craig starts talking and then there’s a scene description line and then Craig keeps talking after that. And Highland does not automatically put that CONT’D in there. Final Draft does want to put that CONT’D in there. That was just a philosophical point from my side, because software wise we could do that. It’s just so often I’ve had to manually delete those back when I was using Final Draft because it really wasn’t the same idea, it wasn’t the same thought. I didn’t mean for it to be one continuous thing.

So, if I meant it to be one continuous thing I could type the CONT’D there to show that it really was one thought. But sometimes three different things happen between those two, so it really is not the same line, the same thought. It shouldn’t be continuous.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t matter. Basically, Don, what I’m saying is you’re right. I don’t see the value in it. It feels very format-y to me. Something that just was sort of vaguely secretarial in the creation of the classic Warner Bros screenplay format or whatever, the [unintelligible] format was. To me it’s literally changing the character’s name. I hate it. Just let them talk. They’re saying something, then a thing happens, and then they say something. And it isn’t continuous. If it were continuous I would make the choice to not break the dialogue up. There is some sort of natural pause, break, or change that has occurred in between those two things.

So, I don’t use CONT’D myself. And so you don’t have to fight me on it.

**John:** Nope. I will say there have been times, because I don’t use it, there have times in table readings where I’ve noticed that an actor doesn’t get their next line because they’re expecting like, oh, if there’s another line of dialogue it wouldn’t be my line of dialogue. But they can get over that. Or they can highlight their own script. It’s fine. It’s not a big deal.

**Craig:** They can figure it out.

**John:** Megana, what do we have next?

**Megana:** Danielle asks, “I would love any feedback on how much to include in therapy scenes. My protagonist seeks professional through a three-month rehab program in the third act which greatly moves them forward in their healing journey. I have plenty of dialogue that navigates what healed them, but not sure how much to include and when is too much.”

**John:** So this is, again, a question of time. How are you using your limited resources of pages to show this three months? And you’re going to make elisions and choices about sort of what we’re seeing. Are sessions individualized? Is dialogue being stretched out over the course of multiple sessions? Is the dialogue extending over other scenes that show passages of time? There’s a lot going on here. Craig, what tips would you offer for Danielle as she’s thinking about how to do this?

**Craig:** Well, I think first of all I would need to know what the nature is of the relationship between the patient and the therapist, or the rehab specialist. Because if it’s a very important relationship then I want to see more of it. There are movies where that relationship is central like Ordinary People or Good Will Hunting. Then there are situations where those relationships aren’t as important, but they are kind of backgrounded and they are used as these sort of subtle markers of progress. In Honey Boy, for instance, there are some therapy scenes. They’re very, very truncated and they’re really meant to just show where a character is in a given moment in his journey.

So, it depends on what you want us to focus on and listen to. The thing about therapy scenes is they’re always, of course, there are great examples, even better than a jury deliberating, which is usually very, very boring and then we just show the good parts, same with therapy. Therapy is circular. It can be boring. It can go backwards. It can be frustrating. And when a movie show – they show this kind of glamorized highlight reel of it all that often concludes with someone saying the one thing that makes everybody go, “Oh my god, I get it now. I’m healed.” Which is not what therapy actually is.

But there could be some key moments or some big reveals or things. So, I guess my only advice would be tailor the length to the significance of the relationship between the patient and the therapist. And try and avoid over-glamorize pitfalls if you can.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not technically therapy, but I go back to Marriage Story and the scene with Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern which is a long scene and plays in continuous time. But the choice to have that be one scene rather than a bunch of little small scenes that add up to that scene was so smart and so well done because it allowed for a continuous emotional progression within a scene. It made it its own moment and would not have worked so successfully had it been broken into smaller bits.

And so I’m going to throw two contrasting bits of suggestions here. One is to look at sort of like if you sort of shatter it apart and just take the pieces and thread them through a period that covers time, where we can see progress of the character, where you’re not sort of in one scene for a lot of it, that’s a possibility. Or to do this Marriage Story approach where you really anchor it around one central scene that is really doing the work of this thing and not try to break it into three scenes of equal length which I suspect is going to be the least effective way to handle it.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** What’s next, Megana?

