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

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

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

**John:** You are listening to Episode 629 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, should you break up with a producer you like but who doesn’t seem to be moving a project forward, how should a writing team discuss their individual work, and when is it okay to say no to inclusive casting? We’ll answer these and other difficult questions, plus a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at listeners’ pages and give our honest and only semi-filtered feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, we’ll delve into some advice we’d love to give ourselves. All right, Mazin.

**Craig:** That’ll be interesting.

**John:** We got some time travel. We got some hypotheticals, all that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Fun.

**John:** But we got follow-up first. This first bit of follow-up is, Craig, you had asked last week how many of those How Would This be a Movie things that became actual movies had we recommended. I think, Drew, you did the research on this.

**Drew Marquardt:** Yep, I went through. Of the 12 that were actually made, 4 of them were ones you said could be a movie.

**Craig:** Okay. So offhand, that doesn’t seem like a great average. In baseball, it’s excellent. Now my new question is, of the eight movies that we said shouldn’t be made, how many of them were considered successful, meaning were we right anyway?

**Drew:** There are some asterisks on that, because Zola is one that you said no, but there’s something to take from it. I guess that’s not so much an asterisk. But there’s another one, the Kamiyah Mobley Story, that you had said no, not quite. That was the one where the girl realized the woman she thought was her mother her whole life wasn’t actually her mother. You said not exactly the story, but there’s a version. Then you went on to essentially pitch A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One.

**Craig:** I guess this goes to show that John and I are about as good at being movie executives as movie executives are, because I feel like this happens all the time.

**John:** We try to pick the winners. We definitely gestured in the direction of things that could get made. But actually, more stuff was able to get made than we even picked. Our little Scriptnotes studio did not choose to make those films, but other people did, so good for them.

**Craig:** Right, not bad. Batting 333.

**John:** Now, Craig, in Episode 627, Aline and I did a How Would This be a Movie without you. Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s fine.

**John:** But we actually had a success we didn’t know was actually a success, because one of those story topics we discussed was about this guy, a mathematician who figured out a way to game the lottery and win. It turns out there actually has been a movie that was basically the same premise.

**Craig:** That preexisted it or…

**John:** That was made two years ago. The story that we were talking about was actually 30 years old, but there’s been a recent movie that actually was largely the same premise.

**Craig:** You guys were asking if this could be a movie, when in fact it already was?

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** That’s a double asterisk.

**John:** A double asterisk. This is Jerry and Marge Go Large, which is a movie that I’ve only seen on in-flight entertainment options. It’s about a mathematician who scams the Michigan State Lottery to save the small town where he lives.

**Craig:** That is a pretty good idea.

**John:** It’s a pretty good idea. It works. One last bit of follow-up I see in the Workflowy here.

**Drew:** Chris in Oakland writes, John’s been talking about learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, and he recently started learning an alphabet that was created as a better fit for the sounds of English. “It’s called Shavian. It was created in honor of George Bernard Shaw. He wanted to get rid of silent letters and all the bizarre spelling and have something that made sense.”

**Craig:** I clicked on the link to this website and immediately started laughing, because it’s its own alphabet, and it looks so much like what I would call science fiction writing.

**John:** Yeah, or fantasy writing.

**Craig:** When you’re on an alien ship.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** This is alien writing. This isn’t going to happen. I guess that’s my biggest issue is why are they doing this? It’s not going to work.

**John:** Because you can. It’s one of those things, if you could go in from the start and actually have it make sense, this is a way that it could make sense. I spent a couple minutes going through this. I’m actually impressed by some of the choices that they’ve made, because there is a logical consistency with how these sounds work in English and what these shapes are on the page, which totally makes sense, because the IPA, for all its wonders, is a beast to read and there ends up being so many special marks on it to get the actual flow of it right. It’s hard to really read it. I think you probably could train yourself pretty quickly to be able to read this in a natural way.

**Craig:** Sure, but you won’t.

**John:** You won’t.

**Craig:** I understand why they did it, and I assume that they did it really well, but this just seems like a strange exercise, because it is impractical. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** It’s like Esperanto in the same way. It’s an artificial system that improves upon how we’d naturally do things, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever going to get used.

**Craig:** Esperanto at least has the benefit of being the first. They didn’t know that Esperanto would be a total failure when they invented Esperanto, but the people that did this know about Esperanto, so they really should know better. But I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps the people that have invented Shavian understand that really this is kind of an academic exercise. I hope that they know it’s an academic exercise.

**John:** I do recommend everyone click through the links, because it does look really cool, and it does look like all the sci-fi science you’ve seen, which I support. I enjoy that as a thing. One of the interesting choices, as I was clicking through and reading stuff, that was very, very smart in here is that… We’ve talked about on this podcast, I’m sure, that certain Englishes are rhotic and not rhotic. In America, we say water, and we actually pronounce the R’s. In a lot of the UK, it’s watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** Watta.

**Craig:** Watta.

**John:** You don’t pronounce those final R’s. Cleverly, Shavian, their symbol for that last -er, -ar, -ir sound is one glyph that marks it as that sound. If you are pronouncing this with a British accent, you just wouldn’t pronounce the R. If you’re pronouncing it with an American accent, you would pronounce the R. You don’t have to put a separate R there that is pronounced or not pronounced based on your dialect.

**Craig:** But isn’t that what R is doing, in ours?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We see an R, and we either pronounce it or we don’t.

**John:** But if you were to put the R in Shavian, then basically everything you see there is supposed to be pronounced, and so it would not be the same word for these two people.

**Craig:** We’re running into problems already. I have huge issues with Shavian, clearly.

**John:** Is it solving a problem we desperately have? Not really. We got the IPA. We got other ways to do this. I just love people who are spending the time to tilt some windmills and do some fun things.

**Craig:** I think this is where you and I find ourselves differing. You love them.

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** I’m like, what is going on with you? That said, I’m also the person that sits and builds large Lego sets, and there’s no purpose for that.

**John:** Absolutely. If these were not designed to reproduce language in a way that is spoken, but were instead a kind of cipher that was used in word puzzles, Craig Mazin, you would love it.

**Craig:** The point of the cipher in the word puzzle is to decipher the cipher.

**John:** Not to use it on a daily basis.

**Craig:** Correct. I do love deciphering ciphers though, and there are so many. John, there are so many.

**John:** There are so many ciphers.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions. Often, we do these late in the podcast. Let’s start it this time with some-

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** … past questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Let’s start with George in Berlin.

**Drew:** George writes, “How do you balance specificity versus not excluding actors for consideration based on things like race? Where do you find it important to be more general or more specific? Are these the kind of things that you would try and rewrite after a film or show was cast?

“I’m currently writing a family drama, and the way the family functions is informed by the fact that they are a white, middle-class family in the north of England. There’s a level of arrogance and refusal to change written into the family, as a byproduct of their situation. They’re white, they’re middle-class, living in a predominantly white, smallish town in the Northeast, and this has obviously massively shaped their worldview. If my protagonist were, say, the child of immigrants, and the family were members of a minority community, I think their experience of growing up in the Northeast would have been radically different. It doesn’t necessarily mean their life would be better or worse. They would just be different people objectively.

“I want to be specific. I want to hone in on the cultural nuances and the specificity of the situation, but I don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role just because I wrote from the perspective of a white, Northeastern English experience. If the family’s roots were Asian, Indian West African, or East African, the family and the characters would be different in each of those culturally specific situations.”

**John:** I like how thoughtful George is being here. He’s trying to balance this sense that he has written a very specific family that is attuned to the experience he needs in this story, and at the same time, he would love to be able to open roles up to nonwhite actors, and feels like it’s just not going to work because of the specificity he’s put in there.

**Craig:** I think George is being thoughtful, but perhaps too thoughtful, meaning it seems like George is writing a defense against somebody being angry with him because he wrote parts that were specifically for white people.

Now, here’s the thing. As we change the way we cast things, and try and include traditionally under-represented actors, that’s about getting rid of what I believe we’ve called default white, so that kind of thoughtless, “Okay, I’m going to write a character, and that character is plumber. Unless I say otherwise, we’ll just assume that’s a white guy.” That’s the way it used to be. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re not doing that for small characters, large characters, big characters, small. However, when we are writing characters that are specifically connected to a culture – that’s an important word, not race, but culture – then we have to write for that culture.

In this case, George, I would suggest that you don’t think about race as much as culture. You are specifically writing about white, middle-class, Northern England culture. Therefore, you may say you don’t want to write nonwhite actors out of consideration for the role, but you have. That’s what you’ve done. That’s not a crime, because this is about white culture in northern England, so that’s okay. That’s okay.

I don’t think we should be twisting ourselves into pretzels when there is an easy answer for things. If you were writing a story about Pakistani British culture in northern England, you would be excluding white actors from consideration for the role, because it’s about Pakistani British culture. This is fine. If you’re not specifically writing about that culture, then yes, I think open casting is a wonderful thing and should be promoted and celebrated. But I think you might be complicating this a little bit, George, because you’re a little nervous maybe that someone’s going to go, “Why did you write parts for white people?” Because you’re writing about white stuff. That’s why.

**John:** Sometimes Craig just answers a question so thoroughly and completely that I have nothing left to add, and that’s one of these happy situations. Craig, well done.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Chris in Glendale writes, “When Academy voters vote on Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, are they expected or required to actually read the screenplay, or are they allowed to base their vote on just watching the film?”

**John:** Easy answer. You are not required or expected to read the screenplay. I would say over the last 10 years, there’s been a much more concerted effort to make screenplays available to everybody who wants to read the screenplays. They can actually look at the words on the page. But no, you’re not required to.

Most people are not basing on that. Instead, they are basing their vote on what they perceived was the best writing, the best storytelling, the best work that was probably attributable to the screenwriter, and yet there’s no perfect way to know how much of what seems like the screenwriter’s job was that screenwriter doing that work there. You don’t know.

**Craig:** You don’t know.

**John:** In many ways, the award can also be called best film that probably had a great screenplay.

**Craig:** I think that applies to best directing and best casting and best editing, and even best cinematography, which you think is evident.

**John:** But no. Look at the acting awards. All those acting awards are also dependent on great editing and-

**Craig:** Great editing, great directing, and great writing. It’s really hard to get a Best Acting award if the script is bad, if the director is bad, if the movie is bad. These things are actually not particularly determinable. It’s all gut checks. I find it all fascinating from an anthropological and sociological point of view. But even though the word “best” is in front of all these categories for all the awards, in reality there simply is no way to determine that. Really, it’s just the one more people voted for.

**John:** One of the weird things about a screenplay though is that the absolute best screenplay of the year, if it’s not also a fantastic movie, no one’s going to pay attention to it. No one says, “Oh, that was a great screenplay, but the movie was only so-so.”

**Craig:** No one would know.

**John:** That’s never going to happen.

**Craig:** Also, the converse is true. When a movie gets the Best Director nomination, but doesn’t get Best Screenplay, how is that possible? How can you get the Best Director nomination but not get a Best Picture nomination? How is that possible? How can you get Best Actor and not Best Screenplay? How is that possible, since a screenplay was the thing that created the character in the first place and wrote all the words down that the character says? How is any of that possible? Really, if we wanted to be purists, there would be one award, and the award was Best Movie. That’s that. It’s a short ceremony, and everyone goes home.

**John:** There are awards that day. The National Board of Review is just Best Movie. They don’t give anything else.

**Craig:** That makes sense. By the way, also unnecessary, because we don’t need to say what the best movie is. The fact that everybody disagrees on what the best movie is is probably an indication that it doesn’t really make sense. Best movies, movies that made us happiest, all in favor. Same for television. But I don’t run these things.

**John:** As he’s headed off to the DGA Awards.

**Craig:** I myself am not nominated for a DGA Award, but I am rooting for Peter Hoar, who directed Episode 3 of The Last of Us.

**John:** Excellent. Another question.

**Drew:** Freshly Repped writes, “I started working with a new writing partner in August. We wrote an animated pilot that everyone seems to like, so much so that we got repped off it. First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything else either of us have. Now that we’re repped, my partner wants to show our agent her individual samples and the writing she’s done with her wife. I feel like this is a no-no, given that he’s trying to pitch us as a team. We have no credibility yet, since we’ve never staffed or sold a thing. My partner thinks there’s nothing wrong with bringing him other material, because we each have individual contracts with the agency, and nothing in those precludes us from working with other people. I’d love to hear your thoughts and appreciate your help.”

**Craig:** Tricky one. What do you think, John?

**John:** Tricky one. I would love to hear from some writing teams for what their perspective is, because I’ve never written as a team. You wrote as a team a zillion years ago. My instinct is that the letter writer is correct in assuming that it could confuse the situation about who they’re representing and what the voice is of this team. I think you should focus on the work that you’ve done as a team and not be showing the work you did separately at this moment in your careers.

**Craig:** Here’s the part, Freshly Repped, that is a little dicey. That is that it involves your writing partner’s wife. Look. You can certainly imagine a situation where your writing partner is at home, and she’s telling her wife, “Hey, good news. Me and this other person, we’ve got ourselves an agent.” The wife’s like, “Oh, what about the thing we did? You love that, don’t you?” She’s like, “Uh-huh.” Now, maybe she does, or maybe she’s just trying to keep her wife happy, because happy wife, happy life. I don’t know.

The other thing is, I don’t know if that stuff’s good. It may be that it’s worth having a conversation with your agent and saying, “Look. This is going to happen. I can’t stop this from happening. I don’t want to stop this from happening. That would probably be a huge fight and cause resentment. But please be honest with me when you read it. If you think it’s really, really good, then it’s good for me to know, because I kind of need to know that it’ll be a little bit of a divided attention situation. If you think it’s bad, I back you on… If you need to be polite about it, but not be super active, then we can all just play the game together quietly and politely.”

But I tend to feel like the truth is, good stuff wins; better stuff beats not-as-good stuff. If your writing partner and her wife are writing things better than you are writing with your writing partner, it’s just going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. I suspect that’s probably not the case.

**John:** No, it’s not the case. If you look at the first paragraph here, “First script, first submission, first agent. Both of us have been writing for years before this, but this is easily better than anything either of us have.”

**Craig:** I’m going to assume that, Freshly Repped, your perspective is honest and at least close to accurate, in which case, have the confidence to just… My advice would be to let it happen and just let the natural course of events take their path. The agent will not waste your time. It would be so much better for you and your new relationship with your new writing partner to let the agent say, “Guys, I’m going to concentrate on the two of you, instead of one of you and her wife.” I would just see how it goes. There’s no way to get around it, basically. That’s my feeling.

**John:** If we do have teams who want to write in with their perspective, I’m really curious what you guys would recommend, because I know it’s always challenging. People are writing separately and together. If you can offer some best practices, we’ll love to hear it.

**Craig:** I don’t love that the partner is doing this. I wish I could know if they were being coerced or not, because that does happen.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** Next question.

**Drew:** Hrothgar in LA writes-

**Craig:** Hrothgar.

**Drew:** “A few years ago, one of my scripts was featured on a script hosting service and later optioned by an actor producer. Working with this producer has been great. They have good notes, communicate regularly. They seem like a genuinely good person. But they’ve also never produced anything. It’s been several years now. And though we’ve attached a qualified director, the project feels like it’s moving forward at a glacial pace.

“Recently, another director found me online, expressing interest in the project, but only if they direct. What’s more, they claim to have financing, and based off of their resume, I’m inclined to believe it. I want to remain loyal to my original team and be patient, but I’m also deeply broke, and staying the course gets harder and harder every year I lose money being a screenwriter. I don’t want to be an asshole, and I want to make good art, but I’m also tired of selling my plasma to afford ramen.”

**Craig:** Oh, good god.

**Drew:** “How do you know when someone just can’t get a project off the ground? Is it foolish to chase the shiny offer and maybe actually get paid or does loyalty actually count for something in show business? If you do ever take a project away from a producer, how do you go about doing it?”

**Craig:** What do you think, John? Hrothgar is selling his plasma for ramen.

**John:** It’s making ramen money. For a different project I was working on, I did look up the business of selling plasma. It’s profitable-ish. It’s a thing people do. You can’t sell blood, but you can sell plasma.

Here’s my guidance for Hrothgar. I think you’re right to be independent of this director coming by and expressing interest. I think you’re right to be wondering whether this is ever going to move forward with this director and producer situation. I think it’s worth having a conversation with them about it.

You can honestly say, “Listen, guys. Another director has approached about doing this. They seem to actually have money and a plan for production. I want to talk to you about this. I don’t want to blindside you, but let’s be realistic. Are we actually going to get this thing made?”

That’s a conversation you can have. It’s also a conversation your reps can have. Nothing in your letter says that you’re repped by anybody, but the fact that this did get set up and has some stuff around it leads me to believe you might have some reps who can help you out in this situation, which is part of their job.

**Craig:** I think that’s right. There’s nothing disloyal or unethical about telling the producer, “I have good news. We may have found a director and financing.” You would be actually committing malpractice if you didn’t mention it. This sort of thing happens all the time. You’re not saying, “Hey, this director is going to make the movie, and also, you’re gone.” The actor producer stays. They stay on as a producer. It happens all the time. It’s a credit, so that gets figured out.

Now, if the director is saying, “I have financing. I want to direct. Also, no other producers,” that’s different. Then they can fight about it. But you don’t have to fight about it. You were the hot one in the bar, so let these guys beat themselves up over you. But you don’t need to… This isn’t about disloyalty. You need to pursue it if it’s a legitimate offer and situation. You owe it to yourself to pursue it. Of course.

**John:** First sentence, it says, “Optioned by an actor producer,” so there was a contract at some point that was official. It wasn’t just, say, like, “Hey, I really like this. Let’s just talk about stuff.” But it doesn’t seem like it’s significant money, certainly not enough for Hrothgar to be able to live and afford his ramen with just this money. It does make sense to have a conversation with them about this outside party. It gives you an excuse to have the bigger conversation. It’s like, is there any plan to actually get this thing produced?

**Craig:** When these things happen, sometimes there are some hurt feelings that are just mis-expressed shame, because they haven’t been able to get it going. But if you are kind and generous about it and just clean and simple, I think the producer has as much interest in you and seeing the movie get made. It’s the attached qualified director that’s going to get pinged off of there. You don’t have any loyalty to that person at all.

I apologized to that director, but this is one of the weird cultural things about Hollywood where we overindulge directors and their feelings, and routinely discount and underindulge the feelings of writers. You’re selling part of your blood to eat food, and you can’t afford to worry about this director’s feelings. They didn’t write anything. They didn’t do anything. They haven’t done anything yet. Just attaching themselves clearly wasn’t sufficient, so I think if there’s an alternative, you must reach for it.

**John:** Also, I’d say that the fact that some other director has expressed interest, maybe there’s other folks out there who are also interested, and so this could be a moment to really look at, is there an interest out there for this project in general. Yes, have the conversation with this new director, but also be looking, is there another way to get this thing actually made, because you’ve probably been so fixated on trying to make it with this one producer and this one attached director. There may be other ways out there.

**Craig:** I do admire you, Hrothgar, in that you’re even thinking about these questions and loyalty and art. When I was poor, I did not. I just didn’t feel like I should be selling my blood. I will say, maybe this will sound mercenary and counter to the far more self-care-oriented and self-regard-oriented values of Generation Z and Millennials, but I feel like getting some financial stability in your life will give you freedom to grow and be a better artist, especially for screenwriting, because screenwriting is one of the only arts in existence that doesn’t become complete until people produce it. That is its completion. Yeah, get yourself paid, Hrothgar.

**John:** Do it. Let’s do some Three Page Challenges. For folks who are brand new to the podcast, welcome aboard. Every once in a while, we do a Three Page Challenge. We invite our listeners to send through the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a feature. They sign a little release. We discuss it. We put the pdfs up online so you can read through them with us if you want to. We’ll also give you a short summary. But as a reminder, everyone here has asked for this feedback. They are coming in here with eyes wide open that we may not love everything that we see.

But this is a chance for us to really talk about the words on the page, because it’s one thing for us to describe character arcs and the importance of white space, but when we actually look at those examples on the page, we really can drill down to the specific things, the choices we’re making word by word, sentence by sentence, as we do this craft. I think it’s a thing we love to do. It’s an exhausting task for our producers. Drew, thank you for sorting through the hundreds of people who have sent these things through.

Let’s start off with Routes by Colton Miller. Drew, can you give us a summary for those folks who are listening at home?

**Drew:** It starts in suburban Los Angeles. Young sister Samantha, 17, and Brooke, 12, burst out of the front door of a house to escape the abusive chaos inside. Sam leads them to an old Chevy Impala, and they quietly escape with nothing to their name. The story then transitions to six years later, where an 18-year-old Brooke is now in the back of a rideshare in Los Angeles. She’s lost in thought. Brooke is brought back to reality by the rideshare driver, indicating their arrival.

**John:** All right. Routes, three pages here. Just taking a look at the title page, simple, straightforward. They got the email address on the bottom, so if someone wants to track down Colton’s information, they know where to email him.

**Craig:** I do like a simple title page.

**John:** Craig, I was struck by how real-time these first two pages are. It’s a lot of scene description. It felt like overwriting for me at times. I actually kind of dug it. I liked how bit by bit it was. It just felt like we were in one static camera shot of looking at this house and eventually these girls coming out and getting in the car and backing away. It was a strange use of time on the page, and yet it kind of worked for me. I’m curious what you thought.

**Craig:** I agree to a large extent that there were some beautiful moments that were very visual. I could see everything. I could hear things. I could almost smell the outside. I really enjoyed some of the description of the inside of the car. There were a lot of evocative things.

My issue is that in fact it is kind of unshootable as it currently is on the page – and we can get into why – but easily adjusted to be shootable. Then there’s just a question about how we frame the timeline, because – just a simple thing – it begins with a title that says “six years ago.” “Six years ago” is not a great title to put on a film as the first thing, because six years ago from what? Now? If it’s for now, just give me the year maybe.

**John:** Give me a year. Agreed.

**Craig:** Then give me a new year or just the word “now” when we get to now. It’s a little bit of a wonky bit. You can also not include it at all, just show the first couple of scenes, and then when we get to the next time in “INTERIOR RIDESHARE (DRIVING) – NIGHT,” you can say “six years later.” You can also wait. You can see this older version of Brooke, and then, “We’re here.” “Yeah. Thanks.” She gets out of the car, walks towards something, title, “six years later.” You could always do that as well. Let’s talk a little bit, John, about where we are having an issue maybe with time and how we’re managing time here.

**John:** The first thing I underlined on Page 1 is fifth paragraph down, “All is quiet. The car is motionless, lifeless.” All cars are lifeless. That was my first-

**Craig:** Not in the Transformers.

**John:** That’s true. It could transform.

**Craig:** Or it could be the Love Bug.

**John:** It could be. We could think of more examples of living cars, I guess. But it wasn’t necessary. The problem was that it made it think, is this a movie about a car, because all we’re talking about is this car, when really we’re just trying to set up we are looking at this house. That, I liked.

