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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’re listening to episode 676 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you keep doing creative work when it feels like the world around you is burning to the ground, sometimes literally? To help talk us through that despair, self-doubt, and anxiety, we welcome back a beloved guest from episode 99, Dennis Palumbo, a writer-turned-psychotherapist who deals with these issues every day. And in our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis and I will talk about how therapists are portrayed on screen with suggestions for getting it right.

But first, Drew, we have some follow-up.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We had a few people write in following up on our conversation on AI from back in episode 669.

Imran writes, “Recently, a production company added my original TV pilot onto their slate and paid me to craft its pitch deck. This particular script is a lo-fi sci-fi with a South Asian female lead.”

John: I want to stop on lo-fi sci-fi. I just love that as a term.

Drew: “Now, obviously with pitch decks, the visual job is finding comps, stills, actors, et cetera, to show what we’re making. Finding stills of South Asian female leads in Hollywood roles is a very limited pool. Then trying to find them in any sci-fi context is an almost impossible task.

My past experience is that decision-makers often have what I lovingly call “raciaphantasia.” So I got to show them, but what do I show them? Enter AI. I was able to concoct stills from a show like mine that doesn’t actually exist but feels familiar, allowing me to center a South Asian female lead, like a show from a parallel universe that’s already solved its representation problem. Decks generally just use images ripped from TV and movies and they’re not for public consumption, so I feel like I didn’t go against my general philosophy of not replacing a human with a toaster. Could this be considered an instance of AI-enabling opportunity rather than the opposite? I feel okay with this particular usage, but what do you think?”

John: Yes. So Imran, you’re right at that sweet spot where I’m actually wrestling with the same questions myself because I’ve had to put together pitch decks. Let’s talk through what you’re usually doing with a pitch deck, which is you’re looking for images from existing movies and TV shows that sort of give a sense of the feel and the style of what you’re going for. If I’m putting up things for the female lead, I’m talking about like, “This is Rebecca…” I might put up a series of images of split screens of like a couple of different actresses who could play that part. Here’s Zoe Saldana, here’s Jennifer Lawrence. Here are people in that space.

That’s great, but sometimes you need to show what’s actually happening in the moment in that scene. My go-to source for all this stuff is I pay for a subscription to ShotDeck, which is a really good site that pulls stills from all sorts of images and does a really good job cataloging and tagging them. You can say like, I need a close-up shot of a man looking down. I need this thing. It’s really useful for building that and for building mood boards.

But Imran, exactly the situation you’re running into, sometimes that shot doesn’t exist because it’s just never been done before. Particularly with issues of representation, yes, you’re not going to find enough young Asian female leads in a sci-fi franchise that’s going to probably work for you there. I get what you’re trying to do. I would say, listen, don’t pretend that you’re not doing it. Don’t hide from it. Also, I think you need to put some guardrails around yourself. You’re using this stuff to be able to convince other people to embark on your project, but this is not the final product. The fact that it’s internal is a helpful delimiter for me.

Always just be asking yourself, am I taking away someone’s job by doing this? Because what are the alternatives? You could go out and do a photo shoot with a model who does these things. That’s just not realistic. That’s not how these things are done. You could go to a Photoshop professional who could comp together a bunch of other images to find that thing. That’s maybe possible.

As you go out further with the project, it may make sense to enlist some of those folks in terms of building this deck so you can go out. If you need to show it to networks and other places beyond that, that might make some sense. For what you’re doing right now, I don’t personally have a problem with it. Some people would.

Drew: That makes sense. Next comes from Rita. Rita says, “I work at an animation studio, and while our policies are all strictly against AI use, the message from above is that if it’s going to help us work faster, go right ahead. This isn’t being communicated in anything written or over Zoom since our meetings are all recorded, but rather has been said to me with a wink-wink when I’ve been physically in the office. I suspect this is the case for a lot of studios.”

John: Yes. I would be really curious to hear from our other listeners about what they’re finding in their actual working environments. I was on a studio a lot yesterday in a TV space and I saw a lot of people with a lot of really big monitors. I was wondering how much they were using AI to do some stuff in there, and I don’t know what it is. Listen, like what Imran’s question is, I guess I’m wondering what kinds of things are they saying maybe it’s okay for you to use AI to do some of these things?

You mentioned that the Zooms are all recorded, so great. A lot of times they’re using those Zooms to actually generate notes about what was happening in the meeting. I’m kind of okay with it. Again, are you taking a person’s job who normally would be there to do that? For most of these meetings, probably not. In the case of a writer’s room, yes, a writer’s assistant was supposed to be there doing that stuff. I think when you have policies that are written down but then you’re actually not enforcing them, I think it’s in some ways worse than not ever actually having a policy because it’s basically a question of whether there are any boundaries around anything. Drew, what’s your take?

Drew: I know Rita works in editorial, and so there’s different facets to that too. When we had Mike Schur on the show, he was talking about using his audio engineer, using AI to pull seal noises out of the back of a shot, and that feels like a tool. That feels like a useful thing. These editorial programs have little tools and wizards and things that can clean stuff up. If AI is being used in that capacity, I don’t have any problem with it. That feels fine to me.

John: I think I said this on an earlier podcast. If the person whose job it is to be doing that thing is using the tool themselves, I have less of an issue with it than if someone whose entire job is in that space is using that to replace the person who would normally be doing that work.

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

John: Yes, it does feel bad. I think we’re going to be wrestling with this for a long time. Rita, I would say that it’s good to clock how you feel about these situations. When you feel like something is crossing a line or you wonder if something’s crossing a line, talk with others around you. You may not necessarily be able to go up to your supervisor and say like, this is a problem here. If other people at your level are feeling a similar situation, there may be some logic behind that.

Post is one of those areas that’s going to be affected earlier because it’s people sitting at machines doing things and maybe they’re using the next generation of those existing technologies to do stuff. It may be fine, but it may also be disruptive in a really bad way.

Drew: I’d be really curious where the line is for a lot of these people in post, for our friends at VFX, the ethical boundaries that they’re pushing up against. Because to me, a lot of these just feel like extensions of tools that they might already have, but that’s probably not true.

John: Anyone who’s actually edited a movie or TV show will tell you that most of the dialogue you’re seeing coming out of an actor’s mouth is not necessarily what was recorded in that moment. You’ve slipped lines from other takes and you’ve moved stuff through. It’s all artifice and all manufactured. If you’re sweetening or changing the audio to do that, or you’re doing clever things to people’s mouths so that you can slip frames, we’ve long had issues with how authentic and how real a thing is that we’re seeing on screen is. This is amplifying that. I think people are going to have to make choices about what they feel comfortable with and what they don’t feel comfortable with.

Drew: Yes. Please write in with more on this because —

John: Yes, I’m glad we were able to solve all the AI issues. Now let’s talk about our brains.

Let’s welcome our guest. Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in working with creative patients like writers. His screenwriting credits include the feature film, My Favorite Year, for which he was nominated for a WGA award for best screenplay. He was also a writer for Welcome Back, Kotter, among other series. In addition to his therapy practice, he writes mystery thrillers, which you can find in bookstores everywhere. Welcome back to the program, Dennis Palumbo.

Dennis Palumbo: Oh, thank you, John. It’s good to be here.

John: You were on episode 99, which was a zillion years ago, but it’s one of our most popular episodes. It’s one of the ones that we replay most often because it has such timeless advice for writers facing imposter syndrome, and just really the struggle of sitting down in the chair each day to write. Thank you for that.

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

John: What got me thinking about you in this moment was an article you wrote just a couple weeks ago titled, Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns? Can you give us a little setup behind why you wrote the article and what you were finding?

Dennis: Yes. The article was actually one of the columns in a column I do for Psychiatric Times called Creative Minds, and it’s a therapist looking at dealing with creative patients. The audience is primarily psychiatrists and psychologists because it’s a clinical journal, but apparently, somehow it got a little more. It’s not viral, but it got big for some reason, and I’ve heard from a lot of people. What got me writing about it, frankly, was the LA fires.

One of the things that writers deal with all the time, the two aspects are relevance and perspective. Is what I’m doing as a writer relevant in the world today? And perspective. Relevance to me means, gee, does anybody care about what I’m writing about? Does it help anybody? Is there a reason for it to exist? And perspective is like, here I am complaining because I can’t get the second act to work and people are dying in Syria. People are dying in Gaza. From the 10,000-foot perspective, what I do doesn’t matter.

That really came home to me during the LA fires because I had so many patients who were just saying, look, people are losing their homes, people are dying in Gaza, what the heck am I doing writing my fourth mystery novel? What am I doing writing my 28th episode of an NCIS series?

When you are an artist in particularly a commercial marketplace, it’s really hard sometimes to justify what you’re doing in the face of difficult times. We’re also in a quite erratic and revolutionary political time that’s confusing and disheartening to a lot of people. This is something I noticed in my patients, so I decided to write a column about some of the people that I’ve worked with and some of the things they’ve said about it.

John: Let’s start local, let’s start with the fires because when you think about Gaza, you think about turmoil in the world is not new, but having such incredible turmoil in our backyards, and in many cases, I’ve had 10 friends who lost their houses in these fires, it brings it home very directly. It makes you question, what is it that I’m doing here? What is keeping me in Los Angeles?

Let’s take it from the perspective of the extreme case of a writer whose house burns down in the fires. If you are the therapist talking with that writer about getting back to work, what are the points of the conversation? What are the things that you’re trying to get that writer to see, what’s the conversation like?

Dennis: First of all, I think it’s important for someone to acknowledge the traumatic impact of something like that. You end up with two kinds of patients. There are those who are bowled over by an experience like that and become immobilized. Then you have another kind of patient who says, “I don’t care that my house burned down yesterday, I’m going to get this in on deadline.” To me, they’re two sides of the same coin. They’re magical thinking.

The first thing I would do with any, I have had actually a patient lose her home in the Palisades and we dealt with it like any trauma, any tragedy. People are going to have PTSD symptoms after a tragedy like that. For those who don’t know post-traumatic stress disorder, the kind of symptoms you have is a hypervigilance about bad things happening again, a belief that maybe you could have avoided this by not living in the Palisades or by having one of those automated sprinkler systems that watered down your house. Then if your house didn’t burn down but your friend or your relatives did, then you have survivor guilt.

These are all functions of PTSD. And these traumas have to be experienced and processed and held by the therapist so that the person can move through them. We’re not saying, no, we don’t think you should ever write again. In fact, I’ll make the argument it’s crucial that you do so. I also think it’s crucial that you allow yourself the initial experience and the feelings that you’re having about it and then to challenge the meanings that usually associate themselves with a trauma, primarily meanings that are self-recriminating, that are self-blaming, or that make you feel as though the universe doesn’t like me, my house burned down and this guy’s house didn’t, so God hates me. You would be surprised where people go in the face of a tragedy.

John: Also, we’re dealing with writers who it is by their nature to narrativize, to create stories around these situations and to see themselves as the protagonist in the situation and that they’re in some act of a multi-act story, which is understandable, but may not actually be helpful for them processing what’s happened and to move on with the next stage. You make some examples in your column about great art that came out of really difficult times with Picasso with Guernica. I was also thinking about like Virginia Woolf or Kurt Vonnegut or Auden who are writing about the profound grief and anxiety that they’re encountering.

Some of us will have a chance to channel what we’re feeling into art, but some of us are going to have to write that next episode of that comedy series and go back and do that. That feels like that’s a real tension. You are probably uniquely faced with these things because some people who lost their houses are going back to investment banking and it’s like, okay, that’s a thing. The folks of us who have to go back and write comedy or write things, that feels like that tension is going to be hard to balance.

Dennis: It’s hard to balance unless you look underneath it. I wrote sitcoms for years.

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

Dennis: I got to tell you, if you’re not angry and aggrieved and filled with pain and bitterness, you’re not funny. [chuckles] The only good thing to come out of it, it’s like the old joke, hey, the war was terrible, but a lot of great songs came out of war. The reality is you can write comedy coming out of tragedy, because sometimes it’s the only way you can survive. A whole race of people, the Jews, that’s to me how they’ve gotten through the last number of centuries. But I know it’s very, very difficult.

