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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

I love talking to screenwriters about their experience getting their first movies made because it’s the difference between writing a script and actually creating a movie. Last year, we had Justin Kuritzkes on to talk about his experience with Challengers and Queer, back-to-back with Director Luca Guadagnino. Today, we’re here talking with Nora Garrett, the first-time writer of Guadagnino’s current After the Hunt. Welcome, Nora.

Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I think one of the reasons why I love this as an example is we have so many listeners who are working on their scripts, they’re aspiring writers, they’ve written some scripts but they’ve never gotten a thing made. And so that transition point between like, these are all the words I have on paper and this is a movie that’s actually existing in theaters, just talking through that process gives people a sense of the journey. Craig and I could talk about it and our experiences, but that’s not what happens in 2025 and you have just gone through this process.

Nora: Yes, that is true.

[laughter]

John: I’m sure there were moments that were great and moments that were surprising and fantastic and also terrifying.

Nora: Yes. Oh, I mean, there were so many moments of abject terror that I felt like I was just in a complete state of disassociation watching myself go through it and be like, be cool, relax. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, it happened really fast. It’s interesting to be on the back end of it now looking back.

John: Cool. I want to talk about your journey as a writer, sort of getting up to this point, getting this in the hands of a director who actually made your movie with Julia Roberts starring. Because we have the actual script in front of us, I want to talk a little bit about the words on the page and your experience writing those words, but then seeing like, oh, those actual actors have to do these things and that whole process.

Nora: Yes.

John: And revisions, probably the most revisions you can also imagine. I saw from the cover page, you went to double white, so you went all the way through the colors.

Nora: Yes, we sure did.

[laughter]

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about day jobs, because until very recently, you had a day job doing other things, and I want to talk about what your experience has been trying to have an identity as the person who is a screenwriter and a filmmaker and an actor, but also the day job of it all.

Nora: Of course.

John: Cool. Well, let’s get into it. You and I are both from Colorado, so.

Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?

John: Yes. I saw that you were born in New York. Were you raised in Evergreen?

Nora: Yes, I was raised in Evergreen. Wow, where are you from?

John: Boulder, Colorado.

Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.

John: Talk to us about Colorado, because my experience of Colorado was that I had no idea how lucky I was growing up there. Then you go back and like, “Oh, my God, this place is so pretty.”

Nora: That was exactly my experience. Exactly. We moved from New York when I was four, but I was adamant that I was a city girl to the point where I have vivid memories of touring the houses that we eventually lived in Evergreen. I was telling the real estate agent, I was like, “I’m a city girl, I don’t belong here.” [laughs]

John: You’re four. Yes.

Nora: I’m four. I’m four. I think my father at that point was like, that’s when he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do with this girl.” It wasn’t until I left Colorado to go to NYU and then came back from the city that I realized that this is such a gorgeous, bucolic place to live. My experience of Colorado, and I think it’s still true, is that it’s a pretty big artistic town in the middle of the country.

John: I grew up in Boulder. We had the Shakespeare Festival. For not being at a hub, we had a lot of cultural things.

Nora: Exactly. I was dancing at first at Colorado Ballet and then I transitioned to acting and I went to Denver School of the Arts, which is a local magnet arts high school. I think that there was a lot of local theaters and a lot of local theater that I was able to be involved in alongside the Thespian Convention and the Shakespeare Festival. I always felt like Colorado had a liberal and an artistic bent to it, even despite being in a landlocked state. [laughs]

John: Can you talk to me briefly about dancing? Because you’re the only person I know who’s gone from dancing to screenwriting. Dancing, my perception of it, especially ballet, is that it’s all about reducing differences between things, being flawless, and practicing thing until it’s absolutely perfect. Then I don’t want to say you’re interchangeable with other people, but there’s just no flaws to be seen. Did you love it? Why did you stop dancing? What got you out of dancing?

Nora: Sure. That’s a very astute observation. I think that I loved ballet. I loved it so much because of the regimentation that you’re talking about, I think. I think I was someone who really responded well to structure and that’s been true throughout my entire life. I responded really well to six days a week, very rigorous, two to three hours a day of ballet. I responded to the same rigor when I went to school and took that really seriously.

I think having parameters was important to me, but it’s a ruthless job. Ultimately, I stopped because I had sort of a prescient notion at the age of 13 that I was like, I’m never going to be a prima ballerina. The best I can hope for is corps de ballet. Just because my body simply didn’t do the things that they needed. I didn’t have clean lines. I don’t have hyper-extended elbows or knees or really good turnout. What I did get from that experience was a certain amount of discipline, regimentation, but also it was very performative. There was a lot of opportunity for performance at Colorado Ballet because it’s not like ABT where it’s super competitive to get in the nutcracker.

John: I shared your love of just being, for me it was like testing and standardized testing in school. I loved actually just being right and knowing that I finished the thing and I was done and I’ve gotten the correct answer. I loved that there was a correct answer. While I was always good at writing, and I loved being praised for writing, there was something just really comforting and nice about just like, oh, no, I got like 100% on the test, and that was really easy.

So much of what we’re doing now, there is no right answer and there’s no perfect word for this thing. There’s no perfect scene. You’re always dealing with the imperfection of it all. Going from ballet, which you’re right or you’re not right to acting, there’s no right performance. What was the transition there?

Nora: Yes. Again, really great questions. I feel like the ballet of it all, I mean it’s really just containers, right? I don’t know. I got familiarized with Anne Bogart’s work in college, but she’s a director who talks a lot about the container of something and specifically the container of archetypes. I think with ballet, there’s a really rigid container of steps, but there’s still room within those steps for expression.

A lot of ballerinas take acting lessons because you don’t have words, so you really have to give an ontological experience of emotion to the viewer. I think that with acting, I thought there was a right way, for sure. I was not able to enter into going from pretty much regimented dance to regimented acting classes. I was not able to segment my brain and be like, okay, there were steps that I learned and there were perfect ways to do things in this medium and there’s not in this medium. I thought those two things were transferable to my own detriment, really.

John: To some degree, in musical theater where there’s a track, and to learn a track, you have to drop in that thing, I have such respect for the swings who can come in and just go through any track and a thing, but it really is not directly comparable, the experience.

Nora: No.

John: We have a lot of guests on the show who’ve gone through improv classes. They always were recommending improv classes. The thing about that is there’s no time to stop and make the perfect choice. You just have to continue with what you’re doing.

Nora: Absolutely, yes. I think for acting, it’s something where you can really get into a point where I’ve certainly been there, where you just belabor the thing. I think that it took me a long time to realize that sometimes, especially for someone who can be really cerebral like me, it’s better to just get yourself into a different track and just go with the first instinct as opposed to trying to find the perfect choice.

John: We had Greta Gerwig on the podcast a while back and she was talking about coming out of the mumblecore tradition and how she loved and respected a lot of it, but she got really frustrated that there wasn’t a text to anchor yourself back down to. You felt like as an actor, it was just too terrifying to have nothing underneath your feet to get back down to and that she felt like she could actually push much further once there was a text underneath there.

I hear some of what you’re saying there. It sounds like ballet, yes, you’re getting every step right, but then you’re finding ways to express yourself within that. As an actor, if you have scripted lines, you know those scripted lines, you’re making choices about that rather than every other moment.

Nora: Right. I think that the best-case scenario as an actor is you get to the point where you know the lines so well that everything feels spontaneous within the structure of the memorization and within the structure of having the understanding of your character. Everybody gets to that point differently, which I think was something that took me a really long time to understand. Some people really need to focus on every single line and the motivation behind every single line in order to trick their brain into being spontaneous, and some people can’t do that. They have to just veer straight into the spontaneity. I think I was very convinced that I was like, no, there’s one method and I must find it. [laughs]

John: Was that the reason for going to NYU was to find that method, to find that answer?

Nora: I knew I always wanted to be back in New York, which based on my four-year-old dictums, I think.

John: It’s Eloise returning [unintelligible 00:09:52] and stopping that, yes.

Nora: Exactly. I read all the Eloise books. I read Eloise in Russia. She went to Russia.

John: Of course, she did. Yes.

Nora: Of course, she did. There’s hotels in Russia. I was very adamant that I was like, I’ve got to be back in the city. I belong in the city enough with like, I don’t know if you felt this when you left Colorado, but I met people who didn’t know what elk were.

John: Oh, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. They’re not necessarily like, no, they’re these giant wild creatures who doesn’t wander through your backyard. Yes.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They’re bigger than deer. I was like, “Oh, yes, everybody knows what an elk looks like.” My first friends at NYU were like, “No, you know what an elk looks like. We do not.” I think I was in high school looking back on it. I think that I was told I was a talented performer. I don’t think that I was going off of a feeling of like, wow, I love this and I’m obsessed with this and I just want to follow this. I think I was chasing the feeling of being good and of being someone who was talented and had that sort of external validation. It wasn’t until I got to NYU that I was like, “Oh, I really love this.”

John: Can we talk about NYU? Because I visited New York in college and was like, “Oh, this is overwhelming.” Specifically, the NYU area is just an overwhelming place. My daughter did a summer program there in high school. She’s a city kid. We lived in LA and Paris. She’s like, “I can’t handle the street harassment. Just the daily life of it all was tough.” What was your experience coming from Colorado to a place like NYU?

Nora: My family lived in New York for a really long time, like my extended family. I would go back and visit. I think what I was super attracted to was the autonomy of it. I’ve always been someone who was like–

John: Yes, developing quickly.

Nora: Yes, very quickly. I think that I felt like a person who was an adult faster than other people, which not true, but I felt that way. I’ve always been really attracted to the notion of being there and you can get yourself wherever you want to go and you’re not reliant on anybody else to get you there. There’s a certain amount of autonomy in that respect that I wanted to have. I was desperate to get out of home. Not because of anything bad, but just because I was like, I want to be alone.

John: Also, you’re like the protagonist in your own story and you recognize that you have to leave home in order to have your great adventure.

Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.

John: When did you read your first script? You probably read some plays in high school, but when did you get the first sense of that when it wasn’t like another classic play that you’re reading?

Nora: That’s a good question. I have to think about that. I read a ton of plays for a very long time, but also read a lot of books. That was my first introduction to writing was just being a huge nerd and reading a ton. I remember very distinctly learning how to use a parenthetical for the first time as a very young kid. [laughs] I think that it must have been in college because of– I want to say that I’ve read a script before this, but we did have a class I think my sophomore year of college, where it was acting for film within the container of, you’re at a school for acting for the stage.

We read The Talented Mr. Ripley. The goal of the class was to learn a certain filming technique as opposed to a theatrical one. We read The Talented Mr. Ripley seven times, I think, back-to-back. That was probably my first experience. I remember being really struck by how little was on the page compared to plays.

John: Let’s talk about that, because classically when I look at plays right now, there’s sometimes a lot of scene descriptions where it’s setting up to look at the thing, but then there’s pages and pages and pages of dialogue. What you’re saying, it’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this is for an acting exercise, so it’s really about how are you able to communicate to when the camera’s enclosed, what is the edges of your frame? What was not there on the page that you were expecting to be there?

Nora: More, I think. [laughs] I just thought–

John: You thought it would be much more scripted in terms of every little movement, every step?

Nora: Yes. I thought it would be– it’s not only about stage direction, because I think also, I was very obsessed with the canonical plays. I loved Edward Albee. I loved Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams stage directions are verbose. It is just like a stack of stage directions or very stacked, rather, I don’t know. I think that going to reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, I was like, “Oh, this is so much about the actor’s performance.” I think that that varies script to script, because now I’ve read so many. In that one particularly, I was like, oh, wow, it really is about who you are as an actor bringing yourself to this, because it’s not the same type of roadmap, I think.

John: Also, you look at the differences between a stage play and a screen play. A screen play only needs to be filmed once. It only needs to be actually acted once. Those scenes, they’re going to do it once and they’re going to be done. You can experiment with that versus stage play. In theory, this is a set of instructions for creating basically the same experience again and again and again, no matter who’s in those tracks and who’s in those roles.

Nora: Exactly.

John: That’s an inherent difference between those two things. You’re reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. You start probably reading some other things. When did you start acting in people’s films? Were you acting in shorts while you were at NYU? What was the first time that you were on a set with a camera aimed at you?

Nora: Sure. I did start doing short films in school. I think they really started kicking off probably around the summer after my junior year because NYU and specifically Stella Adler, where I was studying, they have a very rigid– It’s so funny to look back on it now because the stakes felt so high, but they basically were like, “You’re not allowed to act anywhere beyond the confines of this school until your junior year,” which not everybody subscribed to. Again, I was the rule follower and someone who was very serious about this education. I felt like, okay, I’m not ready. I’m a nascent creature. Then I have to wait until one teacher tells me I can go off.

Yes, it was probably around summer of junior year. I have done so many short films, some of which have seen the light of day and some of which have not. I think that I’d probably be terrified watching them back now. I think it all started because I was dating a guy who was very into film. I think his friends were also very into film. They were these people who were involved in the acting school, but they knew they wanted to go to Hollywood. They knew that they wanted to be screenwriters. They had a–

John: They’re the worst. They’re terrible people.

Nora: I believe the term is film bros now. If I’d had that verbiage, I would have used it back then. They’re still my friends to this day, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. I grew up watching Legally Blonde, Charlie’s Angels, Liar Liar, and The Big Green on repeat. I was like, those are my four. That’s what I’ve got.
[laughter]

John: [unintelligible 00:17:01] right.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They had seen everything. I felt like, “Oh, those are the people who make this,” but they were also very committed to making short films. Because I was dating this guy, and I was an actor, I got into that web.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are making short films. What advice could you give to them about having been in a bunch of short films and student short films and posts? What are good experiences? What are bad experiences? What are things you wish those directors had a better sense of when they cast you in something?

Nora: Great question. I feel like I would say really use short films as a sense of experimentation. I think I took everything very, very seriously. I felt like I never knew what short film was going to catapult me to fame. [laughs] That’s what I felt like. Honestly, I was like, “Someone’s going to see this, and then I’m going to be famous at the age of 20.” It’s just not that. You’re making stuff with your friends, and it’s really, truly a time to learn and expand and make really bold choices that may or may not work.

I think that when no one’s watching, it’s really the opportunity to veer into that and steer into that scope. I think as an actor, it’s a great time to learn about your own process and what works for you and watching yourself back, and trying to figure out the dissonance between, oh, this is what I meant to do, and this is what’s actually on the screen. I think everyone in the short film process probably feels that way. Yes, that’s what I would say.

John: I’m friends with some folks who’ve been making a bunch of short films using folks who are very good at social media. These are folks who film themselves constantly. I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be fascinating to watch 10 years from now is how many of those people graduate towards doing bigger, longer, expanded things. These are people who get a chance to iterate all the time.

I think what you’re describing is that they can just constantly experiment, but they’re not used to the sense of an ongoing narrative. They’re used to a 90 seconds, but if you have to tell a story in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it’s just a different beast. Or if you need to work with a larger, more experienced crew, it’s not just you setting up lights yourself. It’s a different thing. I’ll be fascinated to see how that works.

I’d love to just push a little bit more on, you’re an actor who’s agreed to be in a short film. What are your expectations going in? What do the directors and people who are helping out to make the film need to know about? How do they make it a good experience for an actor?

Nora: Sure. Okay. I feel like some of my best experiences were when you knew that– It’s a couple of things. I think you want to feel like, especially with short films where it’s sort of run and gun and everybody’s doing a lot of different jobs, I think you want to feel like your voice is being heard and you’re being valued as a creative entity within the film.

I think it’s important that you know that you’re going to be taken care of throughout all the process, throughout all the extenuating processes after you film. I think it’s important to, and again, this might not be important to everybody, but I think it’s important that you know what cameras you’re shooting on and you know that those cameras are going to look really good, that even if this isn’t a perfect product, you’re going to have something that’s really good for your reel and that it is going to be edited and that there is going to be a final product that you can eventually see.

John: That it actually goes to you and it disappear.

Nora: Exactly. That’s happened to me before. I’ve shot shorts that never seen the light of day. I think it’s much more holistic when you understand that this is going to be something that you can watch because everybody needs it at that point. It’s not the same thing where you’re like, okay, well, I committed my time and energy for free. The promise of that is I’m going to have something to look at at the end of the day. I think it’s a matter of short films are so stressful. I do think there’s a certain way that you have to protect your cast from that stress.

John: Some of these short films you were making with friends, which is great and that’s a safer experience, but were there things where you just auditioned, like you saw, noticed, and you went and auditioned for, you submitted for, and you were just working with strangers?

Nora: Yes.

John: What is that like as a person? You probably didn’t have reps or you had no one on your team at that point. How are you making sure that this is going to be a good situation that you’re actually safe?

Nora: [laughs]

John: For example, would you only meet in a public place or would you go to a place-

Nora: Oh, sure.

John: -where there’s an apartment? I would just love some good advice.

Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–

John: I’m not thinking just for our actors who are listening, but for filmmakers, make sure people feel good about the experience.

Nora: I think something looking back on my experience, especially immediately post-collegiate when I was auditioning a lot for these– I was on Backstage, I was on Actors Access. I did a big cattle casting call for Columbia Film School, which was actually one of the best. I did the same thing for USC when I moved out here. Those were some of the best experiences because you’re meeting film students who are doing their MFA and you’re auditioning in Columbia and you know that it’s the container of the college, so you know that all these people are very committed to doing something and making something and have the resources.

I don’t know if I ever auditioned in someone’s living room. I’m sure I have, but I think for Friends, I think there’s a certain desperation of a young actor that really, at least for me, I would have done anything. You know what I’m saying? I think I would have gone anywhere, seen anybody, done anything, because I was like, again, I was just like, put me in pictures kind of thing. I was just like, “I’ve got it.” I think also there’s a lot of stuff told to young actors that is really hard and harmful. I don’t know if you watched The Rehearsal.

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, but I was watching it this most recent season and it just broke my heart, because I was like, “These people just want the opportunity to be on HBO and it feels like, God, I really recognized myself in that.” I was like, “I would have done anything too. I would have made out with someone for 12 hours on a soundstage.” Because there’s a certain amount of you just really– you’re told for so long that this business is impossible and you’re told that you have to do whatever it takes and you’re told that no one’s going to make it. Part of doing whatever it takes is sometimes, I think, hopefully now it’s different, but compromising what you believe to be artistic integrity or just the integrity of self. Yes.

John: As an actor, you’re constantly waiting for someone else to pick you to do a thing. As a writer, you can just write your own thing. When did you start writing in screenplay form? When did that start off?

Nora: I always wrote since I can remember, and started with prose and really bad poetry. Got into slam poetry in high school, which is embarrassing, but I feel like I should say it.
[laughter]

John: If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. This is a part of your identity.

Nora: Exactly. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that if I say it-

John: Slam poet.

Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–

John: Former slam poet, Nora Garrett. Yes.
[laughter]

Nora: If you only knew. Yes. I got really deep into it.

John: Oh, yes. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. [crosstalk]

Nora: Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing, but I loved it. I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series, and so I wrote a couple of web series. They were just bad. They were bad. I think it was also the Girls’ renaissance.

John: Oh yes, of course.

Nora: Everything was that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. It’s only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is and how you can’t repeat that. That’s what we were all trying to do. Yes.

John: You’re writing those things and you’re writing stuff that you would shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say like, oh, this is what was on the page. This is what it’s actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. You do get a lot of experience that way.

Nora: Yes. My last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. That was really like we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. They looked horrible. They were just awful. I would love to think that I had the cognition at the time to have any creative feedback about the artistic process, but I think I was really just caught up in how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time. I think it’s also when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you’re just like, oh, this isn’t even that art form.

John: No. [chuckles]

Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s an image on a screen, but that’s really about as close as we got there.

Nora: Right, exactly. You’re like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they’re supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes.

John: When did you write your first full-length feature-y script?

Nora: The truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature.

John: That’s great.

Nora: Yes, that is the truth. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the idea of it and going into it. I guess we should say that I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won’t have seen the movie yet. How do you describe it? Maybe describe what your initial intention was for it, and if it’s different than the final thing, tell us what changed.

Nora: It all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. Again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a character who had, at the core of their identity, a secret? This secret is something where I thought it could go one of two ways. I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long, and I was trying to gamify the system in a way, but I was obsessed with the price of it, and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price.

I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of This American Life. Basically, the upshot of that was that statistically, people who are more successful in our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. That can ensure more success. I thought, A, I felt validated by that, but B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion? Again, what’s the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.

Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you’re coming online enough to understand what you’ve done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life and specifically when you start having adult relationships? Then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help, or is there an eventual consequence?

John: From that initial instinct, were you trying to feel like, well, what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to explore this thing? The Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. She’s uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth, how do you live an ethical life? She has this secret at the start of it. Was that baked into the idea initially?

Nora: Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first logline, I did think about the professor and student relationship. Having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself. It was the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience.

John: Yes, so very classically, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they’re wrestling with and digging through. It makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there’s a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies.

The thing we always do for [unintelligible 00:30:09] is about Episode 483, Philosophy for Screenwriters. We were talking through that and that we don’t see it. In this case, your creative character was just so exactly wrestling with that situation. Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I’m not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie?

Nora: Yes. I think the genre that it started out initially was the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real? I think that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, when you’re like sort of what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true, and what is false in what’s happening right now, that to me is the source of that almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? Then I think Luca was more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama?

John: Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that has a negative connotation right now, but we used to make melodramas. Is there something delightful about the drama is the drama in a way?

Nora: Yes, of course. Yes. I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yes.

John: Let’s talk about Alma and all the balls you have her juggling. She is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. There’s that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student who is daughter-like to her, but also obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage which is okay but has some weird dynamics and strains in it. Her husband is a psychiatrist.

She has a best friend who’s also in the department and they have a complicated relationship, an Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition, which I’m not quite sure what it is weighing on her. She has a secret. She has a secret from before. She has a comfortable life, but a lot of things pull in her in different directions. In other stories, one of those might be sort of enough, but there’s a lot happening there. Then these aspects conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper?

Nora: I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that I was part of a group of female writers who we’ve all share our work with each other. One of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you’re just going to finish your first draft in 12 weeks. Basically, the idea–

John: That’s a classic sign-up kind of thing.

Nora: Yes, exactly.

John: A boot camp, like you’re just doing it.

Nora: 100%. You’re just doing it. I thought, okay, I’ll do that. That could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.

John: [unintelligible 00:33:26] containers I’ve heard so far.
[laughter]

Nora: Yes, containers. [laughs] I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer myself. [laughs]

John: Oh, okay, great. Yes. We’ll get to that in the bonus segment.

Nora: Yes, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. Part of that was really beneficial because you just got out of your own way. I think that it’s hard to look back and narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the triad of Julia Roberts’s character, Ayo Edebiri’s character, and Andrew Garfield’s character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.

I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to to see if this was someone who was very calm, cool, and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of.

I think also I was interested in substance use. I don’t know, just sort of that as somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being degrading to their body. I think especially as a woman and especially as a female character, women’s bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. I was interested if you can take the Brad Pitt character where he’s constantly eating in half of his films and give that trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. [chuckles] That notion of just hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind.

John: Great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. Over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script? Did you get through it?

Nora: I did because, again, I love rules. I did finish it. Again, it was just really bad. I think all of it was a really good exercise in learning that just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it’s not the final iteration by any means.

John: Let’s talk about that, getting it from it’s finished to actually to good. What was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?

Nora: I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belonged to the cabal of people that I went to college with. I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was very financially stressed.

Part of that was by necessity and then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. Then I re-outlined, re-broke the second draft, re-wrote it, and then started sharing it. I started sharing it with a group of just really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected. Then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends.

John: Yes, I was going to ask. Knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to hear some stuff and see what’s working there. What did you learn in that reading?

Nora: I don’t know if you have this, but there’s an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud. [laughs]

John: Absolutely. All the things you’d never notice were like, oh, my God, that actually isn’t the text. There’s a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work.

Nora: Yes, 100%. Or I’m like, “God, I use that word so much, like container.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? That makes no sense.” It’s, yes. After getting over the initial hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing, after that, I tried really hard to just step back.

I think it’s really important when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it’s like I had actors who, it was during the actor’s strike, and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other job. It was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors. If they are struggling with this moment or if this doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth, then I know something needs to change.

John: Yes, if they can’t sell it, it probably is the line.

Nora: Exactly.

John: It’s not the person reading the line. Through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of Imagine who ended up taking it? What was that process of I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?

Nora: It’s so funny looking back on that version of myself because I feel like–

John: Looking back, what, two years?

Nora: Yes, [laughs] looking back. It’s not long ago.

John: The younger me.

Nora: The younger me. No, but I think it’s– I’ve had for so long, I’ve been really timid and skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. All of my friends, for the most part, there’s obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. You have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place and then suddenly you’re seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you.

Again, that gap is one that can be difficult to close, but also, it’s that awkward thing of I don’t want to ask my friend to help me. I don’t know what, I really don’t know what changed. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I had this script, and two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, “I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions.”

I submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. [laughs] I remember reading it and I was just like, “Whoa, okay.” [laughs] I think they issued some boilerplate statement that’s like, “We suggest you reapply or suggest you take this writer’s notes.” I don’t think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, “This is bad.”

John: You’re on the website now.

Nora: [laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it. There’s something crazy making in that because you’re like, “What is good?” I can’t say what’s good.

John: It’s a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure, and that there’s just no objective measure of any of it.

Nora: Exactly. It is that thing where it’s like okay, obviously, when the film comes out, we’ll see. There’s a big feeling of just like, “Okay, you hate my writing, and this person doesn’t hate my writing.” I think that I read the feedback, and I had that moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m horrible. Everything I do is bad.” Then I thought, I don’t know, my friends like this, and I trust them, so I’ll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I’ll just keep going. Again, I think that that’s an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, “You’re right, blue cat.”
[laughter]

John: “I’m embarrassed to tell this to you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

Nora: Yes, exactly. I asked a friend of mine who was representative. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me, and he set me up with my now manager, Sidney Blank. I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother’s house in New York. I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta. I took off of Meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting.

I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it’s the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it’s really talky. A lot of conversations, there’s a lot of $5 words, it’s very cerebral at times, there’s no major set pieces. I was pretty certain I was like, this would just be a really good sample, and I’ll be able to get in rooms, hopefully.

John: Getting a room on a succession-like show would be a dream with a script like this.

Nora: That was the dream, 100%. I was like, “Hopefully, I get a manager, and then hopefully, I start working in rooms.” Sydney was the first person who said, “I really think we can make this into a movie.” That was, I think, December of 2023, I think.

John: Yes, so recent.

Nora: It’s so recent or maybe two. I don’t know.

John: What are years?

Nora: What are years? It was very recent, though. Then that next year, which I think it– yes, God, I think it was 2023. Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. Incredibly lucky for me that she was right.

John: That’s great. Imagine read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process?

Nora: I remember that meeting really well. Yes, they met with me, and I met with them, really. It’s also so funny going from auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people’s offices. I had a meeting once in like an ante room of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at 6:00 AM. It was so bad. Then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, “Oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship.” Whereas before I’d been in the position of me trying to really sell myself.

It was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi. Immediately, Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can’t believe any of this is happening.

John: My first paid job was also Imagine. I went through there. Colorado and Imagine. Time shifted or something.

Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.

John: It’s so good. It’s rising up the charts quickly. At this point, they’ve purchased your script, they’ve optioned your script, or what it will be?

Nora: No. It was just a meeting of– Then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him. I had a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it, so we decided to go with him.

John: That’s great. Did you do drafts for Imagine before you went off to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened?

Nora: No. I think this was so atypical across so many different lines. It’s hard to say that because obviously, I don’t have another experience to draw from. I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. Once he signs on to something, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it. He’s like, “This is getting made. We’re going to get it made within the timeframe that I have.”

The process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience where I didn’t even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine’s repped by CAA. Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. Luca’s name was right up there at the top. They asked me after we decided to work together to hone in and find a smaller list of directors. I made a list of four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it’ll be the best day of my life, and Luca was in that little grouping.

We sent the script to his agent who happens to be married to Julia Roberts’s agent. Imagine really wanted things to be we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. The way it happened because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. Then she actually came on first because initially, Luca had a scheduling gap. No, he had a film that was going. Then that film, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. Then he came on.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia, for which she was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. You feel lucky to be in the room, but also, you’re trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make?