There’s next paragraph down, “Until – we hear plates crash. Muffled yelling. Shattering broken glass. O.S. from inside the house.” You would never really use O.S. that way. We understand what it means, but-

**Craig:** “From inside the house,” is redundant.

**John:** Is enough. That’s O.S. Where we’re having some time problems and some geography problems, once these girls come out, they are whispering in a wide shot, which doesn’t actually work. It feels like a closeup of feet. You’re trying to get two things in a frame that don’t actually fit together. This is where it felt like if you’re writing the novel version of this, sure, you can do that, because you’re in this imaginary space, but it doesn’t actually work here. We can stay in this wide shot. We don’t need to hear them whispering. We can see what’s happening. We see they’re sneaking to this car. And then cut to we’re inside the car and we’re in a better place.

**Craig:** Completely agree. There’s nothing wrong with starting with silence. And then it says, “Until – we hear plates crash.” Now, that’s kind of a weird start to an argument. Generally speaking, it isn’t like people are quietly talking and then someone just starts whipping plates. We might want to hear a little bit of a raised voice and then more of a raised voice, and then the plates crash, and then there’s glass, just because suddenly plates crashing out of nowhere is going to feel a little contrived, I think.

“The front door to the house swings open, revealing two girls, 17 and 12, in ratty long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.” Now, when we have two people, you might want to be a little bit more, so it doesn’t seem like they just are wearing a uniform of long-sleeve shirts and sweatpants.

“The older girl holds the younger girl’s hand. This is young Samantha, ‘Sam,’ and young Brooke, 12.” You probably don’t need to say “young” here, because we know their age. We’re going to see them later. It’s Brooke. She’s now 18. So I don’t think we need to do the “young Sam,” “young Brooke” here.

I will read the following: “Sam and Brooke walk briskly towards the car in the driveway. With urgency but trying to not draw attention. Push in on Sam.” Let me stop there. How are you pushing in on Sam while they’re walking briskly toward a car in the driveway? That’s not a thing. You can’t. You’re moving with them, right? I assume. You’ve even called out it’s urgently, briskly. This is where I’m starting to get confused. How close are we? How far are we? Are they moving? Are they not moving? That’s where things like “push in” are tricky.

**John:** Agreed. There’s moments where we clearly have “cut to,” closeups on things, which is great and fine. “Close on Sam’s hand. Her right hand clutches Brooke’s hand. Sam’s fingers – with chipped black nail polish – wrap tightly around Brooke’s palm.” Great. Okay, we’re seeing those things. Again, in a normal script, I would say this is overwriting, but what they’re trying to do here is actually just play in real time and milk this moment. Great, go for it. I have no objections.

**Craig:** I would suggest that there’s a perfectly good version of this where Sam and Brooke say nothing, because here’s what Sam says: “Whispering to Brooke, ‘Let’s go.'” I’m pretty sure that was already said.

**John:** We get that. We get that.

**Craig:** It’s not like Brooke is going to go, “I’m going to hold your hand and walk outside, not asking any questions until you go, ‘Let’s go.'” They’ve already gone. They’re going. It’s happening. And then Brooke, “Sam?” Again, probably would’ve been like, “What are we doing?” “We’re getting the fudge out of here.” That already happened inside. I think you probably don’t need this dialog. If you’re scared, Colton, about having non-dialog pages, that’s okay. You’ve actually done such a nice job of putting all this beautiful white space on the page and giving us reportage, punchy bits. I think all that’s really good. Do you know what I really like, John?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** “As Brooke adjusts in the seat,” this is the car seat, “her bare feet,” which is interesting. I think that wasn’t indicated earlier. It should be. We’re going to notice that. “Her bare feet slide around on a pile of waxy yellow McDonald’s burger wrappers and other trash littering the floor.” That’s cool. I like that. I heard it. I saw it. It teaches me things. It was cool. I like it.

**John:** Craig, this first scene, is it day or night?

**Craig:** In my mind, it’s night.

**John:** Yeah. Look at the first page. It was day.

**Craig:** What in the world? Whoa. Mandela effect moment.

**John:** I totally saw it as a night scene.

**Craig:** How is this not night?

**John:** How is this not night?

**Craig:** How is this not night? It’s clearly night.

**John:** The question was, I was thinking, what sounds do you hear? I was thinking night sounds. You’ve got the crickets. You’ve got the city hum. Nothing’s silent, and so what does it sound like? Night and day sound so differently.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think this is a night scene. Now, I can see what Colton’s going for. This was a day scene, and then we’re going to cut to a night scene. But in my head, I was thinking it’s night scene and night scene.

**Craig:** You can absolutely cut from night to night. Here’s why in my brain I just immediately made this night. “It’s quiet in Reseda.” Now, yes, Reseda is a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles, but it’s a massive sprawl. There is highway noise, distant sirens, cars honking, traffic, the lawnmower guys with the leaf blowers. There’s no silence in Reseda in the day. Night, yeah.

Also, people generally don’t have these big drunken fights in the middle of the day. They do. I’m just saying it’s probably more likely… It feels more of a night thing. More importantly, if it’s day, other people are awake. That means people are hearing it. That means they’re going to come outside and see. No one is on the street in the day, apparently, to notice this or to see these two girls walk out in Reseda. Also, it’s just less dramatic, isn’t it, if it is in the day?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just cooler at night. Anyway, I think night.

**John:** If it’s early morning day, that could be great. That would be a good choice.

**Craig:** Sunrise maybe.

**John:** Gotta be specific.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line for this. We’ve only looked at these three pages, but we ask the Three Page Challenge writers to tell us what happens in the rest of the script.

**Drew:** “An adrift recent high school graduate journeys across the U.S. one summer in search of her estranged older sister who ran away five years ago, desperate to finally find her and bring her home.”

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** That tracks.

**Craig:** Completely tracks. With that in mind, another recommendation, Colton. The young Samantha, Sam, 17, is – my guess – a troubled person, because Brooke is trying to find her, which means she’s sort of lost. It might be interesting to see a little bit more than just the nail polish, just something, because by the time you get to… Nobody who’s a troubled 23-year-old was a not-troubled 17-year-old. I’m just going to go out on a limb here. There’s already a problem.

This is Reseda. It’s Los Angeles. What does a troubled 17-year-old look like? Is she pierced? What has she done to her hair? Is there a bruise? Is she cutting? Is she too thin? Is she missing a tooth? Does she have braces? Just give me a little bit of a sense of who she is, more than just this, especially if we’re going to be hunting for her and she’s not going to be in the script for a while.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at our next script. This is Megha Genesis by Priti Trivedi.

**Drew:** Megha, a 37-year-old skateboarder, confidently maneuvers through a crowd in Austin, Texas. Skating to her family home, she encounters her mother, Deepa, who enthusiastically insists on dressing her in dated power suits for an upcoming job. Amidst the fashion chaos, Megha reveals in voiceover that she’s about to have her first day at two very different jobs. We then cut to a week earlier, when Megha sits on Zoom with a recruiter and is offered a job teaching executives.

**Craig:** Stuart special.

**John:** Stuart special. Title page, clean and simple. A lot of people would put an email address on there. I think it’s a good idea, just because if someone absolutely loves this, that’s how they can get a hold of Priti to talk about how much they love the script. But now, as we get into the actual script itself, Craig, do you want to go first? Want me to go first?

**Craig:** Happy to start. A little bit of a fish with feathers here. There’s something that happens almost immediately that causes a loss of confidence. This is why the first page, the first third of a page is so important. You just want to start to invite people to feel safe as they read.

**John:** Can I guess what it is that you marked?

**Craig:** Sure you can.

**John:** “Confidently boardslides.”

**Craig:** Actually, that wasn’t it, because I had already lost faith before that point. It says, “This is Megha, 37, whose short hair and slight frame make strangers routinely confuse her for a 13-year-old.” No, they don’t. No. Nobody who’s almost 40 is confused for a 13-year-old. That’s not a thing. There are people who are almost 40 who are confused for somebody in their 20s. That can happen. 13? No. The tone is in deep question here. That really threw me for a loop. Then, yes, “Confidently boardslides down a railing, nods hello to some teens practicing flips nearby. They nod back.” Not a great ending to a scene. Nod. Nod.

**John:** Yeah, because I don’t understand, are they nodding like, “Oh, that’s cool,” or like, “Dude, you’re old.” I don’t know what the tone is here. It clearly was trying to do a tone. I also don’t know, is she skating home? Is she skating from point A to point B and she’s going through the park, or was she at the park, skating? Those are very different experiences. If it’s a 37-year-old who gets around on a skateboard, yeah, I get that, but it’s a 37-year-old who also boardslides.

**Craig:** She’s in a park, so I’m thinking that she’s just enjoying a fun afternoon of boarding. This is also an issue that there’s no reason for this, because I didn’t learn anything really, other than the fact that she can skateboard. But does she fall? Is she really good? Are people impressed? Are people not impressed? What am I supposed to deduce from this? I’ve learned nothing about the character. I’ve only learned a fact, that she can skateboard. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** We often talk about the difference between mystery and confusion. It’s not mysterious really that she’s a 37-year-old skateboarder. It’s just kind of confusing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to know about her or think about her, based on this little first chunk, which seems like we’re putting way too much emphasis on this, but again, you have to start someplace, and this was not a place that was making me feel confident to start.

**Craig:** Then she does arrive home on her skateboard, which, okay. “The windows are ringed with multicolored string lights.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to draw from that, because it doesn’t sound like it’s Christmastime. Maybe this is how they decorate their home, which is fine.

But when we get into her room, we go from her skating up to, boom, she is standing in her room, static. That’s not a good cut. When people are in motion, you generally want to go from them in motion to them in motion, or them in motion to them entering the frame. You just don’t want to pop them into, I have just teleported into a room.

More tonal issues. “Her mother, Deepa, 60s, barges in with an armful of business clothes that were stylish when she first bought them in the late ’80s,” and she starts dressing Megha. It says the following. John, I will charge you with figuring out how to direct the following. “Deepa starts draping pinstripe jackets, ruffled blouses, and pencil skirts onto Megha, who is soon engulfed in a blizzard of synthetic fabrics and shoulder pads.” How do you do that?

**John:** It’s not going to work. How do you put a pencil skirt on her? I don’t know what this is.

**Craig:** How do you do that? How do you do that?

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** You can’t. Why is Deepa’s mother saying the following? Priti, if this hurts a little bit, I apologize, but it’s going to help. We’ve all been here. This is important, because it’s her mother. Now, funny moms are a long and storied institution in films, but they still have to be mom, which means they talk to their child as if they’ve met them before. This is what Deepa says: “Try these on and we’ll see what fits you. Oh, I’m so glad I saved these. You always said you’d never wear a suit to work, but I knew that someday you would get a real job and make real money.”

Now, are there moms that make passive-aggressive comments about their kids finally getting a real job and making real money? Completely. Are there moms that sometimes think they’re complimenting their child by saying something like that, when in fact it’s slightly hurtful? Absolutely. But are there parents who say, “You always said you’d never wear a suit to work.” No. Parents don’t cite back to you things you’ve always said, “But … ” It feels a little ChatGPT to me.

**John:** I also had a question about, we are told that she is 60s, “Slightly taller and rounder than her daughter.” Is she native-born American or has she immigrated to America? I want a sense of culturally, where is she at? What accent is she using? These are all things I could make assumptions, because I’ve seen other shows, I’ve seen other movies, but you shouldn’t just have me make that assumption, because it’s a different experience if it’s coming from an immigrant background versus she was born in Austin, Texas.

**Craig:** There’s Megha’s cousin Bina, who’s fine. She’s hanging off the bed. I like that she calls Deepa “Auntie.” Deepa: “Oh, I forgot my pumps.” “Megha shakes off the clothes like a dog shaking off water.” That’s a funny thing to write. It’s a funny thing to read. It is not possible to do.

**John:** Both the clothes on and the clothes off, you can sort of see it in a Disney Channel kind of way. It’s just feeling incredibly broad. Maybe this is an incredibly broad story that we’re trying to tell here, but my guess is it’s not aiming to be that.

**Craig:** There’s some geographical things. We’ve got a drum kit and a recording setup in one corner of the room. Bina is on the bed. She’s hanging off of the bed. I don’t know quite what that means, backwards or just sitting on the bed?

**John:** Head hanging off maybe.

**Craig:** Head hanging off. “Looks up from her phone, bursts out laughing,” has a little exchange. Megha says, “I feel like a pomegranate.” “Bina does a rimshot on the drum kit.” How’d she get over there?

**John:** Talented long arms. Again, tone. It’s incredibly broad you’re going there.

**Craig:** Then Bina seems cool. Bina seems like she’s on Megha’s side. She’s like, oh my god, “Auntie, you’re going to drown her. Polyester doesn’t breathe.” Bina’s like, yeah, don’t wear any of that. Then Megha’s like, “Maybe I won’t wear anything,” ha ha ha. Then Bina says, “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression.” Wait, now who’s Bina now? Did she not get that that’s a cheeky comment?

Now, clearly, Megha is going to be involved in some sort of job that is sex-work-adjacent here, because that’s what is being implied, that she’s going to be working two jobs, like a straight one and a sexy one. But why is Bina saying, “Stop!” “Stop! You need clothes! You need to make a good first impression,” reminds me of Patton Oswalt talking about Germans and their lack of a sense of humor, like they don’t understand humor, and so they just take it very, very literally. I’m confused by these characters.

**John:** I’m mostly confused that they’re the ages that they are.

**Craig:** They’re kind of weirdly old for this.

**John:** They’re kind of weirdly old. If these were 23-year-olds, yeah, I could kind of see that, but they’re not. She’s living at home. She’s 37 years old. Something has gone wrong in her life or very strangely in her life that this is her situation. By the end of Page 2, I guess I need to know more about that rather than about clothes, because there’s some fundamental premise thing I’m missing here. By the end of Page 2, I don’t know anything about Megha. I want to, but I don’t know it.

**Craig:** I would say, Priti, that when we get to Page 3, what I think you really need to work on in a fundamental way is dialog, because Daniel and Megha are both speaking in a kind of super textual way. Everything that they’re thinking, they’re saying. There’s no sense of complexity. They’re just announcing things. It just feels very wooden, and I don’t want it to be. I want there to be subtext. I want there to be feelings. I want there to be emotions. I want them to be concealing things, hiding, playing, flirting, arguing.

**John:** Agendas.

**Craig:** Agendas, passive-aggressive, making choices to not complain about something that someone just said that’s a little off, anything that you can do there. This is all super textual. I think that you’ve got some dialog issues you need to work out. You may have full, great understanding of these characters, but in the execution, we’re not getting any of it. I would focus my work on that, Priti. Great title though, Megha Genesis.

**John:** I really do like it.

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**John:** We’re inclined to like anything that reminds us of Megana Rao, our beloved producer.

**Craig:** Do you think that Megha’s pronounced MAY-guh, because it’s like Sega Genesis?

**John:** I think the title is MAY-guh Genesis. That would make the most sense.

**Craig:** MAY-guh, yeah, I think that makes more… Who knows? Maybe it’s not. But it’s a great title either way. Love that.

**John:** I love it. Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Nobody puts baby in a corner, and no one can put Megha in a box. In this comedy series, a former academic turned adventurer attempts to live the corporate life and rebel against it at the same time, all while acting as a catalyst for change for everyone around her.”

**John:** That’s not what I got off these pages.

**Craig:** Deeply, deeply confused. What was the sexy stuff? What was that? I’m so confused. Adventurer?

**John:** Academic turned adventurer. Let’s say that she was top of her class, but then she just ran around the world and just lived her 20s and 30s just crazy. She was everywhere, she was doing everything, and now she’s come back home and she’s trying to make a start of it. Great. These were not the pages to get me into that story.

**Craig:** No, nor was there any indication that there was anything adventuresome about her whatsoever.

**John:** She had a skateboard.

**Craig:** That’s not high up on the list of things that adventurers do. If she’s an Indiana Jones roaming the world, that’s a very specific kind of person. That’s an adrenaline junkie. That’s somebody who’s faced danger and death. That’s somebody who seeks out the exotic and extreme. She’s just a 37-year-old skateboarder, and then she’s just letting her mom throw clothes at her, and then she’s just having a boring Zoom. I don’t understand it.

**John:** Adventure may not mean Indiana Jones. It could mean just something like Instagram influencers before their time. She’s always just going from the next place to the next place and never having a normal job. Sure, great. Or maybe she worked in the Peace Corps. That’s not what we’re getting here. If you’re going to use a voiceover, which you are right now, let that help understand what her perspective is and why she’s a 37-year-old who seems to be just starting out.

**Craig:** Lots of issues there. Keep going. Keep working at it. Address some fundamentals. I think that’s step one here. I think step one: dialog.

**John:** Dialog, agreed.

**Craig:** Dialog.

**John:** Our third and final Three Page Challenge is Thoughts and Prayers by Eric Hunsley.

**Craig:** Good title.

**John:** Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** In an amphitheater during a summer evening concert, a concertgoer, Paulie, and their companion, Dawn, prepare for a picnic. Simultaneously, a clarinetist revealed to also be Paulie tunes up his instrument backstage. However, up in the lighting grid, a gunman, revealed to be yet another Paulie, assembles a rifle. The musician notices the gunman pointing the rifle down at him and freezes, and then Paulie wakes up out of the dream with Dawn sound asleep next to him.

**John:** On our first page here, Thoughts and Prayers, Episode One, so this is meant to be part of a series. We have a full grid of information with email address and phone numbers and things like that. Sure, but no one’s going to be sending you a postcard, so email address is probably fine here. Phone number used to be important. When Craig and I were starting, we didn’t have email necessarily, so people would call you. I got cold calls from producers who had read stuff. Sure. That doesn’t happen anymore. Email’s plenty fine.

**Craig:** You could get a text. People do like texting.

**John:** People do like texting. If you can text, you can email. But yeah, you can get a text.

**Craig:** The kids love texting.

**John:** They do love texting. Craig, I had to read this twice, but on second reading, I did actually quite appreciate what was going on here. I had some very specific issues and concerns, but I liked a lot of what I saw here. The thing I would want to point out is, of all these Three Page Challenges, we’ve had some good use of white space. The pages have looked nice, and so I want to call it out for all three of these entries.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It took me a bit. I think it would take everyone a bit. Then again, what I find is, if there’s a little bit of difficulty in, let’s say, Page 1… I don’t know if you had the same feeling. It was just a concertgoer off-screen. That was a tough one. I was like, what’s happening in my POV? I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I have a suggestion for how to mitigate that, perhaps. If you get to a place – and we do, on Page 2 and 3 – that makes you go, “Oh-”

**John:** “I see what you’re doing here.”

**Craig:** “… that’s interesting,” then all is forgiven. If you don’t, nothing’s forgiven. In this case, we did get to something interesting and provocative and very bait on the hook that justified a little bit of the trickiness at the beginning. Where did you start to get yourself a little bit lost?

**John:** Right at the very start, I was nervous, as we were moving into the POVs, but also there’s some repetition of words that don’t help you. “POV – concertgoer strolling on the lawn towards the stage.” We were strolling a few paces behind Dawn Berenger. The double strolling is not helping you there.

**Craig:** Double stroll.

**John:** This relies a lot on POV, but then I felt like we were popping in and out of it in ways that were not helpful. We could’ve lost the bottom half of this first scene. “How’s this?” Male voice, “Perfect.” She lays out the quilt on the grass. We don’t go in for that first matching of actions. They just go right to the clarinetist, because we’re about to set this routine where we see similar actions happening in all these places, and we’re starting to realize there’s some pattern thing happening here that’s going to be interesting. But I didn’t need it on Page 1.

**Craig:** Here’s my suggestion. It’s just food for thought, because I think it would help what you’re doing. It’s not to change what you’re doing, but to help it. That is to not not see our concertgoer, but rather to not see his face. You’re allowed to do that. We’re walking a few paces behind Dawn Berenger, 40s, and her date. We can’t yet see his face. She’s holding a picnic basket, stops, turns, hands the basket to him. This looks good. You don’t need him to say anything other than, “Perfect.” We don’t need, “Earth to Paulie. We’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”

“The concertgoer’s POV scans the lawn, taking in the crowd.” If that’s meant to be purposeful, it’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do. It’s just going to be an unrooted, information-less POV scan. What you want instead, I think, is to be behind him and note that he’s turning his head as if scanning the crowd, and then, “Paulie, we’re gonna eat?” “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” Then the picnic basket hingey bit I think would work a little bit better because-

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** … there’s a human there. It’s not just a nobody. It’s not a POV camera, which is a very specific science fictiony way of doing stuff.

**John:** Agreed. You know that I was a clarinetist.

**Craig:** As was I.

**John:** We talked about this on an earlier show. Craig, you do not swab a clarinet before you put it together to play it. You swab at the end of a performance to get all the spit and the stuff out.

**Craig:** Correct. You’ve got your little spit valve, and then you do your cleaning. What you do before, maybe you put a new reed on, you put a little-

**John:** Cork grease is what I was thinking would be a better choice for what he could be doing, because as you’re assembling this thing, you have this little thing sort of like ChapStick that you’re putting on the corks to put it together.

**Craig:** I can smell it now. That white goop, I can smell it. It’s pungent.

**John:** Most people are not going to know that you don’t swab a clarinet before you put it together, but enough people will get that right. It’s going to work great. It actually makes more sense with what you’re trying to set up and do here-

**Craig:** I completely agree.

**John:** … in terms of putting a gun together.

**Craig:** Yeah, because he’s got ammunition cartridges, and maybe he’s putting rounds into a clip. Similarly, a professional clarinetist would have a few reeds. They would select one. They would put it in the mouthpiece, tighten the clamps. There’s lots of good stuff.

**John:** Craig, I have so many sense memories of what it is like, what a new reed tastes like, how dry it is, how it pulls the saliva out of your mouth.

**Craig:** Sticks on your tongue. I also have memories of what an old reed looks like, all chipped at the end like a broken fingernail.

**John:** Absolutely. You’re always picking which of the reeds is going to be good enough, because if a reed is too firm, it’s not going to work right. You start with really soft 1 reeds and you move up to 2s and 3s. It’s a whole thing.

**Craig:** I assume that you, like me, we couldn’t afford lots of reeds. My parents would dole reeds out like I was asking for a kidney. Assembling the mouthpiece, getting it ready, all that, the mouthpiece is the biggest issue. Cork grease to put the pieces together of the body of the clarinet. You got your two pieces, and then you got your mouthpiece going in the top, but the mouthpiece gets the most attention.

**John:** 100%. These are all things, small little changes, but I would say overall, I was digging this. I was a little disappointed it ended in a dream.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Because I was thinking this is going to be some sort of cool heisty thing. For all we know, then the whole sequence continues beyond this and it actually is more than this, but we have not taken a look at the log line. I would say overall, I was digging these pages. I thought they were a nice use of the reader’s attention and really rewarding the close reading of lines.

**Craig:** I completely agree. My hope – and Drew’s about to let us know – is that it’s not just a dream, and that there is something weird going on where Paulie is three different people and he’s gone through a reverse cloning machine or something. I don’t know. I guess it’s probably time to find out.

**John:** Drew, tell us the log line.

**Drew:** “Having just closed the case of a mass shooting in his community, a police investigator must now track down a new threat. Pro-gun legislators have become targets of a serial shooter who, rather than going after the politicians themselves, hunt down their loved ones.”