It’s interesting too, because for a lot of artists, they think, well, the way to be relevant when a tragedy happens is to only write about the tragedy. Like John Hersey writing Hiroshima, or like you said, Picasso painting Guernica. There’s a great story where a former German officer was looking at Guernica on the wall and said to Picasso, “How did you do that?” Picasso said, “Actually, no, you did that.”

The thing that’s really important to remember is you don’t have to write directly about something to write about its emotional impact, because one of the things that writing does that’s so amazing, no matter how small or far off or idiosyncratic an idea is, or even a time zone is, or even a historical era is, if the stakes are real and the people’s feelings are real, anyone can relate to it.

You can write an episode of a sitcom in the wake of a tragedy, because every character in that sitcom wants something, has felt denied something, yearns for something, and has been disappointed about something. You can craft a story about the smallest thing, like not getting invited to the prom, but you can work in it all the ideas about yourself. I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough. If I were pretty enough, if God loved me, I’d go get a prom date. All the things that concern us about ourselves can be filtered through something as silly as a sitcom.

John: Let’s talk about writing as a therapeutic practice, because one of the things that writers have that is unique among some of the creative arts is that we don’t need anyone’s permission to do a thing. Even painters, their studio is burned down. Writers, we just need a piece of paper and we can write stuff. I guess there’s probably a double-edged sword there because because we need so little, there’s an expectation we should be able to get back to work quickly. We don’t need all this stuff around us. We don’t need these permission structures around us. What advice do you have for someone who is sitting down for the first time after a fire tragedy or loss of a loved one or some other profound loss in their life? How do you recommend they start, or do they just start and grapple with it as it comes?

Dennis: There’s no one-size-fits-all model for how you work with a patient. It would be dependent on what I know about the patient’s childhood, their core issues, their values, the kinds of themes they tend to write about. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest that someone write about how they’re feeling right now. Even if what they’re feeling right now is I don’t want to write my episode of this procedural or I don’t want to do this rewrite of this comedy film I’ve signed up to do, write about what you feel and how you don’t want to do it and what’s preventing you from doing it. And then I would probably look at what’s the meaning behind preventing it.

In other words, there are people who would feel, what business do I have of writing about the time my sister broke up with her boyfriend when people have lost their homes? Then I’d say, okay, now we’re talking about how relevant you are, how important what you do is. It’s crucial to remember too that like everyone, writers come from a family of origin that contributes to their mythology of how the world works.

I have a very famous director patient whose parents don’t have much regard for what he does. Now, he has a sibling who’s a union organizer and another sibling who’s a social worker. The parents who are good dyed-in-the-wool liberals think that those two siblings do something that’s important. And one of the things my patient struggles with and, in fact, feels as though his success mocks him is how relevant what he does is, how important what he does is.

If I don’t know that, having worked with him for a long time, if I don’t know that about his core issues, I’m not going to know how to talk to him about what is preventing him from going back to work, which may include the idea that if he were really moved by what was going on in the world or in the Palisades, for example, he wouldn’t be able to write. He wouldn’t be able to work.

One of the things that’s very important is, what’s our self-concept? What meaning do we give to the fact that we can’t work? What meaning do we give to the fact that contrary to what everyone seems to believe conventionally, we’re quite able to work? Does that mean we’re heartless or have no empathy? For some people, what it means is you’re escaping into the work. Doing the work saves your life.

In my experience, writers save their ass by writing. I don’t care if they’re going through a divorce or the loss of a family member or their house burning down. For most writers, the way they connect with themselves is to utilize and manifest their skill set. It’s like True North. If their needle isn’t pointing to True North, they get wiggy. That’s a clinical term. [chuckles] They get wiggy.

John: I want to segue from this incredibly local situation of the fires and the loss of what we see in front of us to something I’m feeling a little bit more personally, which is I feel like I’m grappling with this sense that I’m not sure that the world, as I understand it, is going to exist in two or three or five years. I just feel that it’s an acceleration of things. You touched on part of this, that sense that the administration is trying to rip apart the government, that we have the rise of very powerful AI without any guardrails around it, and the sense that this cold war we’re in with various nations could become hot.

Those are all anxieties I have that the stuff that I’m working on right now may not be relevant, and relevant is a loaded word, but it may just not make sense to do. I find myself in some cases racing to do certain things, like travel to certain places and the belief that it’s going to be harder to do so after, but also holding off on some projects that might take a little bit longer because I feel like, wait, is that even going to be meaningful when it comes out?

A concrete example would be Craig and I have the Scriptnotes book, which should be out at the end of the year. I feel really good about that. We’re going to get it done. I’m excited people have it in their hands. If I were starting a project right now and it was 2027 that was coming out, I would feel a little bit different about that because I just don’t have a clear vision in my head of what 2027 looks like. I see you nodding, so these are not new ideas to you, but how does one start to process that as a writer, as someone who’s trying to work on things that are going to take a while to do?

Dennis: Again, there’s not one way to look at this. My overall view is that art speaks to something when we are in existential angst. The science and reason and even the ability to prognosticate the future doesn’t. That’s the thing that’s so magical about art, is that it transcends what rational or cognitive thought has to say about the situation we’re in. Yes, the world seems incredibly unstable right now and quite dangerous. This is a terrible period to me. It feels like the industry seems like it’s gone sideways. AI scares the living hell out of me. The only thing good about being old is I missed AI as a writer.

I began writing before there were word processors and computers. I wrote the first draft of My Favorite Year on a Royal Portable typewriter, which I still have, by the way, and I had it oiled up and detailed and everything. I figure when the big, massive electromagnetic pulse happens and we all go back to the Stone Age, I’ll be the only guy that can type. That’s my theory.

Anyway, to deal with your question in somewhat more serious terms, I’m hearing this from a lot of patients. I don’t know what the world’s going to be like in two years or five years. I don’t know what my life is going to be like, what the industry is going to be like, what America is going to be like, how it’s going to feel. It’s very frightening for a lot of my patients who found themselves in the Midwest over the holidays and seeing nothing but Trump signs and MAGA hats and feeling literally like they were in a different world. They literally felt like, boy, do I not belong here?

That feeling is encroaching on a lot of people with sensitivity right now. It’s very, very tempting to become overly pessimistic and go, everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, so what I do doesn’t matter. I would flip it on its head. I would say, because you feel everything’s going to hell in a handbasket, it’s never been more important to do what you do. In my article, in my column that you referred to, I talk about two films that speak to that.

One is Sullivan’s Travels, the Preston Sturges film, about a director, filmmaker, a comedy filmmaker who thinks that what he’s doing is irrelevant given the troubles people are going through. He learns throughout the film that his work provides solace and relatability to people. Even at a further end, in Woody Allen’s Stardust, when he’s speaking to some aliens who have come down from outer space and he says, “What can I do to make things better?” and they say, “Write funnier jokes.”

Even though that’s a joke in and of itself, I think the intent’s very serious under there. The role of art is to transcend and help us cope with stuff that reason and science and logic cannot contain, it cannot contend with. I defy anyone to look around the world right now and go, well, through reason, I can contend with what’s happening and feel reasonably certain about what the next five years is going to be like.

John: You can’t even trust the ground underneath your feet. It does feel like everything is just shifting very, very quickly. But your point, which Craig often will get back to as I spin into my, not quite apocalyptic nihilism, but approaching it is, well, our job is to entertain. Our job is to, our function, and this is obviously each individual writer’s going to have their own sense of what our purpose is, but our job is to provide that storytelling, to provide that sense of reflecting the moment that we’re in, but also carrying people outside of that moment that we’re in. That’s really what our function is.

Dennis: I agree with that. See, where I would differ slightly is I don’t think of entertainment as outside of relevance. I think there’s value in any kind of creative entertainment that you do because it’s an expression of what’s in your mind and heart. An expression of what’s in your mind and heart, no matter how silly or outrageous it is, is relevant to others who can have us. You don’t have to have been Rocky Balboa to know what Rocky wanted in that boxing match. He wanted to be taken seriously, to felt like he wasn’t a bum. We all understand that.

You didn’t have to have been raised in poverty to understand what Frank McCourt was writing about in Angela’s Ashes. We all know what it’s like to feel like we’re trying to reach beyond what people think is capable for us. Look at Neil Simon. Everybody says, wow, I really love his plays that were so serious toward the end of his writing career and how relatable they were. I think Come Blow Your Horn and The Odd Couple is relatable because it’s about intimacy. It’s about human connection. If anything is important when times feel crazy, it’s anything that supports the human connection.

John: I wanted to emphasize that, because I think a natural tendency towards when you see things all going crazy is to pull back, is to retreat. I think we also, because we went through the pandemic together, which is also a shared PTSD, which was a function of retreating and pulling back, that there’s a default posture of that, which is just, okay, I’m just going to get in my little bubble and protect myself and protect myself around you.

That’s not generally the right instinct. The instinct is to reach out and to find connection with others and making art, sharing art, being part of a writer’s group, getting a chance to actually show what you’re doing and pull that feeling back in is probably what gets you through it. It also creates meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless or where meaning is harder to find.

Dennis: Psychiatrist Rollo May wrote a book called The Courage to Create, and it’s the same as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The goal for a human being, I think, is to be authentic. Then out of that authenticity, where do they find meaning? There are people who find meaning in animal rescue or in working for Greenpeace, but there are also people who find meaning in writing a 700-page book about their family history. All of it is okay, because art pushes against existential angst.

Imagine going through the pandemic, going through the fires, going through Gaza, going through the Holocaust, going through the Black Plague, going through the Dark Ages. Humanity has managed to get through all of these things by somehow finding a mode of expression for what’s in his or her mind and heart. That’s the courage to create, and just like anyone else, my instinct is to never read a headline anymore. I don’t want to hear– I can’t listen to him actually speak and I can’t look at him. It’s tough to know what’s going on at the White House if those are your rules. I’ll skim a headline just in case there’s an alien invasion or something. But I’m going on a news diet.

Another part of me thinks, well, what are you doing? You copping out? Shouldn’t you be involved? There’s a real dichotomy there. I think for a writer, unlike other people, by writing about a narrative that’s going on in our head, we are involved because that narrative is infused with the context we’re in.

I could argue that reality is only subjectivity in a context. I would say, John, your reality is your subjectivity in the context of what’s going on in the world right now. Whether you write a joke or whether you write a horror movie, if it’s coming out of where your subjectivity is in the context of the world we’re in now, it’s legitimate and authentic. And given how much bullshit there is in the world and how little authenticity we find, whether online or in politics, every authentic expression of your inner world is a candle against the darkness. It really is.

John: We speak of authenticity in a time where the question of whether a work of something that looks like a work of art or a piece of writing was written by a human being or an AI is also relevant. The fact that you did this thing yourself lets you know that you did this thing yourself and you have the skills to put this thing down and you had an original idea and you created an expression of that original idea and you can share it. You can actually have it resonate with other human minds that are out there.

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

Dennis: Yes, my feeling is why give the world more impact on you than it needs to have? If you don’t create because you’re battered by what’s going on in the world, you’ve allowed the world to take away your skill set, which is the thing that is so important to your self-concept. It really is.

John: Great. We have two questions from our listeners, I think, were perfectly suited to your skill set. Drew, do you want to start us off with Shiloh’s?

Drew: Shiloh writes, “Pixar movies have some of the cleanest and densest storytelling in the business, but I’ve heard of the Pixar Brain Trust and I find it disheartening. If it takes 15 of some of the most creative people in the business five years to make a brilliant Pixar film, that’s about 75 years of brainpower being directed into one story. How can one screenwriter writing specs ever hope to compete against that? Is it achievable to write something of Pixar quality by yourself? Because I don’t have 75 years.”

Dennis: [laughs] That’s a great question.

John: That’s a great question.

Dennis: I’ve never heard that question asked like that before.

John: I hear little bits in there that I think do speak to things we talked about in episode 99 and also in this conversation, that sense of like– It’s almost an imposter syndrome. “I couldn’t hope to compete with that.” Also, the idea of competition is a thread we can pull on as well.

Listen, Pixar has a bunch of really smart people who look through all their stuff and critique it and make it work, but so do all other filmmakers you’ve ever encountered. They have selected groups of people who they trust to help them figure out how to do a certain thing.