Nora: I think it’s really difficult being a first-time screenwriter in some ways because– especially coming from the acting world and just having zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms. I think I felt like, “Wow.” I feel so lucky to be here across the board. Again, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to look back and be like, “Oh, what was–” It just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now. I think it would have been insane for me to, at that point, be like, “Luca, no thank you.” That’s crazy.

I think that the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. I don’t want to spoil things, but I used to work there, and he was staying there at the time. Our first meeting was there, and my old manager was there. I remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1:00 AM every night, and he was there. I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino and he was like, “What?” This is a crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I’ve been so many times in such a different capacity, and now I’m meeting with this person here.

I love Luca as a director, and I’d seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. Then, of course, the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash.
[laughter]

Nora: I was like, “Oh, no, I knew it.” I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you’re just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect and I have no idea.

John: It should be obvious, but you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” I’ve actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I’ve been inside this entire movie for years, and so I really can describe everything that’s in here and why everything is in here. I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. It’s not like if this script had plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn’t have the ability to talk about what’s really inside it. You’re the only person who’s already seen the movie, which is- A hard thing to remember.

Sometimes as you’re talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” They’ve never been inside this. They’re just trying to find their way in. You had this meeting where they’re immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we’re going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with them?

Nora: I think Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the thorny social dynamics and really exploring the socio-political world in which these characters were in. I think that something I was scared of when all this was initially happening is I’d heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting denuded and the teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized.

I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he’s really able to silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.

John: Entering the movies, if it’s worth the psychological thriller, there’d be probably a clean answer to how somehow these things sort out. My experience with watching the movies, I went to a 10:00 AM screening in Culver City with just myself, and I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with afterwards.
Fortunately, I grabbed a sandwich nearby, and there were three women who’d just seen the movie, too, and I heard them talking, so I could join their conversation as– Let’s talk about these three things because it very much is one of those movies where you want to have some discussion about what really happened there. For a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places they got to.

Nora: Yes.

John: Can we take a look at some pages from the script? This is how we’re starting the movie. This is the initial scenes as they’re meeting all the different characters. I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. Emma Hoff, the Jill Robbins character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don’t give any specific more information with her at this point, but we’re going to see a lot of specific behavior from her. Frederick Mendelson, her husband. Can you read the description for him?

Nora: Sure. Frederick Mendelson, Alma’s husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over.

John: Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. We meet him in that parking lot.

Nora: Hank Gibson, 40, Alma’s colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower-class background.

John: That last clause, having worked his way up, that’s not evidence that we can’t see that on screen, but we’re going to see it in his behavior later on. That’s just the cheating that we embrace in a screenplay.

Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]

John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.

Nora: Maggie Resnick, mid-to-late twenties, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy.

John: Cast in the movie, played by Iowa Deberry. Her being Black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the screenplay, you didn’t know that.

Nora: No, I didn’t know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn’t any specific notion of race.

John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.

Nora: Forties, a professor, emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.

John: Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. It’s delightful. Again, it’s the specificity that I’m loving about these things. Then we’re meeting her almost in class. We’re going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. We’re meeting Fabiola, not a housekeeper. She’s hired to help. She’s to do everything in person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don’t have kids. We’ll try to put this first three pages up, so people can download them.
There’s a lot of behavior, a lot of setting of worlds and establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven’s apartment life, which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London?

Nora: It was actually in London, yes. Something that Luca is very rigorous about research. He has a research that he’s used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. He is very adamant about verisimilitude. He is a wonderful set designer who makes-

John: The sets are incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. They’re always jammed. All these people are hoarders until you get to one point very late in the movie where we’re at a place that is incredibly spare and spartan.

Nora: Yes, exactly. That was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, where it’s like you’re walking-

John: You’re asleep no more.

Nora: Exactly. You’re walking around the sets and you’re opening drawers and you’re like, God, there’s actually what you would have in your drunk drawer if you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019. This was what it would look like. He was very meticulous about that. I think that that’s a wonderful thing for actors to have, for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to set up entering into these characters’ lives prior to feeling like, oh, we’re just at the fulcrum point.

John: Talk to us about the language, because we’re catching glimpses of them in class, and they’re just talking in what’s almost– It’s legalese or medicalese. It’s almost incomprehensible to what they’re saying to each other because it’s all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. To what degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft? How much of this came in later on? What was that process?

Nora: My cousin is getting her master’s in philosophy at Stanford. I really plumbed her experience and also literally some emails that she’s gotten from professors about announcing talks. The language that’s in the script is a very sanded-down version of the opacity that exists in that world. It is legalese. It’s jargon. Something when I was taking philosophy classes ad hoc, postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. The barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose.

There’s a part of me that loves the idea of you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences, but there’s another part of me that feels like, “Come on, guys, just say the thing.” I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. That was something where Luca really thought if this is someone who’s supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. That required a crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself.

John: It also creates structural issues because you need to find where do those scenes go in a natural way that’s advancing the actual overall plot that we believe that she’s teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and are happening after this.

Nora: Exactly, yes. How can we use those scenes that otherwise would be cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add drama?

John: The tension reaches the boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma just outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie who’s talking with their partner Alex and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It’s a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is that the thing that came along in the process?

Nora: Portions of it were always in the script, certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals.

John: Oh, great.

Nora: Yes.

John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.

Nora: Talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you’re just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals.

John: Is it in New York City?

Nora: No, San Francisco. She’s lovely and so warm and disarmingly so. We had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script, so it at least wasn’t like a complete cold meeting. Luca basically ran it so that obviously, the actors were all very busy, so we had to stagger who was involved in rehearsals. Sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. It started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I, and then slowly but surely, then Io came, and then it was Chloe, and then it was all of us.

John: How far in advance of production was this? Months?

Nora: Gosh. Not terribly far. I would say May, and then Luca went into prep in June. We started shooting early July, I think.

John: I’d love to read through some of this back half here because you’re at the point in the movie where people can more clearly state the themes and what their actual thing is. It’s not couched in specific language, or it could be a little more direct. If you put me at page 82, I’m nowhere near the actor. Anyway, Deborah is. I just want to read through some stuff here. She says, “I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.”

Nora: “Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown.”

John: “There are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible.”

Nora: “You’ve constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. You, you lie all the time, living in an apartment 10 times cheaper than what you can afford, dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting, fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility, another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It’s all a lie. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank, too.”

John: Again, it’s a moment where you actually can pull off all the niceties and things. You’re also answering an audience question. I was watching like, “Wait, if she’s rich, why is she living in that crappy apartment?” It’s rewarding the audience for that question you asked. You’re actually answering that question that was never audibly asked before. It’s like, “Why are you doing this thing?” Getting to express these, you’re not entitled to comfort, is an aspect too.

It’s almost like the audience is not entitled to a nice, tidy ending. It’s setting up, hopefully, the right invitation for the audience about what they’re going to get to because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was and stuff like that, they’re going to be answered but not answered to the degree that here’s the clear, it’s not the sixth sense. It’s not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It’s not that kind of clear answer.

Nora: Initially, it was. Certainly, the drafts that were circulated was very much like you got the answer. I think you’re absolutely right that it is a sense of a metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having.

John: Well, congratulations on the script and on the movie.

Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.

John: We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer.

Nora: Great.

John: Anita writes, “When is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? How long can you go with a character who’s talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to show that?” A script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It’s like, okay, what’s too long where I don’t actually need to show the thing? I don’t know.

To me, it’s just, it’s the instinct. I’m like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and show the story, but there’s other times where you just tell the story. If it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on to the after that long, I think my instinct is to stay. What’s your instinct?

Nora: I think it’s a difficult question. It was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there’s that feeling of how long can you hide the shark in Jaws. You know what I’m saying? How long can you make it? There’s going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually, you move towards satisfaction in the end. There’s a sense of what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying.

John: The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, there’s still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not? Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it’s trusting the filmmaker. It’s showing the actual real truth. That’s not the case. You’re going to have to do a little more work to undo that dialogue.

Nora: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s about rewarding people’s faith while creating as much tension as possible.

John: Let’s take one last question here from Nami. “I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.”

Tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s the buildup to a sneeze. It’s the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, “Oh God, something bad is going to happen.” It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there’s a bomb underneath the table, and you see the countdown underneath the table, or a longer-term thing where you’re just like, oh, there’s this sense of dread.

I think one of the issues that we’re living with as a society right now is that sense that there’s an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment. You’re just not quite sure when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like. In movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you’re cutting into something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we’re still worried about what happened before, or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment?

Your movie has a lot of tension in this building up to just mysteries that we’re trying to figure out. A lot of checkouts guns are being loaded in your movie. Any more instincts about tension and suspense?

Nora: First of all, I love The Twilight Zone. Again, I think it’s a delicate dance between feeling like what you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging, or what can you get away with not paying off and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience?

Nora: Sure. I’ve been really interested in Substack, recently. I think that it’s a great little corner of the internet when there’s a lot of scary corners of the internet. I also think it’s really great to just read Flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. Jessica Tofino is a writer who runs a great Substack called Flesh World. It’s a lot about the beauty space. I’m really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. There’s another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. He writes flash fiction. I just started reading him, and I love it. It’s really tightly told and very evocative.

John: That’s great. A couple of things to respond to on there. Flash fiction as a concept can be great. These are little short bits. It’s almost the textual equivalent of TikToks where it’s just like, here’s the idea, you’re in and you’re out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. I respond to it the same way. It’s like, just one more, just one more, just one more.

Substack is so fascinating, too, because there’s so many really good writers on Substack. Anytime you mention Substack, people are like, “But what about the Nazis?” It’s a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and that it’s corporatizing a bunch of independent voices, and yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating.

Nora: See, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn’t even know about any of that. [laughs]

John: Oh, that’s great. Literally, I’ll post something on Blue Sky about this post that I really liked, and the first comment will be like, “Oh, too bad. It’s on that Nazi platform.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Nora: Oh God. No, everything is ruined. I have to think of a new, cool thing.

John: The scolding that happens in popular culture is true, and that’s also part of your movie, too. Your movie is building off of reactions to me, too, but just the general sense of there’s no good way to be a decent person in the world.

Nora: No. I think it’s also a certain sense of, God, there’s nothing that seems particularly clean in this world now. Everything is touched, everything is tainted in some way, and it’s like how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy?
[laughter]

John: Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One podcast by Jesse David Fox. We had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. The Good One podcast, it’s scripted, but it’s talking with- funny people about how they do their work. One episode I really liked recently was Ben DeLaCreme’s episode.

Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.

John: He’s an incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but talking through the behind-the-scenes of RuPaul’s Drag Race but also the bigger issues of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we’re trying to do. You’re always grappling with, well, what is drag anymore? If drag isn’t dirty, is it still drag? All these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. One of many good episodes of The Good One podcast.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we referred to and the new one, we’re about to record on day jobs. Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes.

Nora: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Let’s talk about day jobs because you are now a produced screenwriter, but for a long time, you were doing other things along the way. Let’s talk about some of the different day jobs you’ve had, some pros and cons of a person who needs to keep a roof over their head but also have brain space and time to do the things they want to do. What day jobs have you had over your life?

Nora: What day jobs have I not had? I was a personal trainer. I was a personal assistant. I was a professional organizer. I was a data analyst. I was studying to be a paralegal. I was a waitress and a cater waiter and a hostess.

John: That’s good. That’s a whole range of things. Let’s talk about the service industry side first, because you mentioned how at Chateau Marmont, you had been a hostess at Chateau Marmont. Then you’re going there for a meeting, which is a very classic moment. That’s a movie moment right there.

Nora: Very movie moment, yes.

John: As a hostess or as a waiter, some pros I can imagine is you leave the job, you’re off the job, you’re done. Great. You probably have a little bit more flexibility when it comes for auditions, which is the thing you were having to do.

Nora: Yes. Being a waiter was one of my favorite jobs.

John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?

Nora: I worked at Dominic’s before it closed down, may it rest in peace. It was a great restaurant. Then I worked at Crossroads, the vegan restaurant, which was– That was one of those environments where the chef was really totalitarian. You had to call him chef. That was my first experience of that. Then I worked at Little Dom’s and Chateau Marmont.

John: In picking those jobs or in giving those jobs, were you trying to optimize your hours to make your life manageable in a way that you could also write and do other things? Talk to us about that decision.

Nora: Yes. I always really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to be on a schedule that wasn’t a nine-to-five because not only could you get everything done that one needed to do during the day at a time where it wasn’t completely clogged with other people, but also, I liked being able to have my days free to write, to audition. The hard thing about working in the service industry is it’s like your days are free, but also, you’re working very late. There is that counterbalance of like there were times that I would write when I got home from work because you’re just so wired. You’re up until three, and then you’re sleeping until noon.

John: Talk to us about you’re waiting on these people. You’re waiting on decision makers. You’re waiting on parents, people who could be reading you, who could be casting you and things. To what degree is that a factor, or you just stop thinking about it?

Nora: I think the great gift of entering into this industry as an actor is the lack of control that you have in that profession is huge. The amount of control you have as a writer feels like the greatest relief in comparison. The thing that was always really difficult for me about being an actor was this feeling of like I can’t just go home and practice my instrument. I can’t go home and play violin, but you can go home and write. Then you have a product, and you have something that you can look at and read over and edit, and it’s immediate and pleasurable in that way.

There was a huge sense of frustration and a huge sense of, I think, impotence. Bradley Whitford, I think, talks about that. I think it was a commencement address at Juilliard or something like that. This idea that you have so much passion and desire and drive and need, and then you have this blockade of being like, “Well, if no one’s going to let me do this, I can’t do it.” I think it’s important to find something that’s lovely about working these type of day jobs in this city of Los Angeles is that almost everybody is trying to do the same thing as you. That can be demoralizing at times, or it can be really lovely to think like we’re all in the same boat, and so we might as well try to do something together.

John: If you were a waiter in Denver who dreamed of being a professional actor, well, you’re just delusional.

Nora: It’s like you’re in the wrong city.

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk through some of the other day jobs. Personal trainer? Was it personal shopper or a personal assistant?

Nora: Personal assistant. I wish I was a personal shopper.

John: That would be incredible. Personal trainer, I have many friends who are trainers, like my trainer, but other friends who train folks. Yes, you can set your schedule to some degree, but you’re always relying on other people showing up, not showing up. It doesn’t stop, I suspect.

Nora: No. Personal trainers do not get paid enough to teach classes. The people teaching your Pilates classes, your HIIT classes, they do not get paid enough. I was teaching a class that was-

John: You weren’t doing one-on-one clients. You were doing classes.

Nora: No, because I worked at a very fancy place where you had to teach the classes with the students. It was dance cardio because I used to be a dancer. It was very Jane Fonda adjacent. The reason I stopped is because I got a stress fracture in the middle of one of my classes. Being a dancer, I was like, it’s fine. I’ll go for another hour. I did. I was like, I’m in a lot of pain. That was the reason that job ended because I had to be in a boot after that. That was a crazy experience because it’s just I’ve never worked out so much in my life.

John: I have actor friends on Big Fish who would teach spin classes and things like that. It’s like, Jesus, your body.

Nora: You don’t even feel good. You’re a receptacle for food, and then you’re just constantly sweating.

[laughter]

John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.

Nora: This is at Meta.

John: Was that your last day job?

Nora: That was my last day job. I had taken a break from working in restaurants to be an assistant for the longest gig I had an assistantship for, which is about five years.

John: Assistant to what kind of person?

Nora: I did a couple. I did actresses, and then I had a stint with producers at CBS and then produce director. I bobbed around.

John: This was personal life stuff? Basically, get me this thing, deal with the plumber, that kind of assistant thing?

Nora: It was both personal life stuff, and it was also all of my on-set experience. I’d been on set a lot, which was invaluable. It was also partially writing experience as well and staffing and reading and coverage and all of that kind of stuff.

John: If you’re working, imagine like an actor on set and you’re a personal assistant for them, what is your relationship between it? Your first responsibility is to that person, but you also have to deal with the crew and production itself. How does that interface work?

Nora: It’s really difficult. I think being a personal assistant is one of the most fraught jobs because it’s all of the intimacy of an intimate relationship without any of the perks. I think it’s really difficult to hire someone to basically be a facsimile of you. Once they get good at it, I think there’s all sorts of identity politics that happen where you’re like, “I want you to be able to write my emails,” and you’re opening up your life to someone. I think it’s really difficult on both sides.

John: This does tie back into your movie then, of course, because I share everything with you. You don’t share anything back.

Nora: Exactly. This notion of like, oh, I’m being collected in some way, but I’m also collecting. I think the weird, tacit understanding of being a personal assistant is that obviously, most people who become assistants are trying to replicate a guild thing where you’re like, okay, I’m going to learn from you.

John: I’m the apprentice and you are this.

Nora: Exactly. That’s a difficult thing because you have to, I think as a boss, have to understand that your assistant has ambition. At the same time, if they’re really good, you don’t want to lose them. It’s a really strange dynamic. I think it’s difficult on both sides.

John: That gets us to meta. You just apply to an open job?

Nora: I went down the LinkedIn rabbit hole where I was– I mean, God, just throwing cover letters into the void. I think I was just at a point where I went back to restaurant work. I went back, and I was a counter service waitress at Pine & Crane.
Going back to a restaurant at 31 is much different than in my twenties. My body was just getting wrecked. I was getting really mentally exhausted and feeling really bad about myself, especially compared to my friends who had enough disposable income to go on vacations and do fun things. I was like, “Okay, someone’s got to give. I’ve got to figure something out.” I started the LinkedIn route. I was actually recruited by meta because of some editing work that I had done for a nonprofit.

John: Some video editing or some text editing?

Nora: Some text editing. Yes, some text editing and development that I had done for a nonprofit. They’ve recruited me to be a data analyst.

John: Let’s talk through your advice to, let’s say, the next Nora is moving out from New York to Los Angeles and is looking for a day job so that they can act or write. Where to first? Do you think restaurants is the right, best first place? What’s your instinct?

Nora: I love restaurants. I think especially because it’s where I earned all my friends. It’s where I earned. It’s where I met all my friends. I had to work. I think especially most people who are attracted to this business are people who really thrive on novelty. The lovely thing about a restaurant is that every day is different. You really observe human behavior from close proximity. It gives you a lot of wonderful skills of memorization but also performance. As depressing as it is to have spaghetti sauce on your hands and under your fingernails for five days out of the week, it’s like there’s also some type of brilliant resilience in that.

John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.

Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Links:

• Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
• Nora Garrett
• After the Hunt
• Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
• The Rehearsal
• Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
• Big Reader Bad Grades
• BenDeLaCreme on Good One
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

JOHN AUGUST: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

CRAIG MAZIN: My name’s Craig Mazin.

JOHN: This is Episode 703 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is mostly just trying to make Drew laugh.
[laughter]

DREW: So far, so good.

JOHN: Today on the show, how do you write a period film that feels accurate but also compelling? Most importantly, not a history lesson. We’ve got at least 10 tips for timely tales, plus some related listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we are officially in the season of the witch. Let’s do our ranking of iconic witches. I have 13 witches-

DREW: Oh, my God.

JOHN: -from literature and film, and we will put them in the proper order-

CRAIG: We’ll rank them.

JOHN: -from God-tier to D-level.

CRAIG: You do have the witch from Into the Woods in there, I see.

JOHN: We could add the witch from Into the Woods.

CRAIG: Now, we have 14 witches.

JOHN: Yes, absolutely. It’s the Last Midnight.

CRAIG: [singing] It’s the last midnight
It’s the–

JOHN: So good. Although it’s a news to get through before we get started on things. Highland Pro, the app that my company makes, we turn on family sharing, which we didn’t have on before. Now, if you have it, anyone in your family–

CRAIG: Why were you guys anti-family?

JOHN: We were not anti-family at all. Basically, they hide it in the interface for you to do it. It’s like, “Oh, can we turn on the switch?” It’s irreversible once you turn it on, but we did it, and it worked.

CRAIG: I guess that makes sense, right? Once you start sharing with somebody, you can’t take it away. That’s a nice thing. I love family sharing.

JOHN: It’s not only witch season, but it’s also back-to-school season. I want to talk through, almost all the screenwriting apps have a version of student licenses or discounted student licenses. For Highland Pro, that’s free. If you’re a student at a university program, you get Highland Pro for free. You just need to send in an email from your email address at your university, so .edu if you’re in the US, but other countries, it’s going to be other things. Photo or student ID. Fade In has a similar thing. Student pricing is $60. Final Draft has student pricing at $90. WriterDuet has 50% off. $90 student pricing.

CRAIG: Oh, Final Draft. Jesus, Final Draft. WTF is wrong with them? By the way, it’s not worth $90. That software is worth $3. They’re charging students a discounted rate of $90, so what are they charging poor everyone else that’s getting fleeced?

JOHN: I think the most recent price I saw on there was $199.

CRAIG: Oh my God.

JOHN: I think it’s more than that. I think it might be.

CRAIG: No. Why are people still paying for this?

JOHN: Buy now. Let’s see what it says.

CRAIG: Do not buy now. Buy never.

JOHN: Final draft 13 personal license is $174.99. That’s 30% off the regular list price, which is $249.99.

CRAIG: $249?

JOHN: That’s a lot of money.

CRAIG: There are people who have paid $250 for Final Draft.

JOHN: All this is a roundabout way to say if you are a student in a university program, you should use one of these discounted systems for getting it. Highland is free, so you might as well try that.

CRAIG: Exactly. Highland’s free. The maximum you should pay is $60 for Fade In. If you’re a student, you don’t need Fade In either. Honestly, Highland, done, or WriterDuet is also like–

JOHN: 50% off.

CRAIG: Yes. What does that cost?

JOHN: Based on what level you’re getting at, there’s a free version of it.

CRAIG: There’s a free version.

JOHN: My daughter was in a screenwriting program last year. She was screenwriting class last year. They were doing it in Google Docs, and it’s just so painful. Just don’t do it in Google Docs.

CRAIG: Why? What? [chuckles]

JOHN: It’s so painful. Yes.

CRAIG: What? I can’t with higher education.

JOHN: Yes. Any of these, Highland, it’s just like, “Oh, it’s a really good program.” Yes, your father spent 10 years making this program. I’m glad that you enjoy it.

CRAIG: Right. Instead, use Google Docs. Was it the school asking them to do Google Docs, or was it the kids who prefer using Google Docs?

JOHN: Basically, I think the professor didn’t require them to use anything other than this. He said it was fine to use Google Docs.

CRAIG: No, it’s not.

JOHN: No, it’s not, because you and I both had to write– Have you ever written in Word? Your early scripts, did you write this in Word? Or you always were in Final Draft or Screenwriter?

CRAIG: My very, very first couple of scripts were in probably WordPerfect.

JOHN: Yes. It is possible to write in a normal Word processor. It’s just ugly.

CRAIG: It just sucks and laborious. [crosstalk] Yes.

JOHN: [unintelligible 00:04:03] was written in Word, and that was the last one I wrote in.

CRAIG: Honestly, we got a lot of problems in this country, not going to lie. Maybe number one problem is screenwriting professors telling students to work in Google Docs. That may be the worst thing America’s dealing with right now.

JOHN: Indeed. Absolutely. Rise of Fascism and–

CRAIG: Rise of Fascism is like fourth. Because I got other issues, like Final Draft pricing. [chuckles]

JOHN: Last bit of news. Once again, I am looking for somebody. A recurring segment on this podcast has ended up being that I need somebody to do a thing, so I asked our listenership, and someone in our listenership is like, “Oh, I’m exactly the person you need to do this thing.” Here’s what I’m looking for right now. We’re doing a new project, and we need a designer for it. We’ll have a link in the show notes with exactly what the whole description is and what the project is. Essentially, we’re looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end experience. Do you know what front-end experience means?

CRAIG: I assume that means the part that people engage with. That part.

JOHN: If it were a web app, then it’s the parts you click on and do that stuff rather than the background server stuff. This is a web thing. Mostly, we’re going to be looking at the other stuff that you’ve built. You need to have a portfolio that shows cool stuff that you’ve built, and most crucially, just taste. Taste is so fundamental here because you can learn anything else, but you can’t learn taste.

CRAIG: That’s called talent.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: I have taste. I just don’t know how to code or design. I feel like I’m well on my way to getting this job. I just got to quickly learn what UX means, and I’m there.

JOHN: 100%. If you are at or above Craig’s level, you
should click through the link and see the kinds of things we’re looking for.

CRAIG: If you see the word UX and you pronounce it Ux, you’re disqualified. This is not your job.

JOHN: No, it’s not. We are looking for an individual, not looking for a company. This is for one project, and so we’ll probably be on an hourly or daily, or weekly rate, but we’d love to find somebody to bring into the team, work full-time. We are based here in Los Angeles. That’s great if we find a person in Los Angeles, but we can also work with someone remote. If you are that person who is the designer who has done this kind of thing, take a look through the notes. You’ll find the show notes, and maybe this is the job–

CRAIG: You know what? I’m going to take myself out of contention. It’s unfair.

JOHN: You’re busy, Craig. Realistically, how are we going to squeeze this on top of everything else?

CRAIG: I play a little bit less Skyrim on my Steam Deck, and I blew through Oblivion. Oblivion, by the way, I’ve forgotten. Kind of a short game, weirdly.

JOHN: Wait, I’m confusing them. Skyrim–

CRAIG: Elder Scrolls IV is Oblivion. Elder Scrolls V is Skyrim.

JOHN: Oh, that’s right, because you went back and played an earlier version. Is it up rest? Does it look decent?

CRAIG: Oblivion, they did a whole remaster because Oblivion came out in 2003, ’02, or something like that. It was like a company came and made it look decent, and it was fun to play again. Skyrim looks really good still.

JOHN: Skyrim is so long. I never finished Skyrim.

CRAIG: Oh, I did, and I’m going to finish it again.

JOHN: I restarted it a couple of times, yes.

CRAIG: I’m going to finish it.

JOHN: I can’t believe you were able to play it on a Steam Deck. It just looks amazing on a Steam Deck. It seems like it’s maybe too small. I’ll put it on my Steam Deck because I’ve not been playing anything other than Vertigo on my Steam Deck

CRAIG: It’s eight inches away from your eyes. It looks great. Anyway, Oblivion, like–

JOHN: Do you put on your readers when you play it?

CRAIG: No.

JOHN: Okay.

CRAIG: That’s actually an interesting thing. I realize I don’t. I guess because I can hold it–

JOHN: Yes, just at the right distance.

CRAIG: Just at the right distance.

JOHN: Is your posture up, or are you looking down?

CRAIG: No, it’s up. The only thing is sometimes my elbows get squeezy because my elbows are bent. I get that my ring finger and pinky finger start to go to sleep. That’s an indication that maybe I should put the Steam Deck down. You know what? I don’t, because winners don’t quit.

JOHN: At whatever point we actually get VR glasses that are really, really good, my God, that’s going to be an incredible game.

CRAIG: They’re getting there.

JOHN: They’re fatiguing to wear after a certain point.

CRAIG: The Quest is a heavy object. I really love that one game that I played on it, the one from the room people from– It was fantastic. I just wait for that one awesome game and then–

JOHN: With some follow-up. Two episodes ago, we talked about connections and the importance of connections. Jay wrote in with some connected and related business. I’m friendly with one of the top screenwriters in town, super A-list, multiple franchises, but our connection is through our daughters, who’ve become best friends at school.

CRAIG: Wait, so let’s see. This is obviously talking about me.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: Let’s see. Who’s my–? Okay, go on.

JOHN: We know each other from play dates and school functions, where we have a fun, casual relationship. Our conversations are about the general state of the industry or upcoming school events. I’ve always felt like I’m not in his league, so I’ve religiously avoided pitching myself or bothering him to read my stuff. Last week, his production company independently read one of my samples. Through my reps, not through him, I now have a general with one of his execs. He and I haven’t spoken about it at all. Should I, A, text him beforehand like, “Hey, funny thing, I’m meeting with your people this week.”

B, mention our connection in the meeting. “Oh, I’m actually friends with your boss. Our daughters go to the same school.”

Or C, say nothing and let it play out, risking embarrassing confrontation later of, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you were coming in for a meeting?” How do you navigate connection that’s personal first, professional by accident?

CRAIG: I love the amount of neurosis that’s pouring off of this. It’s very familiar to me.

JOHN: It’s a very Los Angeles thing, too. I completely picture they were at the same exhausting kids’ birthday parties every weekend.

CRAIG: Sure, over and over and over. I love this. I would go with A.