**John:** Okay, so it’s not a science fictiony kind of premise. It literally was just the stress of it was making him feel this thing.

**Craig:** I’m not as big of a fan of this now, and here’s why. In a weird way, Eric, you’re kind of a victim of how interesting these three pages are. It’s such an interesting concept that you want it to be relevant beyond just, “I’m anxious about mass shootings.” Totally. Many of us are, and certainly, police officers and detectives, law enforcement officers who are charged with protecting us from these things or stopping them or finding the people who perpetrated them are even more anxious. But this is so specific and science fictiony that it’s going to be hard to just go into a straight-up political thriller.

**John:** Yeah, it is. I do wonder if Eric has written a cool short film that just wants to be its own thing, and it’s not the right way into the story he wants to tell, because I like the log line, I like these pages, I don’t think they’re the right combination is my guess.

**Craig:** Also, you don’t suck on the reed. You moisten it.

**John:** You moisten it.

**Craig:** You moisten the reed.

**John:** You let it plump up in your saliva.

**Craig:** You gotta get it soft. This has become more of a clarinet discussion.

**John:** It basically has become a clarinet discussion. But also, you do swab out your clarinet at the end of a session, but during the time, during a long rehearsal, you are also sucking the spit back in, which is really gross, but you gotta do it.

**Craig:** You just gotta do it. One last thing. This is just a formatting thing. Typically, until you’re in production, you don’t need to put scene numbers on your scenes.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** But if you do want to put scene numbers on your scenes, that’s fine. You just want them to be consecutive at that point, because on Page 3, we go from Scene A to Scene 13, which implies that scenes have been omitted, which again is fine, but that’s really only relevant to production. Typically, in production, it would say “Scenes 9 to 12 omitted.” Not particularly useful here, and certainly not a good idea, if you do include them, to have them be non-consecutive.

**John:** I will also say that I’m looking now, it’s Episode 1, so this is part of a series. As a series, this moment works a little differently than as a feature, because if this were the opening sequence to a feature film, I’d be like, mm. With a series, I can imagine this kind of thing maybe playing a little bit better, but-

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know.

**John:** Not for you?

**Craig:** No. It’s a tone thing. It’s giving us a big tone hit. Any time you have a dream where someone wakes up… It’s very useful to do. People have fascinating dreams. I have no problem showing a dream that somebody has, and then they wake up. I particularly appreciate that Paulie didn’t gasp awake. Thank you.

But typically, we know something about the person before, so that we understand a little bit more or we can connect with them a little bit more and their anxiety as they’re in the dream space. We also probably get a sense that it is a dream space. It’s just to meet somebody like this and have it be so…

Also, here’s the other issue. Dreams are not this cinematic. Dreams don’t cut perfectly between three different perspectives. They certainly don’t have weird POVs and then third-person views layering and cutting back and forth like that amongst the same person. It just doesn’t seem like a dream.

**John:** It isn’t dreamy, no.

**Craig:** It seems too real.

**John:** Those are our Three Page Challenges. Thank you to everybody who wrote in. Thank you to these writers, but also everyone else who wrote in with their pages to take a look at. If you have three pages you want us to possibly examine on a future episode, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf, and it goes into the inbox. If you’re curious about doing this for us, please submit. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Submit.

**John:** Submit. My One Cool Thing is a product I bought off of Instagram. I thought it was really well done. It’s called Delve Deck. It’s by a company called Boardwalk. I think I got this ad served to me by Instagram because I do Writer Emergency Pack, and we buy Instagram ads for Writer Emergency Pack, so the algorithm just always serves me things that are kind of like Writer Emergency Pack.

In this case, Delve Deck is a bunch of conversation starters. You pull a card, and it has a single question on it that you can randomly choose. It might be for a party. I was thinking it could also be for a writers’ room. I may send one of these with my kid, who’s going to be a summer camp counselor, because it feels really great for talking to a bunch of kids about-

**Craig:** Icebreaker.

**John:** Icebreaker kind of things. Nicely made. It’s a little LA-based company. If you’re curious about it, we’ll put a link in the show notes to Delve Deck.

**Craig:** “Have you ever murdered someone?”

**John:** The answer is no, but I did stop and think about that.

**Craig:** Next card.

**John:** I want to make sure that I got the answer right. I will say our bonus segment is going to be three of the cards that I pulled out of there randomly, genuinely randomly.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’ll answer those questions.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is a restaurant. I don’t normally do restaurant reviews. I’m always a little nervous that if I talk about a restaurant on our podcast, we’re suddenly going to start getting emails from restaurant promoters, because we sure get a lot of emails from publicity people trying to get people on our show. We’re just not that kind of show, John. That’s not what we do.

**John:** Not good.

**Craig:** That said, I did visit a restaurant here in Vancouver that I thought was so delightful and interesting. Have you ever been to a restaurant that was specifically Afghan cuisine?

**John:** I have not. That is one of our goals for 2024 is to try three new cuisines, so Afghan would be a good choice.

**Craig:** I have never myself been to a specifically Afghan restaurant. Afghan cuisine, as explained by the owner, is kind of an interesting blend of where Afghanistan sits. It’s somewhat Mediterranean. It’s somewhat influenced by Indian. It’s somewhat influenced by more Eastern Asian. It’s got a lot of things going on. This particular restaurant is called Zarak, obviously here in Vancouver, where I’m currently staying. It is family-owned. I thought it was fantastic. Really, really good. One of the best old-fashioneds I’ve ever had-

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** … which is saying something, because I’ve had them everywhere. The cuisine was outstanding. Just a really, really good time. It’s one of those things where, at 52 and living in Los Angeles, you think, I’ve eaten everything. No, I hadn’t. It wasn’t like there was anything that was served where I was like, “What is this?” But the specific way that Afghan cuisine is prepared I thought was really delicious. If you are in the Vancouver area and you’re interested in trying something new, or if you are already a fan of Afghan cuisine, check out Zarak, Z-A-R-A-K.

**John:** Excellent. I do want to make it up to Vancouver at some point while you’re up there shooting. If I do make it up there-

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** … I’ll hit the restaurant.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Zarak.

**Craig:** Zarak.

**John:** Love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matt Davis. 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 newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments and advance warnings when we are going to try to do another Three Page Challenge, so sign up there. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** We’re here on our bonus segment. Thank you to our premium members who make these bonus segments possible, and the rest of the show. As I said in the One Cool Things, I got this thing called a Delve Deck. I’ve pulled three cards out of here, and we’re going to just try to answer these questions. I looked at them earlier on, so I have some answers, but Craig, you’re good at thinking off the top of your head.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** First question. Drew, I want to hear your answers to this too.

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** “If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer, who and what would you ask?”

**Craig:** Wow. If you could ask any living person a question and be assured a true answer? Oh, my.

**John:** This feels a little bit like Speak with the Dead, the spell in Dungeons and Dragons, except it has to be for a living person, and they are compelled to tell you a true answer to that one question. I think there’s different classes of questions you might want to ask. Some cases, there’s one person who knows the truth, and you could ask that one person the truth and actually finally know the answer. Who killed JonBenet Ramsey, I’d want to ask John Ramsey, because he might know, or just know that the family was not involved at all. I might ask OJ Simpson.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t waste that one. He already wrote a book called-

**John:** If I Did It. The hypotheticals there. There’s another class of questions, like, what does this person truly think, truly believe? Craig, what are you thinking? Of living people, who would you want to ask a question of?

**Craig:** That’s actually a very difficult proposition, because there are certain people who might have information that is valuable, but just because they tell me doesn’t mean anyone else would know or believe me or believe that they told me that. If there were a way for me to capture, for instance, on camera, Donald Trump answering truly, do you really think that you were a good president, although he probably does.

**John:** He probably does.

**Craig:** He probably does. He probably does.

**John:** I guess focusing on something that is more objectively true, like how many abortions have you paid for, something like that, which you could capture.

**Craig:** That’s an interesting one, not that it would matter to the people who would vote for him.

**John:** It wouldn’t matter.

**Craig:** Nothing matters to them.

**John:** Literally nothing matters [crosstalk 01:07:58].

**Craig:** Literally nothing matters. I might be interested, I suppose, to ask, let’s say, I’d go with Barack Obama, because I feel like he would give a very thorough answer.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** I would ask Barack Obama, do we have solid evidence of intelligent life on other planets, and what is the nature of that evidence?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know.

**John:** He’s gotta know.

**Craig:** He’s gotta know, right?

**John:** The argument that he doesn’t know is that Trump then would also know, and Trump can’t be quiet about anything.

**Craig:** I think they might’ve just hidden it from him. I feel like there’s so much stuff they just were like, “Let’s not tell him.”

**John:** Drew, what question would you ask, and of whom?

**Drew:** This is tough, because I feel like the ones that are popping in my head… What’s nice about John Ramsey or OJ Simpson is you would probably get a confession, which would do some good, whereas a lot of them, someone might just be like, “No, I had nothing to do with that,” and then it’s a waste. I might go for family drama. Maybe I would ask one of my parents-

**Craig:** If they really love you?

**Drew:** If they really love me, yeah. No, that one’s too close. Your parents especially are people you don’t have the whole picture of. You just get the pieces. I don’t know, I’d go for gossip, like, did you ever cheat on each other or something.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. Drew, you’re so dark.

**John:** I do like it though. I do like it.

**Craig:** I like it too.

**John:** Next question. What is something you’re still angry about?

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Oh, boy.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Craig has had some anger and umbrage over the years.

**Craig:** Nothing but.

**John:** Nothing but. I would say that in my personal and professional life, I don’t actually have a lot that I’m actively angry about. I don’t ruminate about past wrongs that were done to me often, or if that does happen, at least I’m not able to think of them now. I tend to be angrier on behalf of other people or angry on behalf of society. I’m angry about things that happened that I don’t feel have been adequately adjusted for.

**Craig:** There’s so much that I’m still angry about. What, among the many things, is most notable from all the things I’m still angry about, hard to say. I could go for small things and big things. I guess on a big scale, I am still so angry about Andrew Wakefield and his stupid, fraudulent, non-study study that ignited a bonfire of anti-vaccine rhetoric. That guy, I don’t believe in Hell, but if I did… The misery and ruin that he has caused, and the fact that he is so unrepentant and so stupidly, stubbornly in self-aggrandizing denial, it’s infuriating. He’s a real villain. Apparently, I’m still angry about it, John.

**John:** Apparently, you are. I hear that in your tone. Drew, anything you’re still angry about?

**Drew:** Off that, I think COVID response, the way that everyone handled it. It might be worldwide too, because some countries just didn’t have any lockdowns. That felt like something that we could’ve handled, but instead, selfishness just seemed to win, or maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe that was something that was always going to be an endemic thing.

**John:** I do hear what you’re saying, that sense that obviously no one could know exactly all the information, but the people who weren’t listening to people who had the best sense of what to do, I’m angry on behalf of and because of our citizens at times. I get angry about January 6th and the attempt to pretend like it was no big deal or not acknowledge this thing that we saw live on television.

**Craig:** No, you didn’t.

**John:** No, you didn’t.

**Craig:** It was Antifa.

**John:** You can’t trust your eyes.

**Craig:** That was Antifa. It wasn’t like anybody pooped on the Speaker of the House’s desk. It’s all just insane. Have you guys seen the Herman Cain Awards, that Reddit?

**John:** It’s given to the person who dies of the thing they were making fun of?

**Craig:** Yeah, basically.

**John:** Is that the idea?

**Craig:** Yeah. When you say given to the person, it means every day, 12 people. But one of the things they do there is they will provide you with a slideshow, and it’s almost always Facebook posts from an individual mocking medicine, Dr. Fauci, vaccines, the fact that COVID even exists, masks, all of it, and then, inevitably, of course, they contract COVID, and then shortly thereafter, somebody else posts to say, “So-and-so has gone to the Lord.”

There’s this thing that so many of them say. It’s actually disconcerting, because it makes me feel like maybe they are NPCs, because it’s so consistent, and it’s so weird how they all use the same phrase. When they get COVID, so many of them say some version of, “I have COVID. Guys, this thing is no joke.” It’s like, you mean the thing that you’ve been turning into a joke for years, that thing that you’ve been making fun of? Now you want me to know it’s not a joke, because you have it, and you’re in the hospital? They, over and over, go, “Oh, this thing is no joke.” They’re shocked.

**John:** Related to that is people who, when they get COVID, they pretend it’s something else or it’s not really because of the COVID, it’s really because of something else. It’s like, no, it’s because of COVID. This syndrome that you have right now, you have long COVID.

**Craig:** It’s like homophobic relatives telling you that so-and-so died because of pneumonia. You’re like, “Your 31-year-old gay son died of pneumonia in 1983? Uh-huh. Sure, sure, Aunt Ethel, sure.”

**John:** If you could go back and talk some sense into your teenage self, what would you say? Third and final question. Time machine, magical, however you want to get back to give some advice-

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**John:** … to your teenage self-

**Drew:** Oh, no.

**John:** … your specific teenage self-

**Craig:** Good lord.

**John:** … what would you say? Mine I’ve talked about a couple times on the show.

**Craig:** What would you say?

**John:** Simple one is, stop playing clarinet, and instead, stick with piano, because you will play piano the rest of your life. You will not pick up that clarinet again.

**Craig:** Put the clarinet down.

**John:** Clarinet down.

**Craig:** I’m sure that your teenage self would hug you and say thank you.

**John:** Thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** It makes so much sense. Or you don’t have to go back to piano. Learn guitar. Guitar will serve you better. Then obviously, come out sooner. That’s every gay kid.

**Craig:** When did you come out? How old were you?

**John:** I was 22.

**Craig:** It was 1993?

**John:** 1992.

**Craig:** For 1992, you were pretty early there, I would say, relative to so many other people I know. Give yourself some credit.

**John:** Some credit. I could’ve come out in college. It would’ve been fine.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Could’ve. Didn’t. That’s okay. I think I would probably tell myself that despite the fact that I was not given a lot of positive feedback at home, that the positive feedback I suspected I should be getting was in fact the positive feedback I indeed should have been getting, and that I was the kid my parents insisted I was supposed to be. I wish that I knew that sooner, because it’s incredible how many years I lost as an adult to trying to get the approval of other people, when in fact that was never going to work. In the end, either you approve of yourself or you do not. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. Now, I don’t know if giving myself that advice would’ve worked. Then I would’ve hit me, just to really underscore it. “Stop hating yourself.” Punch.

**John:** “Stop hating yourself.” Punch. Let’s say you only had two or three sentences of advice. What would you actually tell young Craig?

**Craig:** At the risk of sounding sappy, “You are absolutely worthy of love and respect, and you are good enough.”

**John:** You are. There’s many men in their 40s who are still struggling with that.

**Craig:** No question. There are people in their 90s. It feels a little generic, because it seems like it’s such a problem for everybody, except when it’s you it’s not generic. Your self-loathing is incredible specific to you. That’s probably what I would do. Now, I assume that Drew is going to go back and tell his teenage self to go ask his mom if she’s been cheating on his dad, but let’s see.

**Drew:** There you go.

**Craig:** What will you do, Drew?

**Drew:** Oh, god. This one’s tough, because I feel like I was a decent teenager for a while, I was a theater kid, and then when I was a senior in high school, I became a real douchebag, because I felt like that gave me some kind of cache. I had an acid tongue, so that was helpful, especially when you’re 18. The meanest person usually wins. I still feel really, really horrible about all of that. I’m trying to boil it down to a concise thing.

**Craig:** Don’t be a douchebag.

**Drew:** Don’t be a douchebag. There’s no value in that. Carry it with you.

**Craig:** That’s one of the natural responses to not liking yourself. Suddenly, you’re mean. I’ve been mean, definitely. When you’re miserable, you’re mean. Facts.

**John:** Hurt people hurt people.

**Craig:** Hurt people hurt people.

**John:** A couple other really simple ones, just quick things younger John August should’ve known, first off, you should change your name, which I did later on, so that’s fine. That I can run. I never thought I could run, and then actually, in my 40s, I learned how to run. I was like, oh, actually I could’ve been running this whole time. That’s great. Also, to not worry about my hair. I shaved my head at 23, 22, basically the same time I came out. The best thing I ever did to stop worrying about my hair. I wasted teenage years worrying about my hair falling out. Doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I get it. Because I didn’t really start losing my hair until I was in my 20s, it wasn’t, I don’t think, as troublesome. I think if you start losing your hair when you’re in high school, it can really rattle you. It’s a fairly rarer circumstance. You’re in your 20s and you’re a guy and your hair is starting to thin out, you’re like, yeah, me and about 12 other guys. You shouldn’t blame yourself for that.

**John:** I’m not going to blame myself. But I think my advice to the younger version of myself was, it’s going to happen. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t let it occupy more thoughts than it deserves.

**Craig:** Have you, for Halloween or anything, put a wig on?

**John:** Yeah, but not a good quality wig. That’s something I would love to try to do at some point is to actually see what I would look like with really good toupees, because sometimes Instagram reels will show me, here’s this toupee thing. I’m like, “Jesus, that’s a really good toupee.”

**Craig:** I did this one episode-

**John:** For the episode you had hair.

**Craig:** I had hair, yeah. On Mythic Quest, I was playing a guy in the ’70s, and they were like, “Let’s put some hair on you.” I was like, “Fine, do it.” It was eerie. It was weird. It was weird to have hair. It felt strange. I can’t say that I was like, “Oh, I should be doing this all the time.”

**John:** Was it hot?

**Craig:** No, it wasn’t particularly hot. I sort of forgot it was there. Then when I would look in the mirror, I was like, “Whoa.” I showed a picture of it to my wife when I was in the makeup chair, but I was wearing a mask, because it was still COVID time. I’m wearing a mask, and then I’ve got hair on. I sent her the picture. She said, “Who is that?” She didn’t know it was me.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Even though you could still see from my nose up.

**John:** Drew, in your acting career, did you have to wear a lot of wigs?

**Drew:** No, I never got to wear a wig. I dyed my hair once. That’d be fun.

**John:** Alas.

**Craig:** Wig yourself. You know what? Wigs are cool, actually. I have to say, at the Emmys, there was the inevitable parade of drag queens when Drag Race wins, because they literally win every year. By the way, side note, for the television Academy, I think there should be a rule if you win five years in a row, you’re done. Mercy rule. It’s crazy. That said, still awesome to see the parade of drag queens and the wigs.

**John:** Incredible.

**Craig:** The wigs are astonishing. I was like, there’s a world where I just wear a wig.

**John:** Just wear a wig all the time.

**Craig:** I don’t pretend it’s not a wig.

**John:** Men used to wear hats.

**Craig:** Or wigs. Founding Fathers, wigs.

**John:** Wigs.

**Craig:** Wigs.

**John:** Love it. We answered our three questions here. Well done. I’ll keep this around on the desk, so if we need a future One Cool Thing topic, it’s handy.

**Craig:** Pull a card.

**John:** Pull a card. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Weekend Read 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [ROUTES](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ROUTES-three-page-challenge.pdf) by Colton W. Miller, [MEGHA GENESIS](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F09%2FMegha-Genesis-3-page-challenge.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=cb5c2802694bc33dab7ab90c86312f541b276f73dbbf856b40d410f14a3d959c) by Priti Trivedi, and [THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2023%2F12%2FThoughts-and-Prayers-2023-12-29-3PC.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=a7e4f2257027ed7a199f18d21648744ce3e1ebf5d818a06321afc61c095df938) by Eric Hunsley
* [Delve Deck](https://www.boredwalk.com/products/delve-deck-conversation-cards)
* [Zarak by Afghan Kitchen – Vancouver](https://www.zarakvancouver.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matt Davis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/629standard.mp3).

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 627 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back the OG Scriptnotes guest host, writer, director, showrunner, producer, Aline Brosh McKenna. Welcome back, Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m so excited to be here. There are so many people I need to thank. Oh, wait. That’s not the right place to do it.

**John:** You have to comment on how surprisingly heavy the award is.

**Aline:** Oh, it’s so heavy. I’m going to put it down. I’m just going to put it down.

**John:** You put it down and then pull out your notes of people you need to thank.

**Aline:** It’s going to mess up the line of my dress.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Today, I would like to talk about agency in the sense of characters and what characters are doing in our stories, but also in real-life people, about making choices about what they want to do next. Then you’ve seen in the Workflowy, we have another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we discuss stories in the news and thing about how we would adapt that into quality filmed entertainment. Aline, have you stretched? Are you ready for this?

**Aline:** I’m really ready. I’m ready for a word I’ve never heard before.

**John:** Yes, which is… How are you going to pronounce it?

**Aline:** Agentic?

**John:** Yeah, agentic. It’s a word I saw a ton that week, and so I thought we’d talk about that. It’s agency as applied to real people, kind of. It’s a word.

**Aline:** I plan to use and misuse this word liberally.

**John:** Yes. At the end of the day, it’s how you use catchphrases to fill things in. Do you remember “at the end of the day”? Do you remember when you first heard that? Because it was during our careers that that became a thing.

**Aline:** “At the end of the day” is an industry term?

**John:** I think it’s an industry term.

**Aline:** Interesting. There’s so many circling backs and touching of bases. I feel like the lingo and the jargon has gotten so much worse as the business has gotten more corporatized, because you used to go to meetings, and there could be a guy smoking a doobie, with his feet up on the couch, just talking about whatever and maybe telling you about his marriage. And now when you go in, everyone is so official. They have all of these bits of jargon that clearly came from a retreat. We once sat down with someone who, I was asking him about what they were looking for, and he said, “Regionality is something that we take into consideration when we look at our buckets.”

**John:** Oh, buckets is a thing, yeah.

**Aline:** Buckets.

**John:** Buckets is a big thing too.

**Aline:** Buckets is a big thing.

**John:** We’ll get into all of those choices that we make. Coming out of COVID, a lot of times where you’re meeting with executives, you’re still meeting with them on Zoom. The small talk is also different on Zoom, because there’s less of that getting in a room and getting comfortable. You’re still asking about what people did over the weekend or where they are, but you’re also in their homes, which is a different thing too.

**Aline:** It’s really weird. I try not to scan the background too extensively. At the beginning of the pandemic, how many bedrooms did you see?

**John:** So many.

**Aline:** So many. I was like, guys, just turn it around. Sit on the bed would be my thought, so I’m not looking at the bed. I saw a lot of beds, basements, guestrooms, pets.

**John:** Vacation homes.

**Aline:** Vacation homes, yeah.

**John:** A lot of people who moved to Colorado, never moved back, all those. In our bonus segment for premium members, Aline and I are going to talk about the experience of being empty nesters, because we have both sent our kids off to college, and so what we’re looking forward to, how we’re adjusting, how many more dogs we’re going to get, the process of becoming empty nesters.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** Now, Aline, we’re recording this on the day that Oscar nominations are due. Have you submitted your Oscar nominations already?

**Aline:** I have. I have, indeed.

**John:** For folks who are not voting in this, I thought we might just talk through what the process is, because it’s not what you would think. It’s no longer a form. It’s a website you go to. You and I are both members of the writers’ branch. Tell us about what you went through as you picked your entries.