The good news is, Shiloh, you don’t have to make a Pixar movie. You don’t make a Pixar movie. Make your own movie, and it doesn’t have to be done in a Pixar-y way. This is me as an amateur speaking. Dennis, dig in. How do you help Shiloh process that?

Dennis: First of all, I haven’t heard it quite put like that. Funnily enough, of course, I’ve had a number of writers who’ve worked for Pixar and it’s like the Bataan Death March. It’s not a great experience.

John: Yes. Let’s make sure that Shiloh hears this, because I, too, know folks who’ve worked up there and some had good experiences, but some also felt like, oh, my God, I spent four months and we worked on like two paragraphs, and it doesn’t feel like it’s my thing at all.

Dennis: See, I used to work in sitcoms. My first years in show business were sitcoms and we had writers rooms with– it’s not like it is today. We had 10 or 11 funny people in a room so that by the time the script came out and you were about to shoot it on Tuesday, I didn’t know who wrote what joke. One thing I knew for sure is the script wouldn’t have been as funny if it had just been me, because that gang-writing of a comedy really helps make it funnier.

Now, if that’s your only goal, that’s fine. But one of the reasons Neil Simon left your show of shows and began writing plays is because he lost his own voice in the writers’ room, which is the reason I started writing prose, because I began to think I’m not a writer, I’m a funny talker. Yes, you can group-write something and over five years distill it down into something as good as Inside Out. I agree. Or Finding Nemo. I agree. But each of those people involved brought their own sensibilities in it. The Brain Trust up there put it through the sieve and took the best from column A and the best from column B.

That’s not how individual writers work. It’s not your job to compete with anyone. See, even if you– God, I always remember one of my patients who won an Oscar for best screenplay. He brought his Oscar in and I said, “Congratulations.” He said, “Thanks, but I’m no Billy Wilder.” What I didn’t tell him is that in an interview where people were praising Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder said, “Thanks, but I’m no Ernst Lubitsch.” It’s like Hemingway said. “Boys, Shakespeare got there first and better, so relax and start writing.”

These kinds of questions, I think, speak to issues of meaning where you’re competing to prove that it is worth it for you to pursue your goals unless in your mind you see it as equal to the material that has inspired you, you’re not entitled to do it. I see this in my practice all the time, this lack of entitlement. The feeling that, well, the thing that got me to be a filmmaker was Citizen Kane or the thing that got me to be a TV writer was The Sopranos, but I can’t do something like that. Those jobs have been taken.

John: Yes, no one’s trying to do Citizen Kane 2. They were trying to do new things that are relevant to 2025.

Dennis: That’s exactly right. That’s why you should never follow trends, because by the time you think you’re following one, it’s no longer a trend. More importantly, some idiosyncratic approach was the beginning of that trend.

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

Drew: Ethel writes, “I was recently approached by a major publication that wanted to interview me about my experience working with someone embroiled in a controversy, and my reps have advised me not to touch it with a 10-foot pole. They say nothing good can come of it, and it’s a lose-lose to speak up, even if it’s only about my own personal good experiences with someone I deeply care about. It’s just business, they say, but is that an excuse not to speak up for a friend?”

John: All right. Grappling with the ethical concerns of like, I want to speak up for my friend. Would it be helpful to speak up for my friend? I don’t want to get embroiled in that controversy. I’ve been there. I understand this. Actually, I very much understand the rep’s point of view of like, no good will come from this. Dennis, I see you nodding here. What’s your insight?

Dennis: I’ve been in this position too because in my 17 years of show business, I knew a lot of people. I worked with a lot of very famous people, and I’ve been approached by people who are writing unauthorized biographies or writing profiles and stuff. My position is always that I will not comment. It’s because I never know how it’s going to be taken out of context or whatever, how it will be used by the writer or the editor. We don’t know if it’s a hatchet job or not. The thing is, we just don’t know.

I think you’d do your friend a disservice even if you say, “I think he’s the most wonderful guy I’ve ever worked with.” Then the writer puts underneath, “Well, that’s the only guy I found that felt that way. Everyone else said he was a son of a bitch.” You actually don’t help your friend by saying, “Well, my personal experience was he was great.” You’ll find someone who thought they had a great experience of Harvey Weinstein. You’ll find someone who thought they had a warm encounter with Bill Cosby. In fact, I know someone who did.

See, if you say, “Yes, well, I don’t know. I thought Bill seemed like a great guy,” you look like a moron because you’re not aware of the totality of the context. Because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity — I know I sound like a therapist, but I can’t help it — because we don’t control the context outside of our own subjectivity and our own intent. It’s usually not a good idea, I think, unless you’re willing to go do it off the record or anonymously. I have a number of patients who’ve said a lot of outrageous things and were just called an unidentified source. My experience is it gets back to who they are sooner or later.

John: Going back to Ethel, I don’t know whether Ethel is still in touch with this person who is famous, who’s embroiled in a controversy. If Ethel wants to be there for that person, for that friend, be there directly for that person and for that friend. That’s reaching out to them and say like, “Listen, I’m here for you. What you’re going through feels like it really sucks.” Let me be helpful to that person. You’re not going to help them by publicly speaking out on something because what Dennis said is exactly right. Outside of the context of you just don’t know how it’s going to play.

Dennis: Yes, you’re much better off to personally just say, “Let’s go have a cup of coffee. You can cry on my shoulder. I think these guys are pricks, but you’ll get through this,” and stay with them as a friend.

John: There are situations where you’re dive-bombed, like you are doing press for something else and they start to ask you a question about that. Just be ready for it and be ready to, you don’t say no comment, which is a sort of a Succession joke I think they had in there, don’t say no comment. No comment is not the thing you want to say. It’s just like, that’s where a publicist or somebody else can help guide, like that’s not what I’m here to talk about today, and you can move on from that.

Dennis: Yes, I agree. I do think sometimes with a little bit of due diligence and thought, you can prepare for certain questions in case they come up. One of the things that was so disheartening for me in Kamala Harris’s campaign was when I think she was on The View and somebody said, “Is there any difference between you and Joe Biden?” and she can’t think of anything.

I thought, her whole team never thought to prepare her for that question? I could have prepared her for that question. Anyway. I think if you’re going to comment to any reporter or journalist or TV reporter about a certain subject that’s embroiled in controversy, at least do some due diligence as to kind of questions they’re going to ask and how you’re prepared to answer them. I wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t do it.

John: All right. It’s come time for our one cool things. Dennis Palumbo, do you have a one cool thing that you can share with our listeners?

Dennis: Yes, I want to share a book that I read and I absolutely love. It’s by Sarah Bakewell and it’s called At the Existentialist Café. Now, I don’t know if your listeners are interested in existentialism, but the subtitle is Freedom Being & Apricot Cocktails. It’s the private lives of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Camus. It’s delightful and funny and talks about where existentialism came from and the lives of the people who pushed it without living it. [laughs] It’s a wonderful, warm, funny, but very intelligent overview of that post-war time in Paris where all these existentialists came from.

When you read it, one of the things you’re really struck by is the impact and influence, particularly if you’re a writer, that this train of thought has on modern writing. The perspective, the cynicism, the valueless aspect, the sense that things are absurd has seeped into especially all of our premium stuff, all of our top tier stuff.

When you read it, one of the things you’re struck by is, oh my God, some of the material and themes and viewpoints of these authors from the late ‘40s and ‘50s has filtered into not only our literature, but our film and television, our comedy, particularly, our satire, particularly. I could make an argument that most of our best stand-up comics nowadays, male and female, are existentialists. I could make that argument, but I wouldn’t take your listeners’ time to do it, but I could make that argument. So I recommend At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell.

John: I shall purchase it today. My one cool thing is River Runner Global, which is a website that I found this week. The idea behind it is it’s showing you a map of the world, a detailed map of the world. You can zoom in to incredibly close things. I was able to find my house that I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Once you zoom to whatever level you want to get to, you can place a single raindrop. Then we’ll take wherever that raindrop falls and we’ll figure out, based on geological data, where that raindrop is going to go. It’s going to show you from what’s going from this into this creek, into this river, into this, and how it’s making its way to whatever ocean it ends up at.

It is a fun way to waste some time and also just sort of zen out and figure out like, okay, where does this all go? It not only shows you the path, but it literally shows you the point of view of this raindrop entering all the different rivers as it’s going its way to the coast. It’s just a good reminder of like, there’s a giant physical world out there that’s going to exist no matter what. I always find that in times of uncertainty, the recognition that the natural world will continue on without us is somehow reassuring, that it’s beyond all the craziness of the day. This is a version of that that’s just on your screen and gives you a sense of like, oh, that’s right, the world is huge.

Dennis: Yes, it reminds me of the thing the Buddhists say, a tree has more to teach us than a zen master.

John: You have taught us a tremendous amount today, Dennis Palumbo. Thank you so much for coming back on. I can’t believe it’s been all these years. We get to repeat your episodes, so we get to you more often, which is nice. This was a really great conversation. Thank you so much.

Dennis: Oh, John, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me back.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. To get an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place 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 Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber or attached to this episode.

Thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes like episode 99 with Dennis Palumbo, one of our most requested episodes, and our bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on how psychotherapists are portrayed on screen. Dennis, thank you again very much for being on the show, and we’ll talk to you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we are back. We’ve had other specialists come on the show to talk through about how we are portraying different professions on screen. Ken White was on to talk through about lawyers and the legal system and how it’s portrayed on screen and what’s the actual reality behind that. Therapists are often characters that we’re seeing on screen. As a therapist yourself, give us a report card. How often are you seeing therapy portrayed accurately and the role of a therapist being portrayed accurately? What are some things that stand out as like, oh, that’s a good example, or, oh no, this would never ever happen?

Dennis: That’s a very broad question and I do have a lot of opinions about it. I’m glad you asked me. [laughs] As some of your listeners may know, I was a consulting producer on the recent Hulu show, The Patient, which was about a serial killer who kidnaps a therapist in the hopes the therapist will use therapy to talk him out of his homicidal rages. The two creators of the show, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, who created The Americans, one of my absolute favorite TV shows, reached out to me and said, we want to know what a therapist sounds like. Are we anywhere in the ballpark of what he would talk like?

It got me thinking about how therapists are portrayed on screen. Probably my favorite depiction of a therapist on screen is Gabriel Byrne in HBO’s series, In Treatment. That was the most accurate representation of how gloomy, pessimistic, humanistic, and struggling against his own doubts the therapist is. I thought he did a great job. Where I have a concern is in most procedurals, whenever they have a psychiatrist or psychologist character, and this is when they’re not a predator or a serial killer, which they are– hell, every other dick will kill.

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

Dennis: Yes, the villain is a shrink. When they’re supposedly a “good guy,” they have a tendency to rattle off diagnoses about the personality and the mental status of a person they’ve never met, and it’s very clear-eyed. It’s like a list of diagnostic categories and symptoms right out of the diagnostic manual. On a typical procedural, they’ll go, well, this guy’s leaving baby dolls with knives stabbed into his eyes. They go, “Well, obviously he hates his mother. What we have to do is go back to his hometown…” It’s obviously nothing. Humans are too unique.

One of my favorite real-life examples of this is the DC sniper, where every FBI profiler said it was an unemployed White man in his early 30s. It turned out to be an older Black man and his nephew. No profiler in the FBI was even in the ballpark of that. Which is not to say profiling isn’t a valid thing. It’s a very valid thing. You want to be careful when a therapist on screen. Do they know more than they should? How certain?
One of the guys who walked that line pretty well was J.K. Simmons on Law & Order as Emil Skoda, the psychiatrist they used. He was fairly forthright. He would say like, “The guy’s a sociopath,” or whatever, but then he’d go, “Well, what do I know?” Often he would say something like, “Well, that could be true, but on the other hand, it couldn’t.” Sam Waterston or someone would go, “Ain’t science wonderful?”

We want our therapists to know. It’s part of the transference we do. There’s a powerful parental transference that viewers have on lead characters in TV shows, particularly therapists. We want them to be right and we want them to know. Now, way on the other side of that continuum is Hannibal Lecter, Donald Trump’s favorite guy. Everybody was so upset that here he was, Hannibal Lecter, a guy who ate people. I don’t think it’s the fact that he ate people that made him so horrible. I think it was the fact he was a psychiatrist and he was a good one.