JOHN: I would go with A, also.

CRAIG: Hard recommend on A.

JOHN: Let’s remind everybody. That is where you text him ahead of time. Say, “Oh, hey, I’m meeting with your people.” Otherwise, it’s just weird if they told you afterwards. Then if you’re in a meeting, you say, “Oh, I’m actually friends with–” then that puts everybody in a weird spot.

CRAIG: Yes. That’s an easy one. If it were me, meaning if I were this fancy guy and I got a text that said, “Hey, it’s blah, blah, I see you all the time, funny thing, I’m having a general meeting, LOL.” I would be like, “Oh, great.” Then I would probably say to that person, “Hey, I want to be in that meeting,” or “Can I read what he wrote,” or be nice to him, or nothing. What I would never do is not say anything, and then just be like, “The hell?”

JOHN: There’s a small number of people this top screenwriter could be, because I’m trying to think of a screenwriter rather than a TV writer. This person has their own development staff and own people.

CRAIG: There’s a lot of them.

JOHN: There’s a few, but it’s 10 or fewer.

CRAIG: A-list screenwriter, franchises, and so forth.

JOHN: We can think of a couple. I would say, Jay, it’s fine, it’s good. You’re overthinking and overstressing it.

CRAIG: Well, yes, but also, that is precisely the kind of overthinking and overstressing that is fairly normal for us. I just don’t want Jay to feel like there’s something wrong with him. There is something wrong with him, but it’s the same thing that’s wrong with most of us.

JOHN: The extra context we got on this is like, this isn’t Jay’s first job. He gets hired for things.

CRAIG: This is an easy one, A. What I do appreciate is that Jay is being considerate of this other person. Because, look, it’s a tough business. Everyone’s scrambling. There have been times where I’ve been aware that I’m talking to somebody who’s maybe in scramble mode, and I can feel that they want to maybe push on it a little bit. I get it completely. It is at least a good thing to be aware that it’s a little awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that this screenwriter has a company that could hire people for things, yes, totally reasonable.

JOHN: Yes. Another bit of connections follow-up. Jamie in Australia writes, “John and Craig mentioned the awkward situations that happen when a distant acquaintance approaches you, especially when you’re with someone who’s not in the business, or you feel the pressure to say, ‘Melissa, this is blah-de-blah,’ but you’re blanking on them.”

CRAIG: [chuckles] My nightmare.

JOHN: In those cases, proactively introduce the person you’re with. “This is my wife, Melissa.” In about 30% of the cases, your acquaintance will say, “Hi, Melissa,” and leave it at that, and you’re back to square one. For most people, this gives them a face-saving opportunity to say, “Hi, Melissa, I’m Kim. I was Craig’s junior assistant producer on his first feature.”

CRAIG: Okay, but here’s the thing. I’m aware of that.

JOHN: I do it. I did it this weekend.

CRAIG: Yes, and I do that, too. The problem is, no one on the other end is going to be like, “Oh, let me make everything easy for you. I’m Kim.” They don’t do that. They’re like, “Oh, hey,” and they also know what you’re doing. They all know it. There’s a moment where it’s like, okay, I’m going to get an A if I say, “Melissa, this is John. He’s blah-de-blah.” I’m going to get an D if I’m like, “This is my wife, Melissa.” Then she’s like, “Oh, hi,” and that person’s like, “Oh, hi,” I guess he doesn’t know my name.

JOHN: A small variation, which is worth trying, which I think I did this weekend as well, it’s like, “Oh, hey, do you know Mike, my husband? Have you met my husband, Mike?” Then it gives Mike an opening for saying, “Okay, I’m Mike.” Then the other person says–

CRAIG: Okay, let me give you a nightmare scenario. “Okay, have you met my husband, Mike?” “Yes. We all went out to dinner three months ago. We sat next to each other and talked at length.”

JOHN: Absolutely true. Absolutely true.

CRAIG: I feel like there are trade-offs. As you get older, your back hurts, your eyes start to– you get closer to death, sweet, beautiful death. You also get to just be excused a little bit for some of this stuff. Like, “Hey, you know what? I’m older. What are you going to do? I’m losing it.” I’m not. It’s just that I know a lot of people. I know too many people. As time goes by, you keep meeting people. It’s the worst. What are you going to do? I think people are like, “Oh, the old guy, he just can’t remember anyone’s names.”

JOHN: I’m sure I’ve said this on podcasts multiple times, but if I’m going to something like a premiere, not of my movie, but other people’s movies, I will, on a drive over, remind myself in the car, who are the people I’m likely to bump into just so they’re a little bit closer to my name.

CRAIG: You can panic about not knowing their names earlier?

JOHN: Or I can Google them.

CRAIG: Oh, God.

JOHN: I Google them in the car.

CRAIG: Lady whose name I don’t know.

JOHN: No, like a producer of this thing.

CRAIG: Oh, like you remember any details about them? Congratulations. I run into people–

JOHN: No, I remember they produced this thing, but I cannot think of their name. Fair.

CRAIG: That’s a reasonable one. It’s the ones that come up– I got to tell you, it happened to me the other day where I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I couldn’t remember who it was, and I should have. I should have, but I didn’t. You know what? I shouldn’t have. It was years ago.

JOHN: It was years ago.

CRAIG: It was years ago, one time years ago, but you know, I felt bad.

JOHN: Yes. There’s also people who I’ve only met on Zoom. I pitched something at eight different places on Zoom.

CRAIG: That one, I think, everybody. Because I just go, “Oh my gosh.” They make the little square in the air, like, “I only know you from this,” as if their face were not enough. Still, any excuse–

JOHN: I’ve only stared in depth at your face for hours on end.

CRAIG: I never saw it bobbing around on the top of the rest of this crap. Now, I know, “Oh, it’s you.” Listen, there’s no–

JOHN: There’s no easy way.

CRAIG: Does this happen to you a lot? You’re young.

DREW: It does a little bit. Although I’ve been the person who’s called out someone for not remembering.

CRAIG: What’s wrong with you?

DREW: Because it was egregious.

CRAIG: What do you mean [unintelligible 00:15:32]? [chuckles]

DREW: It was a person that I had done multiple friend dates with kind of thing, and seen shows with over years. Then I went to a birthday party and they acted like– It was like, “Oh, I have no idea who you are.” I called them out. I bought them a beer afterwards because I felt a little bit bad.

JOHN: There’s also people who have genuine face blindness. Brad Pitt cannot recognize anybody.

CRAIG: By the way, I’m going to start claiming I have face blindness. What a great excuse. Here’s my thing, Drew. What are you going to get out of that?

DREW: In the moment, nothing. It was just pure anger. Hurt, I guess. I’m not saying I was right. I’m not saying you should do that at all. I was in the wrong. This is 10 years ago.

CRAIG: Wait, 10 years ago?

JOHN: Maybe a little less.

CRAIG: How old are you? 12?

DREW: Yes. Yes, I was.

CRAIG: This is like, what, in a sixth-grade birthday party?

DREW: Yes. I was like, we’ve been to school together. We were in fourth grade together all year long.

CRAIG: “Yes, I’m Michael G. I thought you were Michael F.” My thing is, what do you get out of– They don’t know your name. You’re not going to change that. I would just have fun with it. I would laugh about it. You know what I would say, honestly? I would say this is amazing because I’m the one who’s usually doing this. I’m so happy that you’re the one doing it, so I get to enjoy this. Five minutes from now, I’m going to be you with somebody else.

JOHN: Craig, I don’t think we talked about you show up at a party, a friend’s party, and there’s a person there who is actually just a villain. They have done you wrong. They’re apparently friends with the host of the party. Those awkward situations. I’ve had a couple of those. I was like, “Good Lord.” I can generally just avoid the person.

CRAIG: Yes. Do you end up talking to that person?

JOHN: Sometimes it’s at a dinner party or something. It’s like, “Ugh.”

CRAIG: How does your friend not know you have some secret villains?

JOHN: Yes, just people in the industry who have just done me wrong. There’s one director who is just– He’s the worst. Everyone loves him, but he’s just the worst.

CRAIG: Oh, that’s fascinating. I wonder who that– It’s not Steven Spielberg.

JOHN: No. Steven’s great.

CRAIG: How great would it be if you were like, “Oh, man, you nailed it”?

JOHN: Nailed it. We’ve talked about one director who we wanted to have on the show, but he has a villainous history with another one of our friends. That kind of situation does come up. If those two people were at the same event, what do you do?

CRAIG: I don’t really have villains, I don’t think.

JOHN: I have very few, so that was a surprise to this person.

CRAIG: I can think of, honestly, one guy that I don’t want to be at a dinner party with, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon anyway. Doesn’t seem like a dinner party guy, to be honest with you.

JOHN: All right, let’s get to our main topic today, which is writing period stuff. We talk on the show a lot about world-building. If you’re building a futuristic world, you have to be very specific about what’s in that world, what’s different, how not to overbuild, and all these things. What we haven’t discussed a lot, as I was looking through our catalog here, are actual period films and period series, things that are set in recognizable moments of the past.

CRAIG: We’re not talking about female reproductive health today?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: I was confused. Go on.

JOHN: Yes, but I want to make sure that the stuff we’re writing is accurate, but also accessible for audiences. The tension is really between those two things often because done wrong, these can feel like history lessons, but done properly, it’s like, “Oh, this is the color and the context for the world. The history is the plate upon which you are serving the food.” Often, we can confuse the foreground and the background. As we have this conversation, it’s so easy to think like, “Oh, we’re talking about Victorian times or this.” Also, the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.

There was a thing I was writing that was in 2010s, which is like, that’s period. You have to remember what is specifically different about this. Last weekend, I went to go see a screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum. Showgirls and I have this weird history because–

CRAIG: At the Academy Museum.

JOHN: Yes. It was their summer camp. It was a so-called summer camp.

CRAIG: Okay, fair.

JOHN: Here’s the history, briefly, of my experience with Showgirls, is that script by Joe Eszterhas sold while I was in the Stark program at USC for a total of $3.5 million. One of us got a copy of the script. It’s like, “We have to have a dramatic reading of Showgirls.” We had a dramatic reading of Showgirls at my apartment. There were 10 of us, and we read through the whole thing.

CRAIG: Whole thing [unintelligible 00:19:59]

JOHN: Kind of, but it’s also just boring and bad. The movie is actually boring and bad, but also fabulous. It’s a maniacal glee, and the performances are awful, and yet it all works together until it goes just darkly off the rail and cannot be fun anymore.

CRAIG: You know what? We got to get Joe Eszterhas on this show, and I’ll tell you why.

JOHN: Please.

CRAIG: I’ve never met him, never spoken with him. He was ’90s screenwriting.

JOHN: He was the spirit of 1995.

CRAIG: He was it. Year after year, that guy was just crushing it, at least financially.

JOHN: Yes. Jagged Edge. I love Jagged Edge. I haven’t gotten to rewatch it.

CRAIG: Awesome.

JOHN: Basic instinct. Absurd, but sure. Iconic.

CRAIG: Love it. Then it started getting a little wobbly there. Also, Joe Eszterhas, pure screenwriter. Never directed, as far as I know. Did he?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: I don’t think so. He was completely at the mercy of directors, which is why I would want to talk to him. Plus, there is that amazing thing that went down with him and Mel Gibson that people have forgotten.

JOHN: I’ve forgotten that, too.

CRAIG: Joe Eszterhas was working on a script for Mel Gibson. I don’t remember what it was. Mel Gibson, I think, has some sort of compound in Costa Rica. Joe Eszterhas was down there. Mel Gibson was apparently super off his rocker, angry. I don’t know why. Joe Eszterhas recorded some of it of Mel Gibson screaming at him, basically. The stories that must be there from Joe Eszterhas, I wonder if he would come on and just tell a story.

JOHN: In my head, I think I played with him with the Final Draft guy.

CRAIG: Oh, no.

JOHN: Yes, I’m sure he’s delightful.

CRAIG: The Final Draft guy, Rocco Three Shoes, or whatever that guy was, who we talked to. Who was that guy? [chuckles]

JOHN: I don’t remember either.

CRAIG: Quasi-mobster. [chuckles] He’s not really a mobster. He’s not a mobster, but he had that kind of vibe.
[laughter]

JOHN: We’re in business to stay in business.

CRAIG: That is such a mobster thing to say. No, what he said is, we’re not in the business of going out of business. What do you want from us? We’re not in the business of going out of business. Well, it’s not a reason to extort people. Hey, listen, what are you going to do?

JOHN: The whole reason I brought up Showgirls is watching that movie. It’s set in 1995. You’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s right. That’s what 1995 looks like.” It wasn’t trying to be a period. It literally just was that thing. One of the real advantages when we were making a story that is set in the time of motion pictures is we can go back and look like, what did it actually look like? That’s just so fantastic.

CRAIG: Yes. You can look at what it looked like. You can look at it or even look at what the glossy version of what it looked like looked like. The ’90s are amazing, because of our age. We graduate college. We come to Los Angeles. We go through this. 10 years of personal growth and relationship growth and career growth. It seems so separate to us from the ’80s. Everybody else is like, “Meh, it’s basically ’80s blobbing into another thing.” It was just sort of like ’80s plus. It is a fascinating time.

I had never thought about even the 2000s as being period until I had to write scenes in The Last of Us that are set in 2003. Suddenly, I’m like researching, what phones they used and what kind of– I couldn’t remember. Did people have widescreen TVs then, or were we still on square? What was our deal?

JOHN: We’re doing a rewatch of Community, which is a great rewatch if you haven’t seen the show. The phones in it are crazy, because iPhones show up at a certain point, but every other kind of phone you can possibly imagine. There’s sidekicks, there’s trios, a lot of flip phones, Blackberries, everything else.

CRAIG: Palm pilots, somebody has a Newton.

JOHN: Previous episodes, we’ve talked about [unintelligible 00:23:44] stuff obviously with Chernobyl, the deep dive into The Unforgiven. We had Robert Eggers on to talk about Nosferatu, which is period but also that heightened. Mike Makowsky was on to talk about Bad Education, which was ’80s. Mari Heller’s been on a couple times, and it seems like everything she’s done has been a period thing up until the last movie. She took a lot of period.

CRAIG: Yes, I think that’s right.

JOHN: Let’s talk about general goals, no matter what period you’re writing. Fundamentals, story first, history second. The historical setting is the backdrop. It’s not the protagonist.

CRAIG: Yes. There are certain cases where the nature of the story pushes the period forward dramatically because it is about living in the ’80s as opposed to a story that happens to be in the ’80s. I’m thinking of Super 8 or Boogie Nights. Those two movies were ’80s because that was so much of what the story was.

JOHN: All the same, both of those movies, if you needed to transplant them to a different decade, the central character conflicts, the thematic issues, you could find a way to do it in a different decade.

CRAIG: Always for all good drama, which is why Christopher Nolan is making The Odyssey. Always.

JOHN: Pick the scope of history you need. By that, I mean there are certain kinds of movies, it’s history with characters in it. I would say Lincoln is that, Oppenheimer is that, where the history is really foregrounded. There’s other movies where it’s a character story that is taking place in a historical world. I say Titanic is that, Almost Famous is that, where it’s just like the space around it is really, really important, but that’s not the focus of it. Even though Titanic is a real historical event, the movie isn’t about the history that was made there.

CRAIG: Right. It’s worth asking this question, does this need to be a period piece or not? The reason it’s worth asking is, because while it may afford you some interesting things to do in your script, it can be a little bit of a crutch. The first thing that somebody making a budget for that script is going to do is go, “Oh, no, it’s a period piece.” Period pieces cost more money. The end. Every single time. You’re spending more to transform what the world looks outside, even just replacing all the cars as a thing, getting the accurate clothing and the hairstyles, and all the rest.
Period pieces, in that way, can be a trap where people just go crazy with it. Like, “Oh my God, this movie’s set in the ’80s, everyone’s got crazy shoulder pads.” Well, not everybody was walking around with crazy shoulder pads in the ’80s.

JOHN: Most people’s clothes and most people’s– the stuff in people’s houses is actually from 10 years, 20 years before that. People hold onto their stuff. Really great production design, you’ll see that’s set in a period in that specific era. It’s not all new stuff of that era. It’s stuff that’s dragged along. One of the nice things about setting a movie in the present day is you get so much stuff for free. You can just go outside and aim a camera at something like, “Well, that’s 2025,” or whatever year you’re in. You get the modern buildings, you get the modern cars, you get everything else.
All that stuff which would have to be replaced if you’re doing it, say, in the ’80s. A reel showed up on Instagram yesterday that was talking about The Apprentice, the Donald Trump movie that Sebastian Stan was in. It was showing the visual effects they used to put buildings in proper context and make things look right. For an inexpensive movie, they were very, very smart about, “This building looks right, it will just replace the buildings on the side of it.”

CRAIG: Yes. The nature of a skyline is a very interesting research. People will catch you and laugh at you. If you’re making a movie that’s set in 1980s New York and the Freedom Tower is there and not the Twin Towers, people are going to laugh at you. That’s an obvious example, but it creates a lot of issues. At a minimum, just ask, at least why does this need to be set in this time period? Then if you have a great answer, terrific.

JOHN: One of the first movies I wrote, which never I made, thank God, it was a Western. It was like Aliens Out West. It was like a Western, but with an alien creature in it. Doing the research for that, I did not need to know about the 1880s on the East Coast. I just needed to know very specifically, in a Colorado mountain town, what was daily life like. That’s the right scope. I find so often when writers are approaching a period of things, I feel like, “Well, I need to know everything about everything.” It’s like, “You’re probably procrastinating and avoiding writing.”

I would say, all that said, don’t assume you know how things worked. Always stop yourself and ask the question, “Wait, is that really how it is?” Here’s some good examples of things you might not be thinking about. How are letters delivered? How did mail get from point A to point B? How do people light their homes at night? It’s so important. It’s going to be important for production, but also just for what a scene can make sense. If things are happening by candlelight, it’s just fundamentally different.

One of the projects that we’re running right now is in a medieval-y kind of world. Candlelight is tough. It’s challenging to live under candlelight. If you have two characters who are in a room by themselves and just lit by candlelight, everything else is going to darkness beyond that. That is–

CRAIG: Unless they’ve got that candle candelabra. I love a candle candelabra. There’s so many candles. Who’s lighting all those candles? What happens when they burn down?

JOHN: How much heat is that thing putting off?

CRAIG: How many candles did they have?

JOHN: Candles were so expensive. So much of a person’s daily income was spent on candles.

CRAIG: Candles. Then the candle maker, there’s probably a good word for candle maker, right?

JOHN: Candlestick maker.

CRAIG: No, that’s a candlestick. Candlestick is the thing the candle goes in.

JOHN: No, candlestick maker makes the candles.

CRAIG: No, the candlestick maker makes candlesticks.

JOHN: Oh my God. Are we going to fight on this?

CRAIG: Yes. Who’s making the candlestick then? Somebody else?

JOHN: All right. Drew is looking it up to give us the answer.

DREW: A chandler.

CRAIG: A chandler.

JOHN: A chandler.

CRAIG: Chandler makes candles. I knew there was a weird name for it. It’s like Coopers make barrels. All they did was add an H, and they were like, that’s good enough. Chandler. They should have done that with barrels.

JOHN: Chandler, yes. It was probably a hard C-H. That’s a certain one.

CRAIG: Chandler. Chandler Bing. He made candles.

JOHN: It was candles, yes.

CRAIG: Can we agree that the candlestick maker made candlesticks? Come on. It’s a weapon and clue.

JOHN: It is a weapon. That’s true. It’s a candlestick. You’re right. Okay. I will yield on this.

CRAIG: Thank you.

JOHN: What time were meals eaten, and what counted as– did they eat breakfast? How people addressed each other is important. Finding that what streets and roads actually looked like. Were they gravel streets? Gravel is actually a much more sophisticated thing than just a rut down the middle of a road. What was it like?

CRAIG: Here’s a weird one that I remember going, “Whoa, I didn’t know.” And this is why it’s great to look at photographs, because you can pull things from photographs and then go, “Wait, what is that?” and find out what its use was. In the video game LA Noire, which took place in post-war Los Angeles. We’re talking 19– I think it was like 1949 or ’50 or something like that. There was also a section before the war, where it was like the ’30s. I think in the ’30s in Los Angeles, there were no traffic lights. There was like a sign that went ka-chunk.

I was like, “What is that? That is so cool.” By the way, traffic, what a breeze. In the ’30s in LA? Whew. High wind. I love things. Those details. As you’re going through your details, there are details that it’s like, “Okay, I want to get this right. How many candles are in the room? Is anybody going to look at that scene and go, ‘Whoa’?” No. If there’s some interesting whoa, throw it in.

JOHN: If it creates an interesting moment, yes, for sure.

CRAIG: The characters don’t have to say, whoa, nor would they. You might go, “Oh,” that’s the kind of thing that makes you go, “I really am in a different time.”

JOHN: Here’s the challenge is you need to do the research so you have the answers to those kinds of questions that could be relevant and not shove so many of them in that it feels like, “Okay, you’re just showing off here.”

CRAIG: You don’t want it ever to feel like the movie stopped to go. Now, everyone in the mall will dance to Madonna because it’s the ’80s.

JOHN: LOL.

CRAIG: Their hair.

JOHN: Haha.

CRAIG: Well, I guess Wonder Woman did that. Wonder Woman did do that, but you shouldn’t. In general, it’s not a great idea because it takes people out of the story, and it turns it into more of just a look at us.

JOHN: Other things to keep in mind is a people’s sense of
time. Do they have clocks? Do they have watches? Even if they had those, I’ll see if I can find the blog post for this, but the idea of time as a resource that you control is actually relatively recent. People didn’t talk about saving time because you couldn’t do anything with time. Basically, you did your work, you tended the field and stuff, but there wasn’t any sense of like, “Oh, I need to save some time here. What was time?”

Time, as a thing you can sort of touch or control, is a pretty recent invention. It’s really kind of an industrial-age invention.

CRAIG: Yes, I mean, time management, definitely. The other thing to think about is how you prompted this when you talked about time. I think about just night in general, and the world at night. Depending on what time your period is, how dark is it out at night? Because boy–

JOHN: It’s probably really dark.

CRAIG: Your movie that took place in Colorado in the 1800s at night, it’s pitch black. If it’s overcast and the moon is dark–

JOHN: I feel like so often, writers never have been outdoors at true night, like out of the city at night, and you’re like, “Oh, man, it’s dark.”

CRAIG: It is dark, but also you do have the sky itself if it is not overcast. You have a setting– You don’t see this very often in Westerns, and I think it’s in part because it would look fake. At night, clear sky, back before light pollution, the world’s a planetarium. You can see stars ahead of you. It’s gorgeous. I only know that because I’ve been to Alaska, which is as close as we can get to that. It’s insane. You just don’t see that. I think I know because it just would look fake.

JOHN: Money. What was the money? Do people have currency? How are they doing this? How do they handle money? It’s always so weird to me that people’s entire life savings were in their pockets or in a box.

CRAIG: Of course, buried under a floorboard.

JOHN: How much things cost relative to wages? You don’t understand that people used to spend half their money on food.

CRAIG: Also, Louis CK. Are we allowed to cite Louis CK? He had this great bit about how in Westerns, somebody would come in to a saloon and ask for food for their horse, and a beer, a meal, a shave, a room, and then you would just hand a guy one coin. The guy’s like, “You got it.” The guy would bite the coin, and then you’re like, “Done.” What is that coin? Also, he’s like, the guy never adds up all those things. He’s like, yes, you’re actually short one, or I owe you two subcoins for this.

JOHN: I’m going to clip off a piece of that coin.

CRAIG: Everybody just vaguely was like, “That’s about a coin.” Two, better.

JOHN: You’re looking at who could own property is always a question. Obviously, it was only the white man who could own property. Even in Downton Abbey, the whole premise of Downton Abbey is based on the fact that Lady Mary can’t inherit Downton Abbey because of the entail, which prohibited a daughter from inheriting it. Do people smell? People always smell.

CRAIG: Oh, the smell thing. I think about this all the time.

JOHN: In your show, right now, they’re in a civilization where they have some running water, but otherwise, they would have been smelling a lot.

CRAIG: Yes. We presume that if you’re in a civilized settlement, like, say, Jackson, not only do you have laundry, and you showed a lot of laundry and cleaning, but you’ve also probably rummaged a whole ton of deodorant. It’s not like there are stores full of it that you can go rummage through. Maybe they’ve even started to make their own. The issue is more like when you’re dealing with, say, let’s go back to your little town in Colorado in the 1800s, everybody stank. Because everybody stank, nobody stinks.

JOHN: Nobody stank. It’s not notable.

CRAIG: I think about it all the time. I also have this thing about people that start kissing as soon as they wake up.

JOHN: We’ve heard this on the podcast.

CRAIG: On my show-

JOHN: Doesn’t happen.

CRAIG: -when two people woke up and wanted to kiss, one of them said, “No, morning breath.” “I don’t care.” “I’m not–” and I see it all. Why do people do it? I understand why they want to do it, but it’s not cool. Do you just immediately start kissing your wife when you wake up?

JOHN: Me?

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: All the time.

CRAIG: Oh, gross.

JOHN: No, never. We’ve both got night guards in.

CRAIG: Sexy.

JOHN: Playing it against each other.

CRAIG: Melissa wears this thing to prevent snoring. It does not work that well. It’s like a hockey tooth guard. It’s massive. She’s like, [mimics heavy breathing]. Oh my God. Sexy.

JOHN: It’s good stuff. Finally, talking about language and voice. This is a thing where you can just go way out, drop the deep end. Can you define something that makes the audience believe that they are speaking properly for the space that they’re in, and yet the audience can actually understand what they’re saying? That’s where I feel like you have to be aware of what the conventions are in other film and TV that the audience have seen, so it doesn’t seem weird.

You can make a very compelling argument for the accent should act like a British person who is speaking in the 1800s should have actually had a New York accent, but we’re not going to hear it right. That’s the reality.

CRAIG: I love the use of language in The Crucible, the
Daniel Day-Lewis version. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but I assume it’s accurate. People often would say, “I were,” instead of “I was.” I were, which we never say.

JOHN: But we can understand it.

CRAIG: We can understand it. It was so specific, and it felt– I have to assume it was accurate. It was such a lovely way of placing us in a different time, but completely understandable.

JOHN: Wrap this up to say that you, as the writer, are going to be making some of these initial decisions, but there are going to be so many more people who have to weigh in on them. A director, a production designer, historians, subject experts, props, the horse person.

CRAIG: The horse person, the picture car person, everybody.

JOHN: You need to be both able to explain and defend your choices, but also be adaptable to other people, their expertise, and make sure you’re just all rowing in the same direction, which may not be your initial direction, but is a good direction.

CRAIG: I will say that costume people, props people, those two in particular, get so excited about period stuff because it’s such a way to zero in. You just have to make sure that sometimes they don’t just turn it into an ’80s museum. With Chernobyl, we were just like, “Look, accuracy, 100%. Don’t feel like we have to push anything.” Did some people in the Soviet Union in the ’80s wear very bad suits? Of course, but people wear very bad suits now. Don’t give them very bad suits. Give them suits that were correct to a normal dressed-in person then.

JOHN: Agreed. All right, let’s move on to some listener questions. The first couple of these are actually about period stuff.

CRAIG: Okay.

JOHN: Eliza writes, “I’m writing a series that follows a family over several generations from present day to the 1930s. I know the arcs for each character, but I’m struggling with how to move between decades in a way that feels elegant feels elegant and motivated by theme without being too on-the-nose. Do you have any advice for transitioning across several timelines in a television series so it feels organic and thematically connected?” This is a television series.

CRAIG: Well, I guess the first question would be, are you moving within decades within an episode, or is it episode to episode that is a different decade?

JOHN: Let’s talk about why we’re asking those questions. Because if each episode is its own decade, I think you have a lot more latitude to just, you’re just restarting things, and the audience is with you. If you have to move between decades within episodes, that’s more challenging. The thematics, I think about the overall, what is the question that you’re trying to address in this episode or in this series overall, and those aren’t necessarily the transitions I’m worried about. I think actually the visual, auditory, story transitions are really what you need to focus on because if it’s– The bad example is I open a door, and then I open the door in the earlier period as we’re moving back and forth. Those things, the audience can understand what you’re doing.