**Aline:** It’s interesting. You vote for your branch and Best Picture. Then in the second round, you vote for everything. When you’re nominated, it really is your peers, because it’s your branch that’s choosing. I’ve heard people advocate for the technique of really listing all five or six. I think it’s five. But then some people will say that if you really love a movie and you think it doesn’t have a lot of chances of being nominated, that you just vote for one.

**John:** I would say that having filled it out earlier this afternoon, because you’re ranking them, I think that there’s much less of a problem with filling out the rest of the card. I don’t think it’s going to be as big of an issue. Fill out the rest of the card.

**Aline:** This was an extraordinarily good year.

**John:** I want to say the same thing too.

**Aline:** So many good movies. I don’t know what is the trend that resulted in this, but sometimes the awards movies can have a spinachy, homework vibe to them, and I felt like this year there were so many that were wildly enjoyable, like Holdovers and Poor Things, that were just packed with entertainment and fun. We stayed home over the break, and I really enjoyed watching all the movies that were out.

**John:** Yeah, I did too. There have been years where I feel like I’m scrounging to get those last, the fourth and fifth filled in there. No, I had multiple choices I could’ve put in as other really good movies to nominate. I’m really curious. By the time this episode comes out, people will have seen what the nominees are. There’s really good movies out there. I would just encourage people, if there’s movies that are nominated that you haven’t heard of yet, they really are good, and they really are worth seeking out.

**Aline:** I always vote for a straight-up comedy-

**John:** Same.

**Aline:** … because it’s such an under-represented genre, and as discussed many times on this show, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to write. I always find a couple of straight-up comedies that I like and throw them in there.

**John:** Comedies and also animation for me. It’s making sure that we’re recognizing the writing that goes into animation, because a lot of times, those animated films aren’t written under Guild contracts, so they’re not eligible for WGA awards, but they are eligible for other Oscars and stuff.

**Aline:** We are righting wrongs with our votes. We are really-

**John:** That’s what we’re doing.

**Aline:** … administering justice.

**John:** Another thing that happened this past week is I got an announcement for Final Draft 13. I make Highland, so of course, I don’t really use Final Draft. But you write in Final Draft, don’t you?

**Aline:** I do. I tried another program, but the people that I collaborate with revolted. It was like everybody had to get it or nobody. Nobody wanted to change. It’s the devil you know. I don’t know that I’m super up on every update. I got to say, I don’t know that I update until it becomes impossible-

**John:** Exactly.

**Aline:** … not to update. My general feeling about updates – and I’m not alone here – is I approach them with dread, as I almost always find it’s a worsening. Like this new iPhone update, where to get a GIF going, you got to go through several… I’m tapping a lot of stuff to get to my kittens with a ball of yarn.

**John:** Give Aline her kittens.

**Aline:** That’s right. I’m wondering, what does Final Draft have at this… The way I use it is so simple that-

**John:** You’re using it probably the same way you’ve used it for the last 15 years. You have a very set workflow way to do it. To the degree I sympathize with Final Draft is they are selling a product where they sell it once and then they have to convince you to keep buying the new version of it, so they have to keep adding new features to it. But the features, to my eyes, are not particularly rewarding. I would be curious if listeners write in and say, “Oh, I actually do use these new features.” Tell us about it. There are these ribbons and these cards and all these other things. Aline, you’re a person who uses this every day, but I suspect you’re not touching any of those things.

**Aline:** Ribbons, I don’t know what that is. Cards are those slug lines or slugs?

**John:** No. They actually look like little index cards. It takes your whole script and it breaks it down into little index cards.

**Aline:** Oh, right. Here’s the thing. I’ll mess that up. Whatever that is, I will change it to a point where I will then have to text my son and ask him how to undo things. You want a simple… Unless it could do stuff like tell you to get up and go for a walk or make your lunch for you, which would be amazing, because just the constant drumbeat of what’s your lunch… If Final Draft could assemble a turkey sandwich on focaccia, that is a-

**John:** Game changer.

**Aline:** … update I would pay for.

**John:** Absolutely. So many of the features that apps and Final Draft and other ones add, they feel like productive procrastination. It’s like, oh, it’s a different way to look at your thing, or it’s, oh, I’m filling out all this stuff. I’m just here to tell you that you and me and no other professional writers we know of really use all those things.

**Aline:** Are you still doing longhand?

**John:** I still write longhand for scenes, starting out, yeah.

**Aline:** You do? I know other people who do that. That’s so interesting. It’s the same if you’re doing it with a rock and a chisel. You just got to get stuff on paper, although I don’t mind things that get you in the mood. As you and I have discussed, the project of writing is a lot like getting into cold water, where you’re splashing little bits of it on your arm to acclimate yourself. What’s interesting to me is some people really, really use those features to really, really outline. For me – and I think you and I are the same – it will kind of kill my fun. I think it’s probably better for people who really love to have it all completely worked out.

**John:** Writing is one of those weird things where it’s the overall imagination to figure out what the shape of the story is, but it’s also what is literally at the cursor, what is the next letter in this word, what is the next word in this sentence. It’s that kind of work. I don’t see these tools helping you very much in doing that real, actual, granular writing work.

**Aline:** You can spend a lot of time without pages.

**John:** I guess my sympathy for Final Draft and these apps is that they’re not making any money unless they can convince you, Aline Brosh McKenna, to spend another $199 or whatever the upgrade fee is for Final Draft to buy it again. That’s a tough thing for them.

**Aline:** Don’t they do that by making the old versions unusable?

**John:** Eventually, they’ll stop updating them, so they won’t work with the new versions of Mac OS. Then you have folks who don’t upgrade their machines for forever. That’s also a challenge. It’s bad.

The main topic I wanted to get into today is actually kind of related, because it’s about taking control of your circumstances. We’ve talked before about main character energy. I think you actually had some follow-up conversations about main character energy, what protagonists in general want and what they’re doing. But usually, when you hear about agency, it’s usually about lacking agency. Aline, when someone says, “This character lacks agency,” or, “We need to see more agency out of this character,” what do they mean? What is the note behind that note?

**Aline:** An expression that I like is pulling levers, because I think that’s a very nice visual, where sometimes you’ll have a character who’s not affecting the outcome of the story enough, and so they’re serving more spice or frosting, as opposed to being the main course or being something which really moves the story forward.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot with female characters, especially in big, bombastic genre movies. You’ll sometimes find the woman who is the, quote unquote, scientist. All she does is sort of spit out a bunch of lingo. The poor lady was trying to memorize in her chair. But that’s not actually pulling the levers in the story. It’s really important.

It doesn’t mean you have to do it all the same way. Some characters can be moving a story forward by being absent or being passive in some way, although that’s probably higher degree of difficulty. But making sure that your characters are involved in every turn, so that the turns don’t happen without them, and if there is a coincidence or if there is a dropping into their lap of something, that it’s justified by what you set up before.

I don’t mind a happenstance. A lot of times when you tell your friend a great story, it’s like, “And then I turned the corner in Cost Plus and there was John August looking for a throw pillow.” Sometimes coincidences are fine, but if you find that your character is not the one controlling the puppet strings, then it’s something to look at. I’m really an advocate of making writers’ lives easier. The more active your character is in pushing things forward, the easier it’ll be.

**John:** Yeah. I think when I hear that note about, oh, it feels like the character lacks agency, it seems like they’re reacting rather than acting. They’re responding to things that other people are doing, rather than doing the things themselves. They feel like they’re corks floating along in the water and just being moved by the waves. We want to see them having the ability to make choices, and actually making those choices. We’re going to talk about the term “agentic” in just a second. Agency, I think to me, is the ability to make choices, and agentic is making those choices. You’re actually seeing the characters take that initiative, take those actions and do those things.

Before we dive into it, I do wonder whether our notions of agency tend to be a little bit gendered and culturally loaded. We have a sense of agency as the hero with the sword who runs and does the thing, whereas having agency in a story may look different for a female character in another cultural situation.

**Aline:** I think good storytelling requires protagonists who you’re engaged with, and you’re engaged with their decision tree. What’s interesting to me is sometimes we rename these things as main character energy or agentic or whatever. They’re all kind of the same thing. It goes back to our Final Draft discussion. These are elemental. You’re making bread; you need flour, water. There’s a few things you need. I think giving it another name… I’m looking forward to the first time I’m in a meeting and someone says “agentic.”

**John:** It’s going to happen.

**Aline:** I will text you instantly. I think that the reason that people will grab at certain bits of jargon like that is that you can have a shared conversation about what’s important in storytelling. The thing about main character energy is just our idea of what a main character is or does.

In Poor Things, for instance, she’s got diminished capabilities in certain ways, but she’s, I’m going to say, wildly agentic. She’s constantly going, “Oh, I want to go over there,” and it’s very disruptive to everyone around her, making big choices and big swings.

I think that’s part of what makes, to me, a story entertaining. I tend to be less entertained by movies where people are being buoyed by fate. But that’s a genre also. That’s a certain type of storytelling too. It just feels very different from what I do. I really like things that grab you with putting you on a story towrope right away.

**John:** Absolutely. This term “agentic,” I found it in a bunch of… I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these blog posts which were using this term and linking to each other talking about the term. It relates to grind and hustle culture and that sense of doing all the things to put yourself ahead and put yourself first, about taking risks professionally and socially. It also ties into that sense of seeing yourself as the protagonists in this story and not being afraid to take up space and demand attention.

**Aline:** Now, you’re talking about stories or life?

**John:** Both. As I was reading these blog posts, I was seeing people writing about themselves as characters, basically taking a look outside themselves and saying, “What should this person, who is me, do in this situation in order to achieve those goals?” Just like heroes have their “I want” songs. They’re basically giving themselves permission to sing their “I want” songs and actually pursue those things and not stop earlier in the process, not settle for mediocre or okay, but push themselves. I guess mostly, I want to talk for a little bit about real-life people, because I think our listeners are also heroes in their own stories. There’s pros and cons to acting more agentic themselves.

**Aline:** That’s where I think you do get into different sort of people feeling entitled to be more agentic than others. Something I think I’m quite annoying about when I work with women is reminding them that they just asked for permission to do something or they just apologized before they did something or they just apologized before they pitched something.

I’ll often find that men will use humor to cover very aggressive behavior. They’ll say, “I fired that agent.” They did something very aggressive, and they’re proud of it, and they think it’s funny. With women, not always, but it can be a very tortured path just toward saying what you want and going to get it. Obviously, it’s because there are social repercussions to that. It can be not a cute look.

I think you’ll find that women put a lot more exclamation points in their emails. I’m not the first person to say that. We were talking the other day about the devastatingness of when you’re texting someone and then they throw in an “xo.” I don’t know what that means to men, but for women that means I’m done now talking to you. This conversation is done. It’s an “xo.” It’s a firm hug and a kiss of farewell.

**John:** As you’re saying this, I’m thinking back to our text conversations, and how do you and I decide when that thread is done. It can be tough to know asynchronously. I don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I’m doing, whether we have the moments to really engage in that. Finding a nice way to close a text conversation can be challenging. But I agree with you that it is often, there’s a gender and a power level aspect of that. You just don’t know, not even permission, but you don’t even know how it’s going to be received if you clearly state what it is you would like.

**Aline:** You have to be, I don’t know if aggressive is the right word, but you have to be forthright to get anything. You wouldn’t go up to the counter of In-N-Out and be like, “I was thinking, I don’t have to have it. It would be nice. I don’t totally have to have it. I could have something else. I do have a car, so I could go somewhere else, but it would be nice to have a burger. I would love cheese on that. If you don’t have cheese, we don’t need to do… ” That is something that women are taught, not directly take a class in that, but we’re definitely taught to lubricate our asks.

I do think that I modeled myself in certain respects on my father, my brother, and my mom is French. She does not need to lubricate her asks, for sure. I think I modeled myself on a lot more forthrightness. The combination of French and Israeli is two of the most forthright folks. But I do find that women, I’m often saying to them, you don’t need to ask for permission to specifically take up space.

**John:** A classic tenet of this, being agentic, is asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Basically, assume a yes, and also don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you hear no, welcome the rejections, basically. One of the guys here talks about having a Google Doc basically, like, “Here’s all the people who’ve said no to me,” and here’s the rejections you’ve gotten, and taking those as a mark of like, then you actually asked. You actually did. You went up, put yourself out there to ask those questions.

**Aline:** There’s something I’m fascinated with, which is, I think, a spin on agentic, which is I know several people – and they’re men – who are powerful by virtue of not engaging, so they won’t answer the text or they won’t answer the email or they’ll let it slide. I think one time somebody said to me, “Aline, you don’t have to hit every tennis ball back over the net. You’re making yourself very tired doing that.”

I do think if you’re following up with everything, if you’re answering every email, there is a low status to that in a funny way. If you’re just saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I’m not interested in that,” I feel like you can be too forthright and add an extra level of communication. I’ve been working on letting things slide a little bit more and not responding to absolutely everything and being a little less scrupulous about that. I think there’s a funny way where that is agentic in a way.

**John:** It is.

**Aline:** You don’t have to. I shared an office with a male writer who was really helpful with me. One time I called somebody, and I thought maybe I hadn’t said the right thing. Then I was like, “I’m going to call him back and say, ‘I didn’t mean this, but I could mean that. I’m sorry I said this, but really,'” da da da blah and da da da. He was like, “Just stop. There’s a lot of power in just stopping.” It’s interesting. I think it’s more about knowing what your goal is and what the steps are to get it, as opposed to resolving to just talk all the time.

**John:** Let’s talk about strategy here. You and I both have assistants. Part of the reason why we’re not responding to every email is because we have assistants who filter stuff down to us. As something becomes important, Drew will tell me, “Oh, this is a thing we actually need to pay attention to.” But I’m not worried about every bit of schedule and the 19 times to reset a meeting. The time when Drew was off on his honeymoon, and I suddenly had to do a bunch of that stuff, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually really annoying.” I’m glad to have Drew there.

What I do see some of these people who are pitching agentic talking about is, really think about how to be a good assistant to yourself. If you had a great assistant, what would that assistant be doing for you? How would they be filtering stuff down? Amy, my daughter, was just home over the Christmas holiday, and she needed to call and cancel this appointment she had, and she’s like, “Daddy, can you just do it?”

**Aline:** Yeah, it stresses her out.

**John:** It stresses her out. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s like, “It’s weird. I could totally do it for a friend, but I can’t do it for myself.” That’s I think the skill you have to learn is just pretend you are your own assistant and just do the thing.

**Aline:** Man, my assistant, the wonderful Kari O’Hara, happens to be here with me, sitting next to Drew. Big plug for Kari. What’s up? High five. One thing I do is, when I tell assistants that I may not be flowery in my responses, because I do think they’re accustomed to women who are like… If she’s saying, “Do you want to do coffee or lunch?” I think they’re accustomed to women saying, “Oh, thank you so much for asking. Coffee would be great,” blah blah blah. Sometimes I’ll just text back, “No lunch?” or, “Lunch?” or, “No coffee?” One time we ordered lunch in the writers’ room and someone’s lunch was missing. I was in the middle of running the room and talking, so the only words I managed to squeak out were, “Phoebe no lunch.” Then we called the group text Phoebe No Lunch.

One of the things is to try not to lard up all your communications with… Again, I’m back to lubricant. I don’t know what’s happening this morning. Just to be able to find people that you can communicate with directly and simply and that they don’t need everything to be sprayed with cologne before they receive it. I think for women, that’s…

As you get older as a woman and you start to drift towards battleax, which is a wonderful place that I hope to be eventually, where you feel like after a certain age… This is where women, I think, beat men. A really old woman. My mom’s 93. She can say and do whatever she wants. She can ask however she wants. We’re all drifting past that, whereas I think men are going to fall into cranky old man waving a cane.

But I think one of the things about growing up as a lady is learning to get what you want and using softer tactics if you need to, but then also finding people to work with who are comfortable with your directness, so that you’re not always apologizing to the furniture.

**John:** Absolutely. I cherry-picked a bunch of little strategies, different blog posts I’ve listed here. Evie Cottrell has a bunch of them. We’ll put a link in the show notes to them. One of them is, put a big premium on doing something now rather than later, so don’t leave enough time for motivation to fade, which seems like smart advice for writers, but also for anybody who just needs to get some stuff done. My One Cool Thing actually has a little bit more about that. That sense of, “Oh, there’s going to be a better place or time. I’m not ready for it yet.” Waiting is generally not helpful for almost anybody.

**Aline:** My husband has a thing, and I’m sure he got it from a business book or something. But there’s a principle called now, soon, later. It’s things you need to do right away, things you can do soon, and things you can do later. It sounds so simple. But sometimes, breaking that into like, “Hey, if I want to make a hair appointment for Thursday, I got to do that now. Then I need to call the upholsterer. I could do that later.” Just really breaking those down in your brain.

I do think there’s a value sometimes in taking a second and making sure. I’m the king of the random text, of the random reach-out. If anything, I’ve tried to take a breath before I do that and make sure it’s an important communication, especially if I’m reaching out to someone really busy. Then my other thing is, I really used to send people a lot of TikToks, and I’ve lately decided that I’m just sending them homework, unless I write below it. Can’t send a naked TikTok anymore. You have to say, “John, I’m sending you this because it’s about the word agentic.” Don’t just send me a cold TikTok.

**John:** Context.

**Aline:** I’m the worst offender with those, but I’ve just realized that you’re going to… If you’re going to send me a reel, which is obviously a TikTok that was from four weeks ago, you got to tell me why you’re sending it to me.

**John:** That’s fair, because you’ve been on the receiving end of those reels/TikToks. You got pulled out of whatever thought train you were in, because Aline’s texting me, there must be something important. And no. It’s a very cute chihuahua, but it’s not relevant.

Reaching out to people is actually part of the set of advice, which is figuring out what you need and figuring out who can help you get it and then asking for it. Those are things that are challenging to do, that you feel like there’s power imbalances. These agentic people will tell you, just get over your fear of doing that, because you can get no answer, you can get a no, but you’re actually not going to be burning things as much as you suspect you will.

**Aline:** I would say, because we’re almost all communicating now electronically – a lot of people are still in letter-writing age – I think it’s okay to send an email that goes, “Hey John, so-and-so is in town and wants to know if you want to have dinner,” bloop. People still send things with lots and lots of words in it. I always think of Craig’s thing of like, the return key is your friend. Also, I think because of texts, when people get to emails, they really roll out the folderol.

**John:** Short emails are fine. Love them.

**Aline:** Delightful.

**John:** Delightful.

**Aline:** Don’t need a greeting.

**John:** “Hey.”

**Aline:** “Yo.”

**John:** Cut the first two paragraphs. Go right into the heart of it. As I said before about thriving on rejection, so writing down those rejections. Apply for jobs you don’t think you’ll get, because at least you’ll actually have experience of what it is like to interview for those places. Rejections are evidence that you’re actually exploring and trying things.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about luck. The way this blog post was phrasing it was to, “increase your surface area for serendipity,” which is putting more places out there where people can find you and recognize, like, “Oh, that’s a good idea. This is a smart writer.” We talk about how you’ve written that script that’s fantastic. No one is going to read that script unless you put that out there in the world for people to read. The same applies for any other profession you’re doing. If you’re a coder, an artist, whatever, you have to put stuff out there so people can see, and see, oh, this is a person who knows what they’re doing.

**Aline:** For certain. You have to eat some embarrassment. My older son is in the workplace. I think sending a cold email or a cold call or reaching out to someone you don’t know that well, that might be a help. I think that’s really hard when you’re young, because it feels like you don’t have the portfolio. You’re not standing in the right shoes. I remember that being the hardest thing. When you get more experienced and people are like, “I know who John August is, so if he’s emailing me about this thing… ” You’re going to be treated with certain respect. It’s eating the embarrassment of someone going, “Who is this?” or, “Don’t send this to me.”

One time early on in my career, really early on, my agent was someone that I had been friends with, and I didn’t really understand the lines between friend and work friend. Those can be hard to figure out. I had found a piece of material that I thought was really interesting, and I called him on the weekend. Again, it was someone that I was friends with, so I thought that was okay. I called him on the weekend, and I said, “Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?” He was really angry. He was really angry. He said, “How dare you call me on the weekend when I’m home with my family and talk to me about work?”

You know when something embarrassing happens, your body floods with adrenaline, your brain starts printing Polaroids? I can remember where I was sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I had bought at the flea market, the Pasadena City College Flea Market, and painted myself. I can remember where I was sitting. I was so deeply humiliated that I had disrupted him and that I didn’t know what rule.

What I did and what I do a lot with uncomfortable work things is I convert it into something funny. I tend to save those things up as little stories to then tell other people. That is the way that I pop the pimple on my embarrassment.

You’re going to do that when you’re young. You’re going to go somewhere. That’s why every time, when you’re a young person, it’s like, “We’re going to be networking,” then you just have a clenching of the sphincter, because it just sounds like it’s going to be awful. You will have awful interactions, but you might meet your best friend after something where you tried to pitch yourself to someone.

I had, when I was young, a couple things where someone thought I was someone else. I just recently told her this story. I once met with a producer. We were walking in, and the executive said, “Are you ready for this meeting?” The gentleman said, “I’m always ready for a meeting with my favorite writer, Jenny Bicks.” Then we all stood there, frozen. Then the poor executive had to say, “This is actually not Jenny Bicks.” I then had to have a meeting with someone who very clearly didn’t really know who I was, probably hadn’t read my stuff. Again, got to eat embarrassment and just go. It’s like, “You know what? This is still an opportunity. This is still a great producer. Maybe something will come from it.” My second meeting with that gentleman, by the way, he was wearing a wet bathing suit. Continue.

**John:** Oh, good lord. Talk about lines being transgressed. He felt no shame.

**Aline:** None.

**John:** You felt shame about your moment there. Going back to your story of you called the executive on the weekend and realized, oh, I crossed a boundary there that I shouldn’t have crossed, yes, you hold onto those moments, not because you want to fixate and ruminate them, because as a writer, you actually can use them. While it did not directly lead to any scene in Devil Wears Prada-

**Aline:** Yeah, of course.

**John:** … that experience is something that carries through to her character.

**Aline:** Prada was so resonant for me, because I had completely failed as a magazine writer. I remember calling New York Woman with my then-partner. I was trying to leave a message, a query message, but it kept beeping and beeping and cutting us off. It was like, “Hi, we’re so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’re really excited to write for New York Woman, because we think,” beep.

**John:** Oh, no.

**Aline:** It’s like, do you call back? Do you call back? And if you call back, are you starting from scratch? What do you do? Are you starting from scratch, or are you saying, “Sorry, I think I got cut off. I’m Aline, and I wanted to,” and then I got cut off again.

**John:** You’re in the swinger state at this point.

**Aline:** I then wanted to abandon ship, but I thought that’s worse.

**John:** She changed her name so they could never track her down again.

**Aline:** This editor from New York Woman, wherever you are, I’m really sorry for the six half-tries that I left on your machine. But again, trying to laugh about the rejections. I think even if you’re taking a more serious tact to it, yeah, it’s at bats, man. The best baseball player… What’s a great baseball average? 380. Oh, wow, John’s even worse than I am. You guys? What’s good? Oh, wow. We’re in a show biz room. There’s not a person in here.