What’s interesting is that he is the classic manifestation or avatar of a psychiatrist gone bad. The metaphor that he represents is he eats you. It’s that fantasy people have about therapists that they take your soul, they take your feelings, they open you up and look inside. Hannibal Lecter literally opens you up and eats what’s inside, eats your heart. I think he is the classic manifestation of what we fear in clinical workers.

Now, if you want to go back to a wonderful one, in my mind, you have to go back all the way to the Bette Davis movie, Now Voyager, where Claude Rains plays a really warm, thoughtful psychiatrist as opposed to I want to say Claude Akins, but that’s wrong. The actor who plays the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, who neatly wraps up everything having to do with why Tony Perkins was the way he was. No real legitimate clinician speaks with that kind of certainty.

John: I think one of the reasons why therapists and psychiatrists on screen are so compelling and so fascinating for writers is because it’s just a conversation. A lot of the work inside that room is a conversation. A question I have for you is that as writers, we are thinking through our dialogue and we’re thinking through we want both characters to be listening. Yet as a therapist, you’re listening, but you’re also trying to direct the conversation. You’re trying to help a person achieve an insight. This is a weird question to ask, but how far ahead are you of the patient generally? How much are you leading versus listening? What is the balance there? Do you see that portrayed accurately on screen? Because I feel like a lot of the psychiatrists I see or therapists I see on screen have this brilliant insight and are like 19 steps ahead of their patients.

Dennis: Yes. That’s not how most of it– That’s not how it should work and how it isn’t really good clinical work. I think of good clinical work as shuttling over between your own subjectivity and what you’re picking up from the other person, what they’re saying, which then triggers the next thought of yours. It’s a bidirectional encounter. You and your patient are co-creating the session. That’s why when I say, oh, there’s not– when someone says, what do you do about a guy who can’t sleep? There’s no one-size-fits-all model. Give me the clinician. Give me the guy that can’t sleep and let them interact with each other and learn from each other what the therapy is.

To me, it’s a little bit like writing because I think writing is bidirectional. The moment you write a sentence, you’re simultaneously the reader of that sentence, which makes you go, “No, that sentence isn’t right. I want to do something else.” You and your writing are co-creating the text, kind of. I think that’s the way good therapy works. There’s a shuttling back and forth. It’s very similar to what Martin Buber, the philosopher, calls I and thou. A really good therapist is engaged in I and thou. The only thing therapist has is the tools to see where they might be going. Not to direct it, but the tools to recognize where they might be going.

John: Yes. I do feel like sometimes my function on the podcast is that, where I’m trying to be simultaneously in the conversation, but also be thinking down the road where it is that we’re trying to go. Over the course of 12 years doing this podcast, I hopefully have gotten better at being able to do that and understand. The other metaphors that may be relevant here is like it is a bit of improv where you’re trusting that you are the partner there and you’re picking up each other’s cues to create something that neither person could do alone. You as the therapist could not read someone’s whole writing. They couldn’t write a whole thing and give it to you and tell me, help me out here. You need to have a conversation. There needs to be a back and forth.

Dennis: Absolutely. Also, I think one of the things a therapist does is he or she models congruent behavior. If somebody tells a sad story, I’ll find myself tearing up because it’s impacted me. Then if the patient reacts, I’ll go, what’s it like for you to see how much that impacted me? We follow what happens, and you get a range of answers. Some people go, “It weirds me out.” Other people might say something like, “Well, you’d be made a stone if that didn’t make you sad.” You learn each other, and mostly you learn what the therapy needs. Just like you learn what a script needs by writing it.

John: Generally on film, we want to see characters in a room together doing stuff because it’s more interesting. Starting with the pandemic and I think beyond the pandemic, a lot more therapies move to Zoom or online. What is the difference there and what has been your experience working with patients online versus in person? How does that translate on screen?

Dennis: I have mixed feelings because I do a lot of therapy on screen. I have patients all over the world. I have patients in London and Prague and Budapest and South Africa, all over the place. I do it all on Zoom or Skype. I prefer in person only because I like that shared space, that intimacy of the shared space. I also find that you’re able to lapse into silence a little more easily if you’re in the room with a person. You can just let a feeling lie. I think the part of us that are social beings, sometimes I find my patients feel a need to keep presenting something because they’re on a screen.

John: Yes, I get that.

Dennis: It’s not a performance, but it’s a sense of obligation to keep feeding this. I have many sessions where we just both go silent for a minute and it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s moving and it’s human. I miss that part when I work on Zoom. It’s the future and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to be replaced by AI. Not too many years after I retire, there’ll be an AI version of me.

John: We’ll hope to get you back on before that happens. Dennis Palumbo, an absolute pleasure talking with you about– I’m gesturing with my hand to indicate all the world around me. Thank you very much for coming back on the show. This will be another episode I think we’re going to be re-airing frequently.

Dennis: Okay, well, thank you so much again for having me, John.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• “Am I Just Fiddling While Rome Burns?” by Dennis Palumbo for Psychiatric Times
• Scriptnotes 99 – Psychotherapy for Screenwriters
• ShotDeck
• River Runner Global
• At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, 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.

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

Today on the show, let’s get back to basics. Structure, Craig. What is it? Why do writers keep freaking out about it when it’s a fundamental part of storytelling going all the way back to caveman days?

Craig: I think why do writers keep freaking out about it is a perfectly good place where we should start once we get there.

John: Then how do you enjoy a movie? We’ll teach you how not to be so meh about the things you’re watching.

Craig: [chuckles] Be born before 2000.

John: Plus, we’ll answer some listener questions because it’s been a minute. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about the wearables, the devices we wear to track what’s happening in our bodies.

Craig: Fantastic. Let’s do it.

John: First, some news. We had Oscar nominations this morning as we’re recording. We’re recording this on Thursday.

Craig: Yes.

John: As always, I’m so happy for the people who got nominated. I am bummed for the people who didn’t. And it’s all going to be okay.

Craig: Everything will be absolutely okay. Even being considered for something like that is extraordinary. I assume everybody going into that has grown up enough to know that sometimes weird stuff happens. Somehow Conclave got nominated for best picture and best actor, but not best director.

John: Yes, there’s a couple of those.

Craig: Wasn’t quite sure about that one.

John: Wicked also.

Craig: Wicked, best picture but not best screenplay?

John: Yes.

Craig: All right. Not fair to our friend, Dana Fox. There are these strange things that happen but it’s all priced in. At the end of the day, while it is nice to have a trophy, this is all part of advertising. For those folks who did get nominations, I think it’s really exciting that their movies will get more marketing money so more people can see them, particularly for the little ones.

John: But also congratulations, now you get to do six more weeks of work promoting this thing.

Craig: It is a full-time job.

John: You don’t get paid for it.

Craig: No.

John: Drew, tell us about Weekend Read because I think you have all of these scripts in Weekend Read right now.

Drew Marquardt: Every single nominated screenplay we’ve got up from Weekend Read. Should I run down the list?

John: Go for it.

Craig: Yes, please.

Drew: We have A Complete Unknown, A Real Pain, Anora, Conclave, Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, which is a really fun read, September 5, Sing Sing, The Brutalist, and The Substance. They’re all in the “And the nominees are…” category and you can read them there.

Craig: That’s great. It used to be five things, right?

John: Yes. Now that we have both adapted and original screenplay.

Craig: Oh, I see. There are 10 best.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m in the Academy. I should know this, right? I vote very quickly. I shouldn’t say that. I vote studiously.

John: I do too.

Craig: But I clearly don’t pay attention to how many people are in the category and I’m voting. There are 10 best pictures, but then everybody else is five. Is that right?

John: That’s correct. Every other category is five. Drew has gone through each of these scripts to make sure they actually work properly in Weekend Read. So I would just say, rather than doomscrolling on your phone, why don’t you scroll through a script and actually read something and read something good?

Craig: Anything is better than doomscrolling, anything.

John: Now, Craig, I know you took a mandate to consume less news and you’re off all the social media. How is that going for you?

Craig: Amazingly well.

John: That’s good.

Craig: I am aware of what is going on in the world. I get my news through the old-fashioned method, which is to pick a couple of periodicals that I find at least thoughtful and look at their curated reportage of what happened the day before. Not what happened 10 minutes ago and with some breath so that there can be some thoughtful analysis and context. That’s it. I do not get my news from the fire hose of insanity and I don’t watch anything with anyone talking. That’s the key. [chuckles] I do not watch talking heads. I do not look at tweets. I do not look at Instathoughts and it is spectacular.

John: During the height of the fires, I was reminded of how useful it is to have local news. It was one of those rare situations where I turned on the TV and actually watched local news as fires were happening. It was useful to see like, “Oh, my gosh, the fires are getting close here. We actually need to start packing up.” I was so grateful to have that as a service, but I do not want that in my veins all the time. I grew up in a household where the TV news was on at least four hours a day, local news and national news. It’s not helpful.

Craig: Local news, in particular, and this is no slight against them, the work that they do when something like the fires happen is extraordinary and people put their lives at risk and they’re flying around the helicopters. But for the most part, they don’t have either enough things to report that they think anyone will watch or they only have lurid things that aren’t worth reporting that they know people will watch. You get a lot of, there was an accident here and there was a shooting and there was a stabbing.

What you don’t get are, say, this bill was deliberated. All the sudden frenzy over why were tanks empty? What was going on with the firefighters? Why didn’t the pumps work? That’s been being discussed for years and the local news reported on 0% of it. It’s not a great thing to have on all day unless there’s something serious happening.

John: Indeed.

Craig: Like a car chase.

John: Like a car chase, yes.

Craig: Yes.

Craig: All right, let’s do some follow-up because it’s been a while since you and I’ve been here in person to do some follow-up on previous episodes. Drew, take us back to 671. We had a How to view a Movie about an IVF mix-up.

Drew: Several people wrote in that there were already movies out there with a similar premise. Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. There’s a Danish movie called Maybe Baby. There’s an Indian comedy called Good News and a Mexican sitcom called Daughter from Another Mother.

Craig: Looks like they’ve covered this one, John.

John: They have covered it. Internationally it’s been well covered.

Craig: Everyone all across the world enjoys this story.

John: Also, we talked in that same episode about a Unabomber movie and several people wrote in to say there’s a series called Manhunt about Ted Kaczynski starring Paul Bettany and Sam Worthington.

Craig: Okay.

John: Sure.

Craig: Done.

John: Done.

Drew: We’ll put links in the show notes for all those.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We also had some follow-up on way back to episode 454. We were talking about erotic fiction.

Craig: That was a long time ago.

John: Yes.

Drew: Jenny in New York City writes, I was listening to that bonus segment of episode 454 where you and Craig discuss but disappointingly do not read erotic fiction. In it, you bring up Fifty Shades of Grey as the prime example of fan fiction that managed to cross over into popular culture. Craig says that Fifty Shades of Grey seemed like it was heralding the beginning of something and that he’s surprised that nothing similar followed it. Four-plus years later, we’re seeing the floodgates open. There’s a through line from fan fiction to TikTok or BookTok to the traditional book publishing industry.

A well-known example is The Love Hypothesis, which was originally a Rey and Kylo Ren, or Reylo, fan fiction published online in 2018 and then scrubbed of all the Star Wars references and traditionally published in 2021. A film adaptation is now in development. There are also three Draco and Hermione, or Dramione, fan fictions all slated for major publication in 2025.

Craig: Okay. Wait, but also scrubbed of any–

John: Yes. That’s the thing. Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, was fan fiction that was scrubbed.

Craig: Scrubbed from Twilight.

John: Yes.

Craig: Right.

John: We were correct but just ahead of the curve.

Craig: We were ahead of the curve.

John: Now, BookTok caught up with what we predicted four years ago.

Craig: Yay, erotic fiction.

John: Yes.

Craig: Is there anything less sexy than the phrase erotic fiction?

John: Yes, it’s a —

Craig: Boner killer.

John: It’s not so good.

Craig: No.

John: I’m going to be optimistic. I’m going to be positive. This is a movie that we didn’t have in theaters before. The same thing with Fifty Shades of Grey. We weren’t having sexual thrillers on the big screen and hooray.