CRAIG: If you’re inside of an episode and you’re going between decades, it’s the same game you play if you’re not moving between decades. The game is, what would make this interesting from here to here? There’s certain versions where you cut to black, start playing, fade up on a song from the 1960s, fade up, you’re in the 1960s. There’s the visual version where there’s a 2025 bus that’s– you’re looking at it as it pulls forward and stops, and then you cut around to the side and starts pulling away. There’s a billboard for cigarettes on the side of the bus, and you look around, oh my God, we’re in a different time. Play the games. Just play the games.

JOHN: See what feels right and natural. Since you’re saying it’s a family over several generations, you’re probably going to see young and old versions of the same characters, and that can work, but can also be really challenging. Just be mindful of, we’re seeing two characters who are roughly in the same space, but you think they’re going to be different actors. Just be mindful of what we’re actually seeing on screen, because if you have the 30-year-old and the 40-year-old version of a character, that’s a hard thing to distinguish.

CRAIG: That’s just clothes. If they are two different actors, then you can use objects. One actor takes his watch off, it’s all scuffed and scratched, and then the next shot is somebody putting that watch on, it’s brand new, and it’s like, okay, it’s him. It’s just from 30 years ago or something. Use props. Use wipes. Natural wipes, not Star Wars wipes. Use music. Music is a big one.

JOHN: Music helps a lot. Makes you feel like you’re in a
consistent, intentional place, and you’re moving from one thing to the next.

CRAIG: That actually ties back into something interesting about what we said earlier. Music is one of those areas where, if you are using a song to signify a time change, you actually have to use an iconic song. It doesn’t have to be the most overplayed song ever, but it needs to immediately go, “I’m from this time.” Not, “What decade was that from?” Because there are songs where you’re like, “I’m not really sure what decade that’s from.”

JOHN: Absolutely. There’s a lot of early rock and roll that could be from any of those.

CRAIG: It could be from anywhere.

JOHN: Nick has a question about period dialogue. “It seems like most films default to Shakespeare lite when it comes to dialogue for anything set before 1900. If John and Craig were doing something set in the past, like about a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, how realistic would they get in using the language of the actual time? How do you strike a balance between accuracy and specificity to the era while still making the dialogue understandable to the audience?” What Nick’s describing is we default to an RRP, received pronunciation, for a lot of historical things.

CRAIG: Ish.

JOHN: Ish, yes.

CRAIG: He said before 1900. I’m thinking, no. Westerns mostly take place in the late 1800s, and people aren’t talking like Shakespeare.

JOHN: We’ve established a Southern Western sound for the West, and if you’re in that general space, you’re okay. To a specific example of a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, you would probably want to have one voice that sounds like the Roman. Assuming everyone’s speaking the same language, we think it’s a reasonable choice. One voice for the Romans, and I think we have as an audience an expectation that they’re going to speak in a– that Rome is England, and so therefore, in our minds, it’s England. Therefore, the higher status people are going to speak more what we associate with a higher status British person, and lower class people will speak in lower class accents.

CRAIG: Because the English language is stratified by class in the UK version, we do tend to use RP to mean powerful, wealthy, educated, and then your East London to be rabble. At times, it borders on offensive. For instance, especially if you grew up in East London, where a lot of cool people live. Lord of the Rings, which I love, has this thing where the orcs are all cockney, and it’s insane. That’s what?

JOHN: Dwarves are either Scottish or Irish.

CRAIG: Dwarves are Scottish. The hobbits are southwest England. They’re Bristol and stuff like that. Mr. Frodo. I don’t know Mr. Frodo. Also, pirates, weirdly, are all from somewhere there, like Devon. I think they’re all from Devon for some reason or something like that. I don’t quite think that’s fair. On the other hand, you are implying they’re all part of a cluster because the orcs all grow up together. It would seem bizarre if the orcs were like, “I say, I do believe there’s man flesh out there. Let us feast tonight.” The Aragorn was like, “Oy, we just got to move on.” It would be stupid.

JOHN: Again, we approach everything with a set of expectations. If you’re going to abandon those expectations, you’ve got to have a really good reason to do it. In Nick’s example, if we have the barbarians, then the barbarians probably have a German tint to their accent. They have something that they’re probably still speaking English, but they’re speaking with an accent that implies that they have a just as good space.

CRAIG: Therein also is a problem. This was something that we dealt with on Chernobyl very early on. If you speak English, asking somebody to do an accent that is outside of their accent is fine if they’re good at it. Some actors are not good at it, and what you end up with is the Boston Syndrome. The Boston Syndrome, I don’t think, has ever been overcome by any film. Even films that were written by and performed by almost exclusively people from Boston still suffer from Boston Syndrome.

Good Will Hunting has Robin Williams in it, and he does not know how to do a Boston accent, but he tries. RIP, wonderful man, great performance, horrible Boston accent. Those guys knew it, and they were like, “Eh, what are you going to do?” The Boston Syndrome is real. When you ask a group of actors to say, you’re all going to be doing English, but this is slight German. Some of them will be fine, and some of them will be horrible. Now you have the Boston Syndrome.

JOHN: It’s a danger. Last question about period stuff. This one comes from Concerned. “My screenplay takes place during the American Civil War, and while its main story doesn’t focus on slavery itself, people that are slaves are featured in the script. My question is, how should I refer to them? Enslaved person feels modern in a way that could take people out of the moment and may confuse people, but simply referring to them as slaves feels wrong. Roast the question if I’m overthinking it.”

I think there’s two things we’re getting at. You have characters in your story who are enslaved, and I think you can say enslaved as far as scene description, but they need to actually just be character characters, and the fact that they are enslaved should not be the defining aspect of their characters. The people who are referring to them in the course of the story would refer to them as slaves because they’re not going to say, you can’t use modern words for these characters who are in this world where they would say slaves.

CRAIG: This feels a little bit crazy. Whether or not there is some sort of careful language that says we no longer call enslaved people slaves, although they are, that’s what they are. It’s bad. Being a slave is a horrible situation. No one’s saying, “You’re a slave,” and therefore, ha, ha, ha. That’s what everybody called people who were enslaved, and specifically at that time, that’s what everybody called them. In fact, that is what everyone has called people who have been enslaved up until, I don’t know, maybe let’s say 10 years ago.
If you’re writing a script that takes place then, and you are– even if you’re saying just in your description enslaved persons, you’re going to look wrong. Art is not here to conform to academic standards or anything. Art is here to express life, and that is what life was.

JOHN: The term enslaved person, it makes sense for why we want to foreground the fact that these are actual people and human beings who exist independently of their current situation of being enslaved. That makes total sense. In the context of the people inside world of this movie, they’re not going to have that information. Make sure that whatever you’re doing, as the person setting this up, you are being mindful of the reason we want to think of these people as human beings and treat them with the respect that all human beings need.

CRAIG: Unless your movie is making an argument for slavery, I really don’t think this is a problem. Also, I don’t think anybody is going to see the word “enslaved person” and not think slave. Ultimately, the information is exactly the same. You do what is true to that time. Therefore, people, let’s say, in late 1910s, when World War I is going on, they might call their German neighbors Huns. What I wouldn’t do in that script is say, every time in parentheses, slanderous against or crude against German because it’s just– Put yourself in the time. Put yourself in that place. Be inside of it. Be true to it. Don’t let that other stuff-

JOHN: Your instinct to never minimize the characters who are enslaved, to have that one identity of being enslaved, is the right instinct. I just feel like you’re not going to need to use that word in your scene description, probably at all. They have names.

CRAIG: They have names. Also, they’re people. That’s how you show that they’re people. Let’s say you are like someone’s riding by on a horse. They pass a field. Slaves are working. You’re saying enslaved people are working. It takes me out of the world that I’m in because, theoretically, it’s not you saying those people are doing something. It’s the people going by who are thinking it or observing it. It still has to sit within the context of those people.

JOHN: At the same time, in saying that, the sense that you don’t want people to be set dressing. Making sure that if there are people working in the field, find something more interesting than just that because then they do feel like set dressing.

CRAIG: Sometimes background is set dressing. That’s fair. There’s a movie in prison, and somebody’s walking by, and there are a lot of prisoners. Now, people can say a lot of imprisoned people. Sure, but there are a lot of them, and they are set dressing because they’re filling the world out in a natural way. In fact, sometimes showing how many people are just anonymously left to wither away or suffer is in and of itself interesting. It’s not like in Schindler’s List. All those people in the camp had names or anything. No, they didn’t. They were just continuation victims.

JOHN: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Thing. For our One Cool Thing, I have two examples of some new thinking when it comes to alternative power that I thought were both really cool, and I’d never heard about them before. The first is this thing called standard thermal. Right now, we can put up a bunch of solar, and you can get really cheap electricity out of solar, which is great. It’s the cheapest way you can get power for things. The challenge is when you have all that power, you can store it in batteries for a while. If you’re in a place where you need power other times of the year or you need heat other times of the year, what do you do with that extra capacity that you have?

This place called Standard Thermal, their thing is they use extra capacity to basically just generate heat, and they pump it into the dirt, which sounds like it would not work very well, but apparently, you can just store a bunch of heat in dirt. During summer months, you make a bunch of hot dirt, and then you use that hot dirt to create heat for the winter months.

CRAIG: Dirt just stays hot?

JOHN: Yes. You basically pile up, and you make these big dirt piles.

CRAIG: The outside parts of the dirt are insulating the inside parts of the dirt?

JOHN: Yes. Then you basically just pump the heat out of there to use as heating in buildings for the winter months.

CRAIG: How do you pump heat out of dirt?

JOHN: You’re running water or coolant, or you’re basically running–

CRAIG: Coils of water through it.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: It doesn’t lose the heat over time, or just heat
loses it slowly.

JOHN: It holds enough onto it. Again, they’ve just built some test projects there in Oklahoma. What’s smart about it is, it’s just so cheap. It’s a cheap and very-

CRAIG: It’s dirt cheap.

JOHN: It’s literally dirt cheap.

CRAIG: I can’t believe I made Drew laugh.
[laughter]

JOHN: What I like about it is it’s just engineering, and you don’t have to invent anything new. You could do it on a site, and you’re not trying to pump stuff. You’re not trying to move electricity all around the world.

CRAIG: You don’t need rare earth materials to make fancy batteries or anything like that. You just–

JOHN: Battery technology has gotten really good. For when you need power at night, batteries are fantastic. When you need power in February and there’s not enough sun, this seems like a really good way of generating at least heat, which is some of what you need in a lot of places.

CRAIG: That makes all sense.

JOHN: The second energy thing, which I thought was cool, is this company called Pantalasa. I’m going to show you the picture to correct you, so you can see it. It are these nodes that float in the ocean. They look like these spheres with long tails. They basically just bob up and down in the waves. In bobbing them down constantly, they’re just constantly generating power.

CRAIG: Oh, that’s really interesting.

JOHN: Isn’t that so clever?

CRAIG: It’s basically just some electromagnet in there that’s moving up and down.

JOHN: Yes. Actually, what it’s doing is water gets pulled up, and then it gets shot out. It’s spinning these turbines.

CRAIG: Spinning a little flywheel or something.

JOHN: The free float, in fact, generates a ton of power.

CRAIG: Then there’s a battery inside that’s getting–

JOHN: The question is, it’s really easy to generate power on these things, but how do you get the power off of those things? One of the ways they could do it is use the power of electricity to create hydrogen. Then every so often, you send a boat through to pick up the hydrogen.

CRAIG: That’s a little explosive.

JOHN: Yes, but liquid hydrogen, they’ve actually done enough stuff figuring out how to handle that more safely. The other potentially really good use is maybe you don’t need to get power.

CRAIG: How do you get liquid hydrogen, though? You have to really reduce the temperature dramatically.

JOHN: I’m saying liquid hydrogen. I think it’s just compressed hydrogen. I don’t know.

CRAIG: That’s explosive.

JOHN: There’s ways to do it because hydrogen adds an alternative fuel power. It’s the thing that we’re doing more.

CRAIG: I love the idea of that wave motion.

JOHN: The other thing which is potentially smart for it is maybe you don’t actually need to get the power off that. Maybe you can just use that to do power, where you can just use it on the site. You can use it for direct carbon capture. You actually are just pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and converting it that way, or you could use it for long-term computing capacity because basically, you could compute on these things and then just satellites or whatever and beam it to other places.

CRAIG: You could surround an oil rig with these, and then you could use it to pump more oil. No?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: Okay. Just you know, it’s just brainstorming.

JOHN: Right now, we don’t have good ways. I don’t have wireless. I don’t have electricity to transmit any power, but we can transmit data. If you could do a lot of compute-intensive stuff on one of these things, great.

CRAIG: We know this, that there is a massive amount of energy created by the moon because the moon moves the water around. If we could just start harnessing that, wow. That’s just wonderful. Big wave-capturing spinning wheels. It’s going to screw up some beaches and stuff. Who cares? Just the tide coming in and out, water flowing. I don’t know. It just feels like you’d be able to do it.

JOHN: The other thing I saw recently was the proposal for not a thing we were ready to build yet. Basically, you can just take a silicon that’s the size of a cafeteria tray. One side is just basically the silicon is used as a solar cell. The back side is just used as computer processing. You can just stick them in space, and they actually just float around and do useful, valuable things.

CRAIG: That’s nice. Maybe help us with generating everything through AI. Thank God.

JOHN: Thank God. You have an electric thing here, too. Talk about this.

CRAIG: I do have an electric thing here. I’m not a huge car guy, but I do get excited when they start to make electric cars really cool. We have a gazillion uncool electric cars out there, which is fine. They’re doing great. Baidu is making $20,000 a second. Tesla is making plenty that just sit there and do nothing because nobody wants them anymore, lol. Audi has a concept car. A lot of times, these concept cars are like, “We’re never making this.” They’re making this. It’s called Concept C. It is an all-electric roadster.

JOHN: It’s a roadster, I was going to say.

CRAIG: With a hard convertible top that looks like it folds in and retracts. It is so cool-looking.

JOHN: I would say it’s sexy, but it looks uncomfortable to me.

CRAIG: There’s no back seat or anything. I think it’s probably very comfortable for the person driving and the person right next to that person. There’s no space for anybody else. It looks so cool. It looks like an actual future car. The other thing I like about it is in the interior, they’re adopting this thing that I guess Mercedes or BMW had initiated. I think this will be the trend moving forward called Shy technology. The idea of shy technology is, no, we’re not going to put some massive screen in the middle of the dashboard and go, “Look, it’s our technology.” We just blend it in nicely. It’s muted, and it’s a screen. It’s not screaming at you. It’s not huge. There are still some physical buttons.

When my younger daughter and I went to go buy her her first car, one of her must-haves physically, manipulable air vents. She’s like, “I don’t want one of these cars where I have to go into menus to move air vents around. I just want to be able to grab a thing and move it to get the air on me or off of me.”

JOHN: I understand that tone.

CRAIG: That’s a good example where I think actually our hands work better than technology. I don’t need technology to tell me where the air goes. Anyway, this car looks fantastic. I do have one other bonus, one cool.

JOHN: Oh my gosh. This is a rare treat. Coming with not one but two.

CRAIG: Our friend, Derek Hass, has a show called Countdown on Amazon.

JOHN: Derek Hass, who is responsible for the Chicago universe.

CRAIG: Every week, we watch it together. Melissa and I and Derek and Christy watch together in my house and have a blast. So much fun. The season is almost over. This comes out on Tuesday. Last episode is Wednesday. The specific one cool thing is that Countdown within its season, and I believe it’s 13 episodes, does something that I don’t recall another show like this ever doing. Structurally, it innovates something that I actually think is genius. I wonder if it will catch on. Other people will notice what it did. I think it’s a very smart thing. I won’t spoil it. I’ll spoil it off the air for you guys, but I won’t spoil it here for our viewers.

JOHN: People should check out Countdown on Amazon Prime Video. We’re supposed to just say Prime Video rather than Amazon Prime Video, but I always say Amazon.

CRAIG: We’re saying Amazon. We’re not even saying Prime Video. It’s Amazon.

JOHN: We’re saying Amazon now.

CRAIG: It’s Amazon. What are they going to do? Take away my Prime?

JOHN: That is our program for this week. Script notice is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Whit Morless. If you do an outro, you can send us a link to Ask@johnaugust.com.

CRAIG: It’s done by program.

JOHN: I know. I didn’t hear our program.

CRAIG: I was shocked. Keep going.

JOHN: Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. Craig, I’m sorry we’re not using the drinkwear today for this episode.

CRAIG: I have a lovely glass here.

JOHN: You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all the premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have a cool thing, I think we’re going to try in the next couple of weeks for our premium subscribers. Stay put. You’re going to get a little advanced sneak preview of a new thing we’re going to try.
You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Witches. A reminder, if you are the designer, who I should be hiring on for this project, please click through the link to look at that. If you’re a student who is at a university right now and wants to try Highland for free, just go to “apps” and click on Highland. You’ll find all the student licensing information there, or just install Highland and click on the student license button. That would also work. That works. Craig, thanks for a fun show

CRAIG: Thank you for a fun program. All right.
[music]

JOHN: Okay, Season of the Witch, we are going to talk through iconic witches, and we’re going to rank them in [unintelligible 01:03:51] here. You can get [unintelligible 01:03:52] tier A, B, C, or D.

CRAIG: We call that S tier.

JOHN: S tier.

CRAIG: S tier.

JOHN: Wow. S tier. What does S mean for you? Superior?

CRAIG: Yes. That’s just straight from video game.

JOHN: Oh, yes. 100% S tier. All right. You had proposed that we needed to add on a witch who was not originally on my list.

CRAIG: Yes. Of course. Well, it’s Meryl Streep. How can you not?

JOHN: Give us the case for her and where you want to put her in.

CRAIG: Well, I don’t know what the other witches are, but she is a tragic figure who both creates the problem of everything and also leads to the solution of everything.

JOHN: She’s the witch from Into the Woods. Does she have a name independent of that? Just a witch? Witch.

CRAIG: She has this gorgeous relationship with her daughter, who turns out to be Rapunzel. You feel so much for her. She sings two of the best songs in the show.

JOHN: Witch, iconic. Iconic is the-

CRAIG: If you are a musical fan, she is the most iconic witch there is.

JOHN: No, that absolutely cannot be true.

CRAIG: I disagree with you.

JOHN: We’re going to go through the list.

CRAIG: I know because you’re going to say Elphaba.

JOHN: I’m going to say Elphaba. We’ll get to Elphaba in a
second. You put her S tier. I would put her-

CRAIG: She’s S tier. Elphaba is A-tier because of Defying Gravity and for that reason only.

JOHN: You’re putting her S tier. I’m going to put the witch from Into the Woods at B-tier just because she was not even– We thought about this for a while, and she didn’t even enter my consciousness. All right, let’s go to the ones who are already on the list. Bellatrix Lestrange, played by Helena Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter franchise.

CRAIG: I don’t even think of her as a witch because that movie is full of women who have magic who are all theoretically witches.

JOHN: Is she C or D?

CRAIG: She’s D because she doesn’t really impact the story that much, and I don’t think of her specifically as a witch.

JOHN: Cersei.

CRAIG: Oh, wow. Cersei is a sorceress, but we’ll go ahead. Cersei is so classic and is about to have a moment, I assume, once Odyssey comes along. I’m going to go with A-tier.

JOHN: Oh, okay. That’s higher than I would guess. Cersei, she polymorphs people a lot.

CRAIG: She’s classic. She turns you into a pig.

JOHN: She does turn you into a pig. There’s a book about her that people love.

CRAIG: I don’t even know that book.

JOHN: Oh, it’s about Cersei. It’s a big seller. I’ll go A. I think she’s the oldest in terms of-

CRAIG: Exactly. She’s the orig.

JOHN: All right. Now we’re at Elphaba. I cannot believe you think she’s anything less than S tier.

CRAIG: She’s A-tier because she sings a great song, but she’s derived from an S-tier witch.

JOHN: Okay. Let’s combine them as one character. I think-

CRAIG: Whoa. Hold on. You can’t.

JOHN: Wicked Witch. Oh, so we can’t?

CRAIG: No, no, no.

JOHN: Elphaba does not exist without the Wicked Witch of the West.

CRAIG: Exactly. This is my point. Elphaba is a modern reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West, but the Wicked Witch of the West from the bound books and most importantly, the movie, that’s S-tier.

JOHN: Wicked Witch of the West is clearly S tier, but I think they are– I can’t separate the two.

CRAIG: I’m giving Elphaba a gift by making her A-tier because she is derivative of it.

JOHN: We are in agreement that Wicked Witch of the West is S-tier because it’s who you picture when you think of a witch.

CRAIG: That is the witch.

JOHN: You’re putting Elphaba at A-tier. I guess I can see that if we had Elphaba without everything else around her, great. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter.

CRAIG: Again, it’s tough, I guess technically a witch. If we consider her a witch, then she’s– I’m going to say B-tier because I don’t think her magic is necessarily the thing that makes her awesome.

JOHN: The Sanderson sisters, otherwise the Hocus Pocus cutout.

CRAIG: Oh, well, I think they’re C-tier. I think they’re just a little cartoon for me.

JOHN: They’re not who I go to first for this. Drew, you’re welcome to chime in here if we’re getting something [crosstalk].

DREW: I just feel like I’m going to get so much mail on that one. With Hocus Pocus, I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus.

JOHN: I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus. It was around.

CRAIG: I remember it coming out, and I remember it not being particularly successful. Then I think over time, it became a cult thing, and it’s super campy. They should have had it in summer camp. It’s fun for people to dress up because it’s a great dress up. They were parodies of witches. They weren’t real witches to me.

JOHN: I do feel like C is too low for somebody who– It’s a seminal and important witch image for a generation.

CRAIG: I’m not in that generation.

JOHN: I think they might be B for our safety.

CRAIG: I’m excited for the hate mail.

JOHN: Maleficent.

CRAIG: Oh, well.

JOHN: Technically, Maleficent is an evil fairy, but she’s
coded as a witch.

CRAIG: Maleficent isn’t a great character, to be honest with you, from the original Snow White story. Angelina Jolie’s version, they try to zhuzh it up. I’ll give her a B just because, in her old lady image, handing out the apple, she’s spectacular.

JOHN: Oh, no, you’re conflating her with the witch. Maleficent is the villain in Sleeping Beauty. She has the crow. She has this.

CRAIG: Right. Maleficent. Sleeping Beauty isn’t a great story. Just the original.

JOHN: The challenge of it, you have your protagonist who is knocked out.

CRAIG: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about her.

JOHN: C or D.

CRAIG: I’m going to put her in D, actually. Not a big fan.

JOHN: Morgan le Fay.

CRAIG: Well, I can’t put her into S because I put Cersei up there for historical versions. I’m going to say Morgan le Fay as a horror witch goes into A. She’s pretty amazing. If you’re a King Arthur fan, which I am.

JOHN: Again, an horror witch in the sense of she’s establishing a lot of templates for what we’ll explain this. Here, I originally had Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My daughter was like, “Oh, no, it has to be Selena Gomez’s character
from Wizards of Waverly Place. I’m going to put them in as a group component of–

CRAIG: Nickelodeon/Disney Teen Witches?

JOHN: Absolutely. A young TV show teen witch.

CRAIG: We might as well throw in Bewitched.

JOHN: Bewitched separately.

CRAIG: Okay. B, they’re fun, but not great for me.

JOHN: They are a teenager plus.

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: All right. Next up, we have Samantha Stevens, the protagonist of Bewitched.

CRAIG: I love Bewitched.

JOHN: I love Bewitched, too. Dora, come on. Paul Lind, oh my God, his uncle.

CRAIG: Paul Lind anything. [chuckles] I love her. Also, I love the sitcomy vibe as opposed to the adult sitcomy vibe. There was an interesting proto-feminism thing going on there.

JOHN: There really is. Also, just the sanitizing of witches. They’re like, “Oh, they made a show about a witch,” but this is in a conservative time.

CRAIG: Yes, but happily before Satanic Panic hit in the 80s. I’m going to say A.

JOHN: I think it’s fair.

CRAIG: I think she’s A.

JOHN: I think she did some good stuff here.

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: Next, we have Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch of the Marvel Universe.

CRAIG: Not a witch. Just can move stuff around with red.

JOHN: It’s interesting because if you look at her role in the Marvel Universe, particularly in WandaVision and more so in– particularly in WandaVision, they really were trying to pull the– to emphasize the witch aspects of it.

CRAIG: Agatha is a witch. I think of The Scarlet Witch as
not a witch, but a woman who can move stuff around using her red power. She’s incredibly powerful. If we were going on power alone, she’s S.

JOHN: She’s not doing a lot of witch stuff. That’s the thing, whereas as opposed to Agatha is doing witch stuff.

CRAIG: I’m going to say C.

JOHN: I think C feels fair for this.

CRAIG: Do you have the witches from Macbeth in here?

JOHN: I don’t have the witches from Macbeth. Okay.

CRAIG: Those three witches over a bubbling cauldron. Bubble toil and trouble.

JOHN: I like that for them. They’re iconic in the sense of the image. They are a coven. They are doing that [crosstalk] stuff. They have no real power. They’re just foretelling things.

CRAIG: Yes, but they’re pretty witchy. They’ve got a cauldron. Just the iconography of the cauldron alone. Just witches stirring a brew in a cauldron, there’s no-

JOHN: Baba Yaga, I think, exists independently of that. It may be an older story.

CRAIG: Baba Yaga also is incredible. Kind of a witch but not really. Do we have the witch from Hansel and Gretel?

JOHN: We don’t have the witch.

CRAIG: That’s S+++. To me, that’s the ultimate witch.

JOHN: She lives in a candy house.

CRAIG: No, she builds a candy house to lure them and then shoves them in an oven and eats them. S+.

JOHN: It’s a good fairytale witch. Can they compete with Wendy the Good Little Witch?

CRAIG: I love Wendy the Good Little Witch. I loved Harvey Comics. First of all, I love that Harvey Comics was called Harvey Comics. They didn’t even try. There’s Marvel, there’s DC, Harvey. Just some guy. “Harvey, what should we call this? Me, call it after me.”

JOHN: There’s a great movie to be made about either Harvey Comics or a fictional version of Harvey Comics. They’re desperately trying to compete against–

CRAIG: They had great stuff. They had Richie Rich, which I loved. They had Casper the Friendly Ghost, and then Casper Sidekick.

JOHN: Wendy the Good Little Witch.

CRAIG: Wendy was adorable. A. She was good, and she was legitimately a witch.

JOHN: I have no sense of what her actual abilities or powers were. They were just–

CRAIG: Same, but you know what? The word witch is in her name, and she actually was a witch. She wasn’t like Scarlet Witch, where she’s just like, “Oh, it’s a fun name.”

JOHN: I remember our last two on the official list. We have the White Witch from the Narnia movies.

CRAIG: Oh, I always think of her as the Snow Queen. Was she called the White Witch?

JOHN: She’s both.

CRAIG: She was fantastic. I would not know what Turkish delight is if not for her.

JOHN: I know about it.

CRAIG: I’ve had Turkish delight. It’s fine. I don’t quite know if it’s something I would sell my family out for. Edmund, you little bastard. I just love that in that version, CS Lewis was like, “Okay, so this is Jesus, and this is Satan. Oh, this is Judas. Now, what should be the 30 pieces of silver? Turkish delight.” That’s awesome. He made it candy. She’s great. She’s an A.

JOHN: I think she’s an A. She’s identified as a witch, but we don’t see her doing–

CRAIG: She petrifies.

JOHN: She petrifies. That’s her big skill, and she actually clearly has world-shaking power, which is great.

CRAIG: Yes, and she’s Satan.

JOHN: Let’s wrap it up with Willow Rosenberg from Puffy the Vampire Slayer.

CRAIG: This is a huge blind spot for me.

JOHN: Oh, yes. I’ve seen every bit of it. I will say Willow is iconic in the sense of she enters as a nerd who then gets into witchcraft just to help out, and then that pulls her into the dark side. It’s metaphors of addiction. Then she has a witchy lesbian lover. Fantastic stuff throughout. I think she is genuinely iconic in her overall play.

CRAIG: This is what I know that people love the Buffyverse. I’m going to admit something. I don’t know any of it. Then there’s so much because there’s Buffy and there’s Angel. I got to tell you, the only times I interact with it, people that make puzzles really dig Buffy. Sometimes datasets will happen where there’s a puzzle, and you’re trying to figure out how do these things go together. It’s like, well, there’s a willow tree, and then there’s an angel heart. Like, “Wait, all these are names from the Bu–” I’ve picked up stuff from that, but I feel bad.