**John:** As established in last episode, baseball is not my thing. I will guess basketball.

**Aline:** I think high 300s is a good baseball, which is you failed over 70% of the time.

**John:** We’ll wrap up this topic with-

**Aline:** 60%. Keep going.

**John:** Wrap up on a… I love a good metaphor. This was called the moat of low status. Cate Hall has a blog post about it. She says when learning a new skillset, it requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time in which you are actually bad at a thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side, but also because it gives anybody who can cross it a real advantage. Sometimes, these really awkward moments, it’s recognizing, this is the moat, I’m in the moat. It’s going to suck, and you’re going to be floundering and half drowning. When you get to the other side, you’re like, oh, you actually did cross over. In some ways, I feel like we always talk about the wall around Hollywood or breaking in, but really it’s swimming across that moat is really I think a better way of thinking about what it’s like to enter into this industry.

**Aline:** That’s where relationships really are helpful. When you and I met, I think I was pregnant or I just had a baby. It was 20 years ago. You are definitely ahead of me in terms of getting rewrites and talking to people about those things. I can remember conversations. That was not that long before the strike. I can remember I was having conversations where I would say to you, “How do you do this?” or, “How do you initiate that?” I do that for people too. I always encourage them to call me, because sometimes it’s learning how to make that approach or how to dig yourself out of whatever hole. That’s why I think it’s still important to live here, honestly, more than anything else, is just not to meet…

Young people often think they’re here to meet the important folks. You’re not. You’re there to meet your peers, Drew and Kari sitting on a couch later when we ask them for jobs. It’s important to create those things, so that you can call people who are on and about your level. A step below, a step above are the most helpful people, because they’ll also remember what that was like, getting an agent, taking meetings with agents, what was a good meeting, what wasn’t, is this person good or not. To me, the little floats across the moat are these relationships. I treasure those peer relationships that I had when I was a young person so much.

**John:** It’s also important to remember that we swam across the moat in a different era, and the moat has changed. That’s why it’s important to have people who are in the same struggle that you’re in.

**Aline:** That’s right. What I do now when young people come to town, they want to talk to me, is I get the assistants together in my office and their friends to talk to them, because if you want to know how to break in in 1991, I can really help you if you got a time travel machine, but it’s so, so different now. It’s much more useful for young people to find other young people than to talk to me, because I just have different moats. The moats never end. I think it’s also important to say that the moats never end.

I was talking to someone who has a movie in contention in the awards season. What always happens is it coalesces around a couple things. It’s like the Oppenheimer bulldozer is coming, and so for other movies, even though they’re in this amazing conversation and they’re doing panels and events, walking through those things knowing you’re not going to win anything is dispiriting. I was trying to say to this person, “You’re doing great,” but they were feeling bad. They were feeling like they were in a moat, because they were now going to go to 20 events where they were going to watch the same people win over and over. Not all moats are the same, but we all have them.

**John:** Let’s go on to our other marquee topic, How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite things we’ve added over the years. This first article comes from Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris writing for Slate. It’s called Never Use Alone. It’s about Jessie Blanchard. She’s an operator and education director for Never Use Alone. It’s this hotline designed to reduce the risk of overdose for drug users who are alone. Basically, you call this hotline when you’re about to use drugs, heroin or whatever. She stays on the line with you. Before you actually use, she’s like, “Unlock the door. Tell me where your address is.” Then if she hears you overdosing, she will call for emergency services.

The story follows one specific call with Kimber King, who’s recently out of rehab, and highlighting post-rehab life there, and also gets in a bit of Blanchard’s personal journey there into harm reduction. Aline, what did you make of this article? Is there a movie there? Is there a character there? What do you think is the story here?

**Aline:** I don’t know if that’s a whole thing, but it’s a really good kick-off, I thought, for a thriller or a murder mystery or something. Again, I don’t want to minimize the important life-or-death work that these folks are doing. It’s a great idea. I’m really always in favor of things that treat people as they are and not as we hope they should be. But I do think it’s because it’s over the phone, because there’s someone silently listening, it almost made me think of Blow Out, the De Palma movie with Travolta on the bridge. It seems like you could stumble into some sort of mystery, criminal conspiracy by listening through on the phone. I don’t know if it’s about drugs and people who traffic drugs.

PJ Vogt has a new podcast. Have you listened to Search Engine? He has an episode about why fentanyl is in everything. It seems like it could be a good jumping-off point for a story about that world of drugs and availability, but also could kick you into maybe a genre piece that had a mystery or a thriller.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s always that issue of, if it’s a two-hour movie, it’s a one-time story, there has to be something remarkable about this out of all the things. This is the happenstance that kicks into this specific story, that’s not a thing that happens all the time. I think she’s potentially a really interesting character, because her background is a nurse, her own family lost to addiction, and trying to walk this line of wanting to help people, but realizing that in helping people, she may be prolonging their addiction. That is really interesting. But I agree that there has to be some inciting incidence beyond just what’s usual.

**Aline:** For sure. The other thing is it could be someone’s job inside of a thing, where let’s say you have an emergency response team and they do suicide intervention, if you wanted to do something with several people. It could be a job that someone has, because there’s this aspect of silent witness and overhearing. Those are good Hitchcocky-feeling things.

**John:** Another possibility would be to actually just do the origin story of how she came to do this, so it’s the first time she’s doing this thing. Basically, after a loss in the family, she’s doing this for the first time, because she doesn’t want this thing to happen.

**Aline:** It’s going to have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to go someplace.

**Aline:** It would have to go somewhere.

**John:** It has to be. Who are the obstacles? Who are the people who are telling her no? What is she overcoming? What is the journey that she’s going through?

**Aline:** She somehow gets connected to her cheating ex-husband and doesn’t call 911 when she should.

**John:** Maybe.

**Aline:** That’s not this exact woman, but that could be a different character.

**John:** Second up, we have an article by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times. This one is looking at cases of silicosis, which is an incurable lung disease that’s happening among California workers, particularly those who are cutting and polishing engineered stone, silicon kitchen countertops. It’s affecting workers at much younger ages. People in their 20s and 30s are getting a fatal, incurable lung condition. The story follows particularly Leobardo Segura Meza, a 27-year-old father diagnosed with silicosis. This is a California story for this one, mostly Los Angeles County, and the questions of what controls or safeties things we’re going to put here.

**Aline:** Man, that was distressing.

**John:** Yeah, it was distressing. My first thought is it’s an Erin Brockovichy thing. Whenever bad things are happening to people and no one’s paying attention, that it’s an Erin Brockovichy kind of story, where you have somebody coming in to recognize the situation and fight for them and to help them. That’s one option. But I’m also wondering if there’s a way to have the people that are being affected be more the drivers of the story.

**Aline:** It’s so funny, I had the exact same thought, which is those “someone from the outside is the savior” stories apart from occasionally feeling inauthentic, I think have been done so much. Could it be a story about people who have to organize, who have never organized before? I was really distressed to hear that there are interventions with water and other equipment that they could use to make it better, but they won’t.

I don’t know that this one jumped out at me as anything other than a background piece. It feels like there’s a lot of businesses which can be shady, based on how they’re implemented, not inherently shady, but how they’re implemented. To me, this just made me think of how really venally consumerist and bottom-line-based our economy has become, that the idea that you would protect workers and that you would have those things in place to protect them is just not a first thought. I just think we’ve gotten increasingly like, if you make a buck, then that’s all that matters. Getting the water probably costs money, and getting the right equipment probably costs money.

I would see it more as like, if you were doing a movie like The Big Short or something, and one of the businesses that you stumble across is someone who’s just rampantly killing people when he could be doing something else. But it didn’t jump out at me as its own piece.

**John:** I didn’t get the sense that the countertop manufacturers were… They could be negligent, but they weren’t evil. Sometimes it was just the ignorance, that they didn’t know what was happening there, and sometimes it was people who were just not trained to do this thing or that weren’t aware of what the actual problems and dangers are, because apparently, it’s different than cutting other stone. If you’re cutting granite, you’re not going to have the same issues as you are these special things.

**Aline:** Yeah, it’s those composites. A friend of mine’s mother called her and said, “I’m thinking of having my counters replaced, because we have this stuff that’s harmful.” We were saying, “It’s already in there.”

**John:** It’s the cut.

**Aline:** When you cut it up to get it out, you might be creating the very thing that you’re protesting.

**John:** It’s not a problem existing there in a space. Like you, I’m not sure there’s a full movie here. It felt like this is the context background for a Law and Order episode. It’s a thing that’s happening, and we’re meeting a bunch of people because of that situation, but it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily driving the whole thing.

The other way you could get into this is that it’s a story about this family, and the patriarch of the family, the young father of the family is going to be dying at a young age because of this thing. That’s an interesting story that I haven’t seen before.

**Aline:** He learns how to represent himself as a lawyer, and he takes the case.

**John:** Even if the court case is in foreground or the sense of what is it like to be a young father who knows he’s going to die of an incurable thing, like an old man’s disease, that could be an interesting story, whether he’s the central character or he’s the father of the protagonist.

**Aline:** One of the things that’s happened – this happens also when people send me books – is that Hollywood swings back and forth between doing things that require special handling in the sausage factory. It has swung back and forth many times since you and I have been doing this. TV and movies like to take turns doing this. In the word of Super Mario Bros being the most successful movie, I don’t know that this is commercial. Again, that’s why I tend towards genrefying these, because if there’s a murder or an extortion or a way to make it Night Agent, because otherwise, we’re not really engaging with how commercial things are. But right now, there’s such an emphasis on things that are super commercial. I look back on things like Erin Brockovich, just wondering who would make that.

**John:** I still think you can make Erin Brockovich, but it has to be a more seasoned movie.

**Aline:** With a big star.

**John:** With a big star. You wouldn’t put it out in the summer. You’d put it out in December, to get a bunch of awards. That would be driving it.

This might be more commercial. This is called Loyalty Testers. It is Gina Cherelus writing for the New York Times. It looks at this service called Loyalty Test, where they hire these, quote unquote, “Testers” to flirt with people’s partners online and assess their loyalty. It tracks Caden Redmond, who’s a college student who charges $100 per test, which involves starting a conversation on TikTok or Instagram and gauging their response to those romantic advances and then reporting back to the person who hired them whether they got something out of it. There’s people who do it freelance, but this service has recruited a bunch of Testers and about 1,000 customers, and they’re going on through it. Aline, this feels like it’s in a relationship space. I can see a rom-com version of this. What are your instincts with Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** There’s always some rom-com version of this floating around, whether you go on dates and you try and do this. Now, it’s sort of catfishingy online things. This is a TikTok genre. There’s a couple people who do this on TikTok, and they’ll show you the texts. It has an unpleasantness to it that I think as a romantic comedy, I think if it was sharper, more edgy, more like Bottoms or something, where it was a little bit more irreverent and anarchic, because you’re dealing with shitty behavior from both the person who’s fishing and the person who’s been fished, although I don’t know that this always means that people want to cheat or if people are excited to have been flirted with. It is kind of shocking in those TikToks how fast particularly men go to, “Yeah, I’m going to be in Phoenix next week, so what are you doing? I’d love to get a drink.” I don’t know. It depressed me.

**John:** I wonder if it’s the jumping-off place. You have a person who is a Tester, who has become so jaded and cynical about love, and they’re the person who has to be finally won over that there are actually goodhearted people that cannot be tempted or pulled away. That’s probably the best way in there. There’s a non-rom-com version of this as well, of course, which is that you think you’re doing one thing, but it actually spirals way out of control, and someone’s life is put in danger because of this flirting.

**Aline:** Or it’s Bill Clinton, or somebody says, “I want you to test this person,” but what you don’t realize is it’s Putin. I guess you could play with that a little bit. No Hard Feelings, which I really enjoy, had an aspect of somebody’s hired to do… Somebody’s hired to do a something is a genre on its own. I wrote one of those. That’s Three to Tango. Someone hires someone to do a something, and it leads to unintended consequences is a genre of which I thought Bottoms did a fun job of. It turned into about four different movies along the way. I thought that that contributed to the fun, anarchic spirit of it, that they have a very tiny germ of an idea, and then it leads them hither and thither. If you’re going to do something with a satirical edge in the way that this has a satirical edge… Pain Hustlers is the movie I think of recently. It’s scammy people. Then it feels like it’s got a satiric aspect to it.

**John:** Don’t sleep on No Hard Feelings. If you’ve missed it in theaters, it’s worth a watch. It’s really well done.

**Aline:** The funniest scene of the year.

**John:** The fight on the beach?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. I love it. It’s so good. Next up, we have Zachary Crockett writing for The Hustle. This is about a man who won the lottery 14 times. Stefan Mandel, who is a Romanian mathematician, exploited loopholes in various lotto systems to buy every possible combination. If you have to guess six numbers, there’s only a certain number of variations, and you can actually just buy them all up. The formula basically works out. If it’s worth it, if it’s three times the amount of money you’re going to spend, you should absolutely do it, because it can pay off. The challenge, of course, is that logistically, it’s absolutely a nightmare to buy all those tickets. But you can do it. He won the Virginia Lottery and some other ones, got quite rich off the Virginia Lottery. Ultimately, the story continues, went through bankruptcy. There were lawsuits and other things. He’s now living a quiet life in Vanuatu. A lottery movie, is there a thing to do here?

**Aline:** The one thing that jumped out at me was, you know when you’re watching a heist and they’re putting together a group of guys? It felt like one of the group of guys has retired to Vanuatu, and this is his claim to fame, and so they’re putting together… They need someone who crunches the numbers, and it’s this guy. I would pitch the guy from this season of Fargo who plays the hitman. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

**John:** I haven’t seen it.

**Aline:** I will find out what the name of that actor is. But someone really enigmatic and interesting, with a foreign accent, who made a killing doing something abstrusely mathy like this, and then retired to an island, but they have to bring him back for this heist on a casino. That’s what I pictured. That’s not a whole movie, but it’s a really fun backstory for somebody.

**John:** It’s good you bring up heists, because this thing has a heist feeling, because they’re not breaking the law, but logistically, it’s just so challenging to do what they’re doing. They have to convince so many people. The social engineering of it all was a huge factor as well. There’s just mechanics of doing this thing, but there needs to be a larger purpose. That’s why I think you going to they’re pulling somebody in to do this one extra job makes more sense, because if it’s just like, “We want to make a bunch of money,” nobody cares. That’s not actual real stakes. You have to do it for… There’s something that he’s actually really going for here. Originally, he’s doing it so he can escape from Romania. That feels a very great purpose.

**Aline:** Did you see BlackBerry?

**John:** I loved BlackBerry, yeah.

**Aline:** It kills. What I loved about it is everyone is there for a different reason. Glenn’s character really does not care about what they’re doing or why.

**John:** He just wants a hockey team.

**Aline:** He just wants a hockey team. What I loved about that character piece was that he was such a jerk, but then he was so good at being the exact guy they needed in that exact moment, and then somehow it’s a version of the Peter principle. It itched some part of his brain which caused him to completely take his eye off the ball and just grind on the hockey thing, which was so funny. That single-mindedness, the character who’s single-minded to the point of being socially inept, it feels like one of these. I bet Noah Hawley could do something with… I could see a season of Fargo where they do something like this.

**John:** Glenn’s character in BlackBerry is agentic.

**Aline:** He’s the most agentic.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Aline:** He and Emma Stone in Poor Things, quite agentic. I would say that Barbie’s pretty agentic.

**John:** Barbie’s agentic too, yeah. None of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. They’re happy to pick up the phone to get an answer. They know what they don’t know, and they’re not letting that get in their way. Let’s look back through these things and see which of these might actually be movies. Also, we should talk about which of these things do we need to get those specific rights, or is it just the general story space. Never Use Alone, is there anything here?

**Aline:** I don’t know how widespread that is. If it’s just this one lady, then it’s different from if that’s been adopted as a widespread practice. There are many movies about suicide hotlines, and this is a zhuzh on this. It’s very topical, and it’s a thing people are interested in. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s an interesting space. I could see the indie film version. I could see the Sundance movie that’s in this space.

**Aline:** You would then get her life rights?

**John:** Maybe, because then it’s nice to be able to have her as a person, as not just a resource, but also as part of the, you want to say market of the movie.

**Aline:** The narrative around a movie. That’s a really good point, John, in that for the smaller movies, the narrative around the movies is sometimes just as important.

**John:** I think that could be helpful. Her goals, in terms of keeping people from dying alone of overdoses, would be served by this movie existing.

**Aline:** That too.

**John:** Countertop cancer? We don’t think there’s a movie here.

**Aline:** No, not really. It seems like it’s an element of something.

**John:** Absolutely. The article’s interesting. You don’t need to buy that article. I think it’s a backdrop for something, but there’s nothing here specifically you want to hold on to. The Loyalty Testers?

**Aline:** It’s been around for a long time. Those ideas of “I test your spouse’s fidelity” twas ever thus. Just finding a new spin on it, I-

**John:** I feel like there’s probably a Cary Grant movie.

**Aline:** Here’s the issue though. Some of the funniest things that happen in your life now happen with your hand out, and you looking like you’re telling people a hilarious story. The visual is you lying in bed just looking at your phone. We have so many virtual interactions now, and this type of thing is quite a virtual experience.

Romantic comedies are one of the genres where using electronics… I’m not sure, but I feel like one of the reasons Holdovers was set in 1971 was so that… It’s an awfully short movie if someone can just call an Uber. I think sometimes technology can make these things a little dry. There’s literally not much to look at.

I would rather do a movie about somebody who hires themselves out to go to Rome and find out if the King of Denmark will cheat on the Queen before they get… The Queen of Denmark hires you to go and flirt with him and see if he will… That idea of testing fidelity is a better, almost Shakespearean idea than the specifics of how you’re doing it now.

**John:** I think if you are going to try to do something like this, you have to look at Zola or other movies that are-

**Aline:** Oh, god, I love Zola. Yes, you’re right.

**John:** Really good at-

**Aline:** Great.

**John:** … finding ways to manifest what that online conversation looks like.

**Aline:** Great call. Great call. They did that really well there. But the other thing is people get in trouble a lot with Instagram messages. People are messaging people they’re not supposed to on Instagram after a stranger reaches out to them. It just goes to show that human desire for connection or lust or whatever it is really overrides the logic button.

**John:** I have friends who are absolute strangers who met on Instagram and are dating for years.

**Aline:** Through the DMs.

**John:** Through the DMs.

**Aline:** Slid into the-

**John:** Slid in the DMs.

**Aline:** I don’t like the expression “slid into the DMs.”

**John:** It does feel filthy.

**Aline:** Back to our lubricant conversation.

**John:** Finally, the lottery winner. Is there a lottery winner movie?

**Aline:** Not per se, I don’t think.

**John:** Yeah. I like your notion of taking a piece of that, an idea of that character and bringing it into something else. I think if you’re going to do the story, I think you’re going to probably want something to back this up on. If there’s really good original reporting on this stuff and somebody who has the real scoop on all this stuff, great, but I’m not sure that you necessarily need it. Obviously, if Craig were here, he would say, if it’s all true facts, nobody owns history.

**Aline:** If it’s reported, for sure, if that’s been reported. That’s different from whether you’re going to do a first-person story about what it feels like to live in Romania and how you find these things, as opposed to using that and that math and those statistical things for a different character.

**John:** Do any of these movies get made?

**Aline:** I don’t see you following up on this batch, but really interesting to think about. One of the reasons I really like that you do this is because people struggle to find ideas. I remember one of my early writing teachers was like, “Take the New York Times and put it in front of you, and there’s 100 movies in there.” That really is true. I think what’s harder to do, and which you do your whole career, is figure out why does this speak to me, and what do I really want to talk about here.

It’s interesting how much an idea or a book or something will resonate with you, and you don’t really know why. An example is my most memed of movies, We Bought A Zoo. I really wanted to write that. I really resonated to it. I really had to have it. I really had a clear vision of it. It wasn’t until well into writing it that I realized my dad, who’s an Israeli guy, an engineer, we moved to a house in New Jersey that had nine horses and a bunch of ducks and chickens, and so here’s this guy who’s an engineer and really just works with his brain all of a sudden having to muck out stalls. But I didn’t even think of that when I grabbed that story.

Similarly, sometimes people submit me things, and they’re perfectly great, but they don’t light up the little light board in the brain that you need to follow your interest through the project.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Aline, what do you have for us this week?

**Aline:** Sometimes I just do really not useful ditties, but this time… I have a thing that many, many women have, called melasma, which is when… Look at John’s [crosstalk 00:56:54]. You get discolorations on your face. They’re hormonal. I used to have it really bad after I had babies. It’s just subject to hormones. Your face will have these brown patches. They’re usually on your cheeks or over your lip. They’re also enhanced by sun.

I’ve tried to treat it for a really long time. I’ve done lasers and various creams. Then I was influenced by Instagram. Was it Instagram or TikTok? One of those. But there’s a company called Musely, M-U-S-E-L-Y. You get on the website, and you describe what your skin looks like, and then you send them a picture, and you show them where it is on your face. They concoct a thing for you that has bleaching agents and tretinoins and different things. I’m sure that none of what I said was right, but something like that. They put a cocktail of skin stuff. First, they send you a peel, depending on what you need. They sent me this thing called the Spot Peel. You walk around for 12 hours with what looks like toothpaste on your face. Then you wash that off, and then you follow it up with a cream. I was highly skeptical, but it really worked.

**John:** That’s good.

**Aline:** My right side of my face is really almost totally cleared up. My left side, which is the driving side, which is where the sun damage always is, still has a patch here. You know what? They have really good customer service. It comes right away. They tell you when it’s coming. They make the refill process really good. Sometimes people have a good idea for a business, but the interface is not… I’m not breaking any news here, but the interface is not good. The interface of Musely is really good. You get communications from them, and they explain to you why they’re sending you this thing. The instructions are good. Is it a scam? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it except that it worked for me.

**John:** Good. You had a good customer experience there.

**Aline:** I had a good customer experience and good results.

**John:** Love it. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Adam Mastroianni called “So you wanna de-bog yourself.” It kind of ties into some of the things we talked about in terms of being agentic. He’s talking about those situations where you just feel like you’re stuck in a bog, and you just never can get out. You’re just trapped in the mud. I always love a good metaphor for things. He has a lot of really good metaphors for the stories you tell yourself about why you can’t get out or the frustrations you feel. Gutterballing, which is basically you’re moving the right direction, but you’re already in the gutter.

**Aline:** I thought that was really funny.

**John:** No matter what you do, you’re still not going to strike. Waiting for the jackpot, when someone says, “Here’s a solution.” It’s like, yes, but that doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s not magical. The mediocrity trap, stroking the problem. Some really good-

**Aline:** Stroking the problem felt NSFW [unintelligible 00:59:37].

**John:** It does. It does. That’s basically where you’re acknowledging the problem and you’re talking about the problem and you’re poring into the problem without actually trying to solve the problem.

**Aline:** John, I’m going to pitch an alt to agentic.

**John:** Please.

**Aline:** Pageantic. I’m just going to act like I’m in a beauty pageant all the time.

**John:** You’re going to do that elbow, elbow, wave, wave?

**Aline:** The elbow, elbow, wave, wave. I’m going to divide every meeting into a swimsuit, interview, talent. Pageantic.