**Megana:** Great. So Ash from London asks, “My writing and directing partner and I are 99% in synch. But recently we have both noticed that we might read the same dialogue in a totally different way, inferring different subtext, tone, or intended performance in ways that are quite drastic and effect the interpretation of the scene. It’s a bit like the relationship between reading the lyrics to a song which seem mundane and flat on the page and then listening to the final piece of music. I feel like I’ve suddenly become aware of a massive limitation of the medium and I find myself panicking about people reading the dialogue I write in the worst possible way. What’s happening here? Am I OK? Am I having some kind of existential crisis? Or am I struggling with something that everyone struggles with?”

**Craig:** No, Ash, you’re not OK. This is all you. Of course, what are you discovering, you’re discovering that this is what we are. This is part of our humanity is that we will interpret things in different ways. And it’s actually good news. It means that this stuff is more extensible than you think it is. It’s more rich than you might have thought it was. Yes, it is possible and it happens all the time that people read a line and go, “Why would you – this is so dumb.” And you’re befuddled by that reaction and you say what do you mean. And they say, “Because of this.” And you go, oh, no, no, no, you don’t understand. My apologies. It means this. This is the intention. And then then go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, OK.”

That will happen to you a thousand times. So, in a weird way kind of almost enjoy it when it happens. Like my whole thing is I let people just keep talking. I swear to god. I do. It’s mean, but I just let them keep going until they finally exhaust themselves with their complaining. And then I say, well, it actually meant this. You were just stressing the wrong word. I would stress this word. And then they go, “Oh, oh, OK. Oh god.” And then I can see that they’re embarrassed. And I like that. Because I’m bad.

**John:** Ash, one thing that will help you is at some point you will be in casting for a project and you will see 30 actors read the same scene. And you’ll recognize, oh wow, there are so many different ways to read those exact same lines of dialogue. And you can tell which ones match your expectations and which ones don’t match your expectations and which ones are even better and cooler than your expectations. That’s great. That’s actually performance.

The writing is a plan. It’s a guideline for things that actors are actually going to say. And their performance does really matter. And their intention really does matter. So, there’s nothing wrong with what’s happening. It is super common.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good. I like it. When somebody something and it’s better than what you imagined, that’s a wonderful surprise. And it also jogs the material out of the expected. Because if it can surprise you, imagine what it’s going to do to the audience.

**John:** So I will tell you, my first experience with this was with Go. And we were having a very hard time casting the role of Gaines, the drug dealer, Todd Gaines the drug dealer. To the point where I was sitting through all these auditions like did I just write a bad scene? Is this a bad character? Can this not work? And then Timothy Olyphant came in and read it. It was like, oh, that’s what it’s supposed to be. That is actually – it does actually make sense as a character because this person in front of me was able to do this role and it does actually track and make sense.

So, don’t worry too much about it. That said, you and your writing partner who are theoretically writing the same thing disagree on sort of what these lines are supposed to be, there may be something that’s not happening right in your communication with each other, in how you’re establishing the voices of these characters to begin with. Because as you’re reading through a script if a character has an established voice it should be pretty unambiguous how a given line is going to sound or what the intention of a given line should be. So, watch for that. Maybe you’re not establishing voices especially clearly.

And then I’d say one technique to look at, and this is a thing I see a lot in J.J. Abrams scripts, is in the parenthetical there will be quotes with a line for what the line is meant to say. So if the line was, “You’re stupid,” but in the parenthetical it says, “I love you so much.” Just basically giving kind of like a line reading in the parenthetical. It’s a thing you see more in TV than you do in features, but it’s available as an option if there’s a specific line that is really not what it seems like it is just texturally on the page.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Let’s do one more question, Megana.

**Megana:** All right. Great. So, Lawant from the Netherlands writes, “What makes a story more suitable to live action versus animation? I know the way the screenplay gets written is often a little dissimilar to the way a live action screenplay does. I also know that there are often logistics and economics at play. So do you feel that there are certain stories that inherently lend themselves better to one medium or the other?”

**John:** Yeah. So the obvious thing is if most of the characters in your story are human beings, live action is a really natural good choice. If most of them are not human beings, they are animals, they are other kinds of creatures, animation is a better choice.

Obviously we can do things in sort of hybrid ways that are between the two that are new, and exciting, and different. We can redo The Lion King in “live action.” But we all know what we’re talking about. If it can be filmed with human actors, then it should probably be live action.