JOHN: I’m putting Willow in A safely. The reason she’s not S-tier is that she’s still a relatable human. The young woman that we’re rooting for. She’s not just an iconic witch at all times. Our S-tiers are the Wicked Witch of the West.

CRAIG: I think so.

JOHN: You say–

CRAIG: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth.

JOHN: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth. Then did we put–

CRAIG: I put the Hansel and Gretel witch up there.

JOHN: Hansel and Gretel witch. Again, they’re iconic. They’re Halloween witches, all of them.

CRAIG: Exactly. All three of them look like Halloween witches to me in my mind.

JOHN: Good. Useful. We’ll put a little graphic up there for people to enjoy.

CRAIG: Now the emails come.

JOHN: Now the emails come from our premium members.

CRAIG: Could you not mention the–

JOHN: Because we didn’t think about it.

CRAIG: Because we didn’t think about it. What do you want from us?

JOHN: Craig and Drew, thank you for figuring out which witch is which on our program.

CRAIG: On our program.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 697 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s a new round of how would this be a movie? We’re going to look at four stories in the news and examine their cinematic essences. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about kindness, Craig. The quality I feel like we’re undervaluing and sometimes confusing and conflating with other things is niceness and politeness. Kindness is different.

Craig: Yes, it’s sort of out of fashion, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. I think it’s an evergreen value. We’ll talk about kindness.

Craig: Sure.

John: Most crucially and fundamentally, we have big news today. We are officially announcing the Scriptnotes book. Long spoken about on this podcast, but it is now available for pre-order starting today as you’re listening to this podcast.

Craig: It’s an actual book.

John: It’s an actual book. You’ve seen the PDF of it in this typeset.

Craig: Oh, yes. The book is an object you could now hit somebody with in the head. It’s real.

John: It’s real. I don’t have a physical book in front of me, but underneath the laptop here, there is a copy of the German edition of Arlo Finch. That is the size and dimension of the book.

Craig: Perfect.

John: That’s what it’s going to feel like.

Craig: It’s a real book. For a long time, we bemoaned the state of screenwriting books. Yes, I think of all the screenwriting books on the shelf, at the store, the virtual store, I think ours is the best. I really do.

John: I genuinely do too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Our book is 43 chapters.

Craig: 43?

John: Yes.

Craig: But they’re short.

John: Yes, they’re short, but they’re important chapters.

Craig: Great bathroom book.

John: Yes, great bathroom book. It says so in the book that if this were to become your bathroom book, we would no higher flatter.

Craig: Thrilled.

John: Absolutely. 43 chapters, 335 pages. Responsibility for this, we have to acknowledge. It fell upon Drew Marquardt, our producer, Chris Csont, Megana Rao, our former screenwriter and producer, and Halley Lamberson, who was our former intern. They wrestled through a thousand hours of transcripts to pull chunks together to figure out what this was and then get it into a prose form that is not me talking or you talking, but it’s us talking, which was a difficult thing to do.

Craig: It’s like a duck press. Are you familiar with the duck press?

John: Tell me about a duck press.

Craig: It’s a little disgusting, but it’s very French. Duck press, you basically can put duck inside of this and squeeze. It’s like a huge lever and it squishes [crosstalk] all the juices out. It basically pulls out the most basic, concentrated form of script notes. We’ve put it through the duck press.

John: Oh, okay.

Craig: Certainly, you deserve acknowledgement. You’ve done a lot of work on the book.

John: I had this fantasy that between the four of them, they’d be able to get a written tone that feels right. Now I did have to run my fingers through everything and do it.

Craig: I deserve no credit, other than the fact that I talked for a lot.

John: You did talk for a lot.

Craig: A lot.

John: You created credits on the front of the book.

Craig: Listen, talking is really important. It is the essence that comes out of the duck press.

John: Let’s talk through what is actually inside the book. We have the topic chapters. There’s 21 of them and there’s guest chapters, which are 20. Should we just read through them one by one sort of what the chapters are, so people know what they’re going to be getting?

Craig: Sure, that’s quite a few chapters. We’ll talk about the top. My goodness, 21 topic chapters. I’m almost tempted to just rattle these off to overwhelm people.

John: We’ll alternate.

Craig: Oh, you want to alternate?

John: Yes.

Craig: I love it. The rules of screenwriting.

John: Deciding what to write.

Craig: Protagonists.

John: Relationships.

Craig: Conflict.

John: Dialogue and exposition.

Craig: Point of view.

John: How to write a scene.

Craig: Locations and world-building.

John: Plot and plot holes.

Craig: Mystery, confusion, suspense.

John: Writing action.

Craig: Structure.

John: The beginning.

Craig: The end.

John: How to write a movie.

Craig: That’s a good one. Pitching.

John: Notes on notes.

Craig: What it’s like to be a screenwriter.

John: Patterns of success.

Craig: Appropriately, a final word. John, that covers everything.

John: The goal was to cover the craft and the business. It’s more craft at the start and it gets more business towards the end.

Craig: Great.

John: Just the psychology of what it feels like to be a screenwriter. You’ll recognize some of these titles within titles of episodes, but nothing is basically just one episode, except for how to write a movie is very much your talk that you gave at Austin, which you did as an episode, which is in prose form.

Craig: It’s basically, you can just go boop with that one. I can see how a lot of different episodes have been combined and refined into these things. It is true that it’s impossible, really, to listen to all of the episodes of Scriptnotes at this point.

John: People do it.

Craig: It’s impossible to do it in a way where you would retain everything. This is pretty awesome that you could just go, or here, read this and then start listening to the show for the next 5,000 episodes and see where we go.

John: Published by Crown Books. One of the things that makes me excited about being at a big publisher is they have a whole academic arm, which is just about getting the book into universities.

Craig: Oh.

John: That feels good, because I feel like for a film student, this is a thing that you could use in a class.

Craig: Are they going to do that thing where they charge $5,000 for the book in a university?

John: No, it’s the same price as it is a list.

Craig: What is that?

John: It’s just nuts. It’s a special academic edition or something.

Craig: What do you mean? My God. What a scam.

John: What a scam.

Craig: Going back to the Scott Frank discussion, but we also have these amazing guest chapters where we boil down the best hits of so many great people that we’ve interviewed.

John: One of the fun things about the guest chapters was finding ways so that they are interacting with the chapters around them. If we’re talking about a certain topic, they’re generally related to that or there’s things they’re saying that are-

Craig: It’s like there’s a Segway man.

John: Built into the book.

Craig: Making sure– yes, makes total sense.

John: All right, let’s go through who our guests are.

Craig: All right. We got Christopher Nolan.

John: Michael Schur.

Craig: Lulu Wang.

John: Lorene Scafaria.

Craig: Sam Esmail.

John: Greta Gerwig.

Craig: Justin Simeon.

John: David Koepp.

Craig: David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

John: Damon Lindelof.

Craig: Rian Johnson.

John: Christopher McQuarrie.

Craig: The Daniels.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna.

Craig: Lawrence Kasdan.

John: Eric Roth.

Craig: Seth Rogen.

John: John Lee Hancock.

Craig: Mike Birbiglia.

John: Mike Birbiglia and Ashley Nicole Black.

Craig: What a lineup? Except for Mike Birbiglia, that is an incredible lineup.

John: Yes, just really all-stars and Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Also- [laughs]

John: He’s so angry right now.

Craig: No, but he’s just like, okay, guys. I could see his face like, huh-huh, okay. We love Mike Birbiglia.

John: We love Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Maybe more than anyone. When I say more than anyone, I don’t mean more than anybody else that’s on our show. I mean more than anyone on the planet. I mean more than his wife loves him, his child.

John: The shrine you have in your house to him is just a little bit creepy at times, but also, the way you pours the milk, it works.

Craig: A lot creepy all the time, but you know what? Love him.

John: Love him. There’s two special chapters. There’s a deep dive on Die Hard.

Craig: Oh, great.

John: We have that. It’s both our initial conversation and our subsequent conversation with one of the screenwriters of it and an oral history of Scriptnotes with Julia Turner. Remember that 10th anniversary episode?

Craig: Sure.

John: From behind the scenes.

Craig: Oh, yes. Great Julia Turner.

John: The book is available now for pre-order. If you go to scriptnotesbook.com, it’ll lead you to the right bookstores for it.

Craig: When will it actually be on sale?

John: If you pre-order now, you get it December 2nd.

Craig: Oh, this feels like a good Christmas gift.

John: It does feel like a good Christmas gift. You could order for yourself or tell your parent to order it for you.

Craig: Right, or tell your spouse, your partner.

John: Yes.

Craig: Honestly, if you are partnered up with a dork, they’re going to want this probably.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s very cool. I hope it’s a hit.

John: I would say it too. It doesn’t need to be the out-of-the-gate runaway bestseller, because it’s an evergreen title. There’s always been screenwriting, the fact that it’s not going to go out of date.

Craig: No, nor will it be the hot read over the Christmas break.

John: Would it be great if it were though?

Craig: Yes, sure. I’m not expecting to land on the New York Times bestseller list, but I think at a minimum, now there’s a book that’s worth buying. If your kid is interested in screenwriting and they’re in high school and they’re starting, this is just a simple, easy one. What does it cost, John?

John: The U.S. version I think is $32 or $35.

Craig: That’s reasonable.

John: Yes, and the U.K. version, I’m not sure what the final price is.

Craig: £400.

John: £400. It’s U.K., Australia, New Zealand. They all get one version. It’s largely the same. It’s like the format is slightly different.

Craig: Just colors has a U in it?

John: No. We’re actually not doing any text changes.

Craig: Oh, good.

John: Keeping it American.

Craig: Good.

John: Good. Good, but the cut of the book is a little different. We actually had a phone call, a Zoom about this. Basically, their printing prices just don’t work the same way.

Craig: Interesting. Still Gutenberg-ing it?

John: That’s what it is. That’s how it fits. If you are a listener and you are pre-ordering it today, thank you so much. If you send your receipt for it to Drew at askjohnox.com, we will send you something. We’re not quite sure what that’s going to be, but we’ll send you some of the extra thing for you having pre-ordered it.

Craig: Oh, that’s nice. Cool.

John: Cool.

Craig: Like an object or?

John: I think it’s going to probably be some sort of video of something. Some sort of acknowledgement and a thank you for your pre-order, which is nice.

Craig: What if there’s 10,000 people that pre-order it?

John: Drew’s going to be really busy.

[laughter]

Craig: Oh, Drew, Drew.

John: The other thing you can help us out with, if you are a listener of the show, we are going to be doing some press as we get closer to the time. We are making a list of, what are podcasts we can go on? What are live shows we could do in certain places? There’s limited availability, but there’s things we can do. If you have a podcast or a publication, you think like, oh, John or Craig or both of them should talk to them about this, also, email in to Drew and let Drew know, because we’re trying to get together that schedule for things.

Craig: Fun.

John: Fun. Cool. I will be talking more about this at the Austin Film Festival, but for today, just order your book.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to the Austin Film Festival, fantastic.

John: Scriptnotesbook.com.

Craig: We’re back.

John: All right. Our marquee topic today. How would this be a movie? Craig, can you recap this segment or set up the segment for people who are not familiar with this?

Craig: Sure. In this segment, we take some stories that have been in the news. Sometimes they’re news stories. A lot of times they’re essays. Sometimes they’re actually quite technical. One of them is today. We ask ourselves, okay, if we were running a studio and someone said, oh, we just bought the rights to this thing, how would we make it into a movie? This scenario plays out in studios every day, five days a week, year-round.

John: Absolutely happens in studios, but also happens with producers. Producers are reading, they’re talking to their assistants, their creative executives, there’s this thing, what could this be? Who would we get to write this? What does the actual movie feel like if we’re going to try to do this?

The four things we picked today, three of them are about sort of difficult personal things, and one of them is about a big scientific thing, which is a palate cleanser. Let’s start with A Mother’s Revenge. There’s several articles we could link to for this. The one we’re going to link to is in Slate. It’s as told to Christina Cotterucci, but it’s actually a first-person interview that’s been turned into prose form. It talks about Charlotte Laws, and she has a 24-year-old daughter named Kayla whose email was hacked.

Kayla had a topless picture in her email, which she never sent to anybody, but when she sent it to her computer to save it through her email, that topless picture ended up on one of the most notorious revenge porn sites, isanyoneup.com. Hunter Moore, who ran that website, called himself a professional life-ruiner.

Craig: Great.

John: He put that out there. The mother, Charlotte Laws, wants to get the picture taken down. She calls the FBI, tells her to file a report, so she takes it on herself. She calls everyone, including Hunter’s mother, trying to get this picture taken down. After nine days, it’s finally taken down. They think they’re done, but Charlotte continues to take on the cause of bringing this revenge porn website to justice and take down Hunter Moore.

Finally, the FBI does get involved. Hunter attacks Charlotte online. Anonymous steps in to dox Hunter, and Hunter is ultimately arrested.

Craig: Everybody doxes everybody.

John: This is the account that’s told the slate. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to a Guardian article that has a little bit more on the Hunter side of it all. Craig, what did you take of this situation, this place, and is there a thing about her specific story that’s interesting to you? Tell me what you’re thinking about.

Craig: Yes, this feels very sort of modern Erin Brockovich. A parent or an individual who isn’t necessarily empowered within the justice system, takes it upon themselves to force everybody that is to pay attention to something that’s a real problem. There is also a don’t mess with mom vibe to this, which I love. It is also interesting because it begins when this initial crime occurs. It’s 2012, so it’s a different time.

John: It’s a different internet.

Craig: She actually makes a really interesting point here. There is a ripple effect from what she did. One of the things that we’re always looking for when we’re saying, okay, like how could this be a movie, is how is it relevant? It’s relevant because the work that she did starting with this one picture, which in modern terms almost seems quaint.

John: It does.

Craig: One topless picture? I feel like everyone has everything [chuckles] I don’t.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s like, it’s so much out there.

John: In a world of AI generated fake images.

Craig: Right, but because of that one picture and her, I think, brave pursuit of justice, eventually laws are created. There were no laws anywhere. Now there are laws in all 50 states against revenge porn.

John: You can imagine the end title card of the movie. It’s like, this law is now the law in 50 states.

Craig: Yes, and it’s got a great villain. You would have to figure out a little bit more about the villain, just so it’s not– I mean the thing is, from her point of view here, she’s talking about this, Charlotte Laws is relaying the story. From her point of view, she literally describes him as a monster and portrays him as such, and it sure seems like it from this account. Of course, as writers, we’re like, but who are you, Hunter? Why are you doing this? Who hurt you? To sort of just figure out who the other person on the side of this is, without taking away the villainy, it’s just really just more like making a real character.

It’s funny because sometimes I think in real life, people are mustache twirling villains. It’s just that we don’t like them as much in our stuff.

Great crusade at the heart of it. I’d want to also dig in a little bit more of the daughter because she almost seems like a prop

John: What was interesting is that she’s 24 years old, which seems like if it’s a 16-year-old girl, an 18-year-old girl, then you feel different. A 24-year-old girl, I–

Craig: Things have changed, man.

John: Yes, but I wonder about the agency of Kayla herself and the degree to which her, and that’s actually an interesting point of conflict, the degree to which it’s like, no, it’s done, mom. It’s like, no, it’s not done. It’s like, stop dragging my name into this.

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know how that all went, but it does seem like the relationship there has to be figured out, because it is a part of it and it is a question. Naturally one would say, oh my God, maybe mom, stop, but as long as you could make everybody a bit rounded and no one’s too much of a white knight and no one’s too much of a mustache twirler, there is a pretty interesting story here. Now, it’s small.

John: There’s a Lifetime movie version of this. I think there’s a bigger version of this too. It’s a question of, can it get up to an Erin Brockovich? I’m not sure it can.

Craig: Erin Brockovich was trying to save lives and did. Where this gets interesting is, and she mentions that, there is a woman who’s a victim of revenge porn who commits suicide. Then you start to get real about it. I think the relevance really is now for parents who are struggling to figure out how to deal with this with their own kids, because this is the new playing with matches.

I think people would connect to it, at least parents would, but it feels like you’re going to have to either go all the way over into indie zone or mainstream. I could see a nice, shiny Netflix thing for this. [crosstalk]

John: Netflix makes sense for that too. We’re talking about this in the Erin Brockovich mold where this is based on a real person. We would likely get the life rights to Charlotte Laws. Basically, you’d want to have some ability to portray her and there’s a question of how you can handle Hunter Moore and to what degree, you don’t need his life rights, no. You don’t want his life rights, but there are going to be liable concerns about what you’re saying about him. You have to be able to back up everything you’re having him do with reality.

Craig: Doesn’t seem like it would be a problem, because in real life, he did all of this. He left a public record behind, like a trail of posts and tweets and all the rest and emails, and so forth and he was convicted. As far as those concerns, it’s as close to a layup as you’re going to get.

John: Now, if you were to do the fictional version of this where you didn’t have to use any of the real people’s stuff or you weren’t using any of the real people’s stuff, I think elevating Kayla over Charlotte and having the girl herself take the initiative in this thing feels probably right. It feels like it’s the more direct way to handle this in the sense of coming into ownership of your own story. Because in taking these photos yourself and then having them laid out there, you’ve lost the narrative and sort of reclaiming control over your life feels like an important version, if I’m not bound to reality.

Craig: Sure, you could absolutely argue that the value of the fictional version comes down to, I’m going to punish the person who punished me. Revenge against the revenger. Also curious, his site was a revenge porn. It didn’t seem like it was revenge, he didn’t even know Kayla. I think that also, there is something unique about mom going out there fighting on behalf of.

John: It doesn’t show in this article, but the other article, she’s physically small. She’s like Kristin Chenoweth’s size, and that feels right too.

Craig: Always interesting. There is something just about how powerless you can feel as a parent and how I can see as a mom just how fierce you can be. That is sort of the thing that makes this special, I think.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: But in a fictional version, I think you have to make it about more than just, I’m trying to get a picture down, I’m trying to remove a topless picture. There has to be– in reality, she says years into this process, or it was months or years, it was quite some time, somebody out there committed suicide. I think this is, in a fictional story, that would be something you would realize very early on had already happened, perhaps more than once, which I’m sure is true, so that you understood this isn’t just about taking this picture down. It’s about taking this person down before they hurt anyone else.

John: Going back to the mother at the center of this, is thinking about her as a character, independent of this event happening, where is she starting from and where is she going to? How is this difficult process leading her to a better place or leading her to what they are, essentially? What is it that she is achieving independent of the outcome?

Craig: That’s a great point. You need there to be something wrong before this picture ever ends up on the internet.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Where I would start probably is relationship with daughter. I think if there is a flaw there, because what happens as a parent is you start to feel responsible for everything your child does, and in a story like this, you want to feel like, if only I had been a better mom, and for somebody to say no, but that there is something that is off in that relationship that her pursuit of justice exacerbates, until finally it is confronted and healed along with taking down a criminal.

John: All right, that’s the first one, and I think that feels like there is a movie to be made here.

Craig: Yes.

John: Someone’s going to write in and say like, oh, this actually did become a movie and we didn’t even know. Probably.

Craig: Oh, sure.

John: All right, next up, this is from another Slate thing, it’s in a Dear Prudence advice column. The title is, “Help. My husband’s manic pixie past has become a full-blown threat to my sanity.”

Craig: Here’s what this woman writes in. “My husband and I have been married for 10 years and generally have a happy marriage. He tells me marrying me was the best thing that ever happened to him, but there’s one thing from his past that is threatening to drive me insane, and it recently got a whole lot worse. I’m still deeply jealous of his feelings for his high school friend, Kate. For lack of a better word, she’s his manic pixie dream girl. We’re all on our 30s, but she still acts about 22,” I love the specificity of that, by the way, “and he’s utterly charmed by her. She lives a few states away, so we only see her about once a year, which is the only thing that keeps me sane. Kate is bright and charming and has about a million friends, so doesn’t have much time for my husband anymore. The second she gives him a crumb of attention, he drops everything.

We recently had a party, and she called him in the middle of it,” I love this part, “drunk and bored. He answered and then abandoned our guests to talk to her for 40 minutes. They never dated, but he had a thing for her all through high school and college. Their dynamic seems to be that he will give her money,” money?, oh, boy, “attention, whatever she wants, and she will give him attention when she feels like it.

Last year, we went on vacation together, and she got trashed and pulled me aside to tell me she was uncomfortable with how often he texts her and some of the things he says to her because she likes me so much, and I deserve better. Then the next day, she didn’t even remember having the conversation. What can I do about this?” Then I’m going to add in parentheses, (What can I do about this unbelievable, messy hurricane of a human being?)

John: What I love about this setup is that it has all the characteristics of romantic comedy, but from the Bill Pullman perspective. Basically, our letter writer is the Bill Pullman in a classic Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

Craig: The Baxter.

John: Yes, The Baxter. I think there’s a really interesting setup here. Obviously, you don’t know any of the specific people in here, but that idea of there is a woman from my husband’s past who, on the surface, is super charming, but I recognize how dangerous she is, and that is a threat. To what degree is she overreacting or underreacting? No one is being evil here. The villainy is just people behaving their own natural way.

Craig: Dangerous women have been a staple of cinema since they invented film, and there’s a good reason for that, because dangerous men have been a staple, dangerous staple. We are fascinated by people who are dangerous. Now, dangerous men tend to be violent. Dangerous women tend to be manipulative and cruel, at least that’s how we portray these things in film.
When it comes to situations like this, everyone goes immediately to being close and fatal attraction. It’s the ultimate, but we all have run into people like this.

John: Oh yes.

Craig: We all know somebody like this.

John: It’s also Jolene. It’s the Dolly Parton song, “Please don’t take my man.”

Craig: Sure.

John: The letter writer is questioning her own relationship, her own value to her husband, and the husband is giving her reason to be suspicious. If you take the sex out of it, if you take the, oh, he’s going to leave his wife for this woman, it’s like the annoying best friend who shows up and takes over everything, that’s annoying, but it’s not a threat to the marriage. It’s the, oh, this woman, if she decided to, could flick her fingers and take it over.

Craig: There’s the modern character of the simp, and the whole concept of simping. This guy’s a simp. He’s simping for this lady. Where this lady gets evil to me is when she gets “drunk,” and then says, “By the way–“ She’s going to play both sides of this marriage, because it seems to me like Kate enjoys chaos. You know like that game show they did on Saturday Night Live, What’s My Name?

John: Oh, it’s so good. Yes.

Craig: Then he goes, “Why do you do this?” He goes, “In a word, chaos.” That’s what some people, and they are fascinating people, they are bright and charming and smart. They don’t wake up in the morning deciding to do evil, this is just how they are. Figuring out how to deal with these destabilizing influences in your life is a challenge.

John: Let’s think about, [crosstalk] if it’s a movie scenario, who is the central character? Is it the letter writer, is it the husband? Is it the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, is it Kate? I can see good arguments for each of them. If it’s the husband, then it feels like, then it’s a rom-com, and he has to decide to leave his wife.

Craig: It is slightly rom-com-y. I could see a movie called The Simp. One of the things that’s interesting about situations like this is that the husband clearly has some stuff that needs fixing also, but it is almost certainly in the realm of self-esteem, some sort of damage.

John: If they’re in their mid-30s, it could be that early midlife crisis. He’s yearning for his youth where this girl was in his life more. There’s that aspect of it.

Craig: It’s possible.

John: He wants to feel handsome and attractive.

Craig: There’s something that Kate does for him that he needs to figure out, because it’s not anything real. People like Kate are drugs. They’re fentanyl. They’re not actually lack of pain. A story about a simp figuring out why he’s simping and losing the people that– That concept and that phenomenon, that’s a great title for a movie, by the way. Somebody should just make The Simp. Right? That’s a pretty good title. [laughs]
I could see people going to see that one. Who do we want in this? It’s got to be somebody younger.

John: It’s not Paul Rudd. It’s somebody younger.

Craig: Way younger, yes. Like?

John: It’s not Jesse Eisenberg.

Craig: No. He’s too old too now. We’re too old to know who it should be.

John: Yes, but it’s that guy.

Craig: It’s that guy.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s that concept.

John: It could be his story. What kind of movie is it, though? Is it a comedy or is it a drama? What does it feel like? If it’s a drama, there’s a Chekhov’s gun there, but it’s not going off yet.

Craig: It’s a comedy, and of course–

John: It’s an act of comedy that we haven’t made.

Craig: Yes, exactly. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable comedy. It’s a cringe comedy. Obviously, the poor woman who’s writing in here is listening to us, perhaps. I doubt it, but she might be going, she didn’t write it to us, she wrote it to, you know, saying like, “No, this is not a comedy, this is my life. I’m crying all the time.” We’re sorry. We’re just trying to make a movie.

I do think that the phenomenon of that will-o’-wisp leading the simp off into– It’s The Sirens, right?

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: It’s a classic. Actually, the whole male simp thing is underexplored, I think, because those are the people we cheer for. Just could you love yourself enough, so that you wouldn’t follow this ding dong? That’s where we’re going.

John: Just to raise the issue, I think it probably is a movie rather than a series because it needs to get resolved, and if it’s not resolved, it’s going to drive you crazy. I could imagine this being an episode of an ongoing series where this central guy and this woman comes back, and that becomes the source of tension within an episode, and you have to close that character off and get rid of her.

Craig: Yes, in the old days of sitcoms, there could absolutely be a character that shows up once a season and everyone’s like, “Uh-oh, here we go again.” She blows into town, makes this one-side character, in the B-story insane and he promises he won’t do it again and then next time he does. I could see that.

John: All right. Third article here. An all-fan remarked about gold bars that secretly recorded upended his life. This is Brent Efron’s boring Tinder date who wanted to hear all about his work at the Environmental Protection Agency, so Mr. Efron talked. If only he’d seen the hidden camera. This is an article by Lisa Friedman writing for the New York Times.

The summary is that this guy is 20s, Brent Efron, goes on a Tinder date with this guy named Brady, who seemed to only want to talk about his job at the EPA. At the time, Trump was on the campaign trail promising to target climate change funding, so EPA was fast-tracking grants. Brent comes up with an analogy that the EPA was a cruise ship that hit an iceberg; they need to launch its lifeboats right away. Then he says, “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

It turns out that Brady was an operative for Project Veritas and was secretly recording the conversation and posted the video online. The political right seizes upon the phrase “gold bars” and uses it to cancel EPA grants by the current administration. Brent lost his job, and as the article is being written, he’s trying to find his footing again.

Craig: I think he quit his job, because the odds of him continuing at the EPA after January 20th were pretty slim. We truly live in the stupidest timeline. This is dumb. Project Veritas, it’s funny, the opposite of Project Veritas is just everything.

[laughter]

Those people, the Trump people, don’t care. They’re like, “Yes, that’s right. I said it. Ha ha ha. LOL.” Then Project Veritas because people on the left, I guess, the concept is that they are more virtuous before they get trapped.

John: The entrapment thing is what’s so pernicious and makes me feel so gross about this.

Craig: Yes, it does.

John: Brent did nothing wrong. It’s that feeling that you cannot trust anybody in any situation. It echoes to me with the first story, in terms of just being fundamentally wrong, the violation that happens, the violation of trust that happens. Even though it is just a blind date, being secretly recorded is so invasive.

Craig: Yes, and of note, this took place in Washington, D.C., which does not have the consent law. You can do a one-party recording, which is creepy. I could see a version here that is also a romantic comedy.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: The romantic comedy here is a guy goes on a date. He’s basically been baited into this by this other guy who’s working for Project Veritas. The problem for the Project Veritas guy is he’s starting to fall in love with him. You have to have it over a couple of dates, but he’s starting to fall in love with him, but he’s already got this footage that is the Project Veritas people have and are going to release.

This gold bar thing, it’s actually the most amazing analogy, in that it’s that blue dress, gold dress thing. If you look at it one way or the other, and obviously we know what he meant. What happens if Brady actually falls in love with Brent? What do you do now, Brady?

John: Is Brady even gay? Was the whole thing I set up from the very start, we don’t even know.

Craig: Oh, in this story? No. In reality? No way, because they also go after Brent for being gay. That’s all lumped into the same. I don’t think Project Veritas employs a lot of people on the LGBTQ spectrum.

John: Open the gay folks.

Craig: Oh, yes. Good point. They don’t employ a lot of open gay folks openly.

John: Openly, it’s a lot of work there.

Craig: Openly.