Craig: Not since the ‘90s.

John: Yes.

Craig: There has been a lot of discussion about millennials and Gen Z’s general lack of interest in seeing sex portrayed on screen. I think we’ve talked about it before, possibly because if they want to watch sex on screen, they watch people having sex. They don’t need it or want it in their traditional narrative. But it is part of our life and it’s very much a part of how we relate to each other on very deep levels. It screws things up. It makes things better. It makes things worse. It creates all the people around us and at least most of them. Let’s bring it on.

Also, it is interesting that so much of fan fiction turns toward the erotic. All the way back to– You’ve heard the phrase slash fiction?

John: Of course. Yes, Kirk/Spock.

Craig: Exactly. It began with people writing erotic fiction about Star Trek and specifically like Kirk has sex with Spock or Kirk has sex with McCoy or McCoy has sex with Scotty, whatever it is. It’s not like the stuff that happens now is only because of that. I think it’s always been that impulse is there’s a fandom and they want to write sexy versions of the characters.

John: They do. Also, they’re pining for something that they cannot get in the mainstream version of it.

Craig: Oh, that’s an interesting point.

John: I think the reason why slash fiction is it’s an attempt to take these characters out of their normal molds and use them how they want to use them. There are, obviously, queer writers were behind part of it, but also women, basically. It’s a way of taking control of these male characters and using them how they wish they could be seen.

Craig: Also, if you love those stories, you make a great point. You’re never going to get sex in a Harry Potter film. Of course, you have to wait until they’re old enough, right? Their senior year, you’re still not going to get sex. It’s not how it works. There’s a unsatisfied desire for a certain version of that relationship. That makes total sense.

John: All right. Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is actually prompted by another listener question. This one from Christine. Drew, help us out.

Drew: She says, in episode 662, which was the 20 questions, Craig responded to a listener saying something like, there’s a lot of people who can write glittering dialogue but so few who can use structure well. It had my husband and I fist-pumping. We agree. I certainly can’t do it well. Sometimes it feels like perfect pitch. Either you have it or you don’t. Craig and John, would you talk to us about examples of how you used or struggled with structure in some of your own work?

John: Great, happy to. I think first we should just talk about structure and what we even mean by structure because it’s one of those terms that I think is used as a cudgel against newer writers. Once you actually think about what it really is, it’s, of course, fundamental to every story you’ve ever heard.

Craig: It is story. It’s a fancy word for saying, this is what happens, this is who it happens to, and this is why. That is what stories are. People get excited about the clothing that we put on that stuff because that’s what hits their eyeballs and ears first. What do they look like? What are they saying? The saying, in particular, gets overemphasized. But how do you tell a good story?

Everybody who grows up in any family that’s even moderately sized or even if you just see your extended family at Christmas, doesn’t matter, everybody knows that there’s somebody that’s going to sit around and tell a story that is so boring and bad. But you also know there’s somebody who’s great at it. When that one starts telling a story, everybody leans forward because they know how to do it, how you begin, how you middle, how you end, what’s the point, how it all comes around and coheres together. Poetics by Aristotle.

John: I was a journalism major, and so in journalism, you’re taught to answer the basic questions, who, what, where, when, why, and then how. Structure’s really– John’s talking about the when. It’s like, when do events happen? What is the order of those events? When does the audience learn something? Those are all fundamental parts of storytelling. When you have somebody at a family gathering who is just awful at it and boring, it’s like you did not plan the details and how you’re going to lay out the story and the storytelling in a way that was actually interesting and intriguing.

You’re starting way too early, you’re going way too long. There’s just no clear structure to the story. We know we’re trapped in this endless middle of things. When something is well-structured, you feel beginnings and endings, you feel the closure of moments, you feel that there’s just– There’s a rhythm to it. You’ve recognized what the audience needs and where they’re at and how to move forward. That’s what structure is. What it’s not is some cookie-cutter template. It’s not like, “Oh, here are the magic clothespins which you’re going to hang all your things on. It’s not a thing you impose upon a story. It is the skeleton that’s holding the whole story up.

Craig: I think when you said recognize, that’s where the talent is. Because I don’t know how to teach somebody to recognize something. It might be instructive for people at home to think about Boring Uncle Ron and how Boring Uncle Ron does tell stories because at least you can say, “I recognize why that story stinks.” For instance, he looped back around. He told me something that should have been told earlier. I can’t explain why, except I wish he had mentioned that earlier. It screws up the context.

There was no suspense. He told me what was going to happen before it happened. He just casually said something that he should have milked and understood that I would have found meaningful. There are parts where there are too many details. There are parts where there are no details at all. It doesn’t end. He’s not sure how to end it. It doesn’t have a point. If it doesn’t have a point, it wasn’t the point that the beginning was getting at. There’s no revelation, no purpose, and it is episodic. This, and this, and this, and this. A boring Uncle Ron may be able to teach people more about structure than we think.

John: The other thing that’s important to recognize is that structure is all around you. You just may not be seeing it as structure. Every song you’ve ever heard has structure. There are verses and choruses and hooks and it has bridges. There’s a pattern that fits your brain well. Because there are things like verses and choruses, you can break from them and that surprise us, which is great.

There’s still a sense of what those things are. The equivalents for those are scenes and sequences in movies and TV shows. It’s why learning to write the four-act or five-act structure of a classic one-hour TV show is really, really useful. Even if those commercial breaks are taken out, there’s still a sense of like, “I know where we’re at in this show.” There’s a flow to it.

Craig: There’s a rhythm. It’s a little bit like having a conversation with yourself. One of you is going to tell a story and the other part of you is going to be listening to the story. Part of structure is saying, how does hearing this for the first time me like that? Did I like that? Did that make me happy? Did it bore me? Does it seem clunky? You need to have a relationship with an audience even when there is none because we are performing a service.

Nobody other than Kafka, theoretically, who tried to burn everything he wrote, is just writing to be not read or filming to not be seen and so forth. You have to let the audience in.

You don’t need to let them all in. Your audience can just be you and what you like. You then need to be responsive to yourself and go, “No.” Even though I just came up with that, even though that was my idea of what should happen now and why, the me that’s listening, unimpressed.

John: Let’s talk through our assumptions about the very fundamental structure of a movie or a pilot, the things that are introducing a character for the first time and introducing what it is that they’re trying to do. Early in the story, near the very start, we need to have a sense of who the character is, what they want, what the world is like, what the obstacles in the way that are going to be there, who else is important.
Those are fundamental things. The fundamental choices you’re going to be making, even if you don’t think about it, you’re making those choices by which order you’re putting those scenes in and how you’re telling the audience about those things.

As they’re going off and doing some things, what is the sequence of events that’s happening? What are the choices that they’re making? Where are they going? What are the obstacles along the way? When you see somebody criticize the script for being, “I think you have some structure issues here,” it’s what they’re really saying is like, “I got lost. I got lost in where we’re at, what I should have been focusing on.

The characters might have great dialogue. It might be really enjoyable to have watched them do their thing, but I didn’t feel any momentum. I didn’t feel like there was anything going there. I didn’t know what to even look for in terms of what’s going to happen at the end. What am I even expecting to happen down the road.”

Craig: Oftentimes there’s a lack of intention and we interpret that as a structure problem. Every time, you’re right. When people say there’s a structure problem, they’re trying to say there’s a problem of some other kind. You just don’t know what the word is. Sometimes it’s as if you’re watching a conductor who doesn’t have a sense of how to alter tempo, create anticipation, where to use silence, as opposed to sound. There’s no shape.

John: Yes, there’s no shape.

Craig: There’s no shape. It’s just there and it’s not picking you up and then throwing you down. It’s not putting its hands over your eyes and then revealing something new. These things get shuffled out as structure problems, which for writers can be very frustrating early on because you immediately then go running to some structure book. The structure books are not going to help you. You do need, I think, to think a little bit how to write a movie. A lot of structure is about the main character and how they change. The story is revolving around that. It’s the nucleus and everything’s revolving around that. That creates a sense of intention and purpose, which in theory, will imbue this story with structure.

John: Going back to Christine’s question, when you talk about examples of how you use or struggle with structure in some of your own work. Looking back at the movies I’ve written, by far the most complicated movie structurally was Big Fish because in Big Fish, you have two protagonists who have their own agendas. There’s two different timelines.

They’re intersecting with each other. They are each other’s antagonist. There’s so much stuff to set up and plates to start spinning. Those first 10 pages have to do just a lot of work to sort of start the engines for things going.

The setup is so important, but then it’s deciding, when am I moving back and forth between these different stories? How is my choice to leave this storyline and go to this storyline progressing both of them? How to make sure we’re really moving forward in time and energy as we’re going through the movie, even though we’re intercutting between these two things?
That was a case where I had an instinctive sense of what the story was I needed to tell, but it literally did have to just like pull out a sheet of paper and work out like, “This is how I’m moving back and forth between these things. Then I had to plan scenes that would make transitions between those things feel logical and natural.” That is the hard work of structure sometimes.

Most movies I write don’t need that, but there are situations where you have multiple plot lines happening at the same time and you are going to have to just do that logistical planning work to figure out how you’re going to do that. TV shows are a great example too. Oftentimes, I guess, Last of Us is much more classically, you tend to follow a smaller group of characters, but you are cutting back and forth between them, and deciding when you’re going to cut back and forth between them becomes really important. With Joel or with Ellie and deciding when we’re going to move back and forth to those things are important writing decisions well before they become editorial decisions.

Craig: No question. Television episodes are I find generally easier structurally to deal with because they’re shorter and there is an understanding and expectation that you will get to have multiple starts and multiple endings. So you simplify a little bit. By simplifying, you get to be a little crazier with structure. Television shows are structured way weirder than movies are. You look at the structure of a season, any season, pick any season of Breaking Bad. No movie is complicated like that. It’s not even a complicated show.

John: Also, in series television, you’re looking at the structure across multiple episodes too. Where’s the audience at? What are we setting up?

Craig: There’s episodic structure, there’s season structure, there’s series structure. Movies are, I find to be really challenging because you get one shot and that’s it. When it’s in, there’s no multiple innings. There’s no, “well, that wasn’t my favorite episode.” It’s one episode, that’s it, the end. I won’t name titles, but I will say that I have worked on things that I’m not credited for that were big pieces of IP and they had a lot of expectations and they also were from different media. It wasn’t like I was taking a movie and remaking it. It was another thing.

In those cases, sometimes the freedom of whatever that medium was made it very hard to structure a movie such that the movie was in movie time. It wasn’t five hours long and it wasn’t 40 minutes long. It was roughly movie time and got you through the movement you needed to get. All the things you needed and wanted were there and the stuff wasn’t. Most importantly, everything made sense because other things, a lot of other things can afford to not make sense for a while. Novels can wander off and not make sense for a bunch of it. Kurt Vonnegut novels routinely don’t make sense and then they do in the end and it’s beautiful. For long stretches, you’re like, “What is happening?”

Musicals can wander off down weird alleyways, do bizarre songs, and then come back and it’s fine. It’s fine because also you’re in a big room with them and they’re singing and it’s cool and who cares? Songs can do this, but movies, it’s harder. It’s harder particularly when you’re doing movies like you and I have done. Logic, as it turns out, is also part of structure, making sure that facts are in evidence that one thing follows another reasonably, and that people aren’t contradicting themselves or their story.

John: You were talking about adaptations and adapting a piece of IP. It’s been my experience is that when I’m adapting a novel, there’s so much you love about the novel and you recognize I can’t just tear off the pages and feed them in the projector. They fundamentally have different engines. I have to have an honest conversation with the author if the author’s around, the engine of the movie is going to be different than the engine in your book. Some things are going to need to happen in different order and different sequences and some things are just not going to happen because it’s a movie and the movie has to be about two hours long.

There’s just expectations and payoffs that are just very different for a movie. Having written three books now, I can say it’s really nice to be able to describe the texture of the streets and all that stuff and it provides such incredible rich detail and it’s immersive. That’s not movie stuff. You got to move on past that. When I’ve been tasked with adapting a piece of IP that’s more like a character or a video game or something like that, one that’s not especially narrative, then you do have a lot more freedom to actually make a movie.