But that said, the nature of certain kinds of stories that we tend to do more often in animation than in live action. So, mythic stories, simple fairy tale kind of things. Things that feel like they should have Disney songs in them are generally better off to be thought of as animation. But just this past year there was a project that we took out which was going to be live action, it was going to be sort of Mandalorian-y kind of shot, and ultimately the decision was, you know what, this is probably going to be animation instead just for the logistics of it all. And it was the kind of story where you could kind of go either way and we decided to go into animation.

So, I don’t have hard and fast rules, but the characters and the world are what’s going to dictate whether it’s live action or animation to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only other consideration may, Lawant, is that if your story is what I would call pure story, meaning it is so connected to a really sharply engineered super high concept plot, then it might be better suited for animation. Because in animation you can do anything. You can show anywhere and do anything. So if you have this pure story that really requires very specific plotting and structure, you might want to think about it as an animated tale because you’ll just have more latitude.

**John:** There are Pixar movies that you could do live action, but they really kind of wouldn’t work the same way. There’s certain formulas and there’s certain heroic journey stuff that it just feels better in animation than it feels in live action. And so really just be honest with yourself about the character goals and sort of what the story wants to be and you probably will feel if it’s animation or if it’s live action.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Megana, thank you for these questions.

**Megana:** Great. Thank you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks Megana.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Before I get to my One Cool Thing I have to do follow up on Craig’s One Cool Thing from last week which was There is No Game which is a terrific – it’s a game, spoiler, it’s a game. But really, really well done. I haven’t finished it yet, but do check that out because Craig was actually right this time.

**Craig:** Actually.

**John:** I don’t play all of the games that he recommends, but this time I thought it really was terrific.

**Craig:** It’s a good one.

**John:** Two small things for me to recommend this week. First is Some Kind of Heaven, which is a new documentary that came out this past week. It’s about The Villages in Florida which is this retirement community. And it is a great documentary following several people who live at The Villages. Again, I don’t want to do spoilers. But we’ll put a link to the trailer. But if you went in cold I think it would honestly be the best exposure to it because it’s great. I want to have the filmmaker on at some point to talk through his use of characters and how you create detailed character moments and arcs when you only have these real people for limited periods of time. It’s just really well done. So, I’d urge you to check that out.

But my general One Cool Thing if you want to waste some time is Microsimulation of Traffic which is this German website. And it basically – it’s this animation where you have all these cars in this highway system and you can drag in little obstacles. You can sort of see how the traffic flow goes. I’ve always been really curious sort of how you optimize cars getting from point A to point B. And it’s just a really smartly done version of that. So it’s not Sim City. It’s very much more sort of mathematically-driven in terms of how you optimize traffic flow. And I wasted a good hour on it. And I think you will enjoy it.

**Craig:** There was an article years ago that someone did about traffic in Southern California and what causes traffic and what would alleviate traffic on the freeways. And one of the things that kind of blew my mind was he said one of the biggest impacts on traffic flow is sun.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So you’re kind of going down a hill or something and there’s sunlight in your eyes. You will slow down. And everybody that slows down a little bit causes this ripple effect in the back. The other one is how many cars can you see ahead of you. If you can see a lot of cars ahead of you a lot of times it seems like there’s more traffic, so you slow down. And if you can’t, it doesn’t, and you speed up. It was just like we suck is basically – it was just another one of those your brains are bad stories.

**John:** Yeah. I will say a thing I’ve always read about and never sort of seen until I tried this on the traffic simulator is ghost crashes. Basically there will be an accident or something and then there’s a bump in the rug and there’s this traffic jam that persists for hours after an accident has been cleared. And this simulator makes it really clear why that’s there and why running traffic breaks, which is where the police cars turn their lights and very slowly do these S shapes to sort of slow down all the traffic clears the break.

And so it was fun to see that like, oh, it is actually just jams are sometimes just the echoes of things that happened a long time before.

**Craig:** Exactly. I like that. Ghost crashes. A couple of One Cool Things this week. This one is sort of a cool thing. They’re related. The first one is definitely cool. We announced, The Hollywood Reporter announced, that The Last of Us has its pilot director. Originally we were going to be doing this with Johan Renck who I did Chernobyl with. Johan, like so many people who is working on things, had a movie that got delayed by Covid and so suddenly the schedules couldn’t line up. So some big shoes to fill in terms of where to go and who to talk to.