John: This is reminding me a little bit of Michael Clayton as well, where it’s just like, okay, this is a situation that happened. A question of timeline and what is the span of time of the movie? This is probably the inciting incident, but this could actually be deeper into a thing, and is this once part of a larger crisis? This could be a beat in a larger story rather than the main thing.

Craig: Yes, and one thing about this, and it comes up in the story about revenge porn as well, is it’s hard to dramatize viral moments.

John: It is.

Craig: Because we all experience them privately in our home, looking at our phone for five seconds, laughing about it through text and moving on. These viral moments are so ephemeral, and portraying them can be really sweaty. Anytime a movie’s like, and then it goes viral, just because you said so? No one knows why things go viral.

John: It ends up being a lot of cuts to cuts to. I’m thinking of the Ben Platt musical, Dear Evan Hansen, which has a viral moment that happens, but you get a song underneath that helps show what they build and they grow, and it’s organic, too.

Craig: It works on stage much better than it works on film.

John: It does.

Craig: It’s just the nature of that, because you can use your imagination, theater of the mind from stage, and then in a movie, you’re supposed to see stuff, and suddenly it’s, what else can you do, but cut to a lot of people looking at their phones and extras, like pointing at their phones and saying, “Look, I didn’t even know about this. It couldn’t have been that viral.”

John: I think it’s one of the things that was devastating to this guy and a small space, but also just think about what’s happened in the last six months. You can’t track anything.

Craig: No, but I do feel, on a personal note, very bad for Brent. He seems like such a sweet guy.

John: He seems like a sweet guy, and also, you can’t Google his name without that’s going to come up first.

Craig: In a way, I think he’ll be okay.

John: I think he’ll be fine, too.

Craig: You know what, Brent? I think you’re going to land on your feet, because you didn’t do anything wrong, as he says. You know what? That’s how I know he’s a good guy, because he repeats this theme a few times, like, “I didn’t do anything wrong,” which tells me that he’s been thinking, did I do something wrong? It’s that, I think good people tend to overestimate their own culpability in things, and bad people underestimate it.

John: My takeaway from this is, I think what happens to Brent is potentially a good first 10 pages of something that’s actually not the story at all.

Craig: What it hacks.

John: Yes, it’s a setup, but it’s not the engine of the story.

Craig: It’s not the meat.

John: Finally, let’s talk about the unseen fury of solar storms.

Craig: Boom.

John: This is Henry Wismayer writing for Noema.

Craig: Noema.

John: Noema.

Craig: Yes, that magazine we all read all the time?

John: 100%.

Craig: Great website.

John: Great website, really well done. This is about scientists at the Met’s Space Weather Observation Center who watch sunspots, solar flares, and solar storms, and they’re speculating on what threats space weather could have on our world. Space weather.

Craig: Space weather, somewhere, Roland Emmerich just sat up and went, “Huh?”

John: Yes. I was definitely like, Geostorm. It feels like that.

Craig: That’s very Geostorm, which was Dean Devlin, by the way, not Roland Emmerich.

John: Oh, I’m sorry, but they–

Craig: Roland Emmerich’s producing partner decided, I can also direct, and then Geostorm occurred. Boom. Storm is geo.

John: Yes, in 1861, there was what was called the Carrington Event, which was sightings of the northern lights were reported as far south as El Salvador, just 13 degrees north of the equator. Then, the southern lights, which I wasn’t even sure was a thing, came up all the way to San Diego. What happens is there’s a little flash and then just giant bright lights happening and things that would normally be just in the very poles you’re seeing everywhere.

Craig: It knocked out a lot of telegraph lines, but then weirdly, there were some Morse code telegraphy lines that were powered mysteriously by nothing.

John: Yes.

Craig: The insane amount of electrons and radiation and crap that the sun can barf on us in one of these massive– it’s like a volcano on the sun going off, basically. Back then, knocking out some telegraph lines, must have been very annoying for a day or two. Unfortunately, now, unplugging the world.

John: Essentially, our satellites have very little defense against this kind of stuff. It’s very hard to defend against that stuff in space. On the ground, we can do some stuff just to protect towers and certain things, but it’s expensive. As we’ve learned recently, people, if they have the choice not to spend money to do a thing, they won’t do a thing.

Craig: Even if they do, this is the weak link syndrome. It’s just one section that isn’t working quite right and the whole thing collapses. We would be flattened by one of these things. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. You can turn everything back on, but it’s going to take a bit.

John: It’s going to take a while because stuff burns out.

Craig: Yes, and people will have to walk outside and talk to their neighbors.

John: Obviously, the supernatural or in this case, natural, but a big giant event happens, the world and everything that’s upended is a staple in our big cinematic universes and in our series where things are happening where, in the pilot episode, something big changes and fundamentally society is altered by it. What’s interesting about this is that it’s not a zombie attack. It’s not a plague, and no one is hurt directly by it. Instead, it’s just all of our stuff is messed up for a while and the systems are broken, kind of like systems were broken during the pandemic, which is just we couldn’t do the normal things. Our supply chains get messed up.

Craig: But we could talk to each other.

John: We could talk to each other, which was crucial.

Craig: I’m still marveling at the fact that video conferencing sort of got figured out right when we needed I, which is amazing. There are plenty of movies where things happen and people can’t rely on the normal systems anymore. Typically, those movies portray people as horrible. This article suggests that people would be horrible and that very quickly things would descend into riots and violence.

John: Because we’re used to a very centralized media system where we just return our TV and we get the answers to things.
Craig: The centralized media system is the thing that seems to be causing problems more than ever before. Taking social media out of the equation, the question is, would it actually go well? I would argue that in a lot of places it would go well. That deprived of the ability to feed off of conspiracy theories and nonsense, no, people will not be running outside to shoot each other and take each other’s stuff. They will try and help each other.

That’s not to say that things won’t go wrong in certain places. They would. There would almost certainly be looting. That’s typical, but looting is not shooting people in the head. I guess the question is, how would this be a movie? My instinct would be very small character study of a tiny neighborhood where everybody has to suddenly meet each other for the first time, which would be interesting.

John: There was a movie that I met on over at Paramount. This is 15 years ago. It’s not an active development. It was centered around essentially peak oil, but essentially, if I’m remembering this correctly, and I don’t know if this is part of my picture or part of the underlying IP, was that basically a microbe had gotten out that had basically just ate oil and just destroyed all the oil. Basically, all the gas, all the oil just went away and society falling down around that.

Craig: Saving the planet.

John: Saving the planet, sure. Dead two sides of one coin. It’s just so interesting because 15 years ago, that was really scary. If that happened now, it’s like, yes, it would be bad, but we’re so much better. We just have the technology to deal with this, like how we had Zoom when the pandemic came.

Craig: Yes, there’s a, I wouldn’t call it anywhere like first tier Stephen King novel of his many, many novels, but I did enjoy reading The Dome. I don’t know if you-

John: Oh, Under the Dome, yes.

Craig: Was it called Under the Dome?

John: The CBS edition of it was called Under the Dome. There was a series.

Craig: Oh, they made a series of it? This is Dome-like.

John: A town that gets cut off from everybody else.

Craig: Exactly. That’s what an EMP would do to a small town. Now, in a city like ours, everybody would be talking to everybody, and we would figure stuff out. It would very quickly become who’s on your block, because that’s who you can quickly talk to. If the phones aren’t working and the computers aren’t working, you’re talking to the people you can actually see. That means people near you.

I think a lot of people would probably, like here where we live in our neighborhood, I could imagine in a situation like this, that we all decide, hey, we’re going to all stay in one person’s house for two days and then we’re going to all go to the other person’s house for two days. We just don’t want to be alone. We can be together and play games or whatever, and hope to God the food doesn’t run out. John, you could bring all of your guns.

John: Not having grown up in the South, I was not aware of hurricane parties, but friends were talking about hurricane parties.

Craig: I could see that.

John: Essentially, you know there’s a storm coming, you kind of know we’re going to lose power, but it’s not going to be so bad.

Craig: How would this be a movie? Avoiding the obvious, oh my God, and then someone like, “Well, you’ve got to get to so-and-so to turn the blah, blah.” I don’t think it’s a movie.

John: I think your approach to, this is the excuse for a hangout movie that otherwise wouldn’t happen, a snow day kind of thing, it’s a potential way in. I can see the pilot getting ordered for this as a series and what happens and the collapse of it all. I just don’t think it’s a successful ongoing thing.

Craig: No.

John: I guess wrong about things. There’s always this Netflix series that I can’t believe that anybody watches that, and it’s in its fifth season.

Craig: Who knows if anybody’s watching it, though?

John: They know somebody’s watching it.

Craig: I guess somebody must be watching it. We say this so many times. At this point now, I’ve given up even being ashamed. People are like, “Have you seen so-and-so?” I’m like, “I haven’t even heard of that.” They’re like, “What?” I haven’t heard of it.

John: I was talking to a 21-year-old woman in front of my daughters, and she’s like, “Oh, my dad loves Pretty Little Liars,” which is the most YA thing-

Craig: That’s so crazy.

John: -you obsess with.

Craig: At least I know about it. I know about that. That counts.

John: I know because it’s a good title, and that’s why I know about it.

Craig: It’s like every now and then, I’ll see something of so-and-so renewed for its 19th season. I’m like, “What? What is that?” Happens.

John: Happens. Let’s do a recap of our four movies here. I think we’re saying a Solar Storm’s, unless we want to make Geostorm 2, it’s probably not a big movie. It’s an interesting premise, at least. It’s a kickoff.

Craig: Yes, it could be used as a plot point.

John: Another thing I’ll say is, if you wanted to do a historical thing where we don’t know scientifically what’s actually happening, the fact that we suddenly have Northern Lights everywhere in a older scene would be spooky.

Craig: It would be a cool way if you’re doing– instead of the frogs raining down in Magnolia, the sky explodes.

John: The sky explodes. The Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, so Brian Efron, I think we think that is a setup to a different movie, or it’s a smaller beat in a bigger Michael Clayton-y story.

Craig: Agreed.

John: My husband’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You think there’s a simp movie?

Craig: I think there’s a simp movie. I think there’s a simp romantic comedy. That whole concept of simping, I think, is sad and true, but also funny.

John: Go back 20 years, and you put Seth Rogen as that guy.

Craig: Michael Cera.

John: Yes, totally.

Craig: I’m sure Michael Cera’s like, “Thank you, guys. Thanks. Thank you for putting me right there on the top of your simp list, you jerks.”

John: Finally, Mother’s Revenge, I think we both agree, is the most movie movie in the sense of an Erin Brockovich-y story about this specific thing and what she was able to accomplish against good odds and the fact that there’s a compelling villain figure in it.

Craig: Yes, it’s going to be a Netflix-y kind of thing. It’s going to be a streaming movie. It’s not going into theaters. I can’t imagine.

John: I think you’re right. Cool. Let us go to a listener question.

Craig: All right.

John: This is Brendan, who’s asking, “Way back in Episode 30,” good Lord, “John and Craig discuss emerging technologies like Avid’s ScriptSync and then speculate about when computers can auto-assemble a film and a near future dominated by “screenwriters and teams of robots.” Craig jokingly advocates for scanning actors and making movies “like a factory.” You were joking you were saying?

Craig: I was joking.

John: “Although Craig is obviously riffing here and isn’t serious, it occurred to me how that is now the future we live in. How has your optimism regarding perspective filmmaking technology changed over the course of your careers?”

Craig: So far, so good. Meaning, let’s talk about not perspective. Let’s talk about the things that didn’t exist when we were in Episode 30 that now do exist. So many of them are so great. We’ve talked about lots of them on the show. There have been tremendous advances in all sorts of things, the fact that we don’t need to use film anymore and things still look beautiful.

John: We still have the choice to use film, but–

Craig: Some people can choose to use it. There’s great arguments as to why it’s fully unnecessary, but–

John: You don’t need to email us.

Craig: Yes, don’t email us, Christopher Nolan. We get it. We know. All those wonderful things that we can now do in editorial, things that streamline stuff. There are also things that are frustratingly still stuck in 1990s. A lot of screenwriting software. The stupid schedule we get that the ADs use is still horrible. There are a lot of funky things that we’re still dealing with.

John: I think we recognize that. We still recognize that it’s because institutionalized systems are hard to change because everyone is used to a thing. Because of the weird freelance way we work, it helps to have standards, but those standards are holding us back.

Craig: It’s not exactly a massive marketplace for people to want to innovate in because it’s for 1,000 people and not 10 million. Perspective filmmaking technology is horrifying. Here’s the thing. I choose to not be horrified. I don’t like it. I see what’s going on out there. The question is, really, is that stuff a strange dead end unto itself? Is it actually going to do these wonderful things that people say? I think it’s not. I’m just going to– if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Surely I will be assassinated by AI for this, but it feels to me like it is an increasingly elaborate dead end of stuff. It’s like every time I see, it’s like, “Look what it can do now.” I’m just like, “Yes, but I don’t like that.”

I’m not optimistic at all. I don’t think things are going well I think in part because all the attention and all the money is fixated now on AI and not on things that might actually make our lives easier as human beings.

John: Yes, I would say I’m not as optimistic as I was before. I also want to put things in context of where I think I was at in Episode 30. I went to see 28 Years Later, which I liked a lot. It took me back to 28 Days Later, which was shot on DV. It was like it looked so messy, but it was like that was the aesthetic it was going for. They had that choice to do it. It didn’t mean that all movies suddenly got shot on DV. It was a unique one-time thing. This time they were shooting on iPhones. It was a deliberate choice to do those things.

I think to where I still have optimism is that I think we as filmmakers and as companies that make films still have a choice about what it is that we want to do, and what technologies we’re going to use, and what technologies we’re not going to use. We can recognize what we’re giving up by swapping in technologies that are “good enough.”

I had a conversation this past week about a potentially very expensive tentpole movie. The producer’s like, “If we wait a year, I think some of those VFXs are going to be less expensive to do. I had to say, that’s probably true. That’s probably some of the things that would have cost $10 million, might cost $7 million or $5 million with time. That I can see. I’m torn based on what I feel because I don’t want to spend $200 million on visual effects. I just don’t think that’s a great use of money and time. We can make more movies. I’m recognizing that money spent on visual effects is largely being spent to pay people to do visual effects.

Craig: I think that depending on the visual effects you’re doing, it can really go directly to people when you’re dealing with smaller visual effects houses as opposed to some of the large ones, which overhead and all the rest of it, those are big businesses. Yes, it’s true. There are things that are happening in the visual effects space that will be invisible to us. We won’t know why some things are happening faster and better. The answer will almost certainly be AI because those things are probably quite rote.

John: We didn’t talk about it on the podcast, but maybe it was two years ago now, science fiction film, The Creator, visually gorgeous, but also cost so much less than anything it costs because the director had a sense of how to do things on a budget in ways that were smart. No one’s knocking spending less money on a movie, but it becomes a question of AT what point are we making a movie or not making a movie based on a budget, which we know is the deciding factor so much of the time.

Craig: I guess the long and short of it is, here we are at– what episode are we on?

John: This is Episode 697.

Craig: 697. We’re in Episode 697. 667 episodes later, we definitely scan actors. That’s something we do, but we do not make movies or [unintelligible 00:48:07] the show like a factory.

John: [inaudible 00:48:08] yes.

Craig: In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is as painstaking and laborious as it has ever been. Maybe even more so because the audience has come to expect a certain scale for so many things. If you’re aiming for that quality segment, oh man, it’s expensive. It is exhausting. We’re not quite– yes, I’m not very optimistic that it’s going to get easier.

John: One of the things that has changed if you talk about scanning actors is, yes, we started scanning actors, and the actors unions pushed back against it. There are now more rules about what you can scan, when you can scan, and how you can use it, which feels appropriate.

Craig: The way we have scanned actors was already in line with what SAG wanted and got, which is we scan an actor for this show. We don’t use it for anything else. We really just use it if we need like, “Okay, in this shot, we’re going to change your face because you’re on fire.” Then we have it, but we don’t scan actors so that we can replace actors. I don’t know anybody that is.

John: I think the times we have heard those issues being raised where an actor will argue like, “I was not in that episode, but my face, it has me saying something.”

Craig: That would be bad.

John: It would be bad. I think we need to raise a stink when that happens.

Craig: I do acknowledge that Hollywood is full of jerks. Then there’s para-Hollywood, which is the worst place of off-Hollywood Hollywood where there are no scruples. There are absolutely people right now who are the same schlockmeisters that always existed, who used to say, “You don’t have to worry about safety. Just throw them in the car and light it on fire.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Right? Those guys are like, “We don’t need to get it. Just get me an AI thing that sounds like them, and it’s good enough.” We’re going to have to be dealing with cockroaches forever. We always have, we always will.

John: To the degree I’m optimistic, I feel like we will acknowledge and wrestle with these situations as they come up and we’ll set some standards or practices around them. Sometimes it’ll be comfortable, sometimes it’s really, really uncomfortable, but we can’t pretend they’re just not going to happen.

Craig: No. Ultimately, there will become some sort of understanding of how to ethically employ AI within the human artistic pursuit. Right now, no one knows what the hell that would be. No one. Everyone is either guessing, or is terrified, or is way too excited.

John: That’s why I think we need to have smart people who are actually working in those fields right now having the conversations about what it is because otherwise, it’s going to be made by businessmen.

Craig: It’s ultimately businessmen that will– if we have a prayer, it’s going to be because the businessmen align themselves with us because AI is attempting to eat everyone’s lunch. I don’t know why Hollywood continues to miss this simple fact. The technology industry despises ownership of information. They hate it. They hate ownership of information. They hate ownership of content. It disgusts them. What they love is being the people you pay to go get everything. They don’t want you as a– you write a song, they don’t want you to own that song. They want somebody to pay them to play that song for them. That’s what technology wants, and they will forever undermine the basis of what makes Hollywood tick, which is ownership of artistic expression.

John: All right. Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a piece of technology that is in front of Craig right now. It is called TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL?

John: It is this very minimalist e-ink display. You buy it off of usetrmnl.com, and you can set up for what things you want it to display. It’s just a simple website, and you can have it display the weather. I have right now displaying how many days until the Scriptnotes book comes out.

Craig: 136.

John: As we’re recording this. You can set up your little dashboards. It’s fun for nerdy gadgeteers like me. It’s just like a very good version of something that I just wanted and the fact that someone made it was great.

Craig: It can display anything?

John: Anything.

Craig: It looks like it’s a nice little side thing for D&D.

John: Totally. It switches between screens, but it updates itself once every 15 minutes. The reason why it does it so slowly is because it goes for six months on a charge.

Craig: I’m thinking, you know how for some players, their action economy, how they’re supposed to do and the things that they can do, they forget. Especially as you level up, it gets more and more– to have a flowchart-

John: Oh, totally.

Craig: -would be very cool to have. I just want everything to be about D&D, but it’s like this thing’s adorable. I love that it’s called TRMNL with no vowels. It’s TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL.

John: If you are curious about a little device, so it has a stand, but you can also hang it on a wall.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: Let’s take a look. I think that was–

Craig: TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: It looks like the kind of device that wants to make you happy like in the Toy Story world. It’s really sweet.

John: The version you’re seeing, it’s $139. They come in different colors. There’s a limited edition, which is $154. I got the developer one, which is a little bit more expensive, so I can program my own dashboards.

Craig: Developers. Developers.

John: Developers. Developers. I like it. It’s not going to change my world, but I do like it.

Craig: I love that. We should throw on a link to Steve Ballmer doing the developers, developers, developers speech just because–

John: It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s the greatest thing of all time.

John: It’s an early nerdy meme. I just love it.

Craig: It’s just insane. It’s wonderful. My one cool thing this week, you want to talk about nerdiness?

John: Please.

Craig: John, I’ve gone back in time approximately almost 20 years back in time with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

John: I remember playing Elder Scrolls way back in the day. Talk me through which one this is so that I don’t get confused.

Craig: Elder Scrolls IV is the one before Skyrim.

John: Okay.

Craig: This is back when they made these games not once every 30 years. Skyrim came out in 2011.

John: I think that was maybe, actually, the first Elder Scrolls I played.

Craig: Okay, yes. That was the first a lot of people played. That’s 14 years ago. We still haven’t seen six. They’ve said maybe there will be one and no one knows what’s going on with it. I think maybe I want to say four years prior to that Elder Scrolls IV came out. If you didn’t play it, it was excellent.

It was the first Elder Scrolls I played. I didn’t play Morrowind. I hadn’t played the prior ones. I didn’t know anything about that world. I think it was the first Bethesda game I played. It’s outstanding.

They’ve done that remaster thing, which they’re remastering stuff from 2013 now. I’m like, go back to the 2000 and aughts. What I love about the way they did it is they didn’t remaster it so it doesn’t look like– it’s still those janky faces. It’s like that weird– but it just still looks really good. I’m playing it on the Steam Deck, and I’m having a blast. Because it’s been– what year did Oblivion come out? 2006. Just shy of 20 years. I don’t remember anything from 20 years ago. This is awesome, but–

John: The fact that you can play it on a handheld device now too is great.

Craig: It’s so cool.My daughter was just four, and she would sit on the couch and watch me play Oblivion. We have these great memories of her getting so excited when there would be trouble. I’d say, “Oh, the music’s changing. There’s going to be trouble.” Then she was like, “Find trouble, find trouble.” It was just a great game. John, do you play the Bethesda games?

John: I played Skyrim and Fallout a lot, yes. Most of them have a very similar mechanic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’ve complained about that that they’re a little too similar.

Craig: Starfield is where you start to feel, A, it’s really getting old. No people when you talk to them should not look directly into the lens of the camera. That’s insane. B, compared to Oblivion, which is essentially 20 years old, Starfield is empty. It is devoid. Oblivion is packed with so many people, and so many stories, and so many places to go and things to see. When you go into a town, there’s, I don’t know, 18 houses in one district that you can knock on a door and talk to people. Starfield is like five people live in this city. I don’t know what’s going on, but I would urge Bethesda, look back, look back to your roots. I’m having an absolute blast.

John: That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. On top of your games. Birdigo, which is the game that I made with Corey Martin, which is a cross between Wordle and Balatro, is going to be out this week. If you are listening to this episode as it comes out, take a look for that on Steam as well. You can put that on your Steam deck.

Craig: You guys are pumping stuff out left and right.

John: Yes, more stuff coming.

Craig: Factory.

John: Nothing could top the Scriptnotes book, which is available for pre-order.

Craig: Nothing today? Today.

John: Today.

Craig: It’s happening right now. People, it’s happening.

John: Adam– I’m going through the– Boilerplate, people can just pull up on their phone right now scriptnotesbook.com and pre-order the book.

Craig: Just-

John: You can pre-order it from-

Craig: -pre-order?

John: -your local bookstore through bookshop.org or through one of the big services, whatever you want to do.

Craig: We’re not going to judge you.

John: Do what you want to do.

Craig: Do what you want to do.

John: Do you. If you live in the Los Angeles region, we are planning to do live shows for the book on the week it comes out. Just still pre-order it. If there’s an extra book you get there, you can give away one of your copies of your book.

Craig: Listen, if you get eight or nine of these, then just think of everywhere you go, just hand a book out to someone.

John: Do you have more than one bathroom?

Craig: Yes. It’s a great way to tip people.

John: Absolutely. Not to replace– give them money– Then, also–

Craig: -then also be [unintelligible 00:58:08] here.

John: Yes, absolutely. Listen, I know you are a waiter. I know you are a valet, but you’re also probably a screenwriter. Here’s a book for you.

Craig: Great job.

John: Great job.

Craig: It’s a great way to get punched in the face.

[laughter]

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where we can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts, and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes with all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes all the way back to Episode 6. What did I reference?

Craig: 30.

John: 30, yes. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on kindness, scriptnotesbook.com. Order your book and send Drew at ask@johnaugust.com the receipt from that, and we’re going to send you something. I don’t know what that’s going to be yet, but it’s going to be fun.

Craig: Amazing.

John: Craig, thanks for a good show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, I want to talk about kindness.

Craig: Shut up, John.

John: It could have been from, Into the Woods. I think I may have heard that [unintelligible 00:59:34] recently like, “You’re so nice. You’re not good. You’re not bad. You’re just nice.”

Craig: “You’re not bad. You’re just nice.” It’s one of my favorite lyrics.

John: It’s so good. He’s a very nice prince, and he’s nice.

Craig: It’s the last midnight.

John: Yes, so good. Kindness is not niceness, and it’s also not politeness. I just wanted to separate that out both in terms of the real world, but also how we’re thinking about our characters. I think so often we have characters who we think about as being good, but what is it that they’re doing good? Do they have a good nature? Are they friendly? Are they helpful? Is their niceness transactional? I think kindness has a non-transactional quality to it that I think is a crucial distinction.

Craig: Yes, nice almost implies not nice. It’s absence of trouble. “Oh, you’re nice.” Kind does imply deeds.

John: It implies action for sure. It’s not just a good spirit. It’s not pity, because pity can make you feel condescending. Kindness is not pity. It can be related to love, but you can be kind to somebody you don’t love. You can be kind to somebody you despise.

Craig: Nice is seeing somebody crying and saying, “Hey, are you all right?” and they’re like, “Yes, no, I’m fine. I’m fine.” You’re like, “Okay, just checking on you.” Kind is sitting down with them and going, “How can I help? Is there a way for me to help?”

John: Exactly. Compassion would also be recognizing someone else’s pain, but not doing anything about it.

Craig: Kindness implies an attempt to connection, going out of your way. Nice people can ignore trouble. That doesn’t make them not nice. It just means that they’re not bad.

John: There is a CS Lewis quote talking about how your goal is not just that someone is happy, but they’re better on a deeper level. There’s comforting, but that comforting isn’t necessarily kindness. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. There is an aspect of that that is actually a little bit true that you have to speak to the actual truth of things and not just paper stuff over.

Craig: Then think of the great Tennessee Williams line, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” meaning the things they give me, the way they take care of me. It’s an interesting thing to think about is, characters who are kind oftentimes feel they don’t have main character energy-

John: Yes, I think you’re right.

Craig: -because they’re mentors, they’re the neighbor, they’re grandma, priest, buddy.

John: To some degree is that because I think of kind people as having completed an arc or being a little self-actualized. I think there’s something about that feels a little complete about a kind character and they have to learn to do that. There’s situations where I’m thinking of Cinderella who is kind, but she’s also— she starts the story just really weak and disempowered.

Craig: Cinderella is not a good character. Cinderella’s character is victim. That’s it. She’s a perfect person who is kind to the animals. She is a victim of mean people. Then a fairy godmother just goes, “Boop, boop. Have a great night.” She’s like, “Okay.” Then the prince is like, “Love you.” Then she wins.

John: There’s no great arc. There’s no–

Craig: No, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a fairy tale designed to punish the wicked as many of them are. There are morality plays as and apparently stepmothers were a huge problem in like 1500s Germany.

John: I’m not trying to steel-man stepmothers [unintelligible 01:03:24] some other issue, but I think they were actually much more common back in the day of when women died in childbirth all the time.

Craig: Sure, but why were they so mean?

John: On some genetic level, isn’t it the right choice to push aside your husband’s previous children so that he will spend his time and energy on your children? That’s a Hansel and Gretel.

Craig: It must’ve happened quite frequently, or it just happened to the Brothers Grimm.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: They just had a horrible stepmom and they were like, “Well, what should the villain be this time? Can we do stepmom again?”

John: Yes. I think we can do a little twist on it.

Craig: I don’t think we’re done with that.

John: Take her to a witch at a candy house.

Craig: Yes, let’s do that. That’ll be great. What about in this situation? Also stepmom. The problem with the archetype characters like Cinderella is they’re pointlessly kind to the extent that we don’t really care. We’re looking for main characters who are kind, who are almost punished for it in a way. Not that they started victims. They help someone. I’ve seen this in comedies. You help somebody and then you can’t get rid of them. Now what do you do? It’s that kind of thing.

John: Yes, it is. It is that kind of thing. I wonder how kind end up being both-

Craig: Sort.

John: Sort-

Craig: Type and-

John: -and characteristic. The etymology of that, that’s probably fascinating, but–

Craig: Yes, let’s look it up.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go. There’s only one way to find out. Before the 12th century, it just all comes from middle English kinda from old English kind, akin to old English kin. Oh, okay.

John: Oh, so it’s coming from kin. Okay, great.

Craig: It’s like how you would treat kin in this kind way. You would treat them like family and also it’s family. It’s of a sort. That actually makes a ton of sense.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I like the idea of kindness as treating someone not family-

John: As family.