Craig: If they give you a toy, just make sure that the toy is named the toy and that it does the one signature thing that the toy does and the rest is up to you.

John: There’s a liberation to that where it’s just like, I’m not so stuck and beholden on those things. I don’t have all the benefits of the stuff that was in the book, but it’s not so stuck on it.

Craig: It’s almost like the challenge is taking something that has been properly structured for its medium and then telling it again in a different medium. It’s almost like you’ve got to break a lot of bones and then knit them back together because like you get a dolphin and you need to deliver a penguin. A lot of work happens there and some bones just are left behind and it can be messy and it will never really be a penguin and it certainly won’t be a dolphin. It’ll be its own thing. It’s hard, but this is how important structure is really. It’s like we need to be able to tell the story coherently for this medium.

John: Do you have other examples from your own work of things that were particularly challenging to structure or things that surprised you in finding a structure for telling the story? We talked through Chornobyl and figured out where the breaks were in that story.

Craig: Other than the things that I– There were a few jobs where I thought this probably shouldn’t be a movie. There were some things where I thought this should probably be three movies, not one. Famously the Weinsteins had the rights to Lord of the Rings and they refused to let Peter Jackson make three movies. They wanted him to make one movie to cover the three books of Lord of the Rings. Just to be clear, I watched the extended version every year of each of those three movies.

The extended version of each movie is three and a half hours. The theatrical maybe were two and a half. The idea of we’re going to smash all that into one movie is insane. Sometimes you’re running into– I have been in those spots, really when you feel like you don’t have enough runway to either take off or land, it’s terrifying.

John: I will say that when I look back to like stuff I’ve passed on, sometimes it just didn’t spark for me, or the character didn’t spark, the story didn’t spark. There have also been times where this is not a movie or I can sense it’s really fundamentally a structural problem that we’re not going to get past. The audience expectation of when it’s to make it to the screen and what I can actually put on the screen, it’s just not going to match up right because there’s just not time to do it.

Craig: There have also been situations where I found as I was going through it, that the other people involved, be they a director or producer or star, felt that the value was more in some other aspect of it. The pure storytelling was just don’t worry about that because we’re going to do this and it’s going to be cool. I think sometimes action movies fall prey to this. We all love Die Hard because it’s so perfectly structured, but a lot of action movies you can feel them going and we have to have this cool thing so just make a lot of convoluted reasons why it’s going to happen because really people are there for the action.

If you miss that thread of story, like so our friend Chris Morgan who works on the Fast and Furious movies, they found a smart way to create a simple structure, family. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be complicated because they’re smart. They know people are coming for the cars, but that’s why they think they’re coming. The reason they keep coming back is for the characters and the relationships because you could just watch cars doing crazy stuff on YouTube if you want. It’s also important to have partners who recognize we’re going to tell everybody this is about the cars privately in this room. We do know it’s about basic fundamentals that we have to get right.

John: I completely agree with you in terms of family was a central unifying core idea. I would be nervous about conflating that with structure.

Craig: It would have to be an argument, right?

John: It’s a central argument. That’s the central thing we’re always doing.

Craig: Family is worth more than blank.

John: Then as you’re looking at what are the events of this movie? How are we going to structure them? How is this all going to feel and tie back into it? It’s making sure that you are able to remind the audience and remind the characters that it’s all about family, that it’s all going to tie back in there, making sure that of all these set pieces you’re building, which is these things are musicals, but with explosions.

Craig: Exactly. What is the fundamental difference between the structure of one of your favorite Fast and Furious movies and one of your favorite Pitch Perfect movies? Both universal films, oddly enough, family, right? A bunch of people come together. One of them is not, is a loner of a sort. The other ones need them. There are villains that must be overcome. They all find that they are more powerful together and they face their fear and they win through performance of some kind, be it driving or singing a cool song.

John: Absolutely. Those writers as they’re looking at how they’re going to structure their stories. They’re looking at these are the singing moments, the big action set pieces. These are how we’re going to do it. Looking at the note card layout, which is the way they think about like– I don’t actually lay out cards, but you used to do that. You just don’t need cards anymore.

Craig: I now do more whiteboard.

John: As you’re looking at the big whiteboard map of where the story is, that’s what we’re really talking about, structures. It’s making sure that they’re not just individual things but they’re connected in ways that are meaningful and actually provide value.

Craig: And if you’re looking at structure in that way, when you put up a card that says a big race or they sing, you have to know why. They race, but the point of this race is he disappoints somebody and feels horrible or he chickens out or he realizes that he’s better than he thought he was. Why do they sing this song? Because this song shows that they’re all thinking about themselves only and not about each other. That’s why those note cards happen. That’s structure.

John: You’re asking, why is this happening now? What is the effect of this happening now on the stuff before and afterwards?

Craig: How does this change what comes next?

John: We say you’re asking yourself, but that’s one of those cases where having the writer’s room, if you’re in a TV situation or having a writing partner, we know a lot of partners who one person is the person who’s better at sensing this overall map of story and another person is really good at the execution details.

Craig: David Zucker, when I first started working on Scary Movie 3, he didn’t know me. I was shoved in there, right? It’s week one and he has no idea who I am and he’s like, “I don’t know this guy.” He was like, “You’re like structure boy.” I was structure boy. Then it was funny. It was funny. He didn’t mean it as an insult. He actually really respected structure. He was obsessed with note cards and he was a big believer. I’m talking about him like he’s dead. He’s perfectly alive. He would appreciate that I’m talking about him like he’s dead.

He was very rigorous about logic. Actually, he was quite grateful that structure boy was there to help because I think he had real problems with that in his part– He had been trying and there is a great structure to like, for instance, Naked Gun, fantastic structure, but it was hard for him. It took him a lot of work. It was useful to have a structure boy.

John: Just thinking back to last week’s conversation with Jesse Eisenberg, he was talking about like an idea and needing structure in order to actually have the idea make sense. He was talking about how originally he had this approach for the movie and he realized the big reveal happened at the end of act one and he just didn’t have an act two or an act three because things just happened too early. He needed to change everything around and he needed to change the premise so that he could actually have a structure that made sense for the course of the movie.

Craig: Therein is the difference between good writers and not good writers. Good writers will make a mistake and then go, “Oh, that’s a mistake.” Bad writers will make a mistake and go, “This is awesome.”

John: The bad writer might just spend a sec, “Oh, but I’ll figure it out later.”

Craig: No one will care.

John: Or they just give up.

Craig: They give up. I think the biggest issue is it’s that having that other you that can just be the audience with its arms crossed going, “Yes, that’s fine.” What’s worse than hearing that’s fine? I’ve said that to myself before and I’m like, “Oh boy, let’s not do that.”

John: All right. On the topic of that’s fine, let’s talk about the meh. This comes from a newsletter that somebody sent me, it’s written by Sasha Chapin. He writes that, “I believe one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. It’s not that I don’t have critical judgment or favorites. The ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high too.”

He runs through some of this advice for enjoying things. I thought they applied really well to enjoying a movie because what I do find is I feel like people have, some of it’s just as you age up, but there’s a cynicism and it’s like, ehh, that I feel happening more. I just want to remind people of ways to enjoy a movie. Because sometimes if you’re sitting and watching a movie, you’re like, “I could just look at my phone.” No, there are other things you can look at instead.

Craig: I think sometimes people say they didn’t like a movie because there is a risk of saying you like something you can be sneered at. No one will sneer at you for not liking something. If anything, you can be like, “You all cretins. You’ve taken delight in this, you idiot.” It’s hard to say you like things. People will sit through a movie silently watching the entire thing. Then when it’s over, go, “I mean, it was okay.” What else gets you to sit there silently fixated upon it for two hours? Nothing.

John: While you’re staring silently at a thing, wondering whether you like it, some of his advice first is look at the other part. He’s saying, move your attention beyond the part that you’re immediately focused on. For his example, it’s like, listen to the baseline in a song and listen to actually hear what the bass is doing, which can be fascinating. For me, sometimes if I’m not fully enjoying that, but I can then I can look at the sets, I can hear the score, I can just appreciate the world in which the story is in. That’s okay. It’s okay to not maybe be enamored by everything in the movie that you’re experiencing but to focus on one thing, one part of it is also okay.

Craig: Sometimes people think that unless a movie is perfect, it’s bad. Movies will make a mistake. That mistake is not an objective mistake. What it is a disruption in your relationship with it. You are on a great date with a movie and then it did something and you went, “Oh, no, I don’t like that thing.” Well get over it because, like dates, movies will have flaws for you. Other people might enjoy those. You didn’t like it, accept it as part of the process where nothing is perfect, and then get back to liking it. Don’t just go, “There it is.” You know what? The movie had me until this person said this thing and then I was like, “Oh, this is garbage.” That’s stupid. That’s how stupid people talk.

John: Another bit of advice, let the intensity in. He’s talking about how people don’t generally like heavy metal because it sounds like an assault on their ears.

Craig: Yes. An awesome assault.

John: Sometimes a movie will do something like and I’ll just cringe on its behalf. Sometimes you just let the movie be the fullest version of itself and try to appreciate for what the movie is doing, even if it’s not necessarily your taste, just watch it enjoy itself.

Craig: Yes. And if a movie is doing what it was intended to do and you can feel they wanted to make a large macaroni and cheese and I just got a huge bowl of macaroni and cheese. Who love macaroni and cheese? What do you mean? Yell at the macaroni? They did what they would. Really absolutely appreciate at least this is for macaroni and cheese. They cared. They delivered it. What else could we ask for them?

John: 100%.

Craig: I feel like comedies in particular get judged so harshly for this. Again, if it’s not Tootsie, it’s no good.

John: “That joke didn’t work for me.”

Craig: What about the 5,000 other words? You laughed a bunch of times and you’re not even in a comedy club where everybody’s drunk. Do you understand why? The two-drink minimum is the reason 70% of comedians have a job. Everyone’s a little toasty and it’s fun and you’re all together and somebody’s doing it live and adapting and feeling you out and saying, “You don’t like this joke. You’re going to– Oh, you like that one? I’ll give you more of those.” Movies are stuck. They’re only going to do the one thing. That’s it. You could be alone in the theater and you’re like, “Eh, yes.”

John: Next bit of advice. Develop a crush on the creator. Allow yourself to be transiently infatuated with the person who produced the work.

Craig: Who likes that idea? Sexy Craig. You’re infatuated with me.

John: Think about the artist’s intention —

Craig: He wasn’t even giving any of that. He’s so horrified by Sexy Craig.

John: Here’s what I’ve learned is don’t acknowledge it.

Craig: You just turn away from it. At the end of Nightmare on Elm Street, she turns her back on Freddy Krueger and he disappears.

John: That’s my hope.

Craig: You keep hoping.

John: Thinking about intention, why did this creator do this? What are they trying to achieve? Actually, it can be useful to stop and if you’re not enjoying this moment right now, think about the actual person making it or what the intention was behind the thing can get you reengaged in what they’re doing.

Craig: Give people the benefit of the doubt. Now, there are times where you will watch a movie and you will think, “Oh, this is just poorly done.” In those circumstances, sometimes I will think to myself, “Giving these people the benefit of the doubt, something went wrong here.” Rather than me presuming that everybody sat down and said, “This is exactly what we want to do,” did it, showed it to me, and it was a mess. What if I think to myself, “What was this supposed to be? What, who, how, what went wrong? What collided with this?” That in and of itself is interesting, to allow something to be bad without saying and it was intentionally so. It is almost never intentionally so.

John: Even if something isn’t bad, but it’s just mid or meh, it’s like–

Craig: Mid or meh is the worst. I am so frustrated with this mid or meh. No, it’s not. It’s not mid or meh. The only thing that I find mid or meh is the usage of mid and meh, which is the most mediocre thing you can do, just repeating a blase indifference that 1,000 other people have repeated in the last five seconds.

John: What I do find, I try to stop it myself, but I see other people doing it as well, is I feel like people are writing their letterbox review while they’re watching the movie.

Craig: Oh, the worst.

John: To this whole exercise, I’m just trying to remind you to be present for the movie that’s actually in front of you. Don’t try to anticipate your reaction afterwards.