And there is a film, this is, by the way, again not to be like – I don’t want to sound like a butt-kisser here, but HBO is pretty cool. Like we’re making this big show. It costs a lot of money. And we come to them and say, “You know who we want? We want a guy named Kantemir Balagov who had made a small film called Beanpole in Russian, in Russia.” And they were like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

It’s awesome. Beanpole is beautiful. I’m 99% certain that we are also going to be using the cinematographer that Kantemir partnered with. She is also remarkable. Her name is Kseniya Sereda. And it is stunning and heartbreaking and gorgeous. It showed up on a ton of Top 20 of 2020 lists. I’m not a huge list person as everybody knows, but the Top 20 of 2020 lists have been fascinating because so few movies came out that almost all of them are these really obscure and very cool little movies.

So, we’re very happy about that. Kantemir is a fantastic guy. Super talented guy. And he speaks English. But, he speaks Russian better than he speaks English. So, as we’ve been communicating I’ve been trying to find a translation solution, sort of an inline translation solution. I mean, ideally I would be writing an email and something would be mirroring in another window in Russian. That would be incredible. Not quite that simple. I mean, I can sort of go on Google and type it into that window and see what happens.

What I’m using now is something called Mate. M-A-T-E. Which is kind of like an integrated translation system. Its interface is a little funky at times. Sometimes the formatting goes away. And sometimes it comes back. So I’m just – it’s a pretty cool thing. It’s a pretty cool thing. But if somebody out there has an awesome translation solution, sort of a frictionless translation solution for me for English to Russian and Russian to English I’d love to hear about it.

**John:** Nice. Yeah. Send those suggestions in. And that’s our show for this week. So, as always, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Timothy Vajda. We could use some more outros. And so a reminder of what an outro is, because I was looking through the folder and there’s a bunch of pieces of music that are good that really have nothing to do with Scriptnotes at all. So, the only requirement we give is that they be cool and they somehow go Bum-bum-bum-bum-bump, or the minor version of that. But there’s pieces in there that like that’s a cool piece of music but it has nothing to do with Scriptnotes. It does not have our theme. So the only requirement is it has to use the theme in some way. And I want you to keep pursuing excellence and giving us great outros because we really appreciate it.

You can send us links to those outros at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. You can get them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you 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 time travel.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

**John:** OK, Craig, this is very much a dorm room stoner question.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But if you could travel back to any point in history, or pre-history, and go there as a tourist, so we’ll start with the tourist rules where you go and you know you can come back to the present time. What are some places you’d like to visit in history and why?

**Craig:** Yeah. So we put this to our D&D, or you put it to our D&D group as well, and immediately because it’s a D&D group, which is just obsessed with the details and potential loop holes and possible ways to gain the system, there were certain questions in there, but they were reasonable. So let’s also presume that I’m not going to be suffering. There’s not going to be a bad case of bubonic plague or something like that. I’m not going to be immediately burned as a witch because of my clothing and so on and so forth.

So then the question is where do you go back in time. What are you most interested in seeing? And, you know, I don’t know how much of this reflects on who I am or what my interests are, but I suppose – and again let’s also presume you can understand every language.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe because my dad was an American history teacher and that was the bulk of the history that I was taught, I think I would want to go back to those very hot days in July, late June and early July, where Americans were debating whether or not they should be declaring independency from Great Britain in Philadelphia. Because in that discussion there was not only the momentous occasion of our independence, but there was also the first real consequential debate over slavery. It had begun already. And it wasn’t going to get any better or any less complicated or any less morally repugnant. And would ultimately fester and explode into the Civil War and then into Jim Crow and then of course we still are struggling with its legacy today.

So all of that’s there plus Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. It’s pretty – I think I would like it. That’s where I would go.

**John:** Absolutely. So both around the Declaration of Independence, but also figuring out the Constitution are just, are just such seminal moments and we have many accounts of it, but we have no one who can sort of tell us what it’s like to be there and sort of look at it with modern eyes in ways that, you know, just to actually physically be there would be great.

And I guess we’re sort of playing – we’re not playing Terminator rules, so you can’t go back and change a thing. You can just sort of go back and witness it and really see what it was like.

**Craig:** Fly on the wall.

**John:** Fly on the wall. And so fly on the wall, two points in history and prehistory that I’m really curious to see. Everything happening around Jesus’s time. And sort of like what Jesus was like in his time. What the sense of this small little group was like and did it feel like it was the start of something bigger because I guess I just always wondered to what degree civilization was primed and ready to have this explosion of a religion that would take over everything, or it just was lucky.