Craig: -as family, as kin.

John: Absolutely. It’s recognizing the shared experience of this and being able to put yourself— It’s beyond empathy, because empathy, again, is just compassion, seeing a thing but actually not doing a thing.

Craig: This is more like I’m forging a connection with you that I don’t need to, but I will.

John: Altruism, I think, is just more of a platonic idea. It’s a general approach to things, but it’s not specific to it.

Craig: This is why etymology is great.

John: I think it is actually a good example. It’s like, “Oh yes, that’s right.”

Craig: This is why you look things up.

John: Yes, look things up. That’s a lesson we’ve learned after–

Craig: Way to go, [unintelligible 01:05:57]?

John: After 679 episodes. We could just wonder about it, or we could just look them up.

Craig: We’re at 697. What happens at 700?

John: We haven’t–

Craig: Does the ball drop? What happens?

John: We haven’t discussed what should happen. I don’t know. It’s three weeks away.

Craig: Oh my God, this is a lot of pressure.

John: It’s a lot of pressure.

Craig: Although it’s a weird. 750 is a number, right?

John: 750 is a bigger number than 700.

Craig: 750 is insane.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s a real number.

John: We’ve got a year to worry about that.

Craig: That’s DCCL. That’s exciting.

John: I’m impressed that you were able to pull that off in your head, Roman numerals.

Craig: Standard puzzling thing. Oh, that’s right. You’ve got to know Roman numerals. Got to know them.

John: All right.

Craig: John, I’d like to thank you for being kind.

John: Craig, I’d like to thank you for being kind as well.

Link:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes book!
• Send your pre-order receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com
• A Mother’s Revenge as told to Christina Cauterucci for SLATE
• Charlotte Laws’ fight with Hunter Moore, the internet’s revenge porn king by Carole Cadwalladr for The Guardian
• Help! My Husband’s Manic Pixie Past Has Become a Full-Blown Threat to My Sanity, Dear Prudence column for SLATE
• SNL’s What’s That Name
• An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life by Lisa Friedman for NYTimes
• The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms by Henry Wismayer for Noema
• TRMNL
• Steve Ballmer: Developers
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: [singing] My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 693 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you introduce an idea to the audience? We’ll discuss setups that don’t feel like setups and, most importantly, make your audience feel smart. First, we have a lot of follow-up from listeners, some actual news, and some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, I want to discuss The New York Times feature on the top 100 movies of the century so far.

Craig: Oh good, a list. Yay.

John: A list, but also there’s the meta around the list. I think it’s, actually, probably more interesting than the list itself.

Craig: Okay, I’m up for that.

John: You get to see different filmmakers and actors give their top 10 list, which is a performative, revealing kind of thing.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I want to discuss that. We’ll keep that as a special feature for our bonus, people who get to hear our unfiltered takes on these lists.

Craig: Where did Scary Movie 3 land?

John: It tops out on so many lists. It’s crazy.

Craig: It should be in there. Should be top seven.

John: Yes. Spoiler, I have no movies in the official big 100 list.

Craig: Well, I’m going to go ahead and presume I don’t either. [chuckles]

John: You don’t, you don’t. Perhaps we can make some more movies with all the new California tax credit money coming.

News this week that California legislators have voted to more than double the state’s film and television tax credit program and raising the cap to $750 million from $330 million. Basically, a proposed 35% tax credit, which is up from 25%. Most importantly, there’s more money available there to be spending on productions that are shot and posted here in California.

Craig: Yes. Let’s look at this as good news, bad news. Good news, more.

John: More.

Craig: Certainly, double sounds like a lot. Bad news, it is not a lot. It is still not what I would call a competitive program with basically anywhere else where Hollywood goes. Comparing it to the tax credit programs in Canada or Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, even New York, UK, it’s just not competitive with those, but it is less non-competitive than it used to be, right? It’s a good trend.

The hope is that the government can watch this work and go, “Hey, we’re not losing money on this. This isn’t a disaster. In fact, we could afford to be more aggressive later.” If this begins a trend, that’s great. The other interesting factor for this legislation, I believe, is that it limits the tax credit to a certain budget. A show can’t come in that costs $300 million and gobble up $300 million at this thing.

John: How these tax credits are structured is there are certain categories and budget levels of which the funds are tiered towards. Smaller movies and very small movies can get smaller amounts, but you’re right that one thing can’t take up all the money.

Craig: Right, which sounds good, but here’s the bad news part. The bad news part is that large productions tend to push way more into the economy, and they provide much more stability. For instance, if you have a show like, let’s say, Fallout, Fallout’s a big show. They spend a lot of money. They also take a lot of time to shoot. There will be more stability, more employees for a longer amount of time.

Those shows tend to also have multiple seasons, which means there is some ability for crew to say, “Hey, I now have a life where I work on this show, which will work steadily for the next X amount of years.” If the tax credit is chopped up among a lot of one shot things, you lose that sense of stability, because the point of this all is, “Hey, how do we provide a living to people, an actual manageable living?”

John: Well, it’s important to note that these tax credits are about jobs. They’re specifically about reimbursing money spent on people’s employment, people’s salaries for the work that they’re doing. That’s what you’re trying to base it on. Your point is well-taken that you’re spending a lot more of those on these big productions. That goes on longer. That has a bigger effect. I just say, the counterpoint is that by spreading around to smaller productions, too, you’re enabling a wider number of people to get these things. You may be able to incentivize production in places that don’t otherwise get it that aren’t big production hubs. There’s reasons also to be providing tax credits for smaller things.

Craig: Absolutely. Everything’s a choice. When you are dealing with scarcity, you have to make a choice. These other places that I mentioned don’t really have much in the way of scarcity. They don’t really have effective caps like this. If you want to make a small movie in Alberta or if you want to make a large television show in Alberta, you’re both getting it. You’re both getting the benefit of this.

For California, the calculus is we’d like to hire more individual people as opposed to hiring fewer individual people more consistently. That’s the trade-off you have when you aren’t going for large– Large television productions will pump the most money into a system in the most reliable and lengthy way. We don’t have that yet, but I think this is a good sign that something is happening.

If we can hopefully prove that this isn’t some sort of problem and people can get over the fact that the tax credits go right back to these massive corporations, then perhaps California will start to edge its way towards competitive because California has an inherent edge, which is this is where people live. There are costs associated with shooting elsewhere. A promising thing, this is not ideal, but we don’t need ideal right now. We just needed something.

John: Absolutely. The other factor is that with this kind of tax credit, actors and directors and producers and other folks involved in the movie can say, “No, no, I want to shoot in California,” and there’s math that can actually make it more sense to shoot in California. It ultimately come down to more individual decision-makers about the choice to shoot in California than just it is impossible budgetarily to shoot here.

Craig: Yes. People have been working on this lottery system where, if you’re lucky enough, you get what that limited tax credit program was. Our friend, Derek, who makes the new show Countdown on Amazon Prime, they won the lottery. They were able to shoot here in California. I went to go see the first episode at their premiere. You get up there in front of people and you say, “Oh, I would like to thank blah-blah-blah,” and everyone applauds, “Yay.” Derek said, “I’m very proud of the fact that we’re able to shoot this show entirely here in Los Angeles.”

The cheer from that crowd, it was like a cheer of like, “Finally.” It made me sad in a way that that was so special. It shouldn’t be special. It should be the norm. Let’s see how we do.

John: Yes. While we’re talking about numbers, we can talk about the WGA annual report. Each year, the Writers Guild of America West publishes an annual report, which is basically all their financials, but also reports on how the membership is doing and basically what number of writers reported earnings, what the total earnings were, differences between screen, which is basically television and streaming, versus theatrical. We’ve talked about these over the entire course of the Scriptnotes podcast. Craig, what are you seeing here as you’re looking through these numbers? We’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF.

Craig: Well, these reports have a lot of stuff going on, but we tend to look at two things when we do this, you and I. One is, how many people are working? The other is, how much money are we making for the writing we do and for the residuals that we are all collectively receiving? Let’s talk about the number of writers working. It’s not great. It’s bad.

John: 5,228 writers reported earnings in 2024. Those numbers will go up a little bit just with late reporting, but it’s down 9.4% for the previous year. It’s really down from the high, which is 6,910, which was back in 2022.

Craig: Yes, the thing that’s really frightening to me is that it’s down. You’re absolutely right that these numbers from the prior year will always be a bit compressed because they don’t have all the data in yet, but it should be way, way up at this point, even so, from prior year, because the prior year was impacted obviously by the strike. If you just look at 2019, 6,833 writers reported earnings. In 2024, we’re looking at 5,228. That’s bad. That’s more than 1,000.

John: It’s a big drop. Yet, Craig, if we were to roll back even earlier before, we’re at the top 2015, 2016. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but you and I both know that the membership used to be smaller. The number of writers in the guild grew with the rise of streaming. With the rise of streaming series, there were more jobs than there ever have been before. I think what we’re really looking here is a retrenchment in the number of series shot. That’s really what it comes down to is there’s less development. There’s less things being shot. There’s fewer writers being hired because there are fewer shows. There was a huge growth with the growth of streaming that appears to be pulling back.

Craig: Yes, we know for sure that there was retraction in the amount of shows. What we don’t quite yet know is how we’re doing in terms of the average number of people employed per show. Obviously, that was something that was important during the strike to the Writers Guild to create minimum room sizes, which they did. Minimum room sizes are minimums. Those minimum room sizes were smaller than, say, what I think the Writers Guild would hope would be an ideal room size.

John: What was a classically-sized room.

Craig: Right.

John: There are rooms like The Simpsons, which seem to have 30 writers in them. The overall size of rooms has gone down noticeably.

Craig: Yes, I guess the point is, regardless of why, if people are walking around out there going, “It is tough out here,” the answer is yes. Factually, numerically, there are fewer jobs.

John: The corollary to this is the actual amount of earnings has gone up. The earnings were up 12.7% from last year. There are fewer writers working, but those writers who are working appear to be bringing in more money. That is not entirely unexpected. If the people who are not working are the people who were earning the least, and people who are working now are earning significantly above scale, that would be one reason to expect that this number did increase.

Craig: Yes, it does look like the percentage over the prior year, of course, is up because, again, strike. Let’s just say again, going back to 2019, there are about 1,600 fewer writers. The total earnings, only $300 million less. I can’t do the per-writer number here quickly, but it looks like it’s higher, yes.

John: I think the changes you would see here is during the real boom time of streaming, there were a lot more writers working in streaming who are working probably at scale in those lower-level positions. With fewer shows happening, with fewer writers being hired at those levels, the actual amount per writer has gone up. That would make sense.

Craig: Yes. It doesn’t surprise me a ton because so much of our earnings is pegged to scale because so much in television–

John: Especially in television.

Craig: Yes. If you have more and more people who are working as writer/producers in television, which has become far more common as the rooms have shrunk down, so much of the writer income will be pegged to just minimums because it’s the producer income that’s flexible. That will go up by roughly 3% across every three years. I think it is something like that. That’s not super surprising to me. I think we probably are in a place that’s right now in terms of the amount of writers working that is similar to what it was in the earlier parts of the 2010s.

That’s my gut. Let’s also break it out for a moment in terms of screen and television because our poor screenwriters is always, “Let’s start with feature writing,” which has been hammered over time. It’s not terrible news. We look like we’re starting to recover here. 2024, about 1,900 writers working in features compared to 2019, 2,350. Again, that 1,900 is a little low. I would imagine it’ll end up in the low 2000s, which means it’s not that far off actually.

John: We show as being down 3%, but that 3% could become 0% when, actually, the late reporting comes in. The dollars are up already 14.2% versus the previous year.

Craig: Yes, but, again, okay, here’s the problem with the previous year. Previous year is a strike year, right? Everything looks great compared to 2023.

John: Very good, so we have to compare it to–

Craig: Yes.

John: If you jump back several years, it’s just lower than it was.

Craig: Yes, it’s not great. I think the per-writer amount is down. It looks like it’s down to me significantly, which-

John: -which honestly matches my anecdotal experience just talking to people, talking to reps. It’s harder to make the big deals. It’s harder to bump people’s quotes.

Craig: Yes, and this is an area where you will see the market reflected in total earnings as opposed to television because, in television, the market does put a lot of flexible money in producing fees. In screen, it doesn’t. Screen is generally an overscaled thing. The market is reflected in these numbers, and it doesn’t look great. It does look down, but it’s not horrifying.

It’s not what it was five years ago. Just not as good. In television, yes, it’s weird. It’s like the money actually per writer is doing fine. It’s just the amount of writers has plummeted. That’s where the real plummeting has occurred. In 2019, 5,581 writers in television. In 2024, 4,117. Let’s call it even 4,500 by the time the year ends. That’s a thousand fewer. That’s a lot.

John: Let’s quickly touch on residuals. Residuals are, of course, all the monies that writers get paid for their work when it’s reused off of not its original airing of things or not its original screening, but down the road. It used to be DVD money and other things like that. Those numbers have increased. The five-year change is 19.3% up total residuals. We can put in the chart that shows TV residuals versus theatrical residuals.

They’re both up. In any individual category like DVD or network stuff, those things have fallen off a cliff over the last 10 years. What we now call new media, which is streaming, which is everything else, which is all the things that the guild had to fight for over these years to increase those rates, those have made up the difference. Those are the bulk of what the residuals are that writers are getting paid.

Craig: Yes, so there are some good news in here. They have all these categories, and they’ll show you the percent changes for all of them. Again, skip the 2023 to 2024. Just go 2019 to 2024. All these numbers look either horrible or great, but they’re irrelevant in terms of percent. It’s really the percentage of what. What we see, the most important two are new media reuse for SVOD and new media reuse for non-SVOD, meaning, okay, streaming video on demand, and I guess ad-supported or whatever. I don’t know what else.

John: It’s also direct buys through iTunes, through Prime Video, and such.

Craig: Those things are up dramatically. That’s where the bulk of our residual income comes from, by far. Those numbers are good. The trend there is great.

John: Last year, writers brought in $562 million in residuals. That’s great. That’s money going to individual writers. It’s important to understand that in the Writers Guild, those residuals go directly to the writer. It doesn’t go into any big slush fund for the guild itself. Those monies are paid out to individual writers. Writers pay percentage fees back to the guild, but the overall pool goes to those writers. Those are crucial quarterly checks that help smooth out the ups and downs of the business.

Craig: Right. The fear that those would be eliminated, I think the guild, through its efforts and through the efforts of the membership, particularly this last strike, is going to help because of the way it did lock in some success-based residuals for streaming. It looks like we’re going to be okay on that front. Theatrical residuals. For screenwriters, it’s doing quite well, I would say, overall. Just flat-out numbers look much better. These are spread over, not the writers that we just described as working. These are spread over all writers who got anything ever.

John: Got a credit on a teleplay, on a screenplay, yes.

Craig: In 1998. It’s for everything. The residual picture looks pretty healthy. I think the big challenge for the Writers Guild is going to be employment. That’s what it’s going to be because, ultimately, it’s the employment now that drives residuals later.

John: It’s also crucial to understand that the Writers Guild represents the writers who are working, but it does not get writers jobs. The actual frustrating experience of not being able to land a job because there’s not a show to be made is not a thing that the guild directly controls, or we will lose members who will time out of their eligibility to be active members of the guild because they won’t have worked for a while. That’s a thing that’s just going to happen.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. There’s a number in here that is such a fascinating one. Then I think we probably covered the financial thing. They do a little review of the legal department. What they do is they break out the various kinds of cases that the legal department brings against the companies. Cases for initial compensation or for pension and health, or they screwed up the credits, whatever it may be. They list the amount of monies that they’ve collected.

I think the trend is that the legal department is seemingly getting a bit more aggressive because the compensation they’re collecting is more, but there’s one number that I would love to find out what the deal is. Let’s just look at residuals. In 2018, they collected $6.5 million in penalties for residuals that the companies didn’t pay. Next year was $2.3 million. Next year was $946,000. The next year was $12 million. 2023, it was $2 million. 2024 is $9 million.

It’s always between nothing and $10 million. In 2022, they collected $70 million in residuals penalties. I want to know what that is. Was that one massive case against Netflix or something?

John: If I’m remembering correctly, it could have been the Netflix case, or, basically, the case of made-for-streaming movies, and what happens with a made-for-streaming movie and what basis they have to be paid out on. I suspect that is what you’re looking at. It’s really a judgment.

Craig: It’s massive.

John: Yes.

Craig: Anyway, it looks like the legal department is being pretty aggressive, which is great.

John: It’s what you want.

Craig: Yes, they have a ton of open cases, which sometimes means they’re just not mulching through cases. In this, based on what I’m looking at here, it looks like there’s a ton of open cases because they keep opening more cases.

John: Yes, that’s what you want.

Craig: Which is good.

John: Money well spent is getting writers paid.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, let us talk about some follow-up here. First off, we have a correction. Drew, help us out. On Episode 689, we were talking about postmodernism, and it’s not a surprise that we may have said something wrong.

Drew Marquardt: Marion writes, “I want to write to say that the Disney corporate headquarters was designed by Michael Graves, not Robert Venturi, and the product line for Target was also designed by Graves. I’m going to intentionally avoid discussing whether or not the building’s terrible, but I must confess that I’m an architect, and I own several of the Michael Graves pieces from Target.”

Craig: Okay, so we thought it was Robert Venturi. Michael Graves is a very famous architect. The Disney corporate headquarters is a bad building.

John: Yes.

[laughter]

John: Both things can be true, yes.

Craig: I will confess that when you look at the–

John: I love looking at it.

Craig: It’s incredible. From the outside, that building is a masterpiece. If you have to actually work in it or even just go to a meeting in it, horrible.

John: The building causes physical pain upon entering.

Craig: It is the most startling misuse of space, but outside, it looks great.

John: Yes, and so another reminder that Craig and I can make mistakes even without ChatGPT. We can just make mistakes out of our own brain.

Craig: Isn’t that amazing?

John: It really is. We have some follow-up about AI video and VFX because we’ve talked in Episode 689, how visual effects is going to be greatly impacted by AI, just because obviously. We have feedback from Lee in Montreal.

Craig: Okay.

Drew: “I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VFX for 30 years at Weta, MPC, Rhythm & Hues, Sony Imageworks, Cinesite, and DNEG. What has been killing VFX in the past couple of years has been a lack of greenlit projects, not generative AI. We’ve lost thousands of jobs. Many of whom are already leaving the industry before AI will have a real impact. Generative AI, as we see on social media, isn’t yet good enough to meet the exacting standards of Hollywood clients. My question for you as showrunners and directors is, as generative AI gets more powerful, would you want to hire a couple of people directly as part of your production team to sit in a corner and try to generate all of your project’s VFX content using generative AI, or would you still hire a VFX supervisor and proven vendors to execute your brief?”

Craig: All right.

John: Craig, so you’re hiring people more directly than I am, but I think it’s a real question of like, how much stuff do you feel like you might take internally to the team versus your classic way of working with vendors? What are you thinking?

Craig: Well, first of all, Lee, my heart goes out to you because you’ve worked at two companies that have imploded. MPC and Rhythm & Hues. Because of The Last of Us, we do a ton of work with Weta and DNEG. Yes, there has been an interesting shift in the business where there was– I would say in 2020, 2021, the world was actually terrified that there weren’t enough VFX artists out there for the amount of work that had been greenlit, and then there was this massive retraction.

The VFX industry hires people in waves. It’s almost like large corporate farming interests that bring people in for harvests and then lay them off. There’s a lot of like, “You’re hired,” “You’re laid off.” There’s not a lot of good, consistent work there, and it is a mess. That said, generative AI to me is the answer to nothing. I rely heavily on my VFX supervisor, Alex Wang, and our proven vendors, including Weta and DNEG. The only thing that we do in-house is a small amount of work that is still regular VFX work.

We’ll have an in-house group that handles traditional VFX work, not through AI, but that is of very simple nature. Doing split screens or some very simple comp work or beauty fixes where there’s a blemish that you want to just get rid of, or things like that that aren’t a bloater running through the snow, it makes sense to actually have an in-house team that handles some of that stuff. The idea that we would have anybody sitting there using generative AI to make creative choices or even begin creative thinking is not something I have on my show, and it will not be.

John: Yes, I think this point you’re making about, there’s stuff that used to be visual effects, but it got pulled back into editorial, that it’s things you’re doing much closer to the source, because you can. That makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the tools that come out of generative AI, we talked before about sound fixes, there’ll be things like beauty fixes.

There’ll be some things, which I suspect over the course of the next few years, will get pulled closer to the editorial flow rather than the visual effects flow. That makes sense. I do wonder if there are going to be some movies and some shows for which the visual effects and the pre-visualization, all of that process gets to be much blurrier. Almost in the way that animation goes from storyboarding to things much more quickly.

I suspect that we’ll see some new workflows and some models for this kind of stuff. I agree with Craig, and what we’ve always stressed with these tools, is that you want to make sure that the person who’s using these technologies is the person whose job it is actually to do, to create the final thing. Whatever these technologies in generative AI can create, you want the person who is the visual effects supervisor, the visual effects artist, to be using them because that’s a creative artistic thing they’re doing. It’s not just done by some random person sitting over there at a desk.

Craig: [chuckles] Yes, there is no doubt, AI that is being used inside of tasks. A very simple visual effect thing to do is a comp. I have a guy. He’s standing in front of a green screen. The wind is moving, so his hair is blowing around. Now, we have a comp that goes behind him. Somebody has to deal with all the hair in front of the green screen, and that may be stuff that, internally, they’re using AI to do.

It is not creative work. It is just rote work. Highlight and roto every single piece of hair. If AI can do that more quickly than somebody with a tablet, yes, of course, that’s going to happen just like– I don’t necessarily think of the filters in Photoshop as AI, even though, in a sense, they are. They’re algorithms, really, very fancy algorithms. The artistry, no. You’re right. There is a lot of connection now.

Our editors work right next to the visual effects team while we’re shooting up in Canada in a way that the visual effects department now works very closely with the art department. Production design and visual effects are now– I think of them as one big group because there’s such a blending that has occurred. We also integrate VFX with the makeup department. It’s touching everything.

It’s funny, Lee. We do the opposite of what you’re wondering about. Rather than having generative AI kicking out some concepts or things, we use illustrators like actual artists, like illustrative artists, to start, the most human possible way to start, because I find that where you start will tend to be where you start. If you start with generative AI, the path to the end begins with crap. I wish you the best, Lee. I hope you’re doing okay out there. It sounds like, based on the description, that you are indeed still doing okay. Hang in there. We treasure the work that you do.

John: All right. Also in Episode 689, we talked about verticals, which are those stories for your phone, its video, lots of little chapters.

Craig: Oh yes.

John: I was sure that we’d have somebody in our listenership who’s written for these. Risky Business wrote in because he has written for verticals.

Drew: Risky Business writes, “I spent six months writing for ReelShorts. As a writer, it was terrible.”

Craig: What?

Drew: “The first 10 chapters were poured over with repeated rewrites until all the joy was taken out of them. Pretty much, they didn’t care. The rest of the story had little oversight as they didn’t expect people to watch. The CEO repeatedly criticized the writers in company-wide messages while giving 100% of the credit for success to the editors, all while paying $22 an hour with no work orders between feedback cycles and a constant, ‘Your contract can be canceled at any time,’ hanging over your head, and expectation that you’d be immediately available the second they had feedback, which sometimes took over a week to receive.”

“It ended up being less than minimum wage to basically hold all the blame for a possible failure poured on you from the entire company. Creative decisions were made entirely by algorithms based on what was selling, the whole prediction model that Hollywood is always trying to master contracted by the short production schedule. I’ve not had the pleasure of joining any union, but the success of ReelShorts definitely scares me. If the model succeeds, AI will definitely be writing the scripts, and the CEO can have his dreams of never having to rely on a writer’s creativity again.”

John: Yes, so what Risky is describing really feels like the fears you have when you talk to folks who’ve written at Netflix. The softer Netflix version is they’ll tell you like, “Our data shows that people don’t like to see cats in the first three minutes of a show,” or they’ll have some specific things like, “Okay, we can’t do that.” Fine, whatever, but the feedback mechanism is so much longer there.

With something like ReelShorts, all they’re trying to get you to do is to watch through enough episodes that you’ll hit the buy button and then watch the rest of it. The rest of it doesn’t have to be good because they don’t really care. As long as you hit that buy button, you’ve stayed on board. That is just toxic to storytelling. It’s the opposite of anything you would want to do, and yet writers are being paid to do it.

Craig: Based on this and based on what you just said, my prediction is that this thing implodes because it feels like the sort of thing that will be carried briefly by some TikTok wave or sense of novelty, and then everybody will catch on. Once you pay your subscription, it’s crap, and it doesn’t matter. They’ll get bored, and they’ll move on. Regardless, right now, they exist. They sound like a sweatshop.

Let’s just say that this sounds horrible. I don’t really see what the point is of working there because you’re not writing. Just to be clear, sometimes people will bait hooks with the worm of at least you’re writing. This is not writing. It seems like writing, but it’s not. If it is paying, as Risky Business says here, $22 an hour and eventually less than minimum wage because of the overtime that gets baked in there, go work somewhere else.

Work at Starbucks and write something you care about and love. There’s nothing here. There’s neither a ladder for promotion. There is not the ability to get better as a writer. There’s not the ability to make relationships that are going to serve you throughout your career. There’s no value here to you as a writer, none. I would say that I would not advise anyone to work there.

John: If people think we’re being a little unfair to this one company, I will say, we’ll put a link in the show notes to a Time magazine interview with Joey Jia, who is the CEO there. One of the questions they ask is, “Who writes the content on ReelShort? There are reports that some of the content sounds like they’ve been written by AI.” The answer is, “If AI could write the content and make money right away, I would do everything with AI.” Great. Well, he’s not hiding the ball there.

Craig: Yes, no, but then he says, “No, it’s our in-house editors.” This is backing up our friend who’s writing in where the editors get all the credit. We have an in-house editor, also an in-house screenwriting team. People say, “Oh, your content is really like AI. I disagree.” Well, it doesn’t really matter, as far as I’m concerned, what people think the content is. All that I care about is the health, security, and quality of life for professional writers in our business. I don’t see any reason to work at this place. If they were paying $50 an hour, we’d have to have a discussion.

John: Try to?

Craig: No, just go work at Starbucks.

John: Yes, agreed. All right, let’s transition from that dystopian view to– This last week, I got to have the utopian version of that, which is I was an advisor for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Craig: Great.

John: For 25 years, I’ve now worked at the Screenwriters Lab, which is crazy. For folks who don’t know what that is, they bring in filmmakers who are working on their next feature. In the summer labs, they will have already shot two of the scenes from their things, just up on a mountain with random actors, just to test stuff out. Then there’s a screenwriting lab that’s just one week afterwards, which we talk through about what they’ve learned, where they’re at with their script. We give them specific feedback.

I describe it as being like, “We are your friend with a pickup truck who shows up to help you move from where you were to your new place. We’re not going to tell you how to do stuff, but we’re there to help you carry your couch.” One of the best things about this process is that you get to talk to other really smart screenwriters who are talking about the projects that they’re working on with their advisees. Some quotes I wrote down. Robin Swicord says, “Act 1 is the suitcase you pack for the journey,” which just feels so smart and right.

Craig: That’s true.

John: I love that. Stephen Gaghan was talking about how he likes to do a transition pass. After finishing a draft, he’ll set it aside for a second and go back and just look at all the transitions, like transitions from scene to scene, but really from idea to idea, even within scenes, and just really focus on how you’re moving from this place to that place. It’s such a smart idea. I’ve never thought to actually just spend one pass through just looking at the transitions.

Craig: Well, I love that because we talk about transitions all the time. That’s the thing that separates scripts that turn into things that feel like not smooth unities, and then the ones that do. So far, Robin and Stephen are A+.

John: Absolutely. Liz Hannah, who’s been on the show several times out of joy, one of the things she likes to do is to actually literally retype the script. She’ll have it open in one window, have a clean document, and actually retype the whole thing. She gets it back in her fingers. Obviously, you’re changing things along the way. That is a kind of thing I would not do, but I really appreciate the instinct behind that. That feels, I don’t know, just a way to get it back into your bones.

Craig: That’s one of those classic bits of advice that is either going to be 100% useful or 0% useful, depending on the person, because if it works for you, oh, my God, it’s probably a revelation.

John: Yes.