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** What do you guys think of pageantic? They love it. No, I’m just telling you.

**John:** Applause all around.

**Aline:** It’s just a different way of doing-

**John:** Pageantic.

**Aline:** Big hair and a sash.

**John:** 2024, my word is pageantic. 100%.

**Aline:** I would love John coming in with a sash, just a sash that says Mr. Hancock Park.

**John:** One of your One Cool Things originally was a sling for your iPhone. If that was a sash rather than a sling, two things killed at once.

**Aline:** Can you still believe they didn’t send me one free bandolier?

**John:** Come on.

**Aline:** Come on, guys.

**John:** You started that whole trend. We all know it started here.

**Aline:** That’s right.

**John:** I love it all. The last bit of this blog post I thought was really smart was the difference between diploma problems and toothbrushing problems.

**Aline:** Oh god, yes.

**John:** A diploma is something you get once, and then you’re done. A toothbrushing is basically, you got to do it every day. Some people confuse the two things.

**Aline:** I hate that. I hate the eating and the sleeping and the thing that you have to do all… Especially, you know what’s the worst is working out. Let me just work out for an entire day once a month, instead of the… It’s the constant drumbeat. Anything that’s a constant drumbeat. I’m not a routinized person. My husband really is, and I’m really not. The constant drumbeat of the feeding the dog, the brushing the teeth, things that have to be done every day, don’t like it.

**John:** You have three dogs now. Are you brushing your dogs’ teeth?

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** Yes, of course. That was a 100% honest yes. Everyone will know that she of course-

**Aline:** Everyone who knows me knows that Jimmy the dog, you can’t even put a leash on him, so the idea that you’re brushing his teeth… I’ve got one of those little adorable snarl balls, a little chihuahua. There’s many popular ones on TikTok. He’s just basically a little dust of snarl most of the time, interrupted with some kisses and cuddles.

We put some stuff in their water, and then we have a treat that we give them, but I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good… Then every once in a while, we have a lady come over and wrestle them to the ground. Swear to god, because I don’t want to anesthetize them, because I know someone whose dog died being anesthetized for dental. I would really feel bad. We found somebody who will just wrestle your dog to the ground with a bunch of towels and non-consensually brush their teeth.

**John:** Lambert luckily is a very happy tooth-brusher. You just open up his mouth and just go to it.

**Aline:** That’s a really August thing to be, like a very, “Yeah, I got to do this. It needs to get done.” I’m still laughing about the day that Mike broke all his habits, because he had like 60 things, where he was on Duolingo and his running app. He had like 50 things where he was competing for these fake electronic rings of success. I feel like having a dog that… Your dog probably has an app where after you brush its teeth, it logs it.

**John:** It doesn’t yet. I’ve definitely wanted to get those little buttons that dogs can push.

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** “Toothbrush.” But then I feel like-

**Aline:** “Toothbrush.”

**John:** … they’re just training me to do stuff, so no. “Treat. Treat. Play.”

**Aline:** “Get another dog.”

**John:** No. No more dogs. That’s our show for this week.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Very exciting. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Our outro this week is by Larry Douziech.

**Aline:** Woohoo.

**John:** If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Inneresting exists because of Aline Brosh McKenna making fun of how I don’t put the T in “interesting.”

**Aline:** Me, make fun of someone? I would never.

**John:** Never, ever. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Aline keeps pitching-

**Aline:** Guys, I want to make a workout set. If we make a Scriptnotes workout set, it doesn’t even need to be a Lycra one. It can be a T-shirt and leggings. Something for the ladies. Something specifically for the ladies.

**John:** The legs is basically an overlooked thing. The challenge is Cotton Bureau doesn’t make sweatpants or leggings. We’re looking for a vendor. We have pretty high standards.

**Aline:** I know. Your stuff is good. I know. I looked into it, and I couldn’t find anything, but I feel like a viewer will have-

**John:** Maybe our incredible listeners-

**Aline:** Also, I’d wear a Scriptnotes onesie.

**John:** Sure, 100%. Love it. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like me and Aline talking about being empty nesters. Aline, it’s never an empty nest when you’re here with me.

**Aline:** Aw.

**John:** Aw. It’s just so nice chatting with you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** This is our bonus segment for our premium members. We love our premium members. Aline, you’re a premium member.

**Aline:** I am. Of course I’m a premium member. I love having all the episodes at my fingertips. I recommend them to people frequently.

**John:** Thank you very much. I just put my daughter on a plane back to school. She was here on Christmas break. I’m once again an empty nester. You’ve had this experience for a little bit longer. How are you feeling about your life without children in your house?

**Aline:** It’s been a really interesting transition. My first guy left, and then I had another kid at home. They’re three years apart. When Charlie went to college, Leo was 15, 16, so we still had a lot to do with college and a ton of friends. Then during the pandemic, I was incarcerated with them, which was wonderful and every parent’s dream, despite the horribleness of it. But you’re raising them to send them into the world, to be independent, happy people. That’s what you’re doing. I comfort myself with that. But man, I really miss them. We really miss them. This weekend, Will wanted to go see Beekeeper, which I’m obviously not the biggest audience for.

**John:** You’re not a Jason Statham completist?

**Aline:** He’s a Statham completist, as are my kids. He really turned to me and said, “Man, I wish Charlie could go see Beekeeper with me this weekend.” Then Leo, my younger son, is a Scrabble player. When he’s home, we play Scrabble every day. Do I want them to be at home with their mother playing Scrabble and going to Beekeeper? No. They need to be out in the world.

When Leo left, he went to college in September, and two months later I was shooting a movie. I was so busy during that time that I actually felt relief, because I would’ve been letting him down. I wouldn’t have been very available, so I’m glad it didn’t happen in his senior year.

Then when that wore off, we’ve had to become more entertaining to each other. When you notice that’s happening, you start to look at your partner and say, “We should make a list of shows and things.” Will’s gotten really into cooking, and so that’s been really nice. There’s a freedom there to be able to go and pop off and do whatever you want and go take a trip. I try and value that.

There’s this oft cited statistic that you see your kids for 18 years, and then the rest of your life you’ll see them for a year cumulatively. That’s a scary thing. But we talk to them all the time. The really lucky thing for our generation is texting, because nobody really wants to call their parents. I remember really avoiding that myself, just because it’s a big energy shift to be on the phone with your parents. But texting, the ability to send the TikTok or send the funny article or fam chat. Our text thread was ablaze with what happened with Sweet Lady Jane. It’s fun to have those conversations keep going as a whole family or individually. You learn to have the relationship evolve in the next phase.

That said, I have many sad moments. I remember once, one of our mutual friends said that somebody was complaining about taking their kid to a birthday party in kindergarten, and she said, “I would run someone over with my car to be at a kindergarten birthday party with my son just one more time.”

There’s definitely a lot of things that I miss, but I try and think like, they’re where they should be. You don’t want them to be dependent on you. You want them to be independent in the world. But John, they’ll never really appreciate how much you love them until they have their own kids. I didn’t appreciate how much my parents loved me until I had my own kids. It’s their job to live in a blissful feeling that you’re there for them but you don’t have excessive needs.

**John:** I’m going to stop you there, because there are so many things stacked up for me to respond to. For listeners outside of Los Angeles, or listeners in Los Angeles who aren’t aware of it, Sweet Lady Jane is a fantastic bakery you always got your fancy cakes from. It was default, like, “Oh, we need a fancy cake. We’ll get one from Sweet Lady Jane.” They spontaneously closed. It looked like they were going to expand, and they suddenly closed. I don’t think we know why they closed.

**Aline:** It turns out they were being sued for wage exploitation.

**John:** That’s not good. That’s a How Would This Be a Movie, Sweet Lady Jane, the secret story of Sweet Lady Jane. Your earlier point about you’re trying to raise them to be successful adults, Mike will often say, “You’re not trying to raise a child. You’re trying to raise an adult.” The fact that they’re off in college now, doing their own thing, it’s like you successfully raised an adult. Congratulations. They’re out there.

But it also just means that all the time that you spent hands-on parenting them is now free, and you have to figure out other ways to do that. A productive way to do that is to really think about, what is it that you used to do as a couple or you’d want to do as a couple that you couldn’t before. I mentioned on the podcast last time, Mike and I have our 24 for ’24, 24 things we want to get done in 2024, which means seeing the shows and committing to game nights and bar trivia and just making sure we’re getting out there doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. You’re heading to New York to see four shows.

**Aline:** Yes, I’m seeing a bunch of plays.

**John:** That’s a thing you do.

**Aline:** It was a spur of the moment thing. Charlie’s actually going to come down from Boston and meet me for a couple of those. Also, I think they don’t owe you. They didn’t ask to be born. They don’t owe you. I think people get into a thing of… It’s so funny, because moms will say to me, “How often does your son call you?” I call them. They’re incoming. They’re in the incoming. When I’m elderly, I’ll be in the incoming. But right now, they’re building their lives, so I don’t wait for them to reach out to me. I reach out to them. I try not to guilt them.

Also, I’m always marketing Will and I. “We got sushi. We can pay for sushi. We might be able to take you skiing.” We try and make it appealing and attractive and interesting to spend time with your parents, as opposed to it feeling like homework and obligation. I always said when they were little, you’re not there to be their friend, but when they’re out of the house, you are.

There’s this study that shows the only thing you can really control about kids is how much they like you. If Amy’s coming home to fun game nights and dinners and, in my case, a dog and a half – as soon as anyone leaves, I get another dog and a half – it sounds fun, as opposed to coming home to people who are staring at you and trying to suck your blood, trying to vampire your life.

**John:** What was interesting over this Christmas break was recognizing and figuring out the boundaries between, okay, you’re a college student doing college student things, but you’re also under our roof now, and what that balance is and what is a fair expectation of you being home.

**Aline:** That means we have dinner with the dads, and then we take the car, and we’re out until 1:00 seeing our other friends. That’s what that means.

**John:** That is what it means. Are we going to bed not knowing where they are, which in college-

**Aline:** You don’t know where she is.

**John:** In college, you don’t know.

**Aline:** I know. I know. Isn’t that a funny thing?

**John:** It’s a strange thing. I definitely appreciated that growing up with my mom. I was like, “It’s so frustrating that you have these concerns when I’m thousands of miles away.”

**Aline:** My god, in college, your poor mother had to call you on a phone that was like beep, boop, beep, boop, ring, ring, ring. When would she get you? She was not sending you a little text that said, “Hey, our neighbors got divorced.” We’re lucky because we can communicate with them.

**John:** We are both very lucky. Aline, I’m always lucky to have you come back on the podcast.

**Aline:** Yay!

**John:** Thank you.

**Aline:** Woohoo!

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [How to be More Agentic](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic) by Cate Hall
* [What’s Stopping You?](https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/44-agency) by Neel Nanda
* [Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tnpp3cyEHMGthjGAf/seven-ways-to-become-unstoppably-agentic) by Evie Cottrell
* [“Agency” needs nuance](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/acyfmFTN3cNgwnYw6/agency-needs-nuance) by Evie Cottrell
* [The Woman on the Line](https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/overdose-drugs-fentanyl-opioid-never-use-alone.html) by Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris for Slate
* [California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone) by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo for the LA Times
* [Would Your Partner Cheat? These ‘Testers’ Will Give You an Answer](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/style/loyalty-test-infidelity-cheating.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) by Gina Cherelus for the New York Times
* [The man who won the lottery 14 times](https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-won-the-lottery-14-times/) by Zachary Crockett for The Hustle
* [Musely](https://www.musely.com/)
* [So you wanna de-bog yourself](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/so-you-wanna-de-bog-yourself?publication_id=656797&post_id=140270094&isFreemail=true&r=3dw6x) by Adam Mastroianni
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aline_Brosh_McKenna)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Larry Douziech ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/627standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/creating-empathy-for-your-characters).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 624 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig and I were both traveling through the holidays, so we asked producer Drew Marquardt to dig through the archives and compile a character compendium. So Drew, what have you got for us?

**Drew Marquardt:** We’ve got three character-related segments that all kind of do with getting into a character’s head space and bring the audience along with them, and really focusing on scene work.

**John:** That’s great. This is probably top of mind for you, because I know you were just working on this characters chapter or chapters for the book.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly. These are ones that just sort of popped out to me. We talk a lot about character on the level of the entire movie or the entire show, but it was really fun to dig into the specifics in the scene.

**John:** That sounds great. What’s the first segment we’ll hear?

**Drew:** First is a segment on point of view, from Episode 358. That’s, again, point of view for the whole story and also for the scenes and how to play with point of view and use it to your advantage.

**John:** That’s always a good lesson. What’s after that?

**Drew:** Next is the character’s inner emotional states from Episode 472. That’s finding the emotional truths in a scene and thinking about using verbs versus adjectives in terms of what a character’s doing.

**John:** That’s great.

**Drew:** The way watching someone cry doesn’t make you cry necessarily, but watching someone try not to cry and try and do something else can bring out a lot of emotion.

**John:** That sounds good. I remember that discussion of verbs versus adjectives is so useful in talking with actors, but it’s a good way to think about the characters on the page as well.

**Drew:** It’s a very actorly segment, but it all has to do with writing.

**John:** That sounds great. I see the third segment here is all the way back to Episode 151, so quite far into the vaults.

**Drew:** It’s one we don’t do a lot, because Craig’s audio in it is a little bit wonky, if I’m honest. But it sounds like he’s on the phone. It comes through really well, and everything he’s saying is gold, so I had to include him.

**John:** That’s great. It’s on secrets and lies, so why it’s important for your characters to be liars. Your point on audio is well taken. We’ve always prided ourselves on audio on this podcast, but I feel like over the last two or three years, people’s expectations of audio on podcasts has dropped in a weird way.

**Drew:** Interesting. Have you heard it in other places?

**John:** I have. Things that used to be good double-ender conversations where they would send an audio engineer to have a microphone there at the place, now they’re just doing it on Zoom. Even on The Daily, I hear some audio there that I can’t believe they’re getting away with. So I won’t feel so bad about Craig’s audio on this one.

**Drew:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Our character theme continues with our bonus segment for premium members. Is that right?

**Drew:** Yeah, we’ll do a segment on single-use characters from Episode 467, including the greatest single-use character of all time, which is, of course, Edie McClurg in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s get into it. I will be back here at the end for the credits. Everyone else, enjoy.

[Episode 358 Clip]

**John:** Let’s jump ahead. Let’s go to our big topic of point of view. So this is a craft topic that I said we would talk about in some future episode. This is the episode we’re going to talk about it. So point of view I’m going to define as which characters in a story, movie story, a book, have the ability to drive scenes. Basically, that they can be in a scene by themselves and you will follow them. They can be a scene with strangers and you’ll still follow them. And in some stories it has a single POV, so only the hero can drive a scene.

Harry Potter is a classic example of, both in the books and in the movies, essentially, every scene has Harry Potter in the scene. And so you don’t get any information that Harry Potter doesn’t know. Other stories, you could follow anybody in them. So classically, an Altman film. Anybody who wanders through the frame, the camera could follow them and they could be in their own story.

Most films are going to have a mix of point of view. You’re going to have obviously scenes driven by your hero, but perhaps you’re able to cut off to the villain and see the villain do stuff and see scenes that are just driven by the villain, or a supporting character, a love interest. So there are different choices. But the choices we make have to be deliberate. And they really help tell the audience how to watch your movie.

**Craig Mazin:** Yeah. I always think about point of view as an answer to a question. With whom am I supposed to identify with in this scene? And by identify with, I don’t necessarily mean I want to be like them, or they are like me, but rather I’m with them. Even if it’s a villain, sometimes I’m with the villain because the villain is considering the glorious possibility of so on and so forth, and I am with them and their ambition or their desire.

The big thing that I think a lot of early writers and, frankly, a lot of not early writers, a lot of practiced writers, make the mistake of doing is not choosing a point of view in their scene. To me, there is no possible way to create a successful scene if you do not know whose point of view you’re asking the audience to follow.

We are, I think, only capable of having one point of view in a scene. One. That means everything that transpires ultimately is about one person’s eyeballs, essentially. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have other people feeling things and wanting things and doing things, but it’s from one person’s perspective.

**John:** Yeah. So I think you make a distinction here which I think was important to call out is that we can talk about point of view for an entire work, so the course of an entire movie, the course of an entire book, so this book has a certain character’s point of view. It’s told from a certain character’s point of view. But every scene is like a little movie, and every scene is going to have a point of view as well.

And so you may have scenes in which two different characters, we’ve followed them separately, and we’ve seen them have separate scenes, they can do stuff, but once we’re in a scene with them together, you’re going to have to tell us which character’s point of view this scene is from. And sometimes you see writers not making that choice, or the writer may have made that choice, but as it was directed, as it was staged in front of you, it wasn’t actually done from that character’s point of view. And that is a real challenge.

And so that’s a thing, even at this last Sundance Labs I saw. I’ll describe this project in broad terms, because it’s not a movie that’s out there for people to see yet. It was a story that follows two young boys who have an encounter when they’re kids. Then it jumps forward 30 years. You see these two people as adults. We follow one’s person story. And then we cut to the other person’s story. And we know, because we’ve seen movies before, that eventually they’re going to meet. And in fact, they do meet. But the question is, when they meet, who is driving that scene. And interestingly, as the story was structured, as I was reading it, it had gone back to the first character before the two characters met. And so I was saying that I think it’s from this character’s point of view, because he controlled the last scene. The last person we saw driving a scene is the person we’re going to assume is driving the next scene.

And so we talked about like, well, if we took out that scene it would shift, and we would still be in the point of view of the second character. And that’s a crucial distinction. We know they’re going to meet, but literally, who are we going to meet first? Who is driving the scene?

**Craig:** Yep. Absolutely. And it is an important distinction to understand that there is the macro and the micro. And honestly, I find point of view to be the most useful thing to discuss when you are in the micro. Generally speaking the large questions are answered. Who is the star of the movie? Who is the protagonist? Who is the hero? And so on and so forth.

But then you have these little moments inside of movies where you have a real choice to make. Harry Potter is certainly, you’re right, it’s from the perspective and the point of view of Harry Potter. But then here and there you have these moments, things like a scene where Ron Weasley is watching Harry and Hermione together, and he gets jealous. That’s from Ron’s point of view.

A lot of times, the audience will make certain assumptions based on the way the scene unfolds. And one of the simplest assumptions they make is “The first character I see is going to be the person through whose point of view I will be experiencing this scene.”

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of Harry Potter, in most scenes we’re going to probably see Harry first and then we’re going to see the supporting characters. Granted, over the course of eight movies we’re going to be used to sort of seeing a different one of those characters first. But you’re not going to have any scenes that are just one character or the other character. There may be shots or little action sequences where we’re only following one, but in terms of bigger sequences, Harry is going to be around for all of those things.

If you are figuring out how to tell one story point from the book, you have to figure a way to visualize this information and keep Harry still centerpiece to all this stuff. There’s a great example in Goblet of Fire where quite late in the story, Harry is captured by Voldemort. And there’s sort of an information dump that Voldemort needs to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s an information dump that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily need to do for Harry Potter, but it’s very important for us as the audience to understand. And it’s important that Harry be part of that information dump, because he is our way into this world.

**Craig:** Correct. And in the writing of that section in the book, and then by extension, in the writing of the screenplay and the film that we saw, there is not just a metaphoric point of view but an actual point of view. An actual perspective. And this is a very useful thing to think about as well. When you’re writing these scenes, if you decide that this… I always start by like, “Okay, emotionally, whose point of view should we be honoring here?” And then once I have that understanding, then I start thinking about physical points of view, not just through eyesight but also through sound.

So, for instance, a slight variation on the first character you see. You may see a character first, and then we pull back to reveal that someone is watching them. Clearly, there the point of view is with the watcher. You may be on a person’s face, and you hear sounds, and you know that they’re listening. But the actual physical point of view, point of sound is really important in scenes. It’s important because ultimately that is a huge part of how the director directs.

There’s no other way to make those scenes work unless you understand point of view, because a lot of directing, just at least from the physical position, is angles. The question is what are the angles? Where are we looking? Where does the camera go? Who is it looking at? And why?

**John:** Last week we talked about the scene from Aliens. And if people watched the scene, you’ll see that even though Burke is doing most of the talking, the scene is very clearly from Ripley’s point of view. She is the one watching and trying to process what he’s saying. And the camera work shows that. It’s really favoring her, and it’s favoring her reactions to his lines rather than him talking. So it’s still her scene even though he’s the one providing the information and bringing what is new to the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can play games with point of view. You can make it seem like the point of view is one person’s and then it’s another. The great example of that is in the brilliant third act switcheroo in Silence of the Lambs where you think Starling’s point of view is one thing and it turns out it’s another and vice versa. There are scenes where two people have a long discussion, and you’re not quite sure whose point of view it is. And then they get up and they leave and then we reveal that a person has been listening, and they weren’t even in the scene, but it was their point of view retrospectively.

Also, point of view gives you an opportunity as a writer to shake things up. If you have a scene that maybe feels a little perfunctory or a little cliché, but it fits nicely into your story and solves a lot of problems, then maybe the answer for spice is point of view. How can you change that point of view? How can you make the point of view of that scene somebody that you wouldn’t expect? Suddenly, the scene becomes so much more interesting and fresh.

Here’s a cliché scene. An 11-year-old kid is called in on the carpet by the principal. So it’s the principal yelling at the kid scene. Maybe it’s from the point of view of the principal’s secretary or assistant. Maybe it’s from the point of view of another kid who is waiting to go in next to be yelled at. You find fun, interesting ways to make these things happen.

Also, maybe the answer to that scene is, 9 times out of 10, it’s from the point of view of the kid, because the kid is getting yelled at, and we identify with the kid. What if it’s from the point of view of the principal? What if we’re identifying with the principal as they struggle to try and make this work, and then the kid leaves and we stay with the principal after?

And that’s what point of view and those decisions get you. It makes you think about what the beginning and the end of the scene will be and who your eyes should be on and who their eyes should be on. It’s an indispensable way of approaching scene work. And I think we honestly just saved a lot of people a lot of money for film school stuff.

**John:** So let’s talk about the specific example you gave for a kid in the principal’s office and what if it’s the secretary’s point of view or the principal’s point of view. Those are all really great, fascinating choices. And if it was the first scene of your story, it would be really interesting and unexpected, because we expect it from the kid’s point of view, and it’s actually from the principal’s point of view or the secretary’s. But if it was the kid’s story, if it was about the 12-year-old boy, we sort of couldn’t stay with the principal’s point of view unless that principal is going to ultimately have storytelling power later in our movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the moment you decide to stick around with a character who is not established to be a major character, who is not established to have a storytelling power, you’re suddenly elevating that person. You’re saying like, oh, this is a person that we now have an expectation that we’ll be able to come back to and see independent individual scenes.

There’s maybe like 5 or 10 seconds where you can hold on a character after the main character has left before that character goes like, “Okay, there’s something bigger there.” There’s some expectation you’re setting.