And to what degree, who he was individually and how charismatic. And sort of what it felt like in that time would be fascinating. So, that’s one thing, but I would also really be curious to come to North American continent in a time before European settlers arrive and just see what it was like because I think I was definitely raised on this myth that North America was just sort of this empty continent, that there really wasn’t anybody here. And that clearly was not the case. It was actually a pretty busy and full place. And the myth of it being empty was sort of foisted upon us.

So while there weren’t permanently built cities in the way that we saw in Europe, there were actually a lot of people here. And I was just really curious what that was like. And we sort of lost all of that because there wasn’t written language just in that sense of what it felt like here before the Europeans came.

**Craig:** Cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. Probably cleaner.

**Craig:** Much, much cleaner.

**John:** Yeah. We made a mess of things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, changing the rules a little bit, if you could go back to one moment in your life, so we’ve always gone back pre-us, but is there a moment in your life where you’d like to look at yourself?

**Craig:** Oh, oh god. I mean, no. I don’t want to see any of that.

**John:** I don’t know that I want to see any of that either. Because I think I would just – it would just be very wincey to sort of see the dumb choices you make. One of the reasons why I like the show Pen15 so much is that you have these really talented actors going back to play themselves at 15 years old and just how unbearably awkward you are those early ages. And so if I couldn’t change stuff, if I couldn’t encourage the younger version of me to do the things that are so obvious to do in retrospect, I guess I wouldn’t go back and want to watch any of it.

**Craig:** No. I’m embarrassed by all of it. Everything. Everything up to this moment. It’s a tragedy.

**John:** I will say having lost my mom last month there are definitely moments in my mom’s life and in my dad’s life that they’ve given me some reporting on, but I just don’t really have a very good sense of who they were at different moments. So the sort of Back to the Future fantasy of like getting to see your parents when they were teenagers or early 20-somethings would be neat. It’s not Jesus in his time neat. But it would be illuminating.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always feel like if you could get a good look at your parents when they were young it would be a little bit like getting a peek into the cockpit of a plane and seeing how drunk the pilot was. It would give you a bad feeling. Like there but for the grace of god. Like this person should not have been in charge of me at all. At all. Who put this guy behind the seat of an airplane or the wheel of an airplane or whatever you call it, the helm? Who put this guy behind the helm of an airplane? And who put this guy in charge of a child?

And if my kids could look back and see how absolutely clueless I was at so many points they would probably feel exactly the same.

**John:** So a thing I noticed this last year is that as I look back at photos of my daughter there’s continuities and there’s also discontinuities. And I don’t perceive sort of one continuous evolution of a kid from point A to where she is right now. There’s stages. And of course there were small shifts – there were shifts between those stages and there were transition points, but it’s almost like she’s a whole different species than who she was as a younger child.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And sometimes I feel lost for – I look over these photos and I feel lost for who that kid was. And obviously she’s still right in front of you, but she’s not really right in front of me. That younger toddler who was so neat in her own specific way is gone.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is the tragedy of watching your kids grow up. There is a progression that you can see. And you can follow it with a line. And to tie back into our topic in the main show about time and how time can sometimes just break, there is an end of childhood and there’s the beginning of this other thing and there’s a break. And that break is traumatic for everybody. But what happens on the other side of it is a different person entirely emerges. Just a different human being. And it is a struggle sometimes for everyone to wrap their minds around the fact that your kid is gone.

I mean, memory and time claim all children. All of them. And what is left in their place you have to come to accept. And if you can, then there’s this whole other potentially wonderful relationship with them for the rest of your life. But sometimes you have this kid and everything is great and there’s the jump and then they come out on the other side a person and some children and parents don’t like each other anymore after that point and they go their separate ways. It happens.

**John:** And a huge source of tension between parents and kids is the parent not willing to acknowledge that it’s not their small child anymore.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s been a change.

**John:** It’s reality. And tying this back to sense of time and screenwriters as being masters of time, if you haven’t seen Boyhood, the Richard Linklater movie, this is a great opportunity to see Boyhood because that is an experiment in which you follow a kid through this difficult time and you see both the continuities and discontinuities of a kid aging. And a great example of approaching a project with a plan, with an intention, and then having to adjust based on the actual realities of what happens.

So, I loved Boyhood. I thought it was just terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [DGA tells WME to get rid of its conflicts](https://deadline.com/2021/01/dga-sides-with-writers-guild-in-its-dispute-with-wme-over-endeavor-content-1234672501/)
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