Craig: If it doesn’t, well, then you tried it once, and you don’t have to do it again. [chuckles]

John: Absolutely. The thing I also really enjoy about the labs is, as an advisor, I’m looking at three different projects. These were three very different projects. In two of the projects, I noticed a thing that we needed to do. It never really occurred to me before. In both projects, we got to a place where we needed the characters to confront specific dramatic questions in the third act, concepts, but there was no real good way to introduce them there at that moment.

We needed to set them up earlier, but it could feel really forced. It was really the conversation about, how do we introduce ideas so that they’re available to the audience when we get there later on so that we put them into the world of the movie? It’s not exposition exactly. It’s not where we’re saying like, “Oh, to launch the missile, you have to turn these two keys.”

It’s more abstract. It’s how you introduce an idea rather than a fact, an idea like, what does it even mean to own land, or can you ever trust someone who’s betrayed you? You’re priming the audience for those questions. I just want to spend a few minutes, Craig, talking about this need. It’s a thing I’ve found myself doing all the time but never really being aware that I was doing it.

Craig: Sure, and this is one of the craftier bits of our jobs. It is calculated. This is palming something as a magician.

John: It’s magic trick.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. We could go on and on about why it’s more satisfying, but it doesn’t matter. We just know it is more satisfying if something emerges in the third act that feels like, “Oh, it has been there the whole time. We just missed it as characters.” Now, we see it as opposed to just realizing it then late.

John: One of the projects, I’m talking in very vague terms here, but it’s set present day, but hinges on something that happened in that region during World War II. If that were to come up just out of the blue in the third act, it’s going to feel weird and forced. If we bring it up randomly in Act 1, it’s going to feel like a setup. You’re going to feel the setup-ness on it. You’re looking for ways. You can introduce the notion of World War II, the notion of the history here without feeling like, “Okay, this has the objective of doing this thing.”

The answers for that is you’re always looking at, what is the present-tense problem? What is the present-tense need of the scene that brings up this idea so it feels natural to the moment that you’re in and, of course, seeds us for later on, that it feels like, “Oh, of course, the characters are having this discussion. Of course, this thing is being shown here,” or the scene that you’re currently in, and the audience has no idea that’s going to pay off later on?

Craig: Yes, there are two ways of going about this, and I strongly prefer one of them. One way is to introduce the idea in a manner that is not objectionable. An objectionable way is somebody goes, “By the way, you know what it is interesting that right here, which was the site of a World War II battle 30 years ago, happens to be the place where–” and then you go, “Okay.” Well, that is objectionable. A non-objectionable way would be like, they walk by and they see a sign like, “This place was a World War I site. This was a thing. This is World War II.” That’s interesting, and it’s not objectionable because it–

John: Like, “What happened to that church?” “Oh, it was this battle in World War II.”

Craig: Not objectionable. That’s one method, not objectionable. I strongly prefer the other method, which is essential, that when you are introducing this, it is the point of a moment, such that you believe it’s over. There is information here that I need you to know for a point right now that matters, that has nothing to do with why it’s going to be relevant later, because then you don’t feel at all like it’s superfluous. The ultimate trick to me is to make people believe that you are not palming a coin. You are actually holding a coin in your hand for a reason. Then later, it’s revealed, oh, also this.

John: Some examples from movies that might be helpful here. In Finding Nemo, Dory has a joke early on about, “Oh, I speak whale.” It just feels like that’s the thing that Dory would say. It’s a funny joke in the moment, but then later on, she actually does speak whale to a whale. It’s like, “Oh, I did not think that was a setup.” It’s just so much more rewarding because they got it in there without it feeling like a setup at the time. Or in A Quiet Place, the daughter’s cochlear implant is malfunctioning. It feels like you know why they’re doing that. It’s like, “Oh, that’s going to become a problem for this character.” You don’t feel like, oh, that’s actually going to be a solution to the things down the road.

Craig: That feels essential to me. I need you to understand that this person goes through a problem. It is a problem right now we have to solve. You will, in your human story eating mind, go, “Oh, this was important for me to understand a character, what their challenges are, what they want and need, how they relate to their parents, what they need from their parents.” There is meat there. It mattered. That’s better than what I would call the non-objectionable.

John: Absolutely. There was a bottle thought here. It’s like, “Oh, why are you telling me this?” Some of what we’re talking about has obvious overlap with what we’ve talked about before in terms of exposition. I know this specifically because I was looking through the exposition chapter in Scriptnotes book. In terms of sometimes you’re direct, sometimes you’re indirect. I want to make sure we’re also thinking about, sometimes I just need to prime the audience for a concept, or just the notion of a thing that could happen within the course of this movie.

Sometimes it’s bringing up an analogous situation. In one of my scripts, it ultimately hinges on trust. I have one of my characters listening to a call-in radio show. They’re talking about this husband’s betrayed her, and I can’t ever forgive that. Just setting up the idea of trust as being a thematic element is natural to do in a way that is going to pay off later on, but it doesn’t feel like it’s hitting you over the head in the moment.

Craig: It’s got to have its own reason to live there. If it has its own reason to live, no one will think, “Oh, that’s weird that they mentioned that. I wonder if it’ll come up later.” We’re all very good at picking that thing out. If it has its own reason to exist, you’ve solved the problem. Sometimes I think people are so worried about hiding it that they contort themselves into pretzels to make something blend in so casually that it’s almost not a thing at all. Unnecessary and usually sweatier than just confronting it head-on and making it be a thing that matters right now.

John: Absolutely. All right. Let’s get to a couple of listener questions. Drew, start us off.

Drew: Sarah writes, “I’m a screenwriter from the Netherlands whose secret side ambition is to someday direct music videos. After watching the excellent new music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild, however, I’m at a loss. How would you even start communicating the idea for a project like that? As a screenwriter, I just cannot imagine how this would look on the page. At the same time, it seems impossible to pull this off without a script. I know directing music videos is an incredibly specific skill on its own, but I’m very curious what your thoughts would be. Also, what are some of your favorite music videos?”

John: All right. Drew, it’s so interesting that the listener wrote in with this question because you would actually put this music video on the slack, because you’re like, “Wait, is this AI?” I was like, “I don’t think it’s AI. I think it’s just a lot of hard work.” Then we looked back through the behind-the-scenes of these directors working on stuff. It’s like, “Oh, no, they just work really hard.” There’s just a lot of setups and a lot of visual effects. It is a very good video.

Sarah, I’m going to challenge your question. Most of these music videos do not have a script the way that Craig and I are doing scripts. They tend to have documents that lay out the overall vision for something. It might be a one-page brief of what this is, what the concept is, but then they’re going to have a lot of storyboards, setups, a listing of things for these are the moments that we’re shooting that become the production plan for everybody else, the equivalent of the script that they would use for breakdown, for scheduling, for wardrobe. I would be shocked if there’s anything that looks like a script for this music video.

Craig: Definitely. I think, Sarah, this is one of those deals where it’s a very what I call, directorish thing. No one comes in with a screenplay. In fact, I imagine that there never was anything like that here. This feels so much like somebody comes in with the mood board and crazy pictures of wacky cars on the road. What if you cut one in half and it’s so surreal and da, da, da, and the palettes will be this and this and we’ll do these colors.

Then you start to tell this little story that you imagine that you could just describe, like basically she’s hitchhiking, going from one crazy place to another, and blah, blah, blah.

Then you start storyboarding. I don’t see why you would need a screenplay for this. It feels very storyboardy. The way they shoot these things, I would imagine, is to get lots and lots of little mini movies that they then cut together to make 12 movies that seem like they’re going on all at the same time, and then edit it all together. The thing about a music video like this is there is no real coherent structure to it. The structure is the song. The song provides the structure.

John: Absolutely. The music can exist in this liminal dream state. It doesn’t have to make narrative sense. That’s one of the joys of it. You also asked our favorite music videos. We had Daniels on, so I would say Turn Down for What is an incredible music video.

Craig: So good.

John: I would say David Fincher’s Express Yourself by Madonna is incredible in terms of it actually does have a narrative storytelling drive. It’s inspired by First Land’s Metropolis. It is just really well done and does tell a story. It does all the music video things it needs to do so well. That’s a highlight for me. Craig, any other ones that jump out for you?

Craig: There have been so many great ones. Some of them do decide, “Hey, what we’re going to do is we’re going to tell a story that isn’t really reflected in the lyrics of the song, but we’re going to pick something else.” Take On Me is one of the great videos of all time by A-ha. They really told a story based on the movie Altered States. That’s what they did. They said, “What if we did an Altered States?” The idea was it was a man that lives in comics who’s trying to become real, all the way to him slamming back and forth against the walls, just like William Hurt. Great.

A lot of music videos are about showing awesome visuals that have nothing to do with the lyrics whatsoever. If I looked at the lyrics for Manchild, I don’t know if I’m going to see anything there– I’m actually looking at them right now, that would indicate this is what you would do. There’s nothing in here that implies we should be on the road going through a series of hitchhiking moments with crazy visual effects. They’re just letting the structure of the song give you structure, knowing full well, the entire thing is going to be over in, what, three minutes or so. Just delight me with visuals that maybe progressively get crazier, a little bit of an ironic ending, and you’re done.

John: The one other one which I’ll put in the show notes is Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye, which I’m looking up now, it’s directed by Aneil Karia. When it starts, it’s so slice of life. It’s just a short film, basically, that eventually the song starts, and it gets into a thing. It’s a situation where I can imagine there probably was some scripting there because there’s a lot of characters. The verisimilitude of just the space that they’re in and the conversations feels like it could be scripted before it gets to the actual big events.

I don’t want to say much more. It’s 11 minutes. It’s worth watching it. I think it got a–

Craig: It won an Oscar.

John: Did it win the Oscar in 2022?

Craig: I think it did.

John: It’s remarkable. I’d point that out as another example of the music video that probably had something resembling a script at some point, but that’s more the exception rather than the rule.

Craig: You can do basically anything you want. That was a short film. It was 11 minutes long. You could do a Phil Collins music video for Billy, Don’t You Lose My Number I think it was called, where the whole music video was music video directors pitching him ideas for the music video for that song, and then them doing parodies of other music videos. You can do whatever you want. [chuckles] Everything from story to not.

John: I celebrate what has been made possible by the music video because yes, we had commercials before that, but I think just we’ve had a lot of great directors come out of music videos, but also just a lot of cool art and a lot of cool just ways of thinking about visual storytelling that have come out of music videos.

Craig: Absolutely. Music videos and commercials are both interesting places where new things are invented, or things that are subcultural get pulled up into culture. Madonna very famously pulled Vogue up out of the subculture.

Drew: Let’s do one last question here, one from anonymous. “I’ve been working in the legal field for over 10 years, and a couple years ago put my undergrad English degree to use and started screenwriting. My two features have had great feedback, including from a friend who’s a professional screenwriter with several credits. That friend is encouraging me to set up meetings in LA with agents and managers and has made recommendations on who to reach out to.

Here’s the problem. In this world, with this president, at this time, should I, as a transgender person, be open about my identity? I know that being trans has at times limited opportunity as a lawyer, but that hasn’t stopped me. Just altered my trajectory a little. One script I wrote features a trans protagonist, and my other screenplays have strong queer themes. Now I’m wondering if an agency or studio would view a trans writer as a liability they would be unwilling to take on during this administration. Happy Pride, and I hope that those in the generation behind me won’t have to worry like this.”

John: Happy Pride, anonymous. Obviously, I’ve been out my entire career. Easier for a gay man to be out. Being out as a cisgendered gay person is a different lived experience than being a trans person. Everything just means a different thing for me and for your experience. I think the fact that you are writing material with trans characters is going to naturally raise the question of whether you have the lived experience to be writing these things and be reflecting the things on the page. My instinct is you’re probably going to want to be open about your identity from the start. That’s just my first blush instinct, correct? Craig, what are you feeling?

Craig: I come at this just from a purely analytical point of view. I think about the business and the way people function here, so I’ll be very cold and calculating. In my cold and calculating way, I think you’re absolutely right, John, that it is a plus if people are considering a feature script that is about a trans person, if the trans person is centered in that story. Or, as you point out anonymous, you have screenplays with other strong queer themes. The first question they’re going to ask is “Who are you?”

That’s not to say that they might go, “Oh, you’re not trans? Then screw you. You can’t do this.” It’ll be considered a strong plus. I think the challenge you have is not whether or not being out as a trans person is going to impact you. I don’t believe it will. If it impacts you, it’ll impact you positively, I think, given your scripts. The challenge you’re going to have is that the interest in that kind of story right now has been reduced dramatically because these wonderful corporations, no matter how progressive they pretend to be, are always with their finger in the air, checking the wind direction.

Right now, I don’t think there’s a big push in Hollywood to be telling trans stories or queer stories. I think that there’s still some, but I think it’s been reduced. I think that there’s a natural reactivity to what they detect is some sort of backlash trend. That would be a bit of a challenge. Remember, the wheel of things turns slowly. You, as a producer, may say, “With the script I have right now, probably not a great time to walk over there into the chairman’s office and say, ‘Can I have $20 million to make this movie about a trans person?” In five years, they may be cool with it again, and it takes time for stuff.

Your job, anonymous, now that you’re starting to be a screenwriter, is to just get hired to do something. Whether they buy your script, or they love your writing, and then want you to work on something else, get yourself into the world of being a writer. My feeling is that I am not transgender, but I have people in my family very close to me who are. I think about these things all the time. The choice of whether or not you want to be out is more important than just how it impacts your career. I would say that question needs to be resolved by you for so many reasons in so many ways. That ultimately is your choice, but I do not think it would hurt you.

John: I think we’re in agreement here. If we have listeners who have more opinions on this, more specifically informed opinions, we’ll always be happy to hear them. All right. Craig, it’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is this feature written up by Alvin Chang in The Pudding. I love The Pudding. It’s a website that does great deep dives and moving infographics on different topics. This one is called 30 Minutes with a Stranger, and it comes from this project called the Candor Corpus, which recorded 1,700 conversations between strangers.

How they would have these conversations is it was through a– It’s not a mechanical trick, but one of those sites where you get paid by the hour to do stuff. They would set up these people to have a 30-minute conversation that was recorded. They would ask these people before the conversation, right at the start of the conversation, middle conversation, and after the conversation, how they were feeling. Basically, what their emotional state was.

They would do this for all these conversations. The people who were in the study didn’t realize is that they were being set up with people who were like them. Age, demographics, ethnic background, political affiliation, and also people who were diametrically opposed to them. They could really see what is it like to have a conversation with somebody whose politics you fundamentally disagree with, who’s much older than you, much younger than you?

Craig, how do people feel about conversations with someone they generally matched up with versus someone who’s very different than them? What do you think the outcome of the conversations generally was? Did people feel better or worse after the conversations?

Craig: The optimist in me says that there was no difference.

John: The optimist is correct. People felt better after the conversations across the board. It really didn’t matter whether they were matched in those demographic terms or not. Even political affiliation, people generally felt better after conversations, which is what, again, you hope but worry that it’s not going to be true. It’s basically the experience of people just need to talk to people, and people like to talk to people. We are wired to talk to people. It doesn’t matter who you talk to. The experience of talking to people is positive for your emotional health.

Craig: Thank God there isn’t an entire industry designed on getting us to hate each other so that we click on stuff more and see more ads. This is the misery, the misery of social media, that it has taken something that is one of the few positives that we have. That when you just can talk to somebody, you can connect with them on a human basis, that is about things that are far more important and far more relevant than the superficial. It has turned it into shouting. Just basically thrown everybody into a shouting arena and have them scream at each other. This is a wonderful thing. I’m glad he did this. This is great.

John: I think the other crucial distinction here is social media allows you to take anonymous drive-by potshots at people.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It’s not conversation.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s a difference of actual conversation. Where there’s a back and forth where you actually have to listen, is a fundamentally different thing. We are wired to do it, and we just don’t create structures to do it as much as we need to.

Craig: I think that social media basically creates the conditions in which sociopaths are always living. Normal people look at each other, there is a human connection, they have a conversation. If you remove the human connection and you can just yell at somebody’s @ blankety blank, you are now living in the sociopath space. You do not detect their humanity at all, and now you can just do what you want. Horrible.

John: I’ve greatly scaled back my social media. Not to your extent, but to a large extent. There’s been times where someone has come at me weirdly aggressively, and it’s hard to do it. If I can just do the judo move of just honestly and emotionally responding to them, it does throw off the thing. It’s like, “Wait, people are just expecting to punch back.” When you don’t punch back, it throws them off. I don’t know. People say so many things they would never say to your face.

Craig: Of course.

John: I wish there was an option to like, “Great, let’s get on right now. Here’s my phone number. Call me and we’ll talk about this.”

Craig: I used to do things like that, and then I realized I could do this all day. It doesn’t matter. [crosstalk] There’s 12,000 other people.

John: There’s no winning.

Craig: This guy might be screwing with me anyway. He might be DMing his friend, going, “Oh my God. I got this guy talking to me now. LOL. What should I do?” It’s not real. It’s just not real social interaction. It doesn’t deserve our mind.

John: Just don’t talk to people.

Craig: I’ll tell you what deserves our mind, John. D&D and Chris Perkins. My one cool thing this week is Chris Perkins. Who is Chris Perkins? If you know, you know. Chris Perkins was the senior producer for Dungeons & Dragons and was a story genius for D&D and the general D&D world for so long. He just retired from Wizards of the Coast recently. He’s actually joined the whole crew over there at Critical Role, which is with Jeremy Crawford. John, you’ve heard me probably say Jeremy Crawford a few times at the table.

John: Jeremy Crawford is known as being the rules guru of D&D.
Craig Mazin: Jeremy was rules guru, and Chris was story guru. That’s very, very reductive, and I apologize to both of them. [chuckles] They had lots to do with each other and their work that they all did together. Both of them went, “You know what? Our time at Wizards is done. We’re going to move on and just join Critical Role, have some fun over there.”

Together, those guys really did help create the most successful edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever, 5th edition, which was released in 2014. Chris did do some work on the recent version that came out, the 2024. Those of us who play owe him a lot. For instance, Chris was the lead story designer for Curse of Strahd, which was the thing that brought Ravenloft, which has been around forever, into 5th edition. Anyway, I got a chance to meet Chris and actually play D&D with him. I’m playing, someone’s running Lost Mines of Phandelver.

John: Ah, the classic.

Craig: The classic. The intro story from 5th edition, which I’ve now played, DM’d, played, and played, he is playing with us, and he designed a lot of this.

John: So fun.

Craig: It is fun when the DM’s, someone goes, “Is the water coming out in a trickle, or is it a lot?” The DM’s like, “I’m looking. I think it’s a trickle.” Then right next to me, Chris goes, “No, it’s a lot.” [laughs] He’s fantastic. Really, Chris, I guess, and Jeremy. I should lump Jeremy Crawford in there as well. Both those guys are my one cool thing for helping with so many other people. I want to be clear, revitalizing Dungeons & Dragons and making it as super popular as it is today.

John: I got a chance to talk to Christopher Perkins, coming on three years ago, about wizard stuff, and so super smart, and that whole team. Not a surprise that he is just as great around a table as he is at writing these incredible rule books. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, our author this week is by Spencer Lackey.

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 like the ones we answered today. You will find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have a new crafty episode. It was me and Christina Hudson talking action.

Craig, it’s one of the situations where video really is better than just the audio version of it because we can show you the screenplay as the scene is happening and see what’s on the page. Take a look at that one. You’ll find t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in an email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the best movies of the 21st century. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thank you, Drew.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Great. Craig, this past week, the New York Times has launched a feature which is looking at the top 100 movies of the 25 years of this century that we’ve been through so far. You can see their full list. Their full list has many of the movies you’d expect to see there. Craig, have you gone through and actually done the feature? Have you clicked through to see which of those movies you’ve seen so far?

Craig: Yes, I’m scrolling.

John: You’re scrolling. I’ve seen 80 of the 100, which is better than I expected.

Craig: Yes, that’s pretty good.

John: Because there aren’t a lot of esoteric, strange ones on there. There’s just things I just didn’t happen to see. They tended to be foreign films. They’ve always been on the list. I’ve never gotten to see them. It was crazy to me that Anora wasn’t on the list. I think that’s just recency problem is so that people aren’t thinking about stuff like I think Norrish would be on my top 10 list. I really thought the most interesting part about this, and Max Reid, who has been on our show before, pointed this out, is that there’s a separate list that the New York Times pushed of the people’s top 10 lists. That was partly how they made this whole big list.

It’s so fascinating to click through and see what are people’s top 10 lists like Mark Birbiglia. I’ll link in the show notes for that. Mark Birbiglia’s top 10, Children of Men, Frances Ha, Hot Fuzz, Idiocracy, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Sideways-

Craig: Great.

John: -Spotlight, Superbad, Squid and the Whale, and Up.

Craig: Wow. I love how comedy-heavy that is, of course.

John: Yes, which should totally make sense for Mark Birbiglia. Five of those movies are already on the top 100 list, five of them are not. It’s easy to see why you’re making the case for any one of those movies. Sometimes movies speak to you individually. They may not speak to everybody. Any list is going to be evening out the odd choices of an individual person. It’s just fun to see what people put there. Also the fact that it’s– I don’t want to say it’s performative, but you know this is going to become public. You might make choices there that reflect an intention on what you’re trying to communicate about, who you are based on what the top 10 things are that you’re recommending to people.

Craig: Can I ask a question?

John: Please.

Craig: I understand this is very much like religion. I know most people are religious, and I know most people believe in God and angels. I don’t. I never have. More to the point, it is not an active choice to disbelieve. I just don’t. Why do people make lists? What is this?

John: A couple of things I can think about. Why do people individually make lists? I don’t have a letterbox, but many people have a letterbox, and they have a public setting on a letterbox so everyone can see how they’re rating different movies. I think there’s a sense of how you want to put yourself out there in the world, how you want to have people perceive you, what you want to show as being your taste. Producer Drew Marquardt, have you gone through this? Have you marked which of these movies you’ve seen?

Drew: I did. Not to brag, I’ve seen 93.

John: 93? It’s incredible. Did you make your own individual top 10 list?

Drew: I did, but it’s impossible to do because 10 is too much to reduce to. Yes, I could show it to you, but it feels embarrassing in some way.

John: That’s the thing, too. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing my top 10 list. If I think about movies of all time, it’s easier for me to reach for these are iconic things, where Clueless and Aliens will always be in that top 10. Those would be super high here.

As I was going through this process with the top 100 movies, I was thinking about which of these would be on my top 10 list. Some of them I remember liking, but I haven’t gone back and rewatched them. I don’t know if I actually think they’re the best things ever, or maybe I’m just forgetting. A spoiler, Mulholland Drive is either number one or very high up there. I remember liking Mulholland Drive, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it. I would never put it in my top 10 list because I just don’t remember it well enough. I feel like anything you put in your top 10 list, you should have to be able to speak for five minutes about why it’s so good.

Craig: Why is anything anything?? Honestly, this is my issue with this stuff is there’s an instinct, I think, among critics to rank stuff because that’s what they do. They’re pretending to have some analytical ability to quantify and qualify art, which is a ridiculous concept on its face. When you really look at it, it’s just absurd. When you dig underneath the hood of what it means to even describe something as having quality and how individual that is between you and the thing that you’re analyzing, all of it is absurd. Then the ranking of it feels vaguely masturbatory to me, designed to, I don’t know, create some authoritative hierarchy that is impossible to do and also pointless to do.

I think it’s actually demeaning to everything. If I’m Bong Joon Ho and I look on this and I go–

John: Parasite’s number one, that’s right.

Craig: Parasite’s number one. I don’t feel good. I’m like, “Wait.” Then Paul Thomas Anderson’s supposed to be looking at me going, “I didn’t do as well as you did with There Will Be Blood.” If anybody were to say to me, “Hey, I need you to do me a favor. Tell me which one is better, There Will Be Blood or Parasite?” I would say, “You’re an idiot.” That’s an idiot question that an idiot would pose because there is no ability to– first of all, why compare them at all? Second of all, why not just enjoy them both? Do you know what I mean?

John: I agree with you that comparing one to the other is crazy. Any of the films that are in this top 100 list are going to be, by default, really good movies. Here’s the argument I’ll make for why it’s useful for people to share their top 10 lists, or at least “Here’s a movie that you should absolutely check out.” I cannot remember which filmmaker it was, but some filmmaker recently was talking about how important Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona was to them. I’m like, “I have no idea what this movie is, but sure.” I put it on my list and I looked it up, and Mike was out of town one night, so I was like, “I’ll watch Persona.” I dug it. It was really weird.

It’s never going to be on my top 10 list, but it was so specific and strange, and I would never have thought to watch it if this filmmaker– I can’t remember which filmmaker it was, hadn’t talked about how important it was for their work. I think that is potentially the good and the joy of this is it’s exposing me to things that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. In the case of the 20 movies that I haven’t seen, I was reminded, “Oh, you know what? I should probably check these out because there’s a reason why so many people like these movies that made it into the top 100.”

Craig: Sure. This is why I have no problem when people say, “Here are 20 movies from the 2000s I loved,” and list them in alphabetical order, because otherwise, what is the point of this? This numbering is so dumb. It is so anti-art. There isn’t a single director or screenwriter represented on this list, I believe. I swear to you. Not one who would go, “You know what? Yes, I’m glad that I was–“ I don’t think Denis Villeneuve is going, “Oh good, Arrival 29. That’s right. Just not quite as good as Dark Knight, but definitely a little bit better than Lost in Translation.” What?

John: I will say, there are many people who Big Fish is one of their favorite films, but it didn’t end up in the top 100, and it could have ended up in the top 100. I did look for it [unintelligible 01:10:15], it was not there. I do feel a little bit of that, but anywhere in that top 100, I would have celebrated. It wouldn’t have mattered where it ranked in this thing. It would have been nice to see that there. Yes, I get you. I agree.

I think this list is so much more helpful, though, for a person working in this industry now than the AFI top 100 movies of all time. Because when I look at those things like, [crosstalk] Citizen Kane or Meet Me in St. Louis, yes, those are classic films. That is not telling me at all about what it is to work in industry now. I think if you are coming into this industry today, you should have watched a lot of these movies because the people who made these movies are the people who are still running this industry.

Craig: Yes, this is a collection of fantastic movies, don’t get me wrong. There’s not one of these where I went, “Oh, I hate that.” There are a few where I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that, but that’s okay. That’s fine. Maybe I’ll check it out.” That’s fine, but this is why I love the AFI event at the end of the year, where they say, “Here are the 10 movies that we really loved this year. Here are the 10 TV shows we really loved.” No ranking, no award, no best, no competition.

This ranking thing, everyone has become a little film critic where they have to rank things, and then they argue over your number one is number your three. It’s really just them attacking each other’s taste, and it is performative. To me, this is a sell, this is an ad. [crosstalk] This is just the New York Times going, “Hey, click.”

John: [unintelligible 01:11:53] creating a little event for itself. Yes, I get it.

Craig: I swear to you, I feel like it is cheapening to– all of these really, there isn’t one thing here where I’m going, “Oh, that’s not–“ They’re all beautiful art, and they should all be celebrated, and putting them in a ranking, I hear David Lynch. I hear his voice. Did you ever see that interview where it’s early on in the days of the iPhone, where they’re talking about, “What do you think about people that might watch some of your movies on a phone?”

He’s like, “Why would you watch a movie on a phone? On a fucking phone?” This is a fucking list. I just can’t think of something David Lynch would be less interested in than a fucking list. Now, I could be wrong. The late, great David Lynch might actually have loved a list, I don’t know. In my mind, he hated them. Sorry about the f-bombs.

John: No, that’s all right.

Craig: Cool.

John: Thanks, Craig. Thanks Drew.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• The Best Movies of the 21st Century by NY Times
• California lawmakers approve expanded $750-million film tax credit program by Samantha Masunaga for LA Times
• WGA Annual Report – employment and earnings, residuals
• Michael Graves
• How ReelShort CEO Joey Jia Used a Chinese Trend to Disrupt the U.S. Entertainment Industry by Chad De Guzman for Time Magazine
• Sundance Labs
• Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild
• DJ Snake, Lil Jon – Turn Down for What
• Madonna – Vogue
• a-ha – Take On Me
• Riz Ahmed – The Long Goodbye
• Phil Collins – Don’t Lose My Number
• 30 minutes with a stranger by Alvin Chang for The Pudding
• Chris Perkins
• Mike Birbiglia’s top ten movies of the 21st century
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.