Just yesterday I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This is not a movie review. The movie is nuts in a way that I had not anticipated. I really enjoyed it. Partly because it does really odd things. And one of the odd things it does is, there’s a young girl character who is not really established. You don’t see her. But suddenly, like 20 minutes into the movie, we’re cutting to her and her POV and she’s driving scenes by herself. And it sort of threw me at first. It was like, what is this movie? And then I remembered that the Jurassic Park movies always sort of cut to minor characters. They were always elevating these minor people who could suddenly do things by themselves. And this movie takes that and runs with it very fully.

But it becomes interesting later on in the story where she and other characters meet and it does get a little bit murky for me, who was in control of the story at that point, because it wasn’t clear whose POV we really were in in some of those scenes.

**Craig:** It’s a great point you’re making that point of view, more than line count or screen time, determines the importance and the salience of any particular role in a story. The more point of view you afford a character, the more important they are, the more elevated they are in the tale. And you’re right. You can actually have quite a few people doing this. But when they all get together, then you do have a problem, because, again – I’ll just say it’s my rule – we as human beings really can only have one point of view at one time. And maybe it’s just the narrative is reflecting the biological. We have one field of vision. We have one field of sound. We can’t see two things at once, and we can’t hear two things at once. We hear a combination of things, or we see a combination of things, but that’s it. And it’s just our one view.

So in those conglomeration scenes it’s really important that the screenwriter make sure to figure out who is the point of view person here, because I need to make it really clear in that moment, or else the scene will feel very trifurcated, quadfurcated, and so on and so forth.

Sometimes the best thing to do with those characters that you’ve given point of view to is, before you get to that conglomeration scene, kill them. Wayne Knight in the first Jurassic Park has wonderful point of view scenes, and then he dies, because who needs him later?

**John:** This again I don’t think is a spoiler, that Henry Woo, the character played by B.D. Wong in the Jurassic Park movies, shows up in this movie again. And it was strange to me that he didn’t seem to have POV. For a character who has been established through the whole franchise, he’s not allowed to drive any scenes by himself. And it felt like he had sort of earned that. But also, if you look at the course of the actual movie that we’re watching, he shows up kind of late. And so it might have felt strange to give him that power so late in the movie, to elevate him to a place so late in the movie.

When you do shift POVs and we do unexpected things with POVs, you do get a real jolt of energy. So I think back to Gone Girl. So Gone Girl as a book, which I loved as a book and was dying to write the adaptation of that, is told as alternating chapters between the husband and the wife. And for reasons I don’t want to spoil in the story, that structure would not continue necessarily, but then when it does continue in ways you couldn’t imagine being possible in the movie, it’s so thrilling that we’ve changed POV midway through the movie. Our fundamental rules of how we watch the movie change halfway through. It was a great adaptation of a really great story that was told from a specific point of view and had to change its point of view in order to work as a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is thrilling. It’s exciting. It’s jarring. And when it’s done well, it is as exhilarating as any car chase, because you are creating a kind of emotional free-fall in people. And one of the thrills we get, I think, from going to movies and watching television shows is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s point of view, somebody else that’s wildly different from us. Frankly, that’s what we do as writers all day long, right? But when we receive it passively, it can be, because it’s surprising, it’s awesome.

And it can really wobble the ground beneath you for a bit in a fun way, as long as it is done expertly and you feel like you’re caught. When it’s not, then it just feels clunky or confusing, or you start to say to yourself, “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel here or why.” These are the things that we want to try and avoid when we’re shifting points of view radically.

It also occurs to me that sometimes when we talk about stock characters or when we see a movie and we complain about a character that feels cliché, that they aren’t really getting a proper point of view. Rather, they are only existing in someone else’s point of view, and therefore they exist to serve a function.

Okay, so you’re going to be the judge in the trial. Well, you’re never going to get a point of view. You’re just there to go, “Overruled,” so that the prosecutor whose point of view we’re living in or the defendant whose point of view we’re living in can see it and hear it. And one way to avoid those kind of cliché stock characters is to consider that perhaps maybe they deserve some point of view. But then you got to make space.

**John:** Yeah. You got to make space and make sure that you’re not creating an expectation with the audience that your movie will not be able to match.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. It’s tricky.

**John:** Let’s talk about general guidelines for when it makes sense to limit point of view and when it makes sense to broaden out point of view. So, some benefits to limiting POV is it does make your audience identify very closely with whoever that central character is. Generally, if you’re limiting your point of view to one character, like in a Harry Potter situation, you’re going to identify very closely with Harry Potter because he’s in every scene so it’s driving everything.

And particularly, if you have a character whose experience may be different than sort of your audiences, it can be great to limit POV, because then you’re seeing everything through his or her eyes. And so if you have a tale of racism and you’re seeing it through this Black character’s eyes, I think an audience might be able to understand and empathize with it in ways they wouldn’t see otherwise, because we so closely identify with this central character. That’s a huge advantage to that.

It really focuses your storytelling, because you’re only providing information that that character can actually get to. And so that’s helpful. So anything that the audience wants to know, the character needs to know too. And so you’re following in his or her footsteps as they’re going out and trying to do these things. And so we identify very closely with characters if we limit the POV to those characters.

On the other hand, if you broaden POV, suddenly your movie can feel much more expansive, because suddenly you can cut to Egypt, you can cut to Morocco. You can see all these different parts of the world, and so you establish new characters when you want to establish them. That’s hugely helpful too. If you’re the kind of bigger, epic-scale story, that makes sense. If you’re Game of Thrones, you don’t want to limit it to one character’s point of view, because you have to be able to jump around and have different characters be the hero of one story and the villain of another.

**Craig:** Perfect thing to mention, Game of Thrones, because when people talk about George R. R. Martin’s books, they literally refer to point of view characters. So, generally speaking in his chapters there is a character that is sort of the point of view. And they get an inner life. They have an inner voice. And the events unfold through their eyes and their experience. And you’re absolutely right. Any kind of epic story demands it, I think.

And you should kind of know, I think, from the sort of story you’re telling, whether or not you want to be expansive in your points of view or you want to be limited. But some other things to think about beyond just scale is how much your character is meant to know. If there’s certain kinds of mystery, or if there’s a certain sense of powerlessness, generally speaking, it’s great to side your perspective with characters that have less power and less knowledge, because then there’s more to learn, and there’s more to know. And that’s interesting. And it’s instantly sympathetic.

We don’t really want to share the POV of people that know a lot or are in control. We don’t need Morpheus’s POV really ever. We just don’t need it, except maybe, for instance, in the scene where he needs to break free from the agents and run and jump. We are in his perspective, because at that moment he is very powerless. He is weak. And he isn’t really sure he’s going to make it or not. There you go.

**John:** Yeah. A crucial example. So most of what we’ve been talking about has been sort of movie point of view and the things about which character the camera is on. Those are sort of movie conversations. But point of view is always a part of fiction. It’s always been one of the classic things we talked about. Going back to Pride and Prejudice, we are at Elizabeth Bennett’s point of view and not Darcy’s point of view. And we see the story through her eyes rather than his eyes.

Sometimes, just like in movies, it’s good to change point of view. It’s good to change point of view in books as well. The first Arlo Finch book is entirely from Arlo’s point of view. We only know information that Arlo knows. And if there’s information I had to get in there, I had to have Arlo be present for that information to come out.

The second book, for reasons that become clear when you actually read the second book, we do break POV at one point in the story. And my editor was really nervous about this, but then as we talked through it, it actually makes sense that we break POV, and suddenly the rules of sort of who we’re allowed to follow in the world shift a bit. But hopefully by that point, you are comfortable enough with the characters that I’m breaking POV to that it makes sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t remember which Harry Potter book began with an entirely different POV of somebody coming home and finding Voldemort in his house or something. It fills the world out. And partly, it also creates a complex reading experience, because we are asked as readers to build little walls in our mind. Like, “Okay, I just learned something and saw something, but the character whose POV I’m going to be following for the rest of the book has not been there or seen that. I’m going to put a little wall between them. They don’t know that stuff.” And then ideally, the story at the end will link it together, and then they will learn it, and in the learning of it, will learn something else and so on and so forth.

But it’s exciting. You just have to do it really deliberately. That’s the thing. We always say everything is about being specific and being intentional. As long as you know what you’re doing and why, it should work.

**John:** It should work. And exactly the scenario you described, where a story starts with a different character’s POV before going back to the hero, that’s a very classic movie thing as well. So how many movies have you seen that start with some rando people you’re never going to see again? They’re establishing some nature of the world or some nature of the fundamental problem before we get to our main characters. That’s classic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beginning of Scream, for instance. We never see Drew Barrymore again, but it’s entirely from her point of view.

**John:** Absolutely. So it’s teaching us how to watch the movie. So don’t feel like you’re breaking POV just to do that introduction to the world thing. That’s very classic. Or the tag at the end. That’s also well established.

**Craig:** Yep. I really do believe that honestly that’s worth one year of film school.

**John:** Done.

[Episode 472 clip]

**John:** Let us shift gears completely, because I want to talk about a very crafty kind of issue here. The project I’m working on right now has characters who are experiencing some really big emotions. You and I, Craig, haven’t talked a lot about the inner emotional life of characters. We talk about sort of the emotional effect we’re trying to get in readers and viewers, but I want to talk about what characters are feeling, because what characters are feeling so often impacts what they can do in a scene, how they would express themselves, literally what actions they would take.

And so to set us up I wanted to play a clip from Westworld. And so this is Evan Rachel Wood. I think this was from the first season. And what I love about it is that she’s so emotional, and then because she’s a robot, she can just turn it off.

**Craig:** What would you know about that?

**John:** I set myself up for that.

**Evan Rachel Wood:** My parents. They hurt them.

**Jeffrey Wright:** Limit your emotional affect please. What happened next?

**Evan:** Then they killed them. And then I ran. Everyone I cared about is gone. And it hurts so badly.

**Jeffrey:** I can make that feeling go away if you like.

**Evan:** Why would I want that? The pain. Their loss. It’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me. Like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes for that too, so you can see what she’s doing in the scene. What I like so much about that is you look at how she is at the start of that scene and she’s so emotional. She has a hard time getting those words out. And then when she’s told stop being emotional, it brings her way back down, and she can actually speak the words that she couldn’t otherwise say. And that’s so true, I find, both in my own real life – as I get in these heightened emotional states, I can’t express myself the way I would want to – but also in the characters I write. I feel when I know what a character is going through inside their head, it completely changes how they’re going to be acting in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pretty great clip. Evan Rachel Wood is an outstanding actor. And one thing that’s fascinating about that is that Jeffrey Wright, who is playing there against her, who is also a spectacular actor, what he says is, “Limit your emotional affect,” not eliminate it.

Because she’s a robot, she can dial it from an eight to a three. By the way, what he’s doing there essentially is what directors are doing all the time on a set. They walk over to an actor, “Great, let’s just roll it back. Let’s just pull it back five points and see what that’s like.” Because then what happens is you’re still feeling emotion. She still has a quavering in her voice. You can still feel her pain. But it’s like she experienced it three hours ago, and now she’s starting to get a handle on it, as opposed to she’s in the middle of it.
First things first when you’re thinking about your character’s emotional state is ask why are they experiencing these emotions and how distant are they from the source of it, because that’s going to be a huge indication to you about how you ought to be pitching them.

**John:** Absolutely. So one of the things you learn as you’re directing actors is to talk about verbs rather than adjectives. Gives them a thing to do rather than sort of a description of how they are supposed to be feeling, because it’s very hard to feel a thing. And what I might describe as being happy is a thousand different things. But if I describe, “Invite the other character into the space. Share your joy with them,” that’s a thing that an actor can actually play.

Be thinking about sort of not only what is causing this emotional state but what is the actual physicality of that emotional state. What’s happening in there?

And it’s not rational. And that’s a hard thing to grasp is that we always talk about what characters want, what characters are after. This isn’t really the same kind of thing. It’s an inner emotional drive. Something they cannot actually control. It’s more their lizard brain doing a thing.

So what may be useful is imagine that you’re at a party, and how differently you’d act or speak if, for example, you were terrified of someone in the room, or if you were ravenously hungry, if you were ashamed about what you were wearing, if you were proud of the person this party was about, if you were disgusted by the level of filth in the room. Those are all sort of primal things that are happening.

And if you’re experiencing those emotions, the affect is going to be different. You’re going to do different things. You’re going to say different things. You’re going to position yourself in the room differently. So getting an emotional register for each of the characters in a scene can be super important in terms of figuring out how this scene is actually going to play out.

And I do want to stress that we really are talking about scene work here. It’s not overall story plotting. It’s not even sort of sequence work. It’s very much, in this moment right now, what is going to be the next thing the character says, the next thing the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s also what people came for. You’re absolutely right to distinguish between the normal acting place and the normal writing place as one of intention. I want something, so I’m going to figure out how to get it, whether it’s to get your attention or have you fall in love with me or stop the bomb from exploding, whatever it is. That’s the rational stuff that actors go through. And that’s the rational stuff you’re writing in there. That is the plot.

But what people come for is the emotion, because the emotion is when the character doesn’t want anything. They are simply expressing the truth about what they are experiencing in the moment. And that is the part we connect with. We do not connect with the intricacies of disarming a bomb. We connect with fear. We connect with the anticipation of terrible loss, the foreshadowing of grief. That’s what we imagine.

If you’re a parent, you know this feeling. You put your kid on a bicycle for the first time, and whether you realize it or not, your heart beats a little bit faster, because you are anticipating them falling and getting hurt. So that’s the truth. And that’s what we all experience. That is the universal nature of this. That’s the part people come for.

So our job is to understand very realistically what somebody would be feeling in that moment, because while audiences will forgive things like… The first movie I ever had in theaters was a movie called Rocket Man. Not the Elton John story. This was 1998 silly children’s comedy, Rocket Man. And the director, I didn’t get along with. I just didn’t appreciate his creative instincts.

And one of the things he did, I guess, when he was shooting was, there were all these scenes were these astronauts were walking around on Mars, and the visors and the helmets were causing reflections from the lights, so he said, “Let’s just remove those visors, and we’ll put them in later with visual effects,” because he thought that would be easy to do. And then later, Disney was like, “This movie’s not even that great. We’re not spending more money on it.”

So there are scenes in the finished movie where they are walking around on Mars and there’s no visor in their helmet. And audiences will forgive that, because they know on some level these people aren’t really on Mars and who cares. But here’s what they will never forgive. An inappropriate emotional response. Because they know what feels real and what doesn’t. That’s where they will kill you.

So our job is to be as realistic as possible in those moments to avoid the extremes of melodrama, where things start to get funny because they’re so wildly too big, or to avoid the constraint of, I guess we would call it unnatural emotional response, where things don’t connect right or simply aren’t there at all. Is it better to underplay emotion than overplay? Usually. Can you underplay emotion to the point where it’s just not there and the whole thing feels kind of dead and battened down with cotton? Yup.

**John:** Oh, we’ve seen those movies. We’ve seen those cuts where it just got too stripped down. It sounds like we could be talking about actors and how actors create their performance. And this is not a podcast about acting. But there is such a shared body of intention here. And it doesn’t even necessarily go through the director. Because we are the first actors for all of these characters. And so we have to be able to get inside their emotional states and be able to understand what it feels like to be in that moment, you know, experiencing these things, so we can see what happens next.

And so often when I find things are being forced, or when I don’t believe the reality of stuff, I feel like the writer is dictating, “Okay, this is the next emotional thing you’re going to hit,” rather than actually putting themselves in the position of that character and seeing what happens next and actually just watching and listening to what naturally does happen next.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s always a balancing act there.

**Craig:** The mistake I think a lot of writers make is to think, “I want the audience to feel sad, so let me make my character sad.” That’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There are times when the character should be sad, but that’s not what makes us sad.

**John:** Absolutely. And so often the lesson you learn is that if you want the audience to feel emotional and sad, limiting what we see of that character feeling that way or how that character externalizes that thing is often more effective. The character holding back tears generally will generate more tears from the audience than the character who is actually crying, because we put ourselves in that position and we are sort of crying for them.

**Craig:** Yes. And sometimes there’s a situation where the actors, the characters may not be feeling an enormous amount emotionally, but what they’re doing is something we can empathize with so deeply that it makes us cry.

There’s a moment in Chernobyl where Jessie Buckley’s character is with her husband, who is a firefighter, and he is dying, clearly, evidently, and disgustingly. And she’s right next to him, and she tells him that they’re going to have a baby. Obviously, she knows this. She’s not super emotional in that moment. And he sort of just takes her hand, and he’s not super emotional. He’s just pleased with this news. But I cry when I look at it, because I feel such terrible empathy for them.

And it’s hard to even explain, to parse out exactly why that makes me so sad. Is it that she’s smiling and he’s smiling and they’re experiencing this moment of joy and hope, even though he’s perishing in front of her? Is that what it is? It’s hard to say.

But what I do know is that if I try to make people cry then it just gets dumb. So you find your moments. For instance, Jessie, who is a spectacularly good actor and just has amazing instincts, there are moments in the show where she is very emotional. And I don’t necessarily feel emotional in that moment. What I feel is alignment with her, like, “Yes, I’m glad you’re angry. Yes, of course you’d be scared. Yes, of course you’re upset.”

**John:** That comes back to empathy, because you successfully placed us as the viewer into her position, so we are seeing the story from her point of view. And that is not just the intellectual point of view, but the emotional point of view. And that’s why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. We are identifying with her.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But let’s talk about sort of how writers can be thinking about these emotions. I want to get back to your example of you’re the parent whose kid is riding off on the bike for the first time and you know they’re going to fall. That is such a specific example. And the reason you were able to summon that is, when that happened, you were probably kind of recording that. A little red light went off in the corner, “Okay, this emotional thing that I’m experiencing, this is real. This is a thing that I can hold onto. It’s in my toolbox right now.”

A thing I’ve been doing since the start of the pandemic is I started doing Head Space, the meditation app. And one of the things it forces you to do is to really evaluate what are you feeling right now at this moment. And when you get good at being able to analyze what are you actually feeling, you can start to think like, “Okay, what would it feel like to be proud of this moment? What would it feel like to be angry or fearful?” And you can start to distill what that emotion is like independent of the actual cause. And sometimes as a writer, you have to be able to do that. So you actually say, “Okay, what is the moment,” back to Evan Rachel Wood, “with a little bit more fear dialed in? What is this moment like with a little bit more dread or curiosity dialed in?”

Because with that, you’re like a musician putting together the chords and figuring out like, okay, what is the best version of this moment, this scene, this character’s experience in this moment because of the emotions that I’m aware of and able to apply.

**Craig:** That’s right. Then you have the difficult job of figuring out how that would work within the tone of whatever you’re doing. Because every piece has a different tone. And over time, the way we generally make and then absorb culture changes. When you watch action movies from the ‘80s, what you will generally see are a lot of people behaving in ways that are emotionally insane. Just insane. You know, stuff blows up and they’re just like, “Wow, should have worn my sunglasses.” Whatever the dumb crap is.

I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger would quip after murdering people. Who does that? You just murdered a human being. I mean, he deserved it. He was a bad guy. But you killed him, and then you have a little snappy joke that’s a pun based on the manner in which you killed him. That’s the tone of that.

As we’ve kind of gone on, things do change. And generally speaking, our culture has become more emotionally expressive and in touch. I think it’s generally a good thing, of course. And we are, all of us living in a post-therapy age, where many people have gone to therapy, or they’ve just read books like Chicken Soup for the Soul or whatever it is. We’ve been absorbing certain things.

And so now when we write this stuff, part of what has to happen is, you, the author, cannot be afraid of your own emotions. And you can’t be afraid to confront how you felt in moments. And that means being honest with yourself and understanding that when we go to the movies… So forget about you wanting to project some image of yourself to the world. It would be cool to project John Milius to the world, because John Milius is super cool and everything. But I’m not John Milius. And I just don’t write tough like that. I just don’t. I kind of do the opposite. And so you have to kind of forget about projecting some perfectly strong, invulnerable sense of yourself to the world, and instead recognize that everybody who is sitting in there wants to feel comforted by a created human being’s weakness and their triumph over that weakness, because that’s inspiring to them.

And if you want to look at one genre that encapsulates that the most, the embracing of the emotional self, particularly the emotional male self, it is Marvel movies, because superhero movies were about these sort of emotionally distant people, because they were perfected. And now they’re tormented, which reflects Marvel.

**John:** Now it’s about Tony Stark’s relationship with Peter Parker. It’s very specific character interactions is why we go to these superhero movies, especially the Marvel movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. So you have to get it right. That’s the challenge. This is I think probably where writers will fall down more than anywhere else, because they actually don’t understand their own selves, so they don’t know what a character should feel. How many times in our Three Page Challenges have we said, “Why is this person speaking in a complete sentence when somebody has a knife to their throat?” You can’t. You just can’t. There’s a lack of emotional truth.

**John:** Yeah. And so as you’re talking with actors, and they can be frustrated, like, “I don’t know how to do this scene. This isn’t tracking for me,” a lot of times, what it is, they’re saying, “I don’t know how to get from A to E here. You’re not giving me the structure to get from place to place.” And maybe you just didn’t build that, or maybe there’s a way there that you didn’t see before.

As writers, we’re not documentarians. So we’re not necessarily creating scenes that are completely emotionally true to how they would happen in real life. There’s going to be optimization, and it’s going to move faster, and people are going to have to make transitions within the course of a scene that they probably would not do in real life. But that’s the art of it. That’s how you are sanding off the edges and getting there a little bit quicker. But you have to understand what the reality would look like first before you try to optimize it.

**Craig:** Correct. That is absolutely correct.

[Episode 151 clip]

**John:** So Craig, what motivated this talk of liars and liars in scripts?

**Craig:** I’m working on a movie right now. Essentially, it’s a whodunit. And when you start to investigate the world of whodunits, you… I’ve been reading a ton of Agatha Christie. I’ve always been a Doyle fan. And I’ve always been a Poe fan. Poe is really the kind of inventor of the modern whodunit detective story.

For this kind of movie, I felt that Agatha Christie’s genre was the most appropriate, and so I’ve been just reading a lot of Agatha Christie. And one thing that I’ve noticed is all of the characters, with the exception of the detective, are liars. Part of the fun of a good mystery is that when you ask the question whodunit, the answer is any one of these people could have done it.

And we think that they could have done it in part because perhaps they all had motive, they all have opportunity, but more importantly, they are all lying. And it’s lying that makes us suspect them.

But as I started to think about this, I realized, in fact everyone is a liar to some extent or another. All humans are liars. Lying is part of the human condition. But there are different kinds of liars. And there’s different kinds of lying. And when we talk sometimes about new writers who are writing and the characters, we’ll say, “Oh, everything seems on the nose,” or, “There’s not enough subtext.” In a weird way, I think sometimes the mistake people are making is that they’re writing people, and those people aren’t lying. They’re writing truth-tellers.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s just less interesting. So I wanted to talk about how useful it is to think of your characters as liars, but also the different grades or categories of lying and lying characters that you’ll find.

**John:** I think it also feeds into our concept of motivation. Why a person is saying the things that they want other people to believe is key to understanding who they are in a scene and overall in the film itself.