Craig: You bought a ticket, give yourself to it. You’re giving it your time, give it your time. Everybody grew up on 1,000 film critics and they all want to be a film critic. By the way, that’s a job that I guess everybody feels like they’re going to just do for free. It’s so strange. It’s as if people go to a restaurant, have a great meal, they hate on it, they call it mid, they go home, and then they make their own version of it. It’s just, don’t be a critic. That’s a job, which is already questionable.

Just give in and just watch it honestly. There’ll be time enough. How many times have you seen something, and then four days later, you went, “You know what? I actually love that. I was wrong. It won’t leave me. Now I realize I just needed some time.” You don’t give yourself time if you immediately go home and start, letterbox.

John: Here’s the other thing I think is, letterbox, you’re rating it one to five stars, and you’re also giving a thing, but just move beyond like or dislike and just appreciate something he says in his articles, like begrudging enjoyment, or like– There are multiple ways to experience a thing.

Craig: Flavors.

John: here’s things like, I don’t want to watch that movie again, but I’m glad I watched it.

Craig: I’ll give you an example.

John: Please.

Craig: I went to go see a movie called, I believe it was called The Island by Michael Bay.

John: Oh yes. I remember that.

Craig: Remember Michael Bay’s The Island.

John: Scarlett Johansson.

Craig: Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor. It wasn’t a movie that I thought after when I walked out, “That was awesome.” I didn’t have that feeling. There were a lot of things I remember thinking, a lot of this doesn’t seem to add up. As I was going along, I would keep getting jostled out by logic convolution.

But there is a car chase in it that is so spectacular. For me, that was worth the price of admission. I marveled at it. I still marvel at it. I don’t understand how they did it. It is so incredible to me. When I see things like that in movies that I otherwise maybe I’m not enjoying, I go, well, there. You know what? I’m still talking about– Do you know how many movies I saw that I was like, it was really good? I don’t even remember seeing them. But I remember the car chase in The Island.

John: Last bit of advice here that he gives us is, notice how your body enjoys it. What are the physical reactions? Again, we’re talking about being present for it and actually looking at your own feelings. When I’m watching something that is genuinely scary, that’s part of the reason why I’m watching it, so I actually get that physical sensation. When I’m watching something that’s so funny that it hurts, that’s why you go. Just acknowledge and clock that because I think so often you forget afterwards like, “Oh yes, it was actually so funny that my stomach hurt.”

Craig: It was so funny that I laughed. That’s a physical response, just laughing of any kind. It’s so hard to make people do. I love that aspect of it. I find that the physical response that I notice the most when I’m being dislodged from the experience is a wandering. My mind begins to wander and I feel myself returning to my body. It wanders away from the movie, back into my skull. When I’m in it, whether it’s a show, I’m gone.

John: Yes. You’re not physically there.

Craig: I’m not there.

John: You’re inside the world.

Craig: What an amazing trick of the mind.

John: All right. Some advice about movies, TV shows, I would say just let yourself be entertained by the things you’re choosing to watch and see and listen to.

Craig: Be brave enough to like things. It’s actually a more mature and more enlightened state of being when it comes to interacting with art.

John: Agreed. Let’s turn to questions. First, we have Elizabeth in Brooklyn.

Drew: Elizabeth writes, “How does a screenwriter for hire best work with a director? I find that more and more I’m coming on to studio and streamer projects where a director is already attached. Every director is different, obviously, and I’m finding that a good many of them are not story people. They don’t have a sense of the necessary scaffolding or how to build a character’s journey.

Craig: Structure.

Drew: “They obsess over the weeds without zooming up to see the whole landscape. The real problem is those who don’t know what they don’t know. They want to do script brainstorming sessions with me, which is actually them just excitedly pitching contradictory suggestions or plain old bad ideas. They fight me on beats that the studio loves. Should I be thinking of this relationship where you don’t speak the same language?

Sometimes they’re infuriating, but you need to be patient and respectful so that you can create material that suits them and so that the relationship endures. Or is it okay to set up boundaries so that you can go off and write your draft without being subject to many unhelpful brainstorming sessions? When the director doesn’t want me to write something studio has approved, which master am I supposed to serve?”

John: All right. Craig, you and I actually know this writer who’s writing in. Congratulations, Elizabeth. You’re at a point now where you’re dealing with directors on projects and you’re–

Craig: The way we have a million times.

John: Yes. This is all so familiar. I just say like, big giant hug around you. I know how hard this is. Craig is shaking his head.

Craig: If you listen to that question and you put it in the context of any other business when she gets to the point of, should I just be really patient? What? This happens all the time because our business has overindulged directors in film for some reason. It’s a little bit like a history teacher is paired with a history student to write a report on history and the history student is put in charge. That’s what it’s like.

John: To me, it’s like you’re any software engineer who has to talk to Elon Musk.

Craig: That also works. [chuckles] You realize the authority is backwards. It is not earned. I want to be clear about something. There are directors who are brilliant at this. You know how you know that a director is deserving of the authority they have? They are deserving of the authority they have. They earned it. They demonstrated it either through their own writing o– With somebody like Steven Spielberg, he works with screenwriters all the time and he is so good at it that he brings the best out of them. He respects what they do and then does what he does so brilliantly.

We have a situation where somebody’s been writing for 30 years. Let’s give them a couple Oscars while we’re at it. Let’s say that they’re paid $4 million to work on this. The director is a first-time director. Why would you put that one in charge of that one? What do you do? I’m a big fan of boundaries and I’m a big fan of remembering that you do work for the studio. The studio, which bends over backwards and is all worried about directors, needs to know. Otherwise, you just end up writing bad things to make a conversation go better. That’s not going to help anybody, particularly you.

John: What I want to draw the distinction between is the conversation and the writing. I think sometimes, Elizabeth, you just have to like– It’s almost going back to this conversation we just had about how to enjoy a thing. It’s like all this stuff is coming your way from this director and you just have to take it in and feel it. You get much better at like, I hear what you’re saying there and it feels like that could match up with this thing we were talking about earlier.

You get a sense of how to feel that stuff and how to make it all work. But some of what you’re getting paid for, and I hope you’re getting paid well, is just to exist in those rooms and hear that and make people feel heard and then still be able to go off and write a freaking great script that they’re going to be excited to do. The other thing, which originally I was really nervous about, but I became clear that they won’t remember all the things they pitched at you.

Craig: Oh, no. They won’t be delighted by anything more than a good script, regardless of what all the conversations were because they’re not writers and they don’t know. I’m assuming that this is a non-writing director. I’m also assuming that this is not a director that has earned his or her stripes through achievement and success. It doesn’t sound like that. There are directors that you and I know of who are just bananas. Everyone knows they’re bananas. Their thing is when they capture footage and work with actors, their bananas-ness sometimes gets great things. The script has to be the adult in the room.

You and I have talked about ScreenwriterPlus. It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to have a great work ethic. You also need to be extraordinarily diplomatic and shrewd. You are being hired to manage, sometimes, to manage that person. To deliver a good script that the actor will like and the studio will like without the director blowing up and going crazy.

Don’t overindulge the director and don’t be too afraid of them. If that director has so much authority that they can boot you off the movie because you’re not writing down their insane stuff, then you don’t belong there. Then you’re writing a different movie anyway.

John: Going back to Spielberg, I was lucky to work with him on three different projects. He is so smart and is also not a natural writer. He does have the understanding of what he wants to do in a movie and how to make movies. He knows how to do it and he’ll pitch you things. But it is your responsibility to find out how to go from that thing to what actually needs to happen in the movie and the script. Recognizing that people can be awesome at certain things and not be as good as other things. That’s great. That’s true. You also can’t design costumes. You can’t do other things.

Craig: Neither can we. We know how to do it. I write and I direct and I produce. You know what I don’t do? I don’t light. I don’t know how to light. If you put a gun to my head, I know what a bounce does and what a flag does. That’s part of how I tell stories. When I’m working with my cinematographer, I look at something and I’m like, okay, here’s what I think about this and why, or here’s what I want to achieve and why.

Then they execute it with a level of technical prowess that will never fully be understandable to me. There’s a lot that’s going on invisible under the surface that I don’t notice. I just see the end product. And I appreciate them for that because I can’t do what they do. That’s how a great director will work with a great writer, by understanding they need to go do their thing and I’m going to give them a good target to hit. I acknowledge there’s a lot of stuff under the surface that’s happening that I’m not aware of.

The ding-dong directors will casually kick things around like drunken toddlers with no understanding of what they’ve just unraveled and done. It’s very frustrating. [laughs] You know what you’re hearing is the 25 years of working with directors, some of whom I deeply love. I love working with Todd Phillips. I love working with Denis Villeneuve. There’s so many directors that I really enjoyed working with. On my show, there are directors I love working with, even though it’s a different circumstance and I’m the authority. But man, ooh, John, you and I both have been in some rooms where we are just like hostages to a madman.

John: Yes. That’s reality. Let’s do a simple question. Let’s do one from Tad. He’s writing about point of view.

Drew: Tad says, “I get confused about how to return from a point-of-view shot. If I use a his POV slug line, do I need to use another slug line when I leave his POV. If I use John as the next slugline, then I’m trapped on John until I get to the next scene heading, or else I get into a string of sluglines as I jump from character to character.”

John: I understand what Tad is running into here, and I think it’s the assumption that once you put in an intermediate slugline like his POV, they were trapped in there forever, and you’re not. Sometimes is good to signal to the reader like, “We’re no longer in POV.” In my own scripts, I’ve done end POV, or it’s not that, it’s a separate slugline.

Craig: It’s lengthy. Then I think it’s reasonable to say, we begin this person’s POV, and then there’s multiple paragraphs of what they’re seeing, what they’re seeing, and then it says end POV if it’s like a section. If it’s just one moment, I think the next paragraph, John’s POV, Brenda enters the room. On Brenda. You can do that.

John: Yes, totally. That also work.

Craig: Walking into the restaurant.

John: It’s also good to remember the intermediary slugline is really useful, breaking up stuff on the page and give you a sense of how stuff flows. If you’re just popping into POV for one shot or something, you can put POV as part of the paragraph.

Craig: Always. I don’t think I ever break it off on its own because it feels so technical. I want people to just be in the POV rather than being in, now, the POV you’re portraying, and then the POV. I just want them in it. You can be informal about that completely.

John: A case where intermediary sluglines can be really helpful is, let’s say you have a scene that’s happening and then you have characters who are breaking off and they’re having their own little side conversation. That’s a situation where it feels like it’s a scene within a scene, and that’s useful for that. In those situations, it’ll probably make sense that you’re just sticking with those characters and then you have to get us back over to the other shot.

Craig: Sometimes I just use capital letters to do the same job. I might say, OFF IN ONE CORNER, all in caps, then dash, and then spacebar, dash, spacebar, stuff happens. Off in one corner will tell me the story.

John: Totally. All right. Let’s do our One Cool Things. My one cool thing is a good blog post article by Maggie Appleton called Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks, which is just talking about what she learned during her first pregnancy here. She’s about to have a baby. A quote, I’ll read from it. “After decades of existing in a culture that worships rational, modern scientific knowledge, preferably discovered within the last 500 years, it’s been humbling to realize how much the pre-modern animalistic parts of me know and are capable of, and how much of me feels innately, subconsciously designed to want this and feel perfectly equipped to do it.”

What I like about the post as it goes on longer is that it’s recognizing that, oh yes, I’m an animal who’s doing this thing. It’s not even in my control. It’s just like, this is just a thing that’s happening. I’m just a passenger to it. Also, that sense of, so many people will tell you there’s one natural right way to do a thing. She brings up the example of that organic banana you’re picking, bananas exist only because we made them. The banana in the wild is not a thing at all. Just to recognize that you’re living in this messy place of like, yes, it’s fully human and natural, but it’s also a cultural system that we’re in and just you got to float in that.

Craig: “No genetically modified organisms in this.” It’s all genetically modified. It’s called mixing the strains. What are they talking about? No genetically modified stuff in this tangelo.

What’s fascinating about what Maggie says is because her body is designed to do an extraordinarily complicated thing, she is now in the mix of that, discovering how much that is part of who she is and how weirdly not in conscious control we are of it.