**Craig:** That’s right. The idea of drama and of experiencing a narrative where humans move through it and transform is that they are not at the end who they were in the beginning. And if they were just truth-tellers in the beginning, naturally, they’re simply going to say, “Well, here’s the situation. I’m very scared of this. I’m scared of growing up, and I’m scared of telling you that I love you, but I do love you. And I’m hoping that by behaving better, I will in fact grow up, and whether I get you or not, I will be a better person.” [Yawns] Movie over. Everyone has to be concealing something in some way. But then there are characters who are lying for other reasons. Maybe not such understandable or empathetic, or sympathetic, I should say, reasons.

So, let’s talk about some of the different kinds of lying there is. The most useful kind to me is self-deception. I think every protagonist to some level or another is engaging in self-deception. We’ll say the character has an arc. It is a bad character, a dramatically unsatisfying character who has complete access to his or her emotional states, weakness, flaws, and can pinpoint them perfectly, and then throughout the course of the movie, go about and achieve them.

One of my favorite examples of this, because it was done so cannily, is Jerry Maguire. I honestly think that Cameron Crowe pulled off one of the most brilliant self-delusional moves of all time. We’ll see sometimes in comedy, “Hang a lantern on it.” If you have something that seems a little wonky in your story, just go for it and embrace it, and people feel like it’s intentional.

**John:** Yeah. Call it out to the audience, so the audience knows that you recognize that it’s there.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, what does he do with this character of Jerry Maguire? The movie begins with a man who, in a moment of frustration, writes a manifesto about the kind of person that is a good person. But he is still engaged in a very high level of self-delusion. He is in fact not that person. Even the writing of that manifesto is a manifestation of his self-delusion. He’s actually a bad person. The manifesto itself is really more of a temper tantrum, and nothing that he actually thinks he should or could do.

As a result of writing that manifesto, he loses his job and all of his clients except for two. And actually, really what it comes down to is one. And then must struggle over the course of the movie, clinging all the while to his self-delusions, to finally get to the place where he realizes, “Oh my god, I’m supposed to be the person I wrote about in that manifesto.” That’s how strong self-delusion is. Even when you can write down the truth of yourself, you do not believe it.

**John:** Self-delusion is commonly the starting place for a movie where the journey is for the character to come upon emotional honesty, emotional authenticity. And so when we talk about how useful it is for a character to lie, that’s not that the movie should be lying. It’s that the character needs to have progress from this inauthentic state to an authentic state at the end, and Jerry Maguire is a great example of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think all protagonists to some level or another have a self-delusion. If they have an arc, it means they have a self-delusion. Going into the world of animation, the character of Marlin in Finding Nemo, he is honest to himself to a point. He honestly believes that he must take care of Nemo at all costs. But he’s deluding himself, because somewhere down there is access to a truth, an inherent truth, that this can’t last. The boy will grow up. He must let him go.

**John:** Even in movies that are more action-based or sort of have more classically sort of like here’s the hero protagonist, you often see that the hero at the start of the movie is really kind of a series of poses. It’s acting the part of the hero, but it doesn’t actually have the stuff inside him, because he hasn’t been tested in ways to really show what it is that matters to him.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** What it is that is sort of unique to his own journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, in fact, that can start to give you a clue. Everybody is afraid of the second act, but this gives you a clue to your second act. What situations should this person go through so that their own delusion can be laid bare to them.

**John:** Their normal way of doing things and the normal person they’re presenting out into the world is called out in a way or is ineffective in a way, and they’re forced to find a new identity.

**Craig:** Right. And this works in part because it is the function of drama to… Why we are attracted to drama is because it illuminates our lives. All of us are delusional.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everyone on the planet is delusional. We are all walking around either ignoring something in ourselves, willfully or subconsciously, or simply misunderstanding ourselves. No matter how much therapy you go through, there will always be a glitch in the system, because we’re made of meat. We are rational to a point, but the part of us that is irrational is not accessible by the rational, so therefore it’s happening out of our control.

**John:** I would also question whether if you got rid of all your self-delusions, if you got rid of all of the lies, would there even be a person left underneath there? I think so many cases, our personalities and sort of who we perceive ourselves to be is a narrative that is carefully constructed based on experiences, based on our hopes, based on our dreams. And you are sort of a story. And a story is made up of some fabrications.

**Craig:** That’s right. Just as you can’t step into the same river twice, every new realization you have changes your mind. It changes who you are and gives birth to a new level of potential self-delusion. One hopes that you can improve your life. Know thyself is a great goal. But you’re right, it’s actually an impossibility to truly 100% know yourself. Let’s get really heavy for a second. Are you familiar with Gödel’s theorem?

**John:** I don’t know Gödel’s theorem. Tell me.

**Craig:** First of all, a great book. This is my One Cool Thing for every day. Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s an incredible book. Douglas, I want to say it’s Douglas Hofstadter I believe is the… He wrote this I believe in the ’80s, this brilliant, mind-boggling book that goes into mathematics, artificial intelligence, logic, and ranges from Alice in Wonderland to the music of Bach, to the drawings of Escher, and then interestingly in to the work of Gödel.

And Gödel had this very famous mathematical theorem. And essentially what it said is, for any given system of mathematics… In math, I don’t know if you remember, you can prove things.

**John:** Yes. Absolutely. That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Do you remember that? Right. So you have a system of rules, and then somebody gives you an assertion. And then you can create a proof of that assertion using the rules, and you can prove that it is true, and that’s important.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** What his theorem said was, for any system of mathematics, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. And that’s kind of mind-boggling in and of itself. And it gets to this whole idea of recursion, all the rest.

But what it really comes down to is our brains are closed systems. There will always be things that are true that our brain in its current state simply can’t prove. You’re right; self-deception is inherent to the human condition. So, wonderful thing to think about as you’re creating your character.

**John:** And if you go in further, if you actually were to strip away everything you think about yourself, your entire narrative… I’ll put a link in too. Datura. I may be pronouncing it wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** But you know that drug?

**Craig:** The worst.

**John:** It apparently just lays you completely bare, and you sort of see yourself and your wholeness and all of your flaws. And very few people can withstand that sort of spotlight of scrutiny.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** When you lose yourself, you lose all of your lies.

**Craig:** Precisely. And that’s why the journey for a character that is struggling with their self-deception is difficult. See, bad screenwriting teachers will always talk in terms of bloodless structure, because that’s all they understand. So, they’ll say things like, “It’s important that your hero face obstacles.” Why? Why? Let’s just start with these really fundamental questions.

I remember I took a philosophy class in college, and the professor asked a question. “It’s good to know that things are true, but why? Why is truth better than not truth?” [laughs] Then you go, “Huh, I guess I should probably think about that.” Why obstacles? Because if there are no obstacles… The obstacles aren’t the point. The obstacles are the symptom of the difficulty of undoing your self-deception. It’s hard.

**John:** All right. So, self-deception is a key thing. What other types of lies do you think are fundamental for storytellers?

**Craig:** So, that’s the first, and that’s the most common class. Then there’s this second class that doesn’t apply to every character. And I call this the manipulators. These are people who lie for a purpose. They’re lying for an external purpose. And we can break them out into two subgroups. There is the protective manipulators, and there are the manipulators who are lying for gain. So, protective liars are people that lie in order to avoid pain or hurt or to maintain some lifestyle that is their best option.

**John:** So, they’re not trying to deceive themselves. They’re trying to deceive other people, to either protect what they have or protect the things they love.

**Craig:** Right. And you and I have both written movies that have this. Big Fish, Edward Bloom, he’s a protective liar. He is lying because it’s helpful to him. He’s certainly lying more than the average person. He’s not lying to get rich.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And he’s not self-delusional. He’s lying purposely, but in order to protect himself on some level.

**John:** Yeah. I would push a little bit back on protect himself. The only thing he can pass on is his vision of how the world should be, so he’s attempting to use these fabrications in order to create an idealized world, a vision for what he wants for his son.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I actually think that that’s consistent with protecting yourself, in the sense that if you don’t do it, then you feel inept as a father, that you’ve somehow failed, that this is something he needs to do for his son.

In Identity Thief, the character of Diana lies because she is lonely and unloved, and the only way she can survive is by constantly lying. Constantly. It’s become a crutch. And these characters can be very sympathetic, actually. They’re frustrating. They’re frustrating, and that’s fun. They create conflict, which we love, of course. And they also keep the audience guessing, which we love. And then, of course, they have the audience begin to connect with that person. The audience naturally tries to make sense of things. It’s part of what we do as human beings.

So, don’t try and make sense of why this person is doing it, and now they’re doing your work for you. They are engaged. And your job when you finally explain why is to explain why in a way that is satisfying to them, that does make sense.

**John:** Absolutely. So, you’re describing the character’s secrets and lies, which is really the same thing. There is something that they’re not showing. There are cards they are holding back. And that’s a way of engaging the audience’s curiosity.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And anything that makes your audience lean in to the story rather than sit back is a very good thing.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, the second sub-heading under manipulators are the people who lie for gain. And these are typically villains. Sometimes, however, they’re heroes. For instance, Danny Ocean lies constantly for gain. He’s a thief. But, you’ll take a look at a villain like Hans Gruber in Die Hard. Wonderful liar. Wonderful, brilliant liar, and lying for gain. He also too is a thief.

These people who lie for gain are oftentimes much better liars than the people who lie to protect themselves or conceal a personal secret. And they’re definitely better liars than people who are simply self-delusional. They’re professional liars. So, you get to write somebody who is not only screwing with the people around them, but screwing with the audience, and this is important.

**John:** When you say they’re lying for gain, it’s not just necessarily monetary gain. If you look at Jeff Bridge’s character in Jagged Edge, that’s a character who is lying with a very specific agenda. He’s trying to protect himself, but he gets so much more by establishing and maintaining this lie. It’s his natural way of going through the world is that lie.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And sometimes the reason, the gain is actually quite noble. Flick, the ant, goes and gets these guys to help save the village, but they’re just circus performers. And this lie has to be maintained until finally it’s laid bare.

There are all sorts of ways that people can lie for gain, but when they do so, they have to do so with some skill. And therefore, as a writer, you have to actually think like a manipulative liar here who is trying to get something. The truth is no longer important. What’s far more important is what you have to say. And the audience shouldn’t always know.

One of the great things about Ocean’s Eleven is that they lie to each other. They lie to Matt Damon. Not everybody knows what’s going on. And then the movie lies to us through their perspective, because we think we’re seeing something we’re not, and then they reveal how they’ve lied. So, that gives you so many opportunities.

**John:** I think the challenge for a screenwriter is recognizing when it is good to let the audience in and see the liar doing his work, because that can be really rewarding to see somebody be really good at the thing they’re doing, and when you’re better off holding back and keeping the audience in the same point of view as all the other characters, where they’re being manipulated as well.

**Craig:** Yes. And the revelation of their lies should have the punch of some kind of climactic feel, because if you reveal it too soon, you’ll simply lose interest. I mean, we understand the basic lie of Hans Gruber fairly early on, but there’s this other lie that he’s hiding from his own guys, of what’s going to happen with that last bit of security lock. He hasn’t told them, which is actually kind of great. I mean, because look, realistically if you were leading a gang of henchmen into a building to rob it, and you knew that there were seven things you had to get through, and the last one was an impossible-to-break electromagnetic seal on the vault, you would say, “Don’t worry. What we’re going to do is we’re going to stage a terrorist attack. Eventually, they’ll follow the handbook, turn off all the power, and that will open the thing for us. You ask for a miracle, I give you the FBI.” But he doesn’t tell them.

**John:** You like at Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects, and you know that he is manipulative, you know that you can’t trust him, but you didn’t know that everything you’re experiencing was a lie. And it was the right choice to save that reveal to the very, very end. The punch line to the joke is the revelation of this last lie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m sure those decisions, he probably went back and forth about like, “If we revealed a little bit earlier, then we would have the tension about will he get caught.” And this was the decision like, nope, that the whole movie has to be set up to this point.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. And that’s a great segue to our next category, because Keyser Söze is a perfect example of somebody that manipulates and lies for gain. He’s also a very bad person. But his badness isn’t his lying. His badness is that he’s a murderer. The lying is done to get him gain for his other badness, which is murdering.

But then there’s the last category of liar, and this is the worst liar, and these are always villains. And these are some of the scariest characters you can create. They are bad, bad people. These are the chaotic, pathological liars.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** These are the people that lie because they love trouble. And they lie to create strife and drama. They can’t control their lying. I don’t think they’re alive unless they’re lying. I don’t think they even know what the truth is.

So the character that often comes to mind in this case is the latest incarnation of the Joker, the Heath Ledger Joker. One thing that I thought was just – I think everybody thought it was pretty amazing – in Dark Knight was when the character the Joker explains how he got his facial scars. And it was very scary, very revealing confession of a trauma.

**John:** It made you almost sympathetic for a moment.

**Craig:** It did. And then there is another scene later where he explains to somebody else how he got his scars, and it is just as compelling, and just as terrifying, and just as true feeling, but it’s a completely different story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s when you realize this man is just a liar.

**John:** Yeah, he’s truly a sociopath. A psychopath. I mean, all he can sort of do is lie. It’s the air he breathes. If he says hello, that’s a lie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And these characters are very difficult to write, because for the most part, we aren’t them. I mean, occasionally – god help us – we will run into these people.

**John:** I worked for a person. I worked for one of those people.

**Craig:** There you go. And part of the problem is that they’re so good that you don’t really know for a while what’s happening. And then eventually, it becomes clear, and then part of the struggle is it’s hard to wrap your mind around the fact that another person is actually… You, like the audience, want to make sense of them. But you can’t, because they are operating in a way that is… Frankly, they don’t even care about their own destruction, you see?

The Joker doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He has no interest in that. He loves chaos. He loves the chaos that lying can bring. And you’ll see these characters sometimes in noir. These characters will skew towards female, because when you put it in a man you immediately start to think, “My god, he’s going to just start stabbing, shooting, killing, and all the rest,” whereas women can maybe just scramble your brain and make you second guess your own name and all the rest of it. And then finally, Bogart sends you up the river.

But liars, pathological liars are very scary people. And if you’re going to write one, you just have to know that the movie will be deeply infected by them, that they are going to take over.

**John:** It’s a movie that hasn’t come out yet, but Kristen Wiig is terrific in a comedy I saw – I guess you’d call it a comedy, kind of a comedy, kind of a drama – called Welcome to Me. It should be out later this year. And she’s not a psychopath, but it’s one of the rare cases where I’ve seen just a chaotic, manipulative person really at the center of a film, where she is supposed to be the protagonist, but she honestly kind of can’t protagonate in a meaningful way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a really challenging task for a writer and for an actress to put that person at the very center of a movie and not have that person be the villain.

**Craig:** Of course, because the protagonist at some basic level is trying to achieve something. We ask simple questions of our heroes. What do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? What scares you? This or that. What does the pathological, chaotic liar want? Trouble.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s what they want. They want trouble. So, the only person I’ve written like this, and I loved writing him, was Mr. Chow.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Mr. Chow is a chaotic, pathological liar. He does not care if he lives or dies. In fact, he thinks it’s awesome. He just loves trouble. But because he’s so comic, and also embodied in this kind of very small, physically frail man, it’s funny.

**John:** But if you tried to have the Mr. Chow movie, good luck. It’s very, very challenging to put that person in the center of a movie and have them do any of the kinds of things you want a person at the center of a movie to be able to do.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, Todd and I talked for a bit about the idea of what a Mr. Chow movie would look like. And it was totally different, because it was the darkest thing imaginable. And I remember we had this one idea for a scene that sort of sums it up. Mr. Chow comes home to see his elderly father. And he walks in, and his old, old father looks up at him and says something like, “Leslie, you returned to us. You came back.” And Mr. Chow walks over to him and then cuts his throat.

And as his father is dying, his father looks up at him and says, “Good job,” because that’s the only… That’s how Mr. Chow is born. It’s just pure awful chaos and darkness, willful self-destruction. The only goal there is is to blow up the world.

**John:** Yeah. Those characters are almost un-human, because they don’t work in our normal ways. Crispin Glover and I had a few conversations about taking his Thin Man character from the Charlie’s Angels movie and just doing his own movie. And ultimately, nothing will ever come of that probably. But it’s a fascinating character, but such an incredibly challenging character to put at the center of anything, because he is chaos. He’s like chaos and death in ways that’s very hard to… He’s a challenge. It’s very hard to have insight into that character, because deliberately, they’re supposed to be opaque, and you just can’t know them.

Scarlett Johansson’s character in Under the Skin is a similar situation, is where she’s just this lioness. There’s just not a human. There literally is not a human underneath that. It makes it very challenging.

**Craig:** Right. It essentially doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. There needs to be somebody in opposition to it, or they need to not be human, and that’s sort of the point, and then the purpose of the movie is to illuminate the difference between humans and non-humans. But they will infect your movie, and you have to write them carefully. They can kind of get in your head. And by all means, if you run into one of these people, go the other way.

[Present]

**John:** And hey, it’s John back again in 2024, which seems impossible to be real. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a replay by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to give you on single-use characters. Thanks.

[Bonus Segment: Episode 467 Clip]

**John:** OK, so Craig, this last week I was writing on a scene and I recognized that this was a scene where I created a character who is essentially single-use. This character only appears in this scene. He’s very memorable and distinctive and hopefully very funny within this scene, but story-wise this character is never going to reappear again. And not only is there not a natural reason for them to reappear again, they really can’t reappear again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it got me thinking about the situations in which I do have a single-use character and times when I want to make sure the characters can come back, and what our expectation is as writers and as readers and audiences when there’s a character who appears in only one scene.

**Craig:** And generally, we’re going to try and avoid this, meaning when we do engage a single-use character, we’re doing so very carefully and very intentionally, because every actor that we bring on board, that’s an expense to the production, and somebody has to get wardrobed and costumed. And it also demands the audience’s attention. They are just going to presume that when they meet people, those people are in the movie. And the more people they meet who show up once and leave, the more frustrated they get. You keep throwing new people at them, they’re just going to stop paying attention, because they’re like, ah, none of these people are going to stay around, so why am I bothering?

**John:** Yeah. I think people create a mental placeholder for them. And I find as I read scripts, often I’ll circle the first time a character shows up just so I can keep track of, oh, this is that person. And if I find myself circling a bunch of characters, like, oh wait, how many people are in this movie? I think you’re saying that expectation is that this person might come back, so I need to remember something about them.

In some cases, especially if the scene is very dramatic or very funny, there’s kind of a misleading vividness, where it feels like, oh, this person must be important, because look how much screen time or look at what a big moment they had. And that can be a trap in and of itself.

So, looking back at the scene that I wrote, I know it was the right choice to do it, and this was a scene which in its initial conception was going to have a group of people speaking, and then it became more clear that like, oh no, it should just be one person driving it, because it was going to get too diffuse if I had a bunch of people speaking in the scene.

But what I was able to do is, because this scene takes place in a specific set that the hero is going to, and there’s not an expectation that they’re going to come back to it, I think I was able to make it pretty clear we don’t have an expectation that that character is ever going to be seen again. So by having it be a destination and not part of the regular home set in a way, I don’t think we’re going to plan on seeing that thing again.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the ways you can inoculate the audience against thinking that they’re going to keep seeing this person is… Very common use of single-use characters is they die. So, we’re not worried about them. They’re not coming back. I’m thinking of the very opening scene of the first episode of Game of Thrones. There are a bunch of guys we don’t see again. They all die. It doesn’t matter who they are. They die. That’s the point.

Another way we can inoculate the audience is by making sure that our single-use character is rooted by circumstance into a position. So, we have a main character moving through a space, whether it’s an airport, or it is a department store.

**John:** A DMV.

**Craig:** A DMV. Somebody is stuck in their job. They’re not going anywhere. Your character moves in and then leaves. And we understand that character can’t go anywhere else except where they are. I mean, one of the greatest single-use characters of all time is Edie McClurg playing a rental car saleswoman in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And she’s perfect.

**John:** We wouldn’t want any more.

**Craig:** You couldn’t ask for a better foil for Steve Martin losing his mind. And we know we’re not going to see her again, because she lives and works behind that counter and does not exist anywhere else.

**John:** Another thing I think you need to keep in mind with these single-use characters is, always ask yourself is my hero still driving this scene, because so often you have this funny idea for a character, this funny situation, but if my hero can only react to that situation, they’re not actually in charge of it. So what you describe of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the scene is not really about her. It’s about his frustration and what happens, what he does in response to her. It’s not about her. And so making sure that if you are going to use a single-use character, they’re not just going to take over the scene and just leave your hero, your star just facing them as an obstacle and not doing anything themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. There may be a tendency among new writers to try and jazz up a scene by having a waiter come over and be wacky. Nobody wants it. Nobody.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Every now and then, for instance, here’s a for instance. Bronson Pinchot created a career for himself with a single-use character in Beverly Hills Cop.

**John:** Beverly Hills Cop, yeah.

**Craig:** And it was so good. It was so fascinating and so weird that you kind of wanted more of him. And you didn’t get more of him, because he was single-use. And you wanted more of him, and you got more of him eventually. Bronson Pinchot went on to do other things, because I think that was before he did Perfect Strangers, I think. I think it was. I’m sure somebody will write in and tell me I’m an idiot, which I often am.

But the point is, every now and then you will get something like that. But don’t aim for it, because it almost never happens. And you really do want to design these single-use characters as functions for your main character. They are obstacles. They are information. They are omens. They are distractions. But they are rarely the person who is supposed to be drawing the audience’s attention.

**John:** Yeah. So in certain circumstances, your waiter example is exactly right. Because you would say like, oh, you want every character to pop. And it’s like, yeah, but you don’t necessarily want that waiter character to pop. If the waiter needs to be there, but it’s not actually the point of the scene, you kind of want that character to be a little bit background. You want that character to be helping inform the setting, but they are kind of scene setting. They’re not actually the point of it.

And they should be a little bit more like set decoration than the marquee star, because they’re going to probably pull focus away from what you actually want to be focusing on, which is probably your hero and what your hero is doing in those moments.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** So as you look at your script, if you have a lot of single-use characters, there may be something wrong. It’s not a guarantee that something is wrong, but there might be something wrong. So if there’s four scenes in your script that have major single-use characters who have multiple lines and are really doing a lot, ask yourself why. And not necessarily there’s a problem, but there could be a reason why. Maybe these characters should be combined or there’s some way in which they can come back. And you may not be spending your script time properly.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s worth policing through. And every now and then you might find a way to maybe collapse them into one. If you have two scenes, you may be able to get away with just combining those two characters into one character. But yeah, be aware of it and try to avoid. And by the way, when possible ask yourself does this person need to talk at all.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Because the difference between a person who says one word on camera and a person who says nothing is a lot of money and also a lot of attention.

**John:** A lot of time actually shooting, just to come around to film their lines-

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** … is hours on the day.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Episode 358 – Point of View](https://johnaugust.com/2018/point-of-view)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 472 – Emotional States](https://johnaugust.com/2020/emotional-states)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 151 – Secrets and Lies](https://johnaugust.com/2014/secrets-and-lies)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 467 – Another Word for Euphemism](https://johnaugust.com/2020/another-word-for-euphemism)
* [Gödel’s incompleteness theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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