Over on the other side of the aisle, simpler, dumber people, like say a lot of men will be horny, angry, violent, hungry, where we’ve always been in touch with that. We just called it horny because of the different way it works. Our culture, boys will be boys, indulges this notion of, they’re not really in control of all these things. We are, but there are aspects of it that are underpinned by subconscious things way beneath this level. It is interesting how a complicated person doing a very complicated process can suddenly discover this.

John: We have a new baby in our life and it’s been so great to be able to have a baby around and to be babysitting and just to have this small human. I was just watching my daughter hold a baby and feed a baby. She’s like, “Oh my God, it all kicked in.” She really felt all this —

Craig: Oh my God. Are you going to be a grandpa?

John: No, not anytime soon. But that sense of like, oh yes, it’s like a primal physical thing that happens.

Craig: That’s why we keep making more people. It is primal and people will laugh about it, but it’s real. Absolutely. It’s not for everybody. There are plenty of women that pick up a baby and go, “Get this baby away from me.” Perfectly fine. The biological clock syndrome and all that stuff, it’s just science. It’s just hormones.

John: This is me talking out of my ass, but I do wonder if some of the population decline is young people’s decision like, “I don’t want to have kids.” Maybe it’s because they haven’t been around– They’ve just not kicked in because they never got to do that. Because there are fewer babies, there are going to be fewer babies.

Craig: That may be true. Being around babies makes you like babies. Although being around babies casually makes you like babies. That’s why grandparents are like, “Give me, make me a grandparent so that I can show up for an hour and be like, oh, it’s crying now. Bye.”

John: I’m getting the grandparent ability to hang out with the kids.

Craig: You and I have parented our own babies.

John: Still, I’d recommend it.

Craig: Yes. The ride of a lifetime, the ride of a life. There ain’t nothing like it. You want to talk about like when you watch horror movies to feel scared? I’m kidding.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Now you know what fear is.

My one cool thing this week is the 2024 rules of D&D in a different aspect. I finally got to play.

John: Fantastic.

Craig: I’m in another campaign where I play. It’s the first campaign I played where it was D&D 2024 rules from the start. It works great.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It works great.

John: What are some surprises, the things you didn’t anticipate? Because we talked through some of the changes.

Craig: Sure. Character creation is a little bit tricky if you are well versed in the old method because the old method honestly was a bit simpler and a bit stupider when it came to your abilities. It was all tied to are you a dwarf? Are you a gnome? Are you a human? You get plus two strength. You get plus one wisdom. That’s it. Boop. The end. Now it’s not tied to that at all. It’s tied to backgrounds. Each background gives you a chance to add one point to three different things or two to one, one to another, but the three different things are different for each background.

They’re very clever. It’s never the three that would work together in the most min-max way. It’s a little complicated in the beginning to do some math. Once you get through that, and of course you get to, it’s very customizable. The flow of the play has been greatly improved. Every single class gets some fun choices to make. For instance, I’m not a rogue, but another character is. Rogues are notoriously boring to play because even for Arcane Tricksters, mostly they hide, jump out, shoot or stab, go back into the shadows. If they get sneak attack, you roll a bunch of dice. Whoop-dee-doo.

One of the things they’ve done is for at least this version of the rogue, you can trade some of those. If you get sneak attack, you can pull some of those dice out and use them to do other things. You’re always facing those interesting choices as you’re playing. A lot of options, so many options, but they don’t seem cumbersome. It’s just smooth and it’s fun. I have not run into one thing yet where I was like, even the things that nerf stuff a little bit, like Divine Smite’s a little nerf now, but who cares? It’s better, honestly. It makes more sense. Let’s put it this way. Having done it, I wouldn’t want to not do it.

John: We’re finishing up a campaign right now, which is using old rules, but next campaign we’re already planning to use 2024.

Craig: I will encourage everybody to dive in. Honestly, you don’t have to read the whole damn book. You just learn your one thing. D&D Beyond is particularly good at teaching you by helping you build your character. Roll20 doesn’t teach you a damn thing when you build your character. It’s a mess.

John: You would recommend people, even if they’re going to play in Roll20, build your character out in D&D Beyond, then just transfer it over.

Craig: Yes, because D&D Beyond is laid out so much better. Every step of the way, you can click on things and it will tell you, this is what this means. This is what this means. This is what this means. You can go back easily and rejigger it easily. It’s so much simpler.

John: One of my previous One Cool Things was this book on sort of role-playing game history. It’s basically starting with D&D, like going up all the way through where we’re at now, but like all these games I’d never heard of. I’ve loved just buying some of these games that I’m sure we’re never going to play. As I’m watching the evolution of the systems and how things fit together and what this game took from this game, it’s just interesting to see a whole form evolve.

Craig: It really has. Hats off to those guys. They did a great job.

John: One of the games I just was reading about was Fiasco if you remember.

Craig: Oh, yes, sure.

John: A few years ago. At the Kelly Marcel episode.

Craig: That’s right. Fiasco. Poor John. [laughs] I don’t even remember what happened. I just remember that we did terrible things.

John: Yes, absolutely. It was a Coen Brothers movie.

Craig: It was a Coen Brothers movie, and you were like Brad Pitt in it.

John: Yes. [laughter] That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Guy Fee. 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’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware, you’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau.

Craig: Oh, drinkware.

John: You can find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers.

Craig: Yes, thank you.

John: You make it possible for us to do this every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on gadgets that tell us what our bodies are doing.

Craig: Yes, wearables.

John: Wearables. Great. Thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, so for the holidays, I got myself an Oura Ring, which you can see I’m wearing right now.

Craig: I see it on you right now.

John: It’s a little black ring. I’ve worn an Apple watch for a long time, which is also keeping track of healthy things. Friends who had Oura Rings liked them, and so I got one, and it’s impressive. It feels like an Apple product that does not come from Apple. It’s smartly done.

Craig: Does it feel like it will rule them all and in the darkness bind them?

John: Maybe.

Craig: Have you thrown it in the fire and looked for the black speech of Mordor?

John: You know what? I haven’t unlocked that aspect of it yet. Maybe that’s a subscription bonusy thing.

Craig: It must be cast back into the fires from whence it came.

John: The reason I got it is I don’t wear my Apple watch to sleep. It’s actually really good at sleep tracking. Last week, it’s like, “Oh, you’re cold. You’re sick.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I am sick.” Then it actually anticipated.

Craig: Or were you sick?

John: Was I sick? It’s like a somatic force had been there.

Craig: I’ll tell you why I stopped wearing. It was very comfortable. That part I was fine with. I stopped wearing it because what would happen is I would wake up, feel perfectly refreshed, look at my phone. It was like, “Oh-

John: Oh, you slept so poorly.

Craig: -you slept five minutes.” I’m like, what? Then there are times where I’d wake up like, “Oh my God…” It was like, “Great job!” I’m like, either you’re guessing or my brain isn’t working right. Either way, I would get like, oh, I guess I didn’t sleep that much. I don’t want to know. I didn’t want to know. If I’m feeling okay, I slept enough.

John: I was talking to Julie Turner about this last night. It’s that issue of what metrics do you actually want to know and when is it actually helpful for you. Right now, it’s feeling helpful, but there’s other stuff I’ve stopped doing. I was like logging food for a while. It was easy for me to do.

Craig: It’s tedious.

John: I wasn’t getting insightful information out of it. I want to talk about your wearable because you actually have something that you need, which is tracking your glucose.

Craig: Yes, so I wear the FreeStyle Libre from Abbott Pharmaceuticals Corporation. It is a continuous glucose monitor. I don’t have to do the finger sticks. This is for people with type 1 diabetes, but also for people with type 2 diabetes. It’s basically anybody that has any blood sugar issue, it’s very helpful.

I just read that they are now starting to make a version for non-diabetic people to help with weight loss and things like that. One thing that’s amazing about it is it does connect you to what is the impact of the food you eat. Writing down what you ate and then weighing yourself the next day, it’s kind of useless. Could be water, could be poop. Who the hell knows why you weigh what you did that morning?

I’m going to eat something and look at my phone 45 minutes later and go, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that. That’s not working well for me.” It is extraordinarily valuable feedback and I check it all the time. I had a piece of birthday cake. Let’s see how I did. You’ll see it on here. There it is. See it?

John: Oh wow, right up there, yes.

Craig: I had it. This is right when I had it. Now, the good news is, also the arrow is very important.

John: It’s coming down.

Craig: Happily, it’s only in the yellow. It’s not in the red. I try and live my life in the green. Mostly I’m 90. It tells you what your range is. I live 91% in the green, which is amazing.

John: Great.

Craig: The key is that arrow. When you see a high number and the arrow’s straight up, go outside and walk. Walk real hard because there’s problem. If you’re low and the arrow’s pointing down, eat something.

John: How often is it just a surprise to you? At this point, you can just anticipate where you’re at.

Craig: It is rarely a surprise. The only time I get surprised is if I eat something that I haven’t eaten before. With this, I remember the first time I had sushi, I just was like, “It’s just sushi, it’ll be fine.”

John: It’s white rice.

Craig: Oh no, it’s not just white rice. Sushi rice has a lot of sugar in it. There’s something about rice plus the sugar in it that just sends my blood sugar skyrocketing as opposed to say, whole-grain bread. The surprises are only the first time. Day-to-day, I could have told you that was going to happen. That’s not even that bad.

John: My Oura Ring does know if I had a drink. It’s like, “Oh, it sounds like you had a drink.” It does know that you don’t sleep as well when you have a drink.

Craig: I sure don’t and I don’t need an Oura Ring to tell me that. I know I don’t. If I had some trouble sleeping and then I hit Saturday and it’s like, we’re going out to dinner. I’m just like, it would be great to have a drink with people and be social and stuff. I’m not going to because I’m in trouble right now.

John: I’m enjoying the ring for now. I don’t think I necessarily need it for all things. I don’t swim with my Apple Watch, so it’d be useful for that. We’ll see where I’m at down the road on it, but I’m enjoying it.

Craig: It’s a good thing. It just was bumming me out.

John: Don’t stick with things that bum you out.

Craig: No, I want it to be useful. Also, it’s a very after-the-fact thing like, “Oh, you’re having a drink.” Yes, I know, I drank it. “Oh, you didn’t sleep well.” Yes, I know, I’m here. I just woke up and I don’t feel good. It’s like an I told you so ring, which is like not as useful to me as, oh, you shouldn’t eat this next time kind of thing.

John: It does nudge you to go to bed, but I have plenty of other things that are not telling me to go to bed.

Craig: Like the clock.

John: Yes, like the husband.

[laughter]

Craig: The husband, exactly. Is Mike a go-to-bed-early guy?

John: No, actually, I’m generally the person who goes up the stairs first and I’m the person who closes the curtains and turns on the humidifier and puts the dog away.

Craig: Do you need to go to sleep before he goes to sleep?

John: It’s good I do, but it’s not mandatory. Sometimes in D&D nights, I’ll be second, yes.

Craig: You’ll be second.

John: I definitely have a sleep window and if I am not in bed by 11:00, I’m awake again and it’s hard for me to get to sleep.

Craig: I have some windows like that too. Melissa falls asleep so easily and she naps. Sometimes it’s 8:15 and she’s out, and I’m like, “All right, no problem.” We’ve always been on different sleep schedules.

John: Even though we have no kids in the house anymore, we wake up at 7:20 every morning to get Amy off to school and even though she’s not here anymore.

Craig: It’s just the biological clock.

John: Yes. Which is fine. It’s a good time to be up.

Craig: 7:20 is a great time. Listen, having been in production for so long, 7:20 sounds like a luxury. Wake up a lot of times at 5:10.

John: Brutal.

Craig: The worst. Especially when you wake up and it’s dark.

John: In Canada.

Craig: Then you go to bed and it’s dark and then you wake up the next day and it’s dark and you’re like, oh. Going to work in the dark is such a heartbreaker.

John: Not good. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Weekend Read on the App Store
• Oscar nominations 2025
• IVF Mixup movies: Parallel Mothers, Maybe Baby, Good Newwz, Daughter from Another Mother
• Manhunt
• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
• How to like everything more by Sasha Chapin
• Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks by Maggie Appleton
• 2024 Player’s Handbook
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Guy Fee (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: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